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Focus On These 3 Pillars And Always Be Fully Booked · Local Business Marketing Made Simple

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 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 kick in. 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 three this year.
• 0:30
  And I always forget the ages. I don't know just numbers in general, but yeah, life's busy. But 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 wanna share my knowledge with you guys.
• 0:47
  For whoever's listening on the other side of this, whatever you wanna 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 their website? Should they be on three platforms or one platform?
• 1:08
  So, 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 wanna start the first episode here by just giving a bit of a debrief about myself, why you should listen, who am I?
• 1:31
  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. I'm a dad, husband, dad of three husbands, 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 market themselves. Used to, well, up until this point, this is my fourth business now.
• 1:54
  I had free health and wellness businesses before this one. Was on, well, I've been an online fitness coach. I've been a brick and mortar personal training business with Bootcamp Gym, which was women's only. And it's been some rollercoasters. There's been a few bits and bats in between, but it's been some rollercoasters, that's for sure.
• 2:11
  I coasted in the first two years of business until I really started to lean in and really understand marketing, which is why whenever I'm in conversations with business owners who are stuck, it's really hard for me to not come across as the sales 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, but success never comes unless things change. As they say, nothing changes 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.
• 2:50
  But back then I didn't have a mortgage, I didn't have kids and you know, 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 use content to convert people into customers. So yeah, 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.
• 3:18
  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 excite us, but honestly, marketing is just one of those things to 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.
• 3:38
  Now, specifically for myself, with my marketing is across social media, simple ads, social media strategies, primarily looking at Facebook and Instagram. And if you have like a local service based 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'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 for the mortgages. If you're a physio, you know the score, right?
• 4:12
  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, go off tangents by way, there'll be so many tangents on here. My prior free businesses, which were all in the health and wellness space, I didn't use Instagram way as much as I do now. It was all around Facebook.
• 4:37
  Facebook was my thing. And I suppose really the shift into Instagram now more so, I teach both by the way, I'm really, I hate to say it because I love Facebook, but I am favoring 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. I'm probably gonna try and make these episodes up like fifteen to twenty minutes. But you can run really low cost ads, which means if you can run really low cost ads, you get more bang for your buck.
• 5:10
  You can grow an audience fast. And if you've got the right skill set from when someone finds you, and if your content is dialed in, you can get a customer very, very quickly. Just to give you a prime example, there's an amazing person. I'm not gonna say names here, but she literally found my page yesterday at the time of recording this. And let's say for example, she followed my page at 9AM.
• 5:34
  Today, about 10AM, she's now a customer on the six week business accelerator, the program I run. That was in twenty four hours. It could have been sooner. I was slower slower replying because I with the kids at night. That's how fast things can be.
• 5:47
  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 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 into 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.
• 6:28
  Your content wants to do one thing and one thing only, it is to build trust with people. Told you I'd 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.
• 6:44
  And of course, 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 four now successfully, is the only ever comes down to these three key pillars to get a customer. One is awareness. If people aren't aware of you, they can't buy from you. It's as simple as that.
• 7:12
  Right? This makes complete sense. If they don't know you, they can't buy from you. Okay? Your marketing needs to always, three hundred and sixty five days a year, cover awareness.
• 7:22
  People need to be finding you all the time. If you cover that, you're literally leaps and 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.
• 7:46
  So that pillar has 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 a 100 followers today and in six months you have a 110, you've only acquired 10 new followers and eventually the buying 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 awareness.
• 8:16
  And like I said before, awareness creates instant opportunity if you know what you're doing. We had Kevin just recently, he got a 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 away. He's a physio by the way, to see, hey, are you looking for a physio? Have you got back pain?
• 8:40
  Have you 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.
• 8:54
  That's how easy life is. If someone's got a problem and you fix it, 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.
• 9:02
  If you follow my page today, I'm gonna 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 gotta do. So if you if you have awareness covered, you know, boom. The next piece of the puzzle, as I've mentioned, is trust.
• 9:18
  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. It is about building trust.
• 9:29
  Building trust with the people who 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 with 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.
• 9:45
  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? And we'll cover that in later episodes.
• 9:58
  This just fundamentally going in for a bit of an opener here so you 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 easiness of maths.
• 10:31
  So what is that? 20 times seven, one forty, two eighty, five sixty, if I did the maths right there. 600. Yeah. 600.
• 10:38
  600 new followers in a month. That is 600 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.
• 10:51
  Not everyone's gonna buy. But let's just say, let's just say like Kevin, right? 10% booked an appointment. So 60 bookings, there's five forty left. Those are people who are now gonna consume your content over time.
• 11:04
  And it's one of those as well. It depends on the business that you're in because a lot of people are gonna consider. Like I go back to the mortgage one. If you're to get new mortgages for people, different mortgages, whatever it is, every single person who follows you isn't necessarily looking to secure a 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.
• 11:34
  They'll go into the bank, who knows? So that's the name of the game. So you've got awareness now feeding the opportunity in the moment and in the future. You've got your content pillar two, which builds trust with people who know who you are. And then the final piece of the puzzle is sales.
• 11:49
  So if someone knows you now, likes you, trusts you, you've done a great job doing more than bloody 99% of business owners, the the thing where things can fall down is the sales part. A couple of things, and we're gonna go into this furthermore in 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 that this mortgage advisor, let's say I'm looking to secure a new mortgage, okay?
• 12:21
  And I've always gone with banks. I've done HSBC, I've done RBS, I've done NatWest, whatever. And I really like this guy and I really trust him and he's his own, know, entity, his own enterprise. He's not with the banks, he sources for you. One of my sales objections might be, Oh, no, but can I trust you?
• 12:38
  Why don't I just go to the bank? And his content to break down that objection would be something about personalization, sorry, lower rates, more choice. Like, so you 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.
• 12:56
  And even little things, can I bring my kids? Do I need to sign in for a year or a month? Is direct there debit? Is it pay upfront? There's all of these logistical questions.
• 13:05
  And that is 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 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 handle the sales chat. It's like, just little things where if I inquire Let's say I know you, I like you and I'm like, right, come on, let's go message Kavan, for example. Hey, Kavan, got a really bad back.
• 13:34
  Can you let me know how this all works? And Kavan just comes back and he's like, yeah, here's the price list. And it's like, there's no rapport in there, 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.
• 13:46
  It's just like bone price. Everyone slips up on the sales part. So you need to know how actually how to handle the sales conversation because again, without, you know, a lot of people, it's like a taboo subject, sales. But at 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 or 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.
• 14:13
  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, 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 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 twelve months of my first business.
• 14:45
  And that was the final twelve months before I finished that business, not just the first twelve months of being open. And I was in that business for three years, by the way. And towards the end of that, first two years I coasted, then the third year got better because I actually started to study marketing. So it wasn't just like, oh, £12. It was a decent chunk.
• 15:02
  And the reason I say this is not to gloat. 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've made more revenue than in twelve 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.
• 15:41
  You deserve to have the revenue in your bank versus someone else's. This isn't a 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 are things going? It's like, oh, you know, slow and steady.
• 15:52
  And it's like, it doesn't need to be slow and steady, You know? 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.
• 16:07
  I refer back to Kevin who did it in three weeks. Right? Managed to have the confidence to leave his part time job, had a 100 book 100 bookings in six six weeks, doubled his literally probably tripled now his revenue, 60 plus new actual clients. There's no sheer 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 everything, you get control of everything, you could do a lot, that's for sure.
• 16:34
  So anyway, that's the first episode. I'm gonna 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. We'll look at specifically awareness more so.
• 16:50
  Probably do twenty minutes on awareness, we'll probably do twenty minutes on trust and we'll probably do twenty minutes on sales. I'll give you some real examples, life examples, share some stuff that my clients have been doing so you can take it of your own. And the whole point of this podcast is learn from it, use it. And obviously, you ever need more of a handheld, which a lot of people will do, just come and message me to find out how it all works on my side. I had someone the other day, she did one I used to do these content audits.
• 17:15
  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 week and she was like, I literally did everything that you told me to and my business has doubled in four weeks. I was like, she didn't even pay me anything because that's how powerful this can be. So anyway, learn, implement, keep tuning in.
• 17:33
  If you need anything further, drop me a message. If you have want anything covered on the podcast, drop me a message. But apart from that, I'll see you soon.