“Our job as marketers is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get to where they’d like to go.” – Seth GodinTad Hargrave is the man behind Marketing for Hippies and our guest on the Path to Profit Podcast today. Tad defines hippies as entrepreneurs with a sustainability, holistic health, or permaculture slant to it. Although he tried not to, Tad had a knack for marketing and now can develop oxymoronic niches that capture our attention with interest. He breaks down what it means to have an effective niche, explores the ick factor of marketing, and borrows from the slow food movement to drop it into slow marketing principles.So how do we kick the ick factor of marketing to the curb, and bring in a slow marketing avenue that works for everyone? How do you find the clients who have an immediate, visceral, “Yes, oh my God, how do I sign up? This sounds so great. It’s exactly what I needed. I had a dream about somebody like you last night.” According to Tad, it doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens.Find out what puttering sessions are (and how to get paid for them while in your own home!) in the full podcast interview.Join the Creative Business AcceleratorIf you’re ready to stop working all the time and making yourself crazy, and instead want to get focused and clear so you can attract high-end clients, make great money and have a thriving business, then it’s time to become a member of the Creative Business Academy!BioTad Hargrave is a hippy who developed a knack for marketing (and then learned how to be a hippy again).Despite years in the non-profit and activist world, he finally had to admit he was a marketing nerd and, in the end, he became a marketing coach for hippies. Maybe it was because he couldn’t stand seeing his hippy friends struggle to promote their amazing, green and holistic projects. Maybe it was because he couldn’t keep a 9-5 job to save his life.Whatever the reason, for almost a decade, he has been touring his marketing workshops around Canada, bringing refreshing and unorthodox ideas to conscious entrepreneurs and green businesses that help them grow their organizations and businesses (without selling their souls).Tad currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta (traditionally known, in the local indigenous language of the Cree, as Amiskwaciy (Beaver Hill) and later Amiskwaciwaskihegan (Beaver Hill House)) and his ancestors come primarily from Scotland with some from the Ukraine as well.Free giftThe Way of the Radical Business + 3 More Free Things [Link]LinksSocial media:http://instagram.com/tadhargravehttp://facebook.com/hippymarketerhttp://twitter.com/tadhargravehttp://marketingforhippies.comhttps://www.buddhistbootcamp.com/https://bigdreamprogram.mykajabi.com/p/homeTranscriptShow Transcript (7,798 More Words)Brad Dobson: Welcome to the Path to Profit Podcast, with your hosts, Dr. Minette Riordan and Brad Dobson.Hi, and welcome again to the Path to Profit Podcast. I’m Brad Dobson with my wife, Dr. Minette Riordan. Today, we are going to talk with Tad Hargrave about marketing.Minette Riordan: Marketing for hippies.Brad Dobson: Marketing for hippies.Minette Riordan: In particular. Welcome, Tad. We’re so excited to have you here today.Tad Hargrave: Thank you, it’s good to be here.Minette Riordan: Yeah, it’s super fun. It’s been a couple months since we saw you live in Northern California up in Santa Cruz as the very interesting conference about what’s happening in the state of coaching industry, which to me has more than anything to do about how people have been marketing and how I think that that’s going to be changing and shifting a lot. We always start the show with a quote, so who better to start a show about marketing than a quote from one of my heroes, Godin, who says that, “Our job as marketers is to connect to people, to interact with them in a way that leaves them better than we found them, more able to get to where they’d like to go.”Brad Dobson: Seth Godin who always just brings the truth.Minette Riordan: He does.Brad Dobson: Tad, I want to kick this off. You are the man behind Marketing for Hippies. I want to know what “hippie” means in this context. I know certainly it’s a loaded term. People bring a lot of baggage with that term, but what does it mean in this context?Tad Hargrave: I don’t know if I’m particularly precious about the precise meaning, but where it came from was a lot of my friends were wanting to start businesses with some environmental slant to it, something around sustainability or holistic health or permaculture. This type of thing. The idea was so beautiful that they had that the plans they had for the marketing were awful. It’s something I affectionately called my friends or my friends are called by other people, “hippies,” because of their interest in these things, so with all due deference to the actual hippies from the 60’s, yeah, I guess it’s just a term I use affectionately and not too heavily.Brad Dobson: Cool, cool. Just people that are a little bit closer to the world around them, I think. Something like that.Tad Hargrave: Something like that.Minette Riordan: I’m curious about your personal journey, and you share a little bit about this in your bio on your website, about how you came to the conclusion that you are a marketer. How much maybe you tried not to be, that you actually love marketing and are really good at it, so maybe share a little bit about your journey into marketing and how you approach it, really, quite differently than most mainstream marketers.Tad Hargrave: I started working for a franchise of the Leadership Development Company, volunteering, when I was in high school. As soon as I graduated I got a job there and learned a lot about marketing and selling as well. It was a mixed bag. Some of the stuff I learned I think was really good and I still teach in workshops, and some of it was not so great, or at least I can say not something I would feel comfortable doing anymore. Yeah, I did that, and then that business collapsed eventually, and I ended up going down to California and I ended up working with this non-profit doing summer camps, etc., environmental, social justice.The more I was in that, the more I learned about that and went through a big anarchist phase. On the other side of that, was still left with this partly wanting to be self-employed, having the particular affliction of not being able to hold down a job. Ever since I was 18, I’ve been self-employed, starting a couple of different businesses. I just had this interest in and a knack for marketing, so I just thought, well, I’ll start teaching it, and it started from there.Minette Riordan: Nice, and I know you’ve had this version of your business for about 10 years now?Tad Hargrave: Yeah.Minette Riordan: Talk a little bit about, because I know it’s one of the things you really help people with is this concept of [neesh Tad Hargrave: The Canadians pronounce it [neesh I guess I’m also just a fan, in retrospect, I’m a fan of a lot of niches that are oxymoronic in some way, that combine things that normally don’t get combined. I think there’s something very attention catching about it. There’s the website ZenBitchslap.com, or ChocolateforBreakfast.com, or Buddhist Bootcamp. These types of things, these are things you normally wouldn’t put together, but somehow they work.Part of what that speaks to, I suppose, is that for a lot of us, our niche … I define niche as our role in the community or the role we want to be known for. Often, that role is that we’re bridging certain communities, we’re bridging certain worlds. I think that’s true for most people, that we end up doing that anyways. So that can happen in business. I had one foot in the hippie world and one foot in the business marketing world, and so then, of course, this would be a business that would come out of that, yeah.Minette Riordan: I love that. Such a great answer. We work with creatives, so similar challenges with marketing, I’m sure, as some of the people that you’re working with in the holistic, environmental communities as well. It does feel like that, where we have one foot in the business systems and processing side, and one foot in the creative side. It’s a happy place, right?Tad Hargrave: Yeah.Minette Riordan: To bring that balance in the middle of that oxymoron.Brad Dobson: I’ve got to go look for BuddhistBootcamp.com, I think.Minette Riordan: Oh, he’s awesome. That’s a great site. I love that one.Brad Dobson: Oh, is it? Oh, okay.Minette Riordan: Yeah. He’s cool, yeah. I can’t remember that guy’s name. Do you remember the … I can’t either. It’s funny. I just discovered him fairly recently, and I’m curious how your brand has evolved over time. Did you find yourself personally making shifts, not just in your marketing, but in your branding or in your teaching as well? Like by stating Marketing for Hippies, how did you become more that?Tad Hargrave: I don’t know if I did. It felt more like a confirmation. Sometimes, a name is an aspirational thing. You pick a name because it’s something you want to grow into. People change their name to Sunshine Mountain Glow or whatever it is, because they want to grow into that. It’s aspirational. Sometimes, naming, it’s affirmation, a confirmation, of what’s already so, and so I feel like it was more that for me.Minette Riordan: Nice.Tad Hargrave: By the time I finally had it as a URL, it felt so, “Yeah, of course, that’s what I do. That’s who I am.”Brad Dobson: Perfect.Minette Riordan: Nice.Brad Dobson: As Minette said, I think we definitely have some audience in common, and one of the things that our folks struggle with mightily is that ick factor to marketing, because for the most part, they feel like they’ve been put on this world to be healers or helpers or those type of people. It’s a stretch for them to then toot their horn, sell things-Minette Riordan: Ask for money.Brad Dobson: Accept money. How do you help your hippies, your people, to get past that?Tad Hargrave: I would turn that question back to you. I’m curious why you both feel like there’s the ick. What’s the source of it, in your experience? Why do people feel so gross or turned off by the thought of selling or marketing?Minette Riordan: I love that question.Brad Dobson: They think of the slick salesman. They have that picture in their mind of it’s the used car dealer or the crazy guy on the TV with the furniture sales, “Hey, come on down, get a free budgie with your next purchase,” that type of thing.Minette Riordan: It’s that. We also hear it’s hard, right? It’s hard to put a price on [inaudible Tad Hargrave: Yeah. I guess there’s two different ways to come at this. One is that it’s good to wonder about what is it in that used car salesman archetype that is so repulsive, that has us say, “Ick”? Because it’s not necessarily their tone or their vibe, because I can just speak for myself. There are some people who just have this huckster vibe, but they’re super lovable, and I’m not turned off by it. They’re gregarious, they’re over the top. It’s a little schmoozy, but there’s that movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where he keeps saying of Audrey Hepburn’s character, “She’s a phony, but she’s a real phony. She’s a genuine phony.”There are some people that have the huckster vibe, and it’s just so sincere, there’s nothing contrived about it. I just know I’ve experienced that with certain people, and I love them more for it, because it’s just who they are. So, if it’s not that, which is I think the first thing we see, if it’s not that, then what could it be? The thing I would suggest, there are probably a number of things. There are probably a lot of answers.The two that come to mind, one is, Seth Godin’s, she quoted him, the whole idea of permission marketing, that is a practice. That often marketing feels terrible because there was no permission given for the conversation to happen. Somebody just launched into it. I was dating a woman years ago, and she met a woman at a coffee shop. They had a great conversation, and then the woman said, “Hey, we should get together for coffee again.” She said, “Yeah, that sounds great.” So they did, and within minutes, she found herself in an Amway presentation and was too polite or didn’t want to interrupt. But she just felt awful about the whole thing. There was no permission. There was no consent given.I think that’s a big reason why marketing can feel really awful, but perhaps one of the reasons that that even appears in the first place, that consent or permission is not even explored, is because there’s this hidden agenda in most marketing and selling, which is to get the sale. When I first started, all the stuff I learned from all the big name speakers who I have their audio tapes and everything, explicitly, the agenda was, get the sale. That’s how you know you succeeded, you got the sale. If you didn’t get the sale, at some level, you failed.All these beliefs that you should be able to close everybody, the belief in closing people as a practice, the idea that marketing is really about convincing people or it’s about the transference of emotion and whoever’s most certain wins, so marketing’s really then about dominance. All this was wrapped in and explicitly taught. It wasn’t hidden, it wasn’t woven it. It was just, these are some of the principles. If fundamentally your orientation towards marketing is about getting the sale, you’re not going to ask for permission. You’re not going to notice the consequence that you’re having on people or the impact. You’re just going to keep plowing forward, because that’s the only goal.To me, fundamentally, that’s it. That’s the fundamental reason that marketing feels icky, is this hidden agenda. Again, it’s hidden. It’s not talked about. It’s not hidden in the training, but it’s hidden in the practice. It’s like when you see a duck swimming on a pond, on the surface, it seems so still, but underneath the surface, there’s all this going on. That’s, I think, most people’s experience with being sold or marketed to, when it feels terrible is, you actually can’t point to anything. You can’t say, “That was the moment” often. It’s just you’re left with this feeling of you were being maneuvered, that they were actually very busy doing something that you couldn’t see them doing.I would say on the ick side, that’s my best sense of it at this point. Then, in terms of the yeah, being visible, in some ways, it’s the same, actually, because every potential client or person we meet who we’re talking to about our business, there’s fundamentally three categories that people are going to fall into. Yes, maybe, and no. They’re either going to hear what we talk about and have an immediate, visceral “Yes, oh my God, how do I sign up? This sounds so great. It’s exactly what I needed. I had a dream about somebody like you last night.” It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens.Then there’s the nos, and the nos, [inaudible I’d submit that the reason that is is because we’re being neutral and generic in our marketing. We’re trying to be everything to everybody, we’re trying to not to be offensive, we’re trying to just fit in in a certain way. Then the question becomes, why would we do that? Thew reason is, because we’re scared of rejection. But why are we scared of rejection? Because we’re trying to get the sale, fundamentally. We’re trying to get a particular response.It comes back to this, again, in a certain way. If you didn’t have that as an agenda, to try to convince somebody to say yes or to buy from you, then where’s the rejection? How is it possible for them to reject you if you weren’t trying to impose something on them? That’s not a complete answer. There’s a much bigger conversation to have about why people are scared of the visibility, but so I would just suggest, the short answer in terms of a potential remedy to this is really, fundamentally letting go of this agenda to get the sale, but replacing it with the overt agenda to get to the truth, if it’s a fit or not so that this actually becomes one of the central agendas.Again, this is an agenda you can talk about explicitly with the people you’re meeting with. You can say … Just notice the difference. It would be very difficult to say, so, in this conversation, I’m going to covertly be using a lot of techniques to try to get you to be compliant and say yes at the end of this conversation. I’ll be using your name a lot, I’ll be matching your body language, I’ll be trying to elicit your meta-programs or buying strategies and using various closes at the end.It’d be so strange to say that. I don’t know if anyone ever has. But what you could say to somebody is like, “Look, my intention in this conversation is to see if this is a fit on my end, on your end, and if it’s not, then there’s no big deal. No hurt feelings either side. But if it is, then we can see how to move forward.” Then marketing fundamentally becomes filtering, not convincing, not persuading, not seducing anybody, but a filtering process, where you are certainly presenting something that may be appealing to certain people, but also, actively like a screen on a window, filtering out what you don’t want as a client, and supporting them in that same process. Supporting them in filtering you, as well, to see if it’s a fit.Then if it’s a real fit, it’s [inaudible Brad Dobson: So many wise words there.Minette Riordan: It’s so true. The one word that keeps coming to me in everything that you’re describing is connection. When we really approach marketing, whether that’s content creation or workshops or sitting down to have an actual sales conversation with somebody, if the connection isn’t there, we can’t move forward. If that identification isn’t there, that, “Oh, yeah, this person could potentially help me.” It’s filtering, and I loved what you said about being generic or neutral in your marketing.I think if I’ve learned anything in the last couple of years, it’s that my job is just as much to repel the people that aren’t right for working with me or for our community as it is to attract the right ones, because there’s so many solutions to pretty much most of the problems, when it comes to building business, and there’s a match for everybody. [crosstalk Tad Hargrave: Because if you translate it to dating, this all still works.Minette Riordan: Yes.Tad Hargrave: It’s because of course you don’t want to make yourself vulnerable in a certain way, because you take it personally if they reject you, but it really stings when you just … The whole dating arrangement can be scary if you’re walking into it feeling like you’ve got to convince somebody or it all hinges on this, versus you’re looking, too. You’re filtering, too. So many entrepreneurs, it’s a real light bulb moment for them when they realize they could fire clients, or they don’t actually have to accept everyone who wants to work with them.For a lot of entrepreneurs, they’ve been putting up with clients who are just subpar who are draining them in a certain way. When they suddenly get it, “Oh, I could just fire them. I could just stop working with them and double down on the clients I really love. I can actually say no. I can have a list of deal breakers, and I can be really clear about that before I work with people. These are my …” It’s so refreshing for people, yeah.Minette Riordan: I love that. There’s so many directions to go, but I’m really curious about this concept of slow marketing, because it makes me think about slow food and community building and so many other amazing things. What is slow marketing?Tad Hargrave: It actually came from the whole slow food movement for me, that this idea of enjoying food at the pace you want to enjoy it at. Yeah, eating slowly, not fast food. Not just run in, grab it, shove it down, as if food is just fuel for our bodies, which are machines. There’s this whole mechanistic understanding of the world in this. What if food is a kind of medicine, and what if the primary medicine that food gives us is gratitude?That can’t happen in fast food, or it’s very difficult to conjure that when you don’t know where the food came from, the store even, but if you know of this food, this food was grown by this farmer, and this one was grown by this farmer, and the lamb came from this farmer, and you maybe even worked on some of the farms or helped them out and your friendships with these people and you know everything that’s gone into getting it to the plate. Then it was prepared by this other friend who cooked it.You’re just overwhelmed with this gratitude of what it took to bring that meal to your plate and how good it is to be with each other as friends and we’re still alive and isn’t this amazing, when other people aren’t here with us who we wish they were, and yet we’re still here somehow. There’s so much to feel about that. There’s this similar thing in slow marketing, because everything I learned was very much the fast marketing, fast sales.It takes the humanity out of the whole arrangement, versus you can just be sitting down to have a conversation of, is this a fit? And if not, maybe hey, maybe I know somebody who could be a better fit for you. Now you’re just two human beings having a conversation and you both might have something that the other person needs. They may have some money, you may have something to offer. In this current economic arrangement, that seems to be the way it is for the most part, and maybe we could work something out.There’s a real spiritual something that can happen when you’re … There’s a humility that needs to come with this. You know, Mark Silver talks about this better than I ever will, but that as an entrepreneur, you have needs. You need money. You need support for your business. You’re not a self-sustaining entity. It’s good to bring that humility, I think, into these conversations, because that also creates the gratitude when you’ve got a client, because you realize, “Man, they are providing for me. They’re sustaining me in my life, and I couldn’t do it on my own. I’m so grateful.”I don’t see much of that room for gratitude. There’s just this sort of swaggering entitlement in a lot of the more mainstream marketing thing. The irony of it, it’s not gratitude they feel when a sale happens, it’s pride, because it’s like, “Look what I did. Look how smart I am. They didn’t even see this technique I used. I’m so good.” This is why in marketing you see a lot of ninja tactics, stealth tactics, hidden. “You can hack your customer’s brain,” all this stuff.All of it’s speaking to that, that it’ll be hidden, and nobody will notice you doing it. But where does that come from? It comes from the sense that it should be hidden. We shouldn’t be talking about it. Versus … So if you come from that place, you’re going to feel like yeah, you got away with something at the end of the … And you got the sale. “I got away with this. I NLP’ed them, or I Zig Ziglared or Tom Hopkins,” you know.Minette Riordan: Just talking about it makes me have that ick factor, you know? I’ve been in sales for a long time, and I’ve never sold that way, so I love that you’re having this conversation and the analogy between the slow food and slow marketing.Brad Dobson: This is like mindful marketing.Minette Riordan: It is very much mindful marketing.Brad Dobson: It’s right marketing. It’s number nine on the eightfold path.Minette Riordan: Yes. Maybe so. It’s about relationships, and a lot stood out from what you said, but the humanity piece. Like our recognizing our own humanity, but seeing the human in the person across the table, even though money is exchanging hands, the money is just an even exchange of goods and services, but it’s really seeing the human. Mass marketing doesn’t do that. I do think that people are getting really wise to ninja marketing tactics [crosstalk Tad Hargrave: Yeah.Minette Riordan: How do you connect with people? Are you still doing live workshops?Tad Hargrave: Some, yeah. It’s a mix of live and online these days, yeah.Minette Riordan: What’s your favorite way to connect with people?Tad Hargrave: You know, I’m doing these things called puttering sessions. I think that’s my favorite. I don’t know if I’ve talked to you about this.Minette Riordan: No, that sounds cool.Tad Hargrave: This is the greatest business idea I’ve ever had. This is my home. Actually, right before we spoke, I did a puttering session. I function really well when my home is tidy. If it gets cluttered, I get cluttered in my head.Minette Riordan: [crosstalk Tad Hargrave: But, I resent tidying a great deal, so that’s a [inaudible So one day, I just emailed my list and I said, “Look, I don’t know if this is a good idea, but I’m going to offer 10 sessions for about a third of the price I’d normally charge for coaching, but I’ll be tidying and doing dishes while we talk. I’ll be puttering and sweeping, if you’re down for it. I only released 10 because I didn’t know if it was a good idea. I thought maybe I’d be too distracted, it’d be too noisy. A lot of reasons it may not work. They sold out right away, and I did them, and they were really great coaching sessions. So I’ve been doing those for a year and a quarter now. They’re my favorite thing. So my home has never been tidier, and-Minette Riordan: You’re making my 16-year-old daughter giggle in the background over here.Tad Hargrave: Yeah, I think it’s probably my favorite way. It’s something to think about for people in terms of the way we do our work. I’ve heard about coaches who love hiking or going on walks in nature, who just take a Bluetooth headset and go for a walk and do that while they’re coaching. Or actually take people out on a hike and weave the coaching into it, or do knitting while they’re coaching. There’s a lot-Minette Riordan: [crosstalk Tad Hargrave: There are a lot of ways that we can do this that make it more fulfilling and possibly even better. I don’t know. There’s something about being a little distracted. Not being just so locked in, but doing something with your hands. I think most traditional cultures, if there was storytelling going on, you’d be having your spindle and you’ve be weaving something or knitting or whittling something. There’s a part of your brain that gets a little occupied and maybe some other things can come in or go out. Anyways, that’s probably my favorite way these days.Minette Riordan: That’s cool.Brad Dobson: That’s great. That reminds me of Kathy. Kathy takes clients out-Minette Riordan: Surfing.Brad Dobson: Onto the break in Ventura, surfing.Minette Riordan: Yeah, takes them out on the standup boards, does yoga on the board.Brad Dobson: Your mind’s a lot more engaged than just butt in seat, staring at the screen.Minette Riordan: Yeah, my client notes are covered in flowers and hippie doodles. I love that. So, are these coaching sessions, then, are you using them, are they just one-off so anybody anytime can just spend an hour with you?Tad Hargrave: Yeah.Minette Riordan: Which is also a really graceful way to connect with people, as opposed to I’m trying to sell you into some big package.Tad Hargrave: Yeah, I’ve got a mentorship program, which is 12 spots. The current price is $400. It’ll probably go up the next round. That’s full right now, so there aren’t any more spaces in it, but yeah, exactly. It’s a good way to connect with people. Then if the mentorship program, if spaces opened, that’s probably one of the first lists I’d reach out to. Say, “Hey, if you enjoyed this puttering session and you’d like more ongoing, there’s a few spaces open.” And they’ve had a chance to get an experience with me, get something useful, so yeah.Minette Riordan: And your house is tidy.Brad Dobson: I can hear Minette’s wheels are spinning over here. I’m not sure if you’re going to make it tidier, but …Minette Riordan: No, but I do love to make art or do all kinds of things when I’m coaching, and it’s going back to the phone, as well. I use Zoom for a lot of my coaching sessions, and I’ve been doing something similar where I just send out to my list and say, hey, come on for a small group coaching session. Five people.Tad Hargrave: Awesome.Minette Riordan: No cost at all, and let’s just figure out where you’re stuck right now and get you through that. It’s that same thing of just creating virtual ways to create more face time or ear time with people. I think it’s so important. And part of that’s slow marketing, of not needing-Tad Hargrave: Interesting.Minette Riordan: I don’t need a big sale today, but I’m [inaudible Brad Dobson: Cool stuff.Minette Riordan: And bringing more play into all of it. I love that the puttering allows you to bring more play into all of it.Tad Hargrave: Yeah. It’s something I got from a colleague of mine, Alex Baisley, who’s somebody you might actually want to interview. His website’s BigDreamProgram.com. One of the things he said that to me is so brilliant was he said, “You start with what’s the lifestyle that you want to have? And then you back your business into that lifestyle. Not the other way around. You don’t start with, what’s the business and what’s the structure I think I should do and then how do I on the edges tack on some elements of a good lifestyle. You start with, yeah, that lifestyle piece.”If you start with that, it’s just all going to work so much better. You’re not going to be resenting it as you go and wishing it wasn’t quite structured this way. And that you can structure it any way you want to. But how many people, they work a Minette Riordan: I know.Tad Hargrave: But why? It’s not like they’ve thought about it in particular. It’s just, “Well, that’s what you have to do.” But maybe for them, actually working late nights would work better, early mornings, or maybe they just work three days a week, but more. There’s so many ways to structure it just in terms of time or the location of where do you do it. One of my colleagues, she’s a therapist, and she could do five or six sessions a day with clients.Minette Riordan: Day after day after day, right?Tad Hargrave: Day after day, and it was really wearing her out. She said, “I don’t want to do any more one-on-one.” I said, “I don’t think that’s true. I think what’s true is you, number one, need to filter better in terms of who you’re working with, because you’re probably working with some clients that actually aren’t such a good fit, and you’re having to compensate for that. And you’re resenting it but then having to cover it, and that’s just a lot of energy. Number two, I know you really love to do deeper dives with clients, so what if you just did one a day or two, maximum. What if you just did one session a day, but you charged more, but it’s a three hour thing, and that’s just how you work? Maybe you don’t do them as often, but it’s a much deeper thing.”I could just see her, “Oh.” But why not do it that way? There’s no reason not to. I just urge people to really start with that. How do I want my lifestyle to be? Or, maybe I work six months and then I go travel for six months. Or whether or not I’m traveling, I just don’t work. So many ways to do it, and it’s good to look around and see how other people do it so we don’t get stuck in the box of what the industry norms are, as if that’s the only way or the best way to do anything.Minette Riordan: It’s so true. It’s such a great reminder that we can create our business the way we want it. I have a client that all her consulting clients are in Europe, so her day starts at Tad Hargrave: Sure. It’s funny, the next ebook I’ve got coming out is about touring workshops. The one after that is about how to run pay-what-you-can workshops. The one after that is about filtering. So it’s coming. Yeah, you know, when I talk about filtering, I’m not talking about it philosophically. I’m actually talking about it mechanically in your marketing. Here’s an example. I’ve had some online programs, and people would sign up for them, but it wouldn’t be a fit. Part of what you start to realize is, okay, in the filtering thing, I need to make certain things clear on the sales letter.One of them was they didn’t realize it was going to be on Facebook, and they don’t really use Facebook. I needed to make that clearer as a filter so that somebody like them wouldn’t sign up in the first place. But then you start to discover sometimes you’ll put it in the sales letter and people still buy it, because they don’t actually read the damn sales letter, because-Minette Riordan: They just like you.Tad Hargrave: They just like you and they just signed up. So then they complain, but you say, “But it was in the sales letter!” So when that happens, you realize you’ve got to actually mechanically slow down the process to make sure the filtering happens. What I started to do was, like here’s the sales page, let’s say. When they click on the buy now button, the nit takes them to the PayPal or whatever and they pay. What I started to do is I said, what if I inserted something in between, so they click on the buy now button. Instead of taking them to the PayPal, it takes them to this page in the middle, and this page in the middle, I call it the Are You Sure? page.Minette Riordan: Nice.Tad Hargrave: This page is basically just a video, [inaudible Minette Riordan: Wow.Tad Hargrave: What happened with that was, I got emails from people who were saying, “Thank you so much, because I actually was about to go traveling and I wasn’t going to have the time and until I reread that piece, I didn’t realize how much homework there was going to be, and I just won’t be able to do it, and it was going to be a kind of waste of time.” Or, “I didn’t realize it was on Facebook, and I’m just not on Facebook, and so thank you, wow.” So there’s a lot of gratitude.But then the people who signed up were twice as in, twice as excited about it. “I knew it was a fit, I didn’t realize how much a fit until I read, and then I saw, this is exactly me. So it was a confirmation.” It’s this type of thing. It’s the difference between if you stand up on stage in front of a bunch of people and you say, with the agenda to get them to buy-Minette Riordan: “Run to the back of the room!”Tad Hargrave: Yeah, “Pull out your credit card, [inaudible So you say, “Look, if it feels like this might be a fit to want to work with me, I do have an offer, of course. Here’s what it is, and here’s what it isn’t. Here’s how I do it, here’s how I don’t do. Here’s who I think it’s for, here’s who it’s definitely not for. So if this feels like a fit or if you have any questions, feel free to talk to me. Here’s the price. Yes, there’s an early bird for the people who sign up today.”Or, I’ve seen a number of my colleagues, Suzanne Falter-Barns being one, who do things where they do the pitch on a Saturday night, and then they say, “We’re not taking orders tonight. You have to sleep on it, because this is a lot of money. It’s a big commitment, and we want you to sleep on it, and you can let us know tomorrow.” All of this, when I first did the Are You Sure? page and I was very excited and I showed some colleagues. One of my colleagues said, “Well, have you tested it?”“Test it for what?” Well, I know what he means. He means, if we were to do an A/B test and one group clicked on it, took them straight to PayPal, the other group clicked on it, it took them to the Are You Sure? page, would I get the same or a superior response? Of course not. I’m going to get less people if I insert the Are You Sure? page. But there’s not going to be as many refunds. I’m not going to deal with the hassles. I’m not going to have to deal with people in my program who shouldn’t be there and then need to refund them. None of that, no drama.Brad Dobson: Plus you get the people that are going to give you the fantastic testimonials.Minette Riordan: Yep, you can keep the raving fans.Tad Hargrave: And if you get a bunch of people in your programs who are not a fit, guess where most of your energy goes?Minette Riordan: To taking care of them, yeah.Tad Hargrave: And then not to the people who are actually a fit in the first place, so the people who are a fit don’t have as good an experience. The people who are not a fit, no matter how much you pour into it, they don’t have a great experience. Everyone has a kind of more mediocre experience, and that’s the word of mouth. Versus you filter and everyone in the program is on point, and it’s a better program if it’s a group program. Yeah, the testimonials are so much better, the word of mouth is better, they refer more people, and those people are more likely to be a fit.It’s so often so much of marketing is, how do we speed this up? How do we lubricate it? How do we facilitate the process so that they buy faster? Versus, yes, have a good offer. Yes, all of that, of course. But, how do you actually slow it down? Not to push everyone away. This is where filtering becomes a thoughtful thing. Of course, you could set up so many roadblocks nobody buys. That’s possible. We’re not saying that. We’re saying, you’re just being very mindful, as you said earlier, of who is a fit, who isn’t. How do I just make sure those people would never buy?That’s a win. If your agenda is to get the sale, you just failed. You lost a sale. But if the agenda is to get to the truth of if it’s a fit, to filter, to facilitate this decision making process on both ends, it’s a huge win. Then they leave feeling good. Often what’ll happen to those conversations, if you’re talking to them, you’ll say, “Look, this is not a fit, but I can tell you who you should talk to. Here’s somebody who can help you for the situation you’re in.”And they go to them, and that person’s helped them, and there’s nothing but gratitude and good will and good vibes all around, where they say, “Oh my God, thank you so much for referring me to the right person.” That person says, “Thank you so much for referring the business.” Then that person who you turned away and referred out, they may be talking with a friend and their friends says, “I’m really struggling with this.” “You know who you should talk to? There’s this … It wasn’t a fit for me to work with them, but I think for you, it’d be perfect.”Even as you turn them away, it’s a chance to reclarify your niche. I’ve had to have this conversation with a few people, where I say, “Look, you’re not quite sure what you want to do with your life. You still have a lot of options, you’ve got a lot of interests, and you’re trying to figure out how to put it together in a way that can make money. That’s not my thing. My thing is more, I help people who feel gross about marketing, but have to, and figure out their niche and their point of view, so they can get more clients who are a fit with an existing business. But you should go talk to Alex Baisley at BigDreamProgram.com, because that’s his thing.”What’s happened is, I’ve just reestablished my own niche and what I do, hopefully more clearly in their mind. They get a good fit. Everybody wins. It’s a longer game. I guess this is the thing in terms of filtering. Let me just say as the last thought, ultimately, marketing comes down to word of mouth, and another way to say this is reputation. It’s an antique idea in a way, but when you have a good reputation, when you can be known for a particular thing that you’re really good at, over time, you take that out a decade? Marketing becomes pretty easy, as long as you’ve got a good business model set up.Most plumbers I know, it’s all word of mouth. Most of the good ones, they don’t market. Mechanics, it’s the same thing. They’re just really good at what they do, and everyone sends the business to them. They don’t have to market at all, just because of reputation. If you’re working with clients who aren’t a fit all the time, then how are you ever going to get a good reputation? You can’t, because it’s not a good fit, so you won’t do a good job, so they don’t get good results. It’s a trap.Brad Dobson: Perfect.Minette Riordan: I love that. So much great information. Tad, I could just keep going. I love the philosophy.Brad Dobson: This was fun.Minette Riordan: And the practical pieces. Super cool. I love the concept of slow marketing. Where can people go to connect with you, find out more about what you are up to? I know you have an amazing, actually, free ebook that’s very [crosstalk Tad Hargrave: Yeah, if you go to MarketingforHippies.com, there’s a lot of free stuff. There’s almost 700 blog posts, there’s a bunch of videos. Then if people are struggling with their niche in particular, if they go to nichingspiral.com, there’s also a ton of free stuff. There’s a $20 ebook they can get around niching.Minette Riordan: Great. So MarketingforHippies.com. Tad, thank you so much. This was awesome.Tad Hargrave: Thank you.Brad Dobson: Thank you so much, Tad.Thanks for listening.You can also view this call’s video recording on our Youtube channelThe post Episode 88: Marketing for Hippies, with Tad Hargrave appeared first on Path to Profit Academy.