Focus On These 3 Pillars And Always Be Fully Booked

Okay and welcome to episode one of local business marketing made simple by your host Liam Walsh if you didn't already know that and I've been wanting to do a podcast for a long time just as always procrastination and things like that obviously kicking having the time to do so if you didn't know already I've got three children now baby George was born nearly two weeks ago which is absolutely crazy I've got baby George I've got Louis who's four going on five and Harry who's free this year and I always forget the ages it's I don't know just numbers in general but yeah life's busy but um I'm gonna commit to doing one of these episodes every single week if not we'll do more frequently and all you need to know on this podcast is what it's actually for is I just want to share my knowledge with you guys for whoever's listening on the other side of this whatever you want to call it it's not even a screen really is it but there's a lot of people out there who struggle with their marketing who don't really know what to do when to do it how to do it how it should look how it should sound should it be Google should they focus on the website should they you know beyond free platforms or one platform so yeah this is essentially going to be no pitch no ads no nothing that might be the odd pitch every now and again if there's something worth mentioning coming up but for the most part it is literally going to be me and you going through all things marketing and I want to start the first episode here by just giving a bit of a debrief about myself why you should listen who am I if you don't like the sound of me then it's probably worth turning off after this first episode but of course my name is Liam Walsh and my dad husband dad of free husband the most amazing wife and I've been in business now for around nine years up until running this business primarily teaching business owners how to to market themselves I used to well up until this point this is my fourth business now I had free health and wellness businesses before this one I was on while I've been an online fitness coach I've been a brick-and-mortar personal training business with boot camp gym which was women's only and spin some roller coaster there's been a few bits and bats in between but you spin some rollercoaster that's for sure I hosted in the first two years of business until I really started to lean in and really understand marketing which is why when I'm ever in conversations with business owners who are stuck it's really hard for me to not come across as the hills person of the year without telling them they need to take action faster because otherwise you can coast for a long time a lot of business owners they think they need to be in business for a long period of time to start seeing success books success never comes unless things change as they say nothing changes is enough if nothing changes so back then I actually had a reason to learn about marketing in my first business was because I literally walked out of a solid job to become a personal trainer call it impulsive it was for sure but back then I didn't have a mortgage I didn't have kids and you know you just going with your gut instinct and ready for the adventure and obviously in the end it all paid off but it only paid off from the sense of knowing more about marketing knowing how to attract people knowing how to essentially you know use content to convert people into customers so yeah it's been a it's been a it's been a long ride that's for sure there's been a lot of ups and downs and business partnerships come into a crash and burning and but in the end one thing that I could always rely on and one thing that I can always rely on now is fundamentally marketing it still excites me to this day I know we've all got things that excites but honestly marketing is just one of those things for me it's probably why I'm now actually teaching it but just the way that you can control the game and control the outcome now specifically for myself with my marketing it is across social media simple ads social media strategies and primarily looking at Facebook and Instagram and if you have like a local service business or even just whatever business in general but more so looking at service based businesses where you are looking to acquire appointments bookings whatever it may be you know you're fulfilling something if you're a skin clinic it might be people coming in to have an appointment about the skin if you're a mortgage advisor it might be about getting more appointments further mortgages if you're a physio you know the score right and right now especially at the time of recording this in 2025 even just with Instagram you can fully book your business you can scale a business to a team of two or three or four or five and it's just because you know what's funny actually I go off tangents by the way there'll be so many tangents on here my prior free businesses which were on the health and wellness space I didn't use Instagram as way as much as I do now it was all around Facebook Facebook was my was my thing and I suppose really the shift into Instagram now more so I teach both by the way I just really I hate to say excited love Facebook but I am I am favorite Instagram is because you can run really low cost ads which grow your audience and I'll go into this maybe today or maybe future episodes and I'm probably going to try and make these episodes up like 15 to 20 minutes but you can grow run really low cost ads which means if you can run really low cost ads you get more bang for your book you can grow an audience fast and if you've got the right skill set from when someone you know finds you and if your content is dialed in you can get a customer very very quickly just to give you a prime example is an amazing person I'm not gonna say names here but she literally found my page yesterday at the time recorded and let's say for example she followed my page at 9am day about 10am she's now a customer on the six-week business accelerator at the program I run that was in 24 hours it could have been sooner I just slower slower applying because I was with the kids at night that's how fast things can be so if you imagine if you can if you can if you can run low cost ads to get these people who are your ideal demographic let's just go for the mortgage advisor you are essentially not trying to go viral because it's not going to go in front of the right people but if you can attract people who are looking to get a mortgage and they come and find your page and you can you know converse with these people straight away you can literally find yourself with appointments so what does that really mean well what that really means is it gives you control over your marketing because people are finding you some are turning to customers right now that's a working ad system then what happens after then is using your content to build trust with people who haven't taken action yet your content wants to do one thing and one thing only it is to build trust with people told you I go off tangents but that's what the name of the game is so I call this the new customer attraction system when it comes down to it and it's the stuff that I did in my previous businesses I just didn't really know I was doing it and of course you know to be able to teach it today I've obviously had to do it myself countless times but when I look back at every previous business up until the point of doing this one I realized slow and slowly which is why I was able to grow for now successfully is the only ever comes down to these three key pillars to get a customer one is a bonus if people aren't a word of you they can't buy from you it's as simple as that right this makes complete sense they don't know you they can't buy from you kill so your marketing needs to always 365 days a year cover a awareness people need to be finding you all the time if you cover that you'll actually leap some bounds above a lot of other people because a lot of other people it's not all about followers okay you know I'm not this person who says you need to have 10,000 followers to be successful but if you're sat with the same handful of followers and it grows minutely over the months and years you're not in the position where new people are finding you so that pillar is now gone now if that pillar doesn't exist that means pillar two trust with the audience that you have diminishes over time because if you have 100 followers today and in six months you have 110 you've only acquired 10 new followers and eventually the brain cycle of people actually choosing you it goes down as well so what happens is you're just marketing to the same people over and over and over again who eventually have either gone somewhere else don't want what you offer anymore so you need to always be replenishing the pipeline with a awareness and like I said before a awareness creates instant opportunity if you know what you're doing we had Kevin just recently he got 110 bookings in six weeks and it was fueled by his awareness strategy because he was pumping people through to his page opening up meaningful conversations with these people to see if they wanted to buy what he's a physio by the way to see hey have you are you looking for a physio or have you got back pain if you've got knee joint pain like whatever it is and of course if you imagine for Kevin you know he's literally targeting people who have got back pain so it makes it the easiest conversation in the world because they reply saying yes and he offers the solution job done that's how easy life is if someone's got a problem and you fix it like that's how easy this needs to be we don't need to beat around the bush same with me you'll see and you may have already been through this if you follow my page today i'm going to converse with you and find out are you looking to solve your marketing problem right now and some people are some people aren't that's you know that's what you got to do so if you if you have a awareness covered you know boom the next piece of the puzzle as i've mentioned is trust so you have to look at your content now as one thing and one thing only it's not about how many likes you get it's not about going fucking viral excuse the language is is about building trust building trust with the people do follow you right now look at your current audience look at the content that you're doing and really ask yourself am i actually trying to build trust of these people or am i just trying to look busy am i just posting for posting sake you know like there is no concrete strategy with a lot of business owners they know they need to be on social media they know they need to post they know they need to show up more consistency and all that is a different subject for a different time but your content needs to build trust okay um and we'll cover that in later episodes this is this is just fundamentally going in for a bit of an opener here so you'll understand what it actually takes to get customers at scale to be fully booked stay fully booked so content trust awareness fills the pipeline to show your content to build trust with more people every single day every single week if you acquire 20 to 30 new followers a day all right which is really possible on a really low ad spend and even just like there's ads there's local groups there's giveaways there's tons of stuff going we'll go into that later but if you are getting 20 to 30 new let's just say 20 for easierness of maths so what is that 20 time 7 140 to 80 560 if i did the maths right there 600 yeah 600 new followers in a month that is 600 new people who could potentially buy from you you see how i get people fully booked very quickly like yeah so but it's also 600 people not everyone's going to buy but let's just say let's just say like cavern right 10% booked an appointment so 60 bookings there's 540 left those are people are now going to consume your content over time and it's one of those as well it depends on the business that you're in because a lot of people are going to consider like i go back to the mortgage one if you're trying to if you're trying to get you know you're trying to you know get more new mortgages for people different mortgages whatever it is every single person who follows you isn't necessarily looking to secure new mortgage right now but they might be moving house in six months and they're just looking around and shopping around which means again your content needs to build trust with these people faster otherwise they'll go to a different broker or a different mortgage advisor whatever they'll go into the bank who knows so that's the name of the game so you've got a awareness now feeding the opportunity in the moment and in the future you've got your content piloto which builds trust with people who know who you are and then the final piece of the puzzle is sales so if someone knows you now like you trust you you done a great job doing more than bloody 99% of business owners the thing where things can fall down is the sales part a couple of things and we're going to go into this furthermore in future episodes but it's certain styles of content that you can do to break down people's sales objections again I don't know why I keep going back to the mortgage advisor I think it's because we took one on the other day but let's say this mortgage advisor let's say I'm looking to secure a new mortgage okay and I've always gone with banks I've done HSBC I've done RBS I've done net West whatever and I really like this guy and I really trust him and he's his own you know entity's own enterprise he's not with the banks he he sources for you one of my sales objections might be oh no but can I trust you why don't I just go to the bank and his you know content to break down that objection would be something about personalization personalization sorry lower rates more choice like to see now if someone knows you and likes you they still have these sales objections I've tried it before and it didn't work I've been screwed before and even little things can I bring my kids do I need to sign in for a year or a month is there is there a direct debit is it pay up from there's all of these logistical questions and that is the one of the pieces where people go wrong because they missed that bit and then the inquiries aren't as high because they've just got loads of people finding them but they're really in that consideration phase and they've got all these questions that need answering and your content doesn't answer the questions so that's one but anyway it's the way that you handled the sales chat it's like you know just little things were if I inquite let's say I know you I like you and I'm like right come on let's go message cavern for example hey cavern um got a really bad back can you let me know how this all works and cavern just comes back and he's like yeah here's the price list and it's like there's no rapport in the it's straight to the price he's not finding out what this actual customer actually needs he's not showing that he can solve the problem it's just like bone price everyone slips up on the sales parts you need to know how to actually handle the sales conversation because again without you know a lot of people it's like a taboo subject sales but the end of the day we all built our businesses to make money and to make money requires you to sell something and if you can't sell anything or don't know how to sell up through content through conversations through calls whatever it is you will screw it up at the very last moment and that's not what you want so when we break it all down you've got three pillars that you need to focus on awareness trust through content sales through content and conversations if you nail all three your business will grow at a very rapid rate and I said this on a post the other day is you know you have the power to to grow very fast very quickly is that the right English put it this way this business within its first six weeks made more revenue than the entire 12 months of my first business and that was the final 12 months before I finished that business not just the first 12 months have been open and I was in that business for three years by the way and towards the end of that first two years I closed it then the third year got better because I actually started to study marketing so it wasn't just like oh yeah 12 quid it was a decent chunk and the reason I say this is not to go out and you'll never hear me speak about anything materialistic or even just sometimes I'll float numbers around if there's a meaningful amount of why it's important but you'll never see me just boast about revenue and income because I literally don't give a shit and neither do you but the reason I share that story of how in six weeks I made more revenue than in 12 months of the first business is because the only reason I was able to do it is because I know marketing like the back of my hand I know how to get people to find me to trust me to buy from me so I can give them an amazing service and so they come to me and not someone else and the same with you you deserve to be the person that people go to you deserve to have the revenue in your bank versus someone else's this isn't this is a game about you right and I speak to a lot of business owners and it's always a case of you know how things going it's like oh you know slow and steady it's like it doesn't need to be slow and steady you know it and let me tell you something just because it's slow and steady now doesn't mean that it won't be in two years if you don't do anything about it you need to learn how to market because if you do that you can take control you can get fully booked very quickly I refer back to Cavern who did it in three weeks right managed to have the confidence to leave his part-time job had a hundred book hundred bookings in six six weeks doubled is literally probably tripled now is revenue 60 plus new actual clients there's no sheer chance and he's not the only one there's tons and I'll probably share a few case studies over the time on doing these episodes but I just want you to know if you get hold of everything if you get a handle on every friend if you get control of everything you can do a lot that's for sure so anyway that's the first episode I'm going to love you and leave you that is a bit of a tangent there bit of an insight opening and I think on the next couple of episodes we'll dive deeper into the actual pillars look at we'll look at specifically awareness more so probably do 20 minutes on awareness we'll probably do 20 minutes on trust then we'll probably do 20 minutes on sales I'll give you some real examples life examples share some stuff that my clients have been doing so you can you know take it of your own and the whole point of this podcast is learn from it use it and obviously if you ever need more of a hand hold and which you know a lot of people will do just come and message me to find out how it all works on my side I had I had someone the other day she she did one I I used to do these content orders it's like five minutes I just went over a content and said a few things for it to change and she came to me the other the other week and she was like I literally did everything that you told me to and my business has doubled in four weeks I'm like do you even pay me anything because that's how powerful this can be so anyway learn implement keep tuning in if you need anything further drop me a message if you ever want anything covering on the podcast drop me a message but apart from that I'll see you soon