Guest Speaker: Dana Malstaff

Website: www.boss-mom.com

Bio:

Dana Malstaff is the CEO and Founder of Boss Mom. She is a mother, author, business strategist, podcaster, blind spot reducer, and movement maker. She is the author of Boss Mom: The Ultimate Guide to Raising a Business & Nurturing Your Family Like a Pro. With over 9,000 students in various courses and a 20k+ community. With over 10 years of experience in content creation, marketing, sales, community building, and business strategy, Dana grew the Boss Mom brand into a six figure business in less than a year. Her Boss Mom Movement is all about losing the guilt when it comes to raising babies and businesses at the same time, and believes that pursuing our passions and building our dreams while including our children in the process, is the best way to build thriving businesses and families.

Interview Summary

Maria: Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome. My name is Maria Dismondy. I am a children’s book publisher and I am over at Cardinal Rule Press. This is Dana Malstaff and she is the creator and CEO of Boss Mom which is a fantastic organization that I have been part of for the last almost year and we are going to be talking about creating as buzz around a launch. For those of you tuning in right now, you have been following this series for the last 8 or 9 weeks and we’ve been talking about creative marketing. Approaching marketing in a way that it is not spammy, salesly, inauthentic. We’re talking about really getting into the heart and into the mind of your audience. Welcome Dana!

Dana: Wow, thanks for having me. I’d love to hear too for those that are on and as you come and watch whether people are watching the replay or live to comment below and say what they’re launching. Is it a book, is it a digital product, is it something else, let us know what it is you’re launching because then we could start having those conversations because there are little things I bet you could do that are different but then there’s also a framework. I think what’s really great about promotion is you can use a framework and then you can customize it depending on what it is you want to launch. So, I’m super excited about this conversation.

Maria: Actually Dana and I are in a Mastermind together and the joy of being in a group of other individuals who, we don’t necessary sell the similar services or products but again you can approach a different industry using the same framework, which has been really great, and Carrie who is tuning in right now is launching a new brand and website and she’s also part of our Mastermind. Thank you for tuning in Carrie.

Let’s talk Dana, tell us about how you get this buzz going around, something that you’re launching. Are you going to give us a real life example or… let’s jump into it.

Dana: We can do all the things. So here’s one thing, I think one thing we want to do is we want to find what buzz it is because when we talk about launching things, it could be really scary and we talk about buzz, we think marketing and promotion, but what buzz does is buzz is a way for people to get to know less and recognize us, so what I want you to think about is if it takes 7 to 10 points of contact for somebody to remember us and start buying from us, somewhere within there, some people will buy from me right off the bat, they already know you but for the cold audience, there’s just 7 to 10 touch points and every year that touch point gets higher and higher. What that means is before anything you have comes out into the world, before that launch happens, they need to see you 7 to 10 times so that when they see the thing that you want them to actually, they say yes. Buzz is all about creating those 7 to 10 touch points early. What most people do is they create a product then they go out and their 7 to 10 touch points are just telling them the product exists and hoping they buy it and then wondering why they don’t. True launch has the buzz component because it is your primer. Just like paint, it’s a primer. When you put the paint on, it sticks better. It’s like you were a billboard that people saw, and then like, ‘wow, where have I seen that? Oh I remember. Ooh I’m excited that thing is coming out.’ So it’s implemented to remember. Buzz does that. It’s that function, 7 to 10 points.

Maria: I have a great example. There is a real estate agent in our town. I have seen him on my grocery shopping cart, I have seen him on billboards, I have seen him on the back of the bathroom, like when you’re going to the bathroom, on the back wall, he has an advertisement there at the gym. He’s everywhere. If I’m going to sell a home, I’m going to call this guy literally and that is a good example because I’m not even considering selling our home right now but I already have had probably 6 touch points with this real estate agent.

Dana: Yes, and you don’t know from a real estate standpoint when you are going to have coffee chat with friend, he is, and he’s going to be that person, ‘Oh I know somebody.’ Those touch points are massively important and we forget that big corporations having mass amount of money, they spend on ads just to get those touch points, so that when you are at the point that you’re ready, right, so buzz is hugely important.

Here’s the other thing from a buzz perspective and I will give you an example. From the buzz perspective, the more you think about buzz as people going along the journey with you and helping you make decisions and helping you be a part of what you are doing, the better. Buzz isn’t just about telling somebody you have something coming out. The buzz that’s truly leverageable from an online perspective is thinking all about all the decision points you have to have. If you’re writing a book, you have the cover, you have the way you’re going to illustrate, you have the size of the book, all these different things. For an example, for our Boss Mom retreat which is an event, we actually ask people to help us pick out the décor like, ‘hey would you like this view which is rustic, would you like this view which is modern or would you like this view which is party?’

Maria: Those are touch points.

Dana: That’s a touch point, yes. So it’s really important for us to have that there where people go, ‘oh’, and now they get to help me make decisions for every book I’ve ever put out. So we’re going on our third Boss Mom book, every book we’ve put out, they’ve helped us pick the cover, they’ve helped us pick the titling, they’ve helped me pick Boss Mom and the logo and all of those things, in some ways, they’ve helped me pick some of the things we put in book and didn’t put in the book, all of that is part of the process. So what you can do is, if you need to create those 7 to 10 touch points which means you need to be posting and putting out into the world 7 to 10 times in your buzz plan, then think about the decisions you need help with. Claw out what those decisions are and then that’s you can then go out to your community or other communities and it’s not meant to say go by this thing. It’s meant to say I want to be on that journey with you. The other thing besides just helping make decision from buzz plan perspective is, this is me on the journey, check me out behind the scenes while I’m going to see the layout of the book.

Maria: What I love about this Dana is that your community is invested in this product so when the retreat comes around, which is at the end of September, when the new book comes out which I know you have a release coming, your community is excited because they’re along the path and they were on the journey with you and they were able to make decisions. That’s awesome and I love that. The people tuning in, whether you’re creating a launch around the book or a service or a product, it can be using this frame work of those touch points creating a buzz.

Dana: I’m using me as an example. I’m not always amazing, depending on what we’re doing about implementing the buzz either. What we do is we start to build the community and make this assumption that because people know I exist and they’ve heard of me before that they’ll buy from me again, and we need to make sure we don’t fall into that trap because that doesn’t necessarily work. We have to still approach everything from, ‘every time I’m going to have a launch, I have to build buzz and excitement.’ I’ve totally had it where I’ve got a lot going up personally and I’m in this space as much, I’m not thinking about it as much and then I have people come on like, ‘oh, I forgot that you were having an event in September’ because I told them 6 months ago, and now they’re like, ‘oh yes I should get that ticket… I didn’t know my kids’ schedules before but I know it now… that book didn’t apply to me before but it applies to me now…’ or those kinds of things so don’t let the idea that you’ve had something successful happened before means that it’s all going to just happen naturally now. We all need to recognize that every time we put something out, we have to give our all. You’re committed to make that thing you’re launching so commit to make sure people know that it exists so that it actually is a successful one. Isn’t it worst than feeling like nobody wants to hang out with you and by yourself?

Maria: I know, I’ve actually had a client recently who said, no one’s purchasing my product. Well, ‘let’s back up. How long have you’ve been talking about what you’re doing in the journey? Nothing.’ It’s the cold client, there’s that whole theory that you want to have your clients warm up, you want to nurture them, you want them to know they can trust you, we talked a lot about that in this series, it’s not coming just from me but all of these people who are working in the marketing field are saying that you cannot just go and sell to a cold audience. That’s a lot better when they know they can trust you.

Can you tell us when the retreat is because I was transformed from the first one. It was amazing.

Dana: Yes, it’s at the end of September, it’s in San Diego. It’s a 3-day event for Mom Entrepreneurs that helps give your business a growth spurt, and also a place for salted dough and hang out together and make connections and get visibility and make buzz and all kind of fun stuff, which I totally recommend. Part of your buzz plan, if there are places that you can go before the launch happens, do that. You should think about shows that you can get on and that could be a month or 3-month lag time, other podcasts you could get on. If you have a launch happening in 90 or 120 days, think about that and start pitching yourself to those shows and when you have something that you’re putting out like a book, those shows love that because then they have something to talk about, you’ve got something to talk about. Whatever you book is, it builds clout to whatever. There are a lot of different things to be thinking about from my buzz plan where you can get those 7 to 10 touch points.

Maria: … And remember, it should not be happening just 4 weeks before the launch. It needs to be a little further out.

Dana: Give yourself a good 6 weeks and honestly if you know you’re putting a book out a year from now, start throwing little things out at least once a month.

Maria: Teasers! We call those teasers in the book industry, like ‘here’s a picture of the sketch…’

Dana: Exactly, because it does stick in people’s minds and they will be like, ‘ooh I remember you said you’re going to be putting that up, it’s just so exciting’, and now they feel like they’re connected to it, which is what you want. You want people to feel they’re connected to you, not just buying your stuff but really connected to you with what you’re doing. There’s just so much more of loyalty that happens there when people feel like you’re a part of something versus just buying something.

Maria: That’s awesome. I actually voted on the cover of your book so I’m excited to see which one you chose. When will the book be coming out?

Dana: We took everybody’s comment and we morphed it, we’ve updated it. That’s the thing too, if you’re going to ask for advice from people, take it, because I will tell you, the very first Boss Mom book that really launched my brand, the cover was not the one I liked and the title was not the one I liked. They were not my favorites, because you’re so close to your project that you don’t always make the best decisions. The market knows what it want so listen to the market. Don’t ask for advice on something and then not take it. We took the advice, so we morphed the cover for that. The third book, it’s called Climb Your Ladder, Become the CEO of Your Own Business, it comes out in October.

Maria: Awesome. There’s some good stuff coming up for Boss Mom. I love this.

Dana: It helps to have a team who actually helps me actually with this.

Maria: That’s something we haven’t talked a whole lot about. If you are tuning in, there’s Emily Rabitoy. She was probably like 3 or 4 interviews ago but she does talk about… she is an expert author assistant and she strictly does social media marketing for authors. She had a really had a great interview on how to incorporate a team for marketing, slowly but surely.

Dana this has been wonderful. I got people who are still logging on, I want you guys to rewind because you’ve got to hear about the Buzz, creating a Buzz around the product. We try not to go too long on these interviews, but it was fantastic having you today.

Check out Dana over at Boss Mom, I want you to know that she does have the retreat coming out, she has a book coming out on October which is awesome and she has a lot of information in this interview that you have got to check out.

Thank you so much again for your time today and your expertise. This has been fantastic.

Dana: Make sure you tag me so I know where the thing is and then I’ll comment some stuff.

Maria: Super, because a couple of people have been in here telling us what they’re launching, etc., etc. Thanks again Dana.

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My name is Maria Dismondy. I am a children’s book author who also founded the publishing company, Cardinal Rule Press.

Finding ways to market my messages is a passion of mine. I want to help you gain greater recognition of your brand, to generate new readers and improve your sales. Why? Because I love to GIVE and CONNECT and I truly believe we are all in this together!