53. A Six-Step Marketing Framework for Solopreneurs To Implement Now With Ryan Sawrie

Show Notes

In this episode, we speak with Ryan Sawrie, an author, agency owner, and marketing expert with over a decade's worth of experience working with brands on their digital and social media strategies. We discuss:

• What makes his framework unique
• The various phases of his six-step framework
• Common mistakes he sees people make when it comes to digital marketing
• Tips for taking on the marketing workload for solopreneurs

And more!

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Ryan Sawrie (00:00):
This has to do with aligning brand goals, marketing goals with digital marketing goals. What I mean by that, and the reason for that, is there is only so many things that digital marketing can accomplish
Intro (00:14):
Bigger. Doesn't always mean better. Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast, where people who are flying solo in business, come for specific tips and advice to find success. As a company of one, here are your hosts, Joe Rando, and Carly Ries.
Carly Ries (00:33):
Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries,
Joe Rando (00:38):
And I'm Joe Rando.
Carly Ries (00:39):
What I love about talking about marketing for solopreneurs is that the content is endless and is always changing. So today we're talking to Ryan Sawrie about his proven digital marketing framework among other things. Ryan is an author, agency owner and marketing expert with over a decade worth of experience, working with brands on their digital and social media strategies. Ryan has held a number of different roles that advertising agencies and nonprofits. And most of those rules, with the word strategy in them. Literally every marketing job Ryan ever had didn't exist before he held it, which is crazy. From that experience, Ryan has been fine tuning an approach to creating digital strategies and shares that in his book, Build Your Digital Strategy. His hope is that junior marketers and business owners like yourselves will be able to streamline their own learning in this space and create successful digital strategies for themselves. So Ryan with that, welcome to the show.
Ryan Sawrie (01:32):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Carly Ries (01:33):
We are so excited. I know we have a lot to talk about today, so I'm just going to jump right in. I guess my first question is a lot of people have frameworks and methodologies around marketing, what makes your approach so unique?
Ryan Sawrie (01:46):
I think there are two things as I've shared it with people, that they've found it to be different and unique from others. One is that it's intentionally designed to be timeless. I often give presentations around this. The title might be something like Digital Strategy in 2022. It's kind of a joke to myself because the way I design this is that regardless of the hottest social media network, whatever the latest Facebook algorithm update has been, that using this digital strategy process, helps you to come up with successful marketing plans and find amazing ideas for your brand. The other thing that's more granular and different is, I like to put content strategy before channels. A lot of times in this space, our minds want to go straight to, "what do I do with Instagram?, What do I do with TikTok?" We kind of skip straight to that instead of thinking first about what kind of content we can and want to, and need to develop for ourselves and for our brand and our audience. So in my methodology and process, I like to go to content before going to channels. They work really well together but I found that to be a difference from the way other people typically approach digital problems.
Carly Ries (03:24):
Definitely. Now I'm intrigued. Can you talk about your six step framework and dive into each of the phases?
Ryan Sawrie (03:31):
Absolutely. For anyone listening that have a PDF, you can fall along the process. It's at roadmap.digitalstrategysprint.com. So rather than having to take notes, you can just grab that and follow along. I call it A to F . Part of that is just for myself to remember each of the steps easily. Part of that is it's not A to Z just to get people to stop and think a bit about what A to F might mean. I'll go through each of those letters for your audience on a really general broad view. So, A stands for alignment. This has to do with aligning brand goals, marketing goals, with digital marketing goals. What I mean by that and the reason for that is, there are only so many things that digital marketing can accomplish. I don't believe in it as the being all end all of business and marketing. I believe it has specific things that it can accomplish.
Ryan Sawrie (04:33):
The first step, the idea is to figure out what can digital do to help your company or brand actually meet their goals. After A is B and B is for brand identity and targeting. The goal of brand identity and targeting is to make sure that every piece of content, every social network, every website that you might ever develop, that it looks and feels, and sounds like the brand that it represents. There's no confusion from one site to another of who this brand is, what they represent, what they sound like, what they look like, all of those things need to work together and be aligned. And along with that is targeting. Figuring out who is the audience that you're trying to reach and where do they spend time online. What are their behaviors online?
Ryan Sawrie (05:27):
What has changed in this demographic over the past several years? What are the things that they care about? Getting really specific about who those primary and maybe secondary audiences are, so when you get into actual ideas and planning, you know who exactly it is you're trying to reach. You know your brand and you know what kind of message you have. So that's A and B. Then C as I alluded to earlier is content strategy. Content strategy is based on making plans around what messages does your audience need to hear? How are you going to put that messaging, that content together and what exactly you're hoping to accomplish? Why are you making content? There are a lot of different frameworks that I believe in and work for content strategy without getting too deep into this. But ultimately you're trying to answer those questions of, "What do I need to make?
Ryan Sawrie (06:24):
Why am I going to make it? Who am I making it for? So that's ABC and D is distribution. One of the phrases that goes with this is, Bill Gates said a long time ago, "Content is king." But since then we've said, distribution is queen actually. You can have the best content in the world, the best videos, the best messaging, but without a plan to distribute it, you're definitely missing some major pieces. A big part of distribution planning is deciding the channels or the digital mediums that you're going to activate on to meet your goals, that align with your brand, that align with where your audience is, and that makes sense for the content you're going to develop. This would be deep dive into things like why, or how are we going to use YouTube if we are gonna use YouTube? Should we be on TikTok? Should we start creating TikTok content for our brand?
Carly Ries (07:22):
Ryan, is that persona based or how should people decide which channel they should use?
Ryan Sawrie (07:30):
There are so many different decision factors that go into that. I would say, can you meet your goals with the channel?, is the first question. Is your audience active on this channel?, and do you have capacity and resources to be able to consistently produce and publish meaningful content to that channel? So three big questions I think that have to be answered when you're making decisions about channels to activate on. I don't personally believe that every brand and business needs to be on every channel or even a lot of channels necessarily. You've got to be the places that you have capacity for, and that will move the needle for your business. Does that answer your question?
Carly Ries (08:17):
It does. Thank you.
Ryan Sawrie (08:18):
Okay. So that's D and then after D is E, which is for evaluation and measurement. We've made all these plans. We've talked about what we're going to create and where it's going to be. Now we get to the step of putting things like KPIs in place. If we've decided that Twitter is a channel and we are going to do news updates every Tuesday or something like that, what's our goal for that piece of content and that series. How are we going to decide whether we're being successful in meeting our goals or not? That's what E is about, evaluation. Then the last step is F which is finding ideas. As I mentioned in my book, building a strategy isn't just about creating something cool, having a multi-page deck, or even just thinking about digital. We're thinking about a path to finding great ideas for marketing campaigns, for content. If you go back and think about if you've figured out your goals, you've figured out your brand, the kind of content that you can create, and the channels you're going to be on, you've done a lot of great work and a lot of filling up your brain of potential great ideas that are going to help make your brand get noticed and help your brand meet it's goals. That is my A to F digital strategy roadmap.
Carly Ries (09:45):
I love having something that's easy to remember. If you have trouble remembering A through F then we have other problems.
Ryan Sawrie (09:52):
Yeah.
Carly Ries (09:52):
Just to clarify, if you really want to dive into each of those, you talk about that in your book, correct?
Ryan Sawrie (10:00):
Yeah. As you mentioned in the intro, I have a book, Build Your Digital Strategy, which is on Amazon and Kindle, and you can find links to that at digitalstrategybook.com.
Carly Ries (10:11):
Perfect. We will include that link in the show notes too. So nobody has to go searching for it. Ryan, you've been in the digital marketing space for awhile. You've worked with agencies there, you've worked with clients and everything, what are common mistakes you see people make when it comes to their digital marketing?
Ryan Sawrie (10:26):
That's a good question. I think the two biggest mistakes I have seen is, people in businesses just trying to move so fast. Part of why I built this strategy process is how frequently in agency life in particular, that people came to me just begging for an idea for a client activation event or moment that was coming up soon and often just people coming and saying, do you have any great ideas for us that really just didn't work for me? I didn't think it would be a successful way or a good way to work with our clients, so I started using this process to fill in the gaps as much as possible and help other people on my teams to understand if you want great ideas, this is the way to get to them.
Ryan Sawrie (11:20):
If we can fill in all this info, as much as possible, when possible, we're going to have even better ideas than me pulling something out of the sky right now. . The other thing that I think is interesting is how much people get caught up on things like algorithm changes or the latest tactic that some influencer has figured out. It gets them 10% more views on Instagram reels or something like that. A client was talking with me the other day, how he saw that YouTube people are ending their videos abruptly because it messes with the view time that people view it all over the end, instead of tuning out when they get to the end card. Those things are fine, but I think people just spend too much of their mental energy, too much of their Google searching, on what's hot, what's working right now for people instead of spending more time on thinking big picture, thinking about a strategy and goals. I definitely support figuring out what's working right now, but I just think too much effort is spent on those things.
Carly Ries (12:31):
That is a great point. I think another thing that solopreneurs struggle with is just their workload when it comes to content marketing. So for our audience and these people that are running their own businesses, any tips for taking on that workload and how they might be able to, not bite off more they can chew.
Ryan Sawrie (12:50):
I would say a couple of things. The first one, as I mentioned earlier, don't get feeling like you have to be on every channel that you see your competitors on, that you see other business owners using for personal lead generation. I would say if you're starting out, pick one or two, three at the most channels that you think are the most important for your business and focus really well on those. Making them successful, doing thoughtful, purposeful things on those channels. I would say the other thing that doesn't get utilized enough yet as a strategy is just content repurposing. One of the honest reasons for me to write a book was that I would have something that I could constantly come back to as a piece of content for me to repurpose, repackage, use in different ways. I've used parts of the book to build a webinar. I've used parts of the book to do a LinkedIn post and a guest blog post on other people's websites. So, having something in content that you can constantly repurpose and reuse is something I think business owners should be doing.
Carly Ries (14:07):
I second, third and fourth that. Joe and I actually just recorded our podcast, between the two of us that'll get released, and that was one of the things I mentioned. People just don't realize that they can do that, which is so important.
Ryan Sawrie (14:23):
Yeah. I think I saw on average, 20% of your audience is gonna see a post that you make. So even if you're worried about people seeing the same thing again, chances are most people didn't even see it the first time you published it.
Joe Rando (14:38):
Another really important point is that there's an expression that, the CEO of a company, they really should call them the CRO because their real job is chief reminding officer, reminding people to do the right thing, yet they already told them. Hearing these things more than once, especially if it's on different platforms, different media can really drive it home. It's not a bad thing to say it two or three or four or five times if it's good content.
Ryan Sawrie (15:06):
Exactly. I think sometimes as marketers, as business owners, the things that we feel are obvious to us, aren't actually obvious to other people We think, everyone knows this, I don't need to say it again. Well, that's most likely not true. Just because it's easy to you, it doesn't make it easy to others.
Carly Ries (15:27):
Absolutely. Ryan, we are big cheerleaders for solopreneurs here and like to encourage them on their journey, so we're going to end with something inspirational from you. Not that the rest of this wasn't, but from you personally , and that is what is your favorite quote about success?
Ryan Sawrie (15:43):
It's not necessarily a quote, but I had a conversation with a client about KPIs recently. They were asking something along the lines of how many subscribers should I hope to get this month on YouTube? We hadn't really done much on YouTube yet. We were still building a strategy and my response was "well, better than you did last month.". That's kind of how I view success for myself and my business, and for clients I work with. Is there's not a magic formula or a specific number, but our goal is always just to do better than we did last month.
Carly Ries (16:22):
Perfect. Love it. And so true. Ryan, I cannot believe we are wrapping up this episode. I think this is gonna be so helpful for so many people. I know you've already stated the link a few times, but can you tell us where people can find you online and share those links again?
Ryan Sawrie (16:37):
For people that are interested in learning more about the process, roadmap.digitalstrategysprint.com is a place to find that, and you can find my book at digitalstrategybook.com. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn as well.
Carly Ries (16:57):
Sounds great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That wraps up another episode of the One-Person Business podcast. Be sure to visit LifeStarr.com/podcast to find more episodes and subscribe. Or you can find us anywhere you listen to your shows, we'll see you next time.
Closing (17:15):
You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a One-Person Business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures. At LifeStarr, we're creating a One-Person Business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com