The Five Love Languages of Marketing | 108
I was listening to Maggie Reyes' podcast episode about Rethinking the Five Love Languages recently, and my brain started to make comparisons to business. You may not think that love languages and marketing have anything in common, but it’s actually a fitting way to think about the marketing strategies you should be using in your business.
If you aren’t familiar with the Love Languages, there are five: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, touch, and quality time.
Let’s look at how these can apply to your marketing strategies.
#1 Words of Affirmation
In the love language world, this is all about saying affirming and kind things to your partner. In the business world, think of this as your testimonials and social proof! After all, testimonials are the affirming words people say about your business.
Social proof is really powerful, and it can help people make decisions about working with you. I imagine when you buy from Amazon, you look at the reviews before you make a purchase - the same thing happens when people buy from us. (Although, I wouldn’t air your “bad” reviews for everyone to see. 😉 Instead, I recommend you take the feedback into consideration to improve your business.)
#2 Acts of Service
I heard a quote a while back that selling is serving. Essentially, the idea is that by talking about your offers frequently and consistently, you are giving people the chance to jump in when they are ready. This doesn’t mean your doors always have to be open, but you are consistently warming people up to potential ways to work with you.
You can do this by sharing the behind-the-scenes of a project or membership, pointing people to a waitlist, posting a “Work with Me” post, and more. Serve people by letting them know how you can help them!
#3 Gifts
Another marketing strategy is gifts, or as we like to call them in the business world: freebies, opt-ins, and lead magnets. Offering free “gifts” helps bring people into your world, showcase you as the expert, and let them experience your style of work.
Most importantly, offering freebies gets people on your email list. This means you can further build trust with them through your email marketing content. You can offer freebies during collaborations, in blog posts, on social media, on your website, and more.
#4 Touch
Love languages talk about touch as physical intimacy, but in our business - we can see this as the relationships we build with others. In Episode 106, I dive deep into relationship marketing, but I’ll give you the gist here.
Through DM conversations, workshops, live calls, and more, you slowly build a relationship and connection with your audience. This is huge. Relationships lead to trust, brand awareness, referral marketing, and more.
#5 Quality Time
This is one of those marketing strategies that will never go out of style. Quality time is all about showing up and delivering quality content to your audience. You can do this through trainings, video series, webinars, and more.
By offering these training sessions, whether they are free or paid, you can also build your email list - where you hopefully offer even more valuable content in the form of weekly emails.
Interested in talking about marketing strategies with me? Sign up for a Monday Mini! These are 30 min, 1:1 strategy calls where we can talk about marketing for YOUR business.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Thanks for listening to this week’s Saturday Strategy Session! If you found this podcast helpful for your teacherpreneur journey, then head over to iTunes, so you can subscribe and leave a review. Each and every review means the world to me and helps me continue to create valuable conteHey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Today we are gonna be talking about the “right” way to market. And specifically, I'm actually gonna be diving into what I'm calling the love languages of marketing. So, I didn't do this intentionally, but I had already accidentally planned this episode to go live the week of Valentine's Day, which is so perfect because we're talking about love languages. And in just a second I'll explain what that means.
I am actually in Vancouver. Well, I'm leaving tomorrow. When you're listening to this, if you're listening to this real time, I am headed to Vancouver for a girls trip with my sister and my daughter, and then my sister and my niece. I'm super, super excited. So anyway, happy Valentine's Day! Let's jump into the episode.
So if you've never heard of the Love Languages before, there are five of them. And typically they're used in the context of relationships and being able to communicate effectively with others and using their love languages.
The 5 Love Languages consist of 1) words of affirmation, 2) acts of service, 3) gifts, 4) touch, and 5) quality time. For me personally, quality time is a huge love language, and so I feel loved - like my bucket is full - when I get lots of quality time with my husband. Some people might have gifts as their love language, and so when they get presents or people shower them with things, then that's how they receive love. My mother-in-law is very much this person. She's always buying little things for all the people in her life just because it's how she shows that she loves people.
So everyone has different love languages. And I was actually listening to a podcast by Lindsay Dotzlaf. It was a podcast about money and she referred to Maggie Reyes's podcast specifically about love languages. Maggie is a relationship and marriage coach. I have only listened to a few of her podcasts. But as I was listening to this specific one, the connections were just like zapping in my brain of how these love languages that are definitely 100% designed to speak to relationships, actually have all these connections to marketing.
Now, a couple of things. Number one, I really liked Maggie's approach to love languages in relationships. So if it's something that you've heard of or something you're struggling with or something you wanna learn more about, I highly recommend Maggie Reyes’ Five Love Languages episode.
Now enough about the backstory, let's actually dive into the love languages. So just quickly, I'll name them again, and then we'll go through them in more detail about how they relate to marketing your business.
So words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, touch and quality. So the first one is words of affirmation. In marketing this would be using a testimonial. They are such a great way to build social proof and trust with your audience. Trust is a huge thing right now. There's unfortunately a lack of trust in online businesses, and so it can be really, really important to be building that trust.
And so when we see that someone else has liked and had a good interaction with a product or a service, it can help us to feel more confident that we are more likely to have a positive interaction with that service. And I don't know about you, but when I'm doing something like reading Amazon reviews and somebody gives it one star, you can totally tell if it really is an issue with the product, or sometimes it's a bit more of a user issue.
And it's really, really great to see when something has a whole ton of five star reviews, and then you go and look at the one star reviews and their user issues are okay. Like I understand that. That's not a problem with a product. Whereas there's multiple one star reviews that are saying the same thing, like broke within a few weeks or doesn't do what it says it does. Then you kind of get a better idea of what you're getting yourself into. So testimonials and reviews are a great way to build up social proof. And some of the really great ways to do this are in carousels with pictures of the resources and then testimonials throughout so that they can scroll through it. You can use testimonials in your emails. Definitely recommend having it on sales pages or long form landing pages. If it's one of the shorter ones where it's literally just the form with like two or three bullet points, you don't necessarily need a testimonial there. But if you have a longer form landing page for a freebie opt-in, you can definitely consider putting a testimonial there. Weave testimonials into your copy - whether it's social media copy, email copy, or blog posts. Those are all great ways to incorporate it naturally.
You can even use testimonials in your lives when you're talking about the experience that a customer had, or you can actually read reviews or testimonials during the livestream. A lot of people do that in podcasts. At the beginning of the podcast, they'll say a shout out to a five star review they received. And it can also encourage other people to leave reviews if you do something like that.
Now, it's important to remember that testimonials probably aren't gonna be the reason why someone bought from you. It's a little bit more of a subconscious piece of your marketing. One of the many pieces of straw that eventually break the camel's back. So adding them in and using them throughout is a really great way to help people trust you more. Especially people who haven't been around in your audience, haven't purchased something else from you before. They are still getting to know you and it can speed up that trust building piece.
Love language number two is acts of service. So this is when you do something for somebody else. And in marketing, I am relating this to actually making an offer and telling people what you have for sale, what your signature offers are, what your programs are.
And this is so important because how can people possibly know that you have something that they wanna buy if you never tell them? If you're never allowing people the opportunity to buy, then they can't buy. Like, let's just say you wanted to buy a hammer and you didn't know that Walmart had a hammer. You may already be in Walmart and you just don't go to whatever section it would be in. But if for whatever reason Walmart had signs up that were like, hammers 50% off. Then you're like, oh, I need a hammer!
So once somebody trusts you, then you may get those extra sales by just making the offer. And something that one of my coaches says all the time is, selling is serving. Because when you're offering up your signature programs consistently and allowing people to join them, then they will when the time is right for them.
And I'm not saying that means you have to have your doors open at all times. Absolutely not. But if you're consistently selling and making offers to people and allowing them to get what they need, then you're helping them grow their business or you're helping them improve their teaching or make a difference in the classroom, or whatever it might be You're helping them actually take advantage of it and better their lives, better their business, better their classroom.
So it's really, really important to use this love language of marketing outside of a launch. Typically, we're very intentional during a launch. We're talking a lot about what we have to offer, what we have to sell, but it's important that you talk about it more than that. So even if the doors are closed, referring back to your offers, referring back to what people could have previously purchased from you is one way to continuously reference your signature offer. It gives people the opportunity to just be aware of it and know about it.
If you offer services, doing a monthly or weekly ‘work with me’ post is a really great way to share about your freebies or your small ticket offers. Getting in your stories on a regular basis is great, and then calls to action in your emails, having people learn more about the program, using the call to action with a testimonial. Making sure people know it's available and that it's a thing that they should be excited about, even if your doors are closed.
Now, this of course is easier if you have something on evergreen that can be purchased at any time, but it's still an important piece. People need to know and need to start getting excited about what you have before the launch. That way when the launch happens, they're ready to go. They're ready to buy.
Love language number three is “gifts” and in the case of marketing, this would be your freebies - things that you are giving to people. High value, quality content. And also another part that's important to this is email nurturing. It is one of the best ways to build relationships and connections with your audience. And emails are making a comeback. There was a bit of a dip, but stats are on the up and up. I've heard this on other people's podcasts, I've heard this from my own clients, I've experienced it in my own business. Open rates and click rates have been steadily increasing over the last little while.
It really genuinely seems like more people are opening emails than last year, two years ago, three years. . So that's really powerful information. I just want you to keep in mind that email marketing is not dead. People are actually reading more of these emails, and I think part of it is that there has been a push towards quality, high value emails.
And so if you are actually giving your audience something that they can gain from the email, they're more likely to continue opening it. So when and how are you gonna do this? I already said you should be sharing your freebies on social media or whatever channels that you're using on a regular basis. So whether it's on your feed, your stories, through reels, in podcast episodes or blog posts, sharing your freebies is a really, really great way to make sure people actually know that the offer exists.
The second way to be using this is during a collaboration. So if you are a guest on someone else's podcast or if you record a training for a summit that you're in, make sure at the end you share your freebie so that people can go and find that freebie and that they can get more from you and they can learn more from you.
Then the last one comes back to something I just said - your podcast and your blogs. And you can even consider creating a podcast or a blog post that goes with your freebie. I typically would recommend walking through using the freebie or how people can use it in their classroom or in their business - whatever would be appropriate for the type of freebie you've created. Creating a long form piece of content that has value outside of the freebie, but then also drives people to download the freebie at the same time.
Love language number four is touch, and this one was really hard for me. This is actually like physical touch. So there are people who, in relationships, feel love and show their love by physical touch. So holding hands, hugs…So this is kind of hard, especially for online businesses because there is very little physical touch. But I just brought it back to relationship building. One-to-one relationships, connections that you can be doing with people, getting into dm’s, conversations with people, coffee chats, and even live events.
Relationships are so important in today's digital marketing space. Because of that lack of trust with bro marketing and a lot of people coming into online business over the pandemic, which caused waves of change. And not all of these people came into their businesses providing high quality content. It was a time where it was really easy to get away with garbage offers. A lot of people saw success but couldn't actually give what they were saying they were giving. And I think many people got burned. There just weren't the results that were expected.
But also there was a lot of garbage that got produced because more people were online and a lot of those businesses are no longer around or are starting to falter. The bigger problem, I think, is that it eroded trust. People are much more cautious now to purchase something because no matter how good the sales page is, no matter what kind of relationship I've built with a person beforehand, there could be smoke and mirrors and then almost nothing on the other side - that terrifies me.
So building those one-to-one relationships is a way for your audience to vet you and to really connect with you and to feel like they can trust you. And then when you have a positive relationship with someone, you're more likely to feel like you got value out of whatever program you joined. So that's a big piece.
Also, building relationships, especially one-to-one relationships, is very important for service providers or contractors; people who are providing one-to-one done-for-you service. And you can go back a couple episodes for this, but when I talked about the newest element of holistic marketing - I think it's episode 106 - which is relationship marketing. So this piece of touch marketing and building relationships is really important for anyone who is using relationship marketing and networking, because that's how we get to know and trust people. It’s through these one-on-one conversations. So I really recommend that you build time into your schedule to have authentic conversations and build authentic relationships, whether it's in your dm’s or in groups.
And I want you to be genuine in your conversations with others. I think we've all been in those DM chats where someone's asking us all kinds of questions, but you know it's just to get the information that they want from you so that they can pitch their thing. So I think it's really, really important that when you're having these conversations and you're building these relationships, it's in an authentic way. It really is just to get to know these people better, to build relationships, build friendships, become biz besties or referral partners. And then you can invite people to do things with you in a way that's gonna benefit them.
I will often invite people to come live on Instagram with me, or to be on my podcast, whatever I think would be really beneficial for them and what they're gonna take away from it. And also it has a benefit to me, to my audience. I want it to be a win-win.
You also need to take initiative. If you just sit back and hope that someone's going to invite you, then it's gonna take a really long time. So what I found is that the more I invite people to do things with me, the more that they invite me to do things with them. And so it's this give and take relationship where if I have something exciting happening then I invite them, and when they have things happening, they invite me. So by me taking that initiative and inviting them first, I am now being invited to many more opportunities to build my business, to build relationships, to make connections.
The last love language is quality time. For this one, we're gonna talk about trainings, video series, webinars. Showing up and really giving people high-quality, valuable information. This is a really great way to showcase yourself as an expert and to give a lot of value typically in a short period of time. I almost would put my podcast or blog posts here as well, but that might go better under gifts, but that's another way that you're showing up as an expert.
You're providing a ton of value. You want things to be impactful. Another great thing about having trainings or video series, it's helpful to build your list. You're gonna get more people onto your email list, and then you can nurture them and sell to them. So having video trainings and webinars or masterclasses, it’s gonna be just a very, very powerful part of your marketing.
Some of the best ways to do this is either to host a monthly or quarterly free training or low cost workshop, and then also to participate in summits or conferences and even to host your own conference or summit. And that can be online or in-person. The purpose, again, is to show up as an expert, provide tons and tons of value, and then hopefully the result is you're growing your email list and you're able to sell these people down the line.
So just as a recap, the five love languages of marketing are…
Words of affirmation. So use testimonials in your marketing acts of service, actually making the offer and telling people what you sell.
Gifts. This is your freebies, your long form content. That value that you're giving away for free.
Touch. Which is building relationships, one to one.
Quality time. And this is those higher level trainings or video series webinars that you're offering.
So what I want you to do so that you can actually take it and then implement it into your business, is to decide which one of these five love languages you want to work on this quarter. We're in the middle of February, and so between now and the end of March is about six weeks. That's tons of time for you to really say, okay, what I really wanna focus on is quality. I'm gonna create a brand new video series for my audience. You can map out the video series, you can record it. So your goal is to have a new video series by the end of March.
So what are the steps that you need to do? You break that down, decide the topic. Outline the videos, record the videos, write the email sequences, promote the video series, and then week six video series goes live. So each week you have a tangible thing that you can do for whichever of these love languages that you decide to implement into your business between now and the end of the quarter.
Whether it's words of affirmations and being more intentional about your testimonials, or it's acts of service and regularly making the offer and telling people what you sell. Gifts. So being more intentional about your high quality, valuable content, or the freebies. Touch. So being intentional about building relationships one-to-one with people. Or quality time. Maybe it's a new training or video series. Which one of these things do you want to focus on between now and March?
I would love if you took a screenshot of this episode, shared it in your stories, tag me and let me know which one of these love languages you're focusing on between now and the end of March. We will be cheering you on and celebrating your steps towards better marketing and your business this year!
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!nt while also reaching more fellow ambitious teacher business owners just like you!
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