Sara Leisinger of Who’s Lance Digital Media can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Sarah Banowetz of Banowetz Marketing can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Our guest today is Amber Henline. She can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Amber can also be found at PerformanceTherapeutics.com
Transcription:
[Announcer] Welcome to Sarah Squared, the podcast for all things marketing, business growth, branding, and social media. Sara Leisinger is the owner of Who’s Lance Digital Media, serving start-ups and solopreneurs. And Sarah Banowetz owns Banowetz Marketing, a full-service agency located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Together, they make up Sarah Squared, dedicated to the inspiration, motivation, and education of growing companies.
Sara Leisinger: Welcome. Welcome back.
Sarah Banowetz: Welcome.
Sara Leisinger: This is Sarah Leisinger.
Sarah Banowetz: And I’m Sarah Banowetz.
Sara Leisinger: Together we are Sara(h) Squared.
Sarah Banowetz: Sara(h) Squared.
Sara Leisinger: We’re so fun.
Sarah Banowetz: We’re so corny.
Sara Leisinger: I love it. I love it. Thank you for joining us today, and we have a fun, fun little episode for you guys for the non-profit sector today. We have Amber joining us.
Amber Henline: Hey guys.
Sarah Banowetz: Hey.
Sara Leisinger: Hi, Amber. I love your hair.
Amber Henline: Thanks. I just washed it.
Sara Leisinger: You can’t see it but it’s awesome.
Amber Henline: I think I washed today.
Sara Leisinger: You should just know that her hair is actually awesome.
Sarah Banowetz: She actually … now would you say that you founded the CR Wellness?
Amber Henline: I sure did.
Sara Leisinger: Okay, so CR Wellness Center.
Amber Henline: The wellness center.
Sara Leisinger: The wellness center.
Amber Henline: Yes, ma’am.
Sara Leisinger: Give us a little background about that.
Amber Henline: I’m a massage therapist by trade, and so I saw a lot of people coping with chronic pain issues and chronic disease. I saw a lot of people not getting the care that they needed, either they couldn’t afford it, their insurance didn’t cover it, and so I decided we needed to do something about that.
Sara Leisinger: It’s so cool. How proactive.
Amber Henline: I founded the wellness center and essentially, we exist to decrease chronic pain and disease burden for [inaudible 00:01:43] County.
Sara Leisinger: Oh, that is so neat, right?
Sarah Banowetz: Yeah.
Sara Leisinger: Right. Okay, we were sitting and we were chatting the other day, and we were doing some chatting about your social media.
Amber Henline: It was awesome. Not my social media but sitting with you.
Sarah Banowetz: I mean, your social media is not bad. Don’t cry.
Sara Leisinger: Everybody is kind of starring in their own unique little spot. We’re just going to take that into consideration. As far as marketing of a non-profit, how has that been for you because I know you wear lots of hats in that organization?
Amber Henline: It’s been a huge struggle because what I like as far as content isn’t necessarily what is engaging people and creating fans for our organization, and so thinking outside the box for me with content and where to put certain content has been an extreme struggle.
Sara Leisinger: Oh, the struggle is real. Hashtag.
Sarah Banowetz: I do want to jump in and say, Amber, you do a really good job for someone who’s not marketing.
Sara Leisinger: Fake it until you make it.
Sarah Banowetz: Amber and I got earlier this week. Oh, was that last week?
Amber Henline: It was a few days ago.
Sarah Banowetz: Was it?
Amber Henline: Yeah.
Sarah Banowetz: The days have been-
Amber Henline: I think we … what did we get together? Just recently, right?
Sarah Banowetz: Yeah.
Sara Leisinger: A few days ago.
Sarah Banowetz: You have a pretty good head on your shoulder regarding marketing, so this conversation should be fun.
Sara Leisinger: I figured since you know both of us and you kind of had some of those burning questions going on your mind, we’ll put you in a crossfire here.
Amber Henline: Cool.
Sara Leisinger: And you can fire away. We’ll answer to the best of our ability.
Amber Henline: Okay.
Sara Leisinger: Awesome.
Amber Henline: Alright.
Sara Leisinger: Go ahead.
Amber Henline: What are the best marketing platforms for a nonprofit?
Sara Leisinger: That is a super, super broad question. Are you talking social?
Amber Henline: Let’s start with social, yes.
Sara Leisinger: Okay. Taking a look at your business now, when you’re choosing platforms, don’t just blanket choose your platforms there’s not any group of platforms that are right for any certain industry per se, there are some that maybe favor some certain industries but there’s no magic formula.
Sarah Banowetz: You want to go where your audience is.
Sara Leisinger: Absolutely.
Sarah Banowetz: Essentially what Sarah’s saying.
Amber Henline: Okay.
Sara Leisinger: So if your audience is like viewing the event that you had a little earlier this year, what was it? The cat-
Amber Henline: The catwalks casino and cocktails.
Sara Leisinger: Yep, it was super cool. [crosstalk 00:04:00]
Amber Henline: Spectacular.
Sara Leisinger: It was so much fun. So if you took, pictures of that event and put it on Insta, that would probably resonate with people. But again, we’ve got to see where your audience is at, so have you noticed anything about where the eyeballs are? Are you getting good engagement on your … what are your current platforms?
Amber Henline: Facebook.
Sara Leisinger: Okay.
Amber Henline: And Instagram.
Sarah Banowetz: And what is your current target audience.
Amber Henline: Well, it depends on … it depends. If we’re looking for donations, that would be pretty much anyone between 20 and 60 or above but the target demographic that we’re trying reach would be people with chronic pain. That can be a younger person, however statistically that would be somebody more over 40.
Sara Leisinger: Okay.
Sarah Banowetz: So have you found that the people who give, and I don’t know the answer to this question, but the people who give donations are the ones who at one point in their life had chronic pain, and it’s been resolved, and they want to help others?
Sara Leisinger: Either that or they know somebody who’s experiencing pain that they can’t help them with.
Sarah Banowetz: Okay. So then that helps kind of narrow down your target audience a little bit. Those two would overlap a little bit more then.
Sara Leisinger: So in my personal experience when you have a bit of an older audience, you want to get your content on platforms that are a little bit friendly to an older audience. So like, for your awareness platform, so there’s three different types of social platforms, there’s awareness, trust, and action. Okay.
Amber Henline: Okay.
Sara Leisinger: So for your awareness platform you probably want to go Twitter. You can mix up the content and this is the fun part, okay, you get to discover what they like and what they’re looking at.
Amber Henline: Okay.
Sara Leisinger: You get to create appropriate hashtags for the Wellness Center, but you can also use hashtags that kind of dominate your field so things like maybe starting really broad with your hashtags and going like, nonprofit, aches and pains, wellness and then getting a little bit more narrow on it and going Cedar Rapids.
Sarah Banowetz: Yes, you definitely want location based[crosstalk 00:06:00].
Sara Leisinger: And really take it basically through a funnel, so I say broad hashtags at the top and by broad hashtags it’s like on Instagram you can tell by how many posts it’s got it’ll be in the millions.
Sarah Banowetz: Millions.
Amber Henline: Yep.
Sara Leisinger: In the middle kind of category, I’m sorry, I have Instagram on the brain because I’ve been doing some research for them, so in the middle category, location based. So you really want to bring that down to a local level and then your bottom category is going to be your hashtags that you’re trying to build.
Amber Henline: Got you.
Sara Leisinger: So you kind of put that through a funnel and your simultaneously doing a few things, you’re getting noticed. You’re getting noticed locally, and you’re building your personal brand.
Amber Henline: Great. That’s what we need.
Sarah Banowetz: And don’t choose between really want to … so as Gary V would say, is similar to what Sara’s saying is, “In each post, you want to do five long term hashtags and five now hashtags.”
So #theWellnessCenter might not have much traffic right now, but you want to be using it because in the future after you’ve built your brand, then those previous posts will show up under that hashtag.
Sara Leisinger: And everybody likes to see a journey. So what I run in to a lot is people want to not do anything on social media until they’re absolutely perfect. That’s not viable it’s not relatable, you’re a human being, you’re not a machine and there are other human beings on the other side of these things.
Amber Henline: Nice.
Sara Leisinger: Looking at it.
Amber Henline: Right.
Sara Leisinger: So they want to see the journey and that’s okay. You know you will definitely get better over time but for now just put something out there. Put your content out there. So like end of the year time, we just recently passed that, that’s a great time for donors. Everybody’s looking to get rid of their money, get that extra write off. So like we were talking about the other day, maybe on an Instagram or on a Twitter or doing a thank you campaign. This is what your donations have done this year. And then we do that a bunch of times, we do a bunch of jabs right. Maybe we do that for the rest of the year.
Sarah Banowetz: Sara you’re going to have to explain the difference between a jab, and a right hook.
Sara Leisinger: Oh gosh, Gary V.
Sarah Banowetz: Yeah, ’cause you just said jab, and I don’t think people [crosstalk 00:08:10].
Sara Leisinger: Okay. Well, so if you guys don’t know, Gary [Vaynerchuk 00:08:15], we were going to discuss him in another podcast-
Sarah Banowetz: We are so don’t go into it too deep but a quick-
Sara Leisinger: Oh so a jab is like the building report kind of content.
Sarah Banowetz: Not like a salesy pushing thing.
Sara Leisinger: No, don’t do that. Don’t be that guy.
Sarah Banowetz: No.
Sara Leisinger: Basically you want a bunch of those if you’re treating it kind of like a sales funnel or a sales process the jabs are what builds report. It’s what adds value to other people and that way when you go to land that right hook or that sales kind of pitch, it’s going to actually go a lot further than-
Sarah Banowetz: ‘Cause you’ve started to build trust for them.
Amber Henline: So how often would it be too much to do right hooks?
Sara Leisinger: Again it depends on[crosstalk 00:08:58].
Sarah Banowetz: It’s going to depend-
Sara Leisinger: … your audience.
Sarah Banowetz: But I would at this point, I would do a lot more jabs than right hooks.
Sara Leisinger: Yeah, ’cause right now we’re building them. So like I said it’s if you were at the end of the year and say it’s the middle of December, and you’re doing a thank you kind of donor campaign. You would take basically through the end of the year and then maybe the last day of the year or something like that. Maybe the second, the last or third to last day of the year. You say, by the way, if you would like to donate to the Wellness center, here’s how you do it. Cool?
Sarah Banowetz: When we walked into the office today, Sara mentioned my shoes, which I’m wearing right now, which are Gary V shoes, this is a right hook, the shoes. He’s an entrepreneur right, a marketing guy, I bought his shoes, they’re hundred dollar shoes. Why did I buy these guys shoes? It’s because he’s been providing so much value to me, free value, like free, like just like free, like I mean really, I’d pay so much money to pick his brain-
Sara Leisinger: I guy his books.
Sarah Banowetz: … and he’s just like free, free, free and then after so much time of just free, free, free value. Constant, constant free value and it’s built so much trust that then when he said, “By the way I’m working with Case Western and we have new shoes. Like, sports hero have shoes and I think that entrepreneurs can have shoes too. Buy my shoes.”
And he was like, “Buy my shoe.”
And I was like, “Take my money.”
Sara Leisinger: And that’s actually what happened with me to. I started listening to his podcast and consuming some of his content on YouTube. Similar thing happened. I kept hearing this jab and this punch and I’m like what? What is that? What is a jab? What is a punch? And so then it was like well we’re going to do crushing it. We’re going to crush it. We’re going to do the, ask Gary V. And I was like what are all these things? Well, I am an avid reader and he’s kind of written some books. By written I mean he recorded it and somebody ghostwrote it for him. But still[crosstalk 00:10:51].
Sarah Banowetz: Poor Amber this has turned into a … Sara and I really like Gary V.
Amber Henline: Yeah, apparently.
Sarah Banowetz: There was another, we haven’t[crosstalk 00:10:58].
Sara Leisinger: I’m not like a fan girl. Okay I am a fan girl. [crosstalk 00:11:07]
I appreciate brilliance wherever I can find it. The dude’s brilliant. You know, so like it’s not like I’m trying to duplicate his business ’cause he says all the time, “Yeah, that’s fine you can listen to what I say, but watch what I do.”
So, I’m like, everybody else might be like, I’m going to do this or do this because Gary V did it and I’m going to be like, that’s really cool, what I’m going to do is I’m going to watch what he’s posting on his channels. I’m going to monitor his content, because I want to know what makes that sucker go. Like, that is a machine, I want to know what makes it work.
I’m tired of being the machine I want to create the machine and that’s why I look at Gary V.
Sarah Banowetz: And I think that you’re king of asking essentially … you don’t want to come across as desperate when you’re doing your right hooks and such right?
Amber Henline: No. I don’t want people to know that we really, really need their money. But more money equals more people we can help, so I mean money really[crosstalk 00:12:10].
Sarah Banowetz: So then that’s how you can do it without sounding desperate, I mean, you and I are in the same networking group and I think that one way I’ve positioned … I have a brand new company I just started a year ago with my marketing company and I have part-time staff that would like to go full-time and in my networking and I don’t know, ’cause we’re in the same networking group, when I stood up and said during our 60 second mini commercials that we have each week, when I said, “Oh, by the way, I have staff that I would like to bring and give more hours, so I need more work.” Does that sound desperate? Because I feel like that was-
Amber Henline: No, you’re trying to help others.
Sarah Banowetz: Yeah, right. So you could do essentially the same thing is just say, “Hey, you know what, we really do need donations for x, y, z reason.”
Sara Leisinger: And it’s all about the way you convey that too. So that’s why we’re saying the thank you campaign, because if you feature people prominently like, this is what we’ve been able to do with the current amount of donations, this is the good your money can do.
Sarah Banowetz: Absolutely.
Sara Leisinger: Because people, I don’t know why exactly people like to give, some people like to give because it makes them feel really good to just give to people. Some people get the satisfaction from that. Some people are like, well, you know, I want the write off. Either way. Right. That’s more money in your pocket, spends the same way.
Amber Henline: Right.
Sara Leisinger: So that’s what I’m saying, give them the happy result. So you can have the, well we have a problem, you need to solve it for us on the one end and that doesn’t do as much as, this is the happy result. This is the result that you can contribute to.
Amber Henline: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:13:44]
Sarah Banowetz: Amber, we should have you back on again so you can talk more about the Wellness Center-
Amber Henline: Awesome.
Sarah Banowetz: And what you do, but in the mean time, where can people find both you as a massage therapist and the Wellness Center.
Amber Henline: Massage therapist my business name for massage is, Performance Therapeutics. You can find me on Facebook or my website, performancetherapeutics.cr and the Wellness Center is cr-wellness.org which is our website. Instagram is bewellcr as well as Facebook.
Sara Leisinger: Awesome.
Sarah Banowetz: Excellent.
Sara Leisinger: Well thank you for coming today.
Amber Henline: Thanks for having me.[crosstalk 00:14:20]
Sarah Banowetz: And we’re glad we … hopefully we helped.
Amber Henline: Yeah, definitely.
Sara Leisinger: Awesome, let’s give you a couple of steps to practice. Like, what are you going to practice?
Amber Henline: I’m going to practice telling our stories[crosstalk 00:14:30] and creating good content.
Sarah Banowetz: Absolutely.
Sara Leisinger: Perfect. And creating good content. [crosstalk 00:14:35]
Amber Henline: Yes, yes.
Sarah Banowetz: And if people did want to donate? How would they go about doing that?
Amber Henline: Go to our website which is cr-wellness.org.
Sara Leisinger: Awesome.
Sarah Banowetz: Awesome.
Sara Leisinger: Thank you so much.
Amber Henline: Thank you
Sarah Banowetz: Thanks for coming on Amber.
Sara Leisinger: Well, thanks for joining us again today on Sara(h)Squared, we’re super glad to help, have you hopefully for the other nonprofits out there we’ve been able to provide some value for you. And we will see you guys next time.
Sarah Banowetz: Yeah, bye.
Sara Leisinger: See yas kind of loose.
Sara Leisinger of Who’s Lance Digital Media can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Sarah Banowetz of Banowetz Marketing can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Our guest today is Amber Henline. She can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Amber can also be found at PerformanceTherapeutics.com
