577 Selle Evans:

Ever felt underestimated, like you didn’t belong at the big boy’s table, working tirelessly around the …clock to prove your value, and succeeding against the odds? What was the price?

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business we meet an inspiring African American entrepreneur who started out in Corporate America on a never-ending treadmill of over-performance, always feeling she had to prove herself again and again.

Tired of constant frustration of feeling overworked, under looked, and underappreciated by Corporate America, Selle Evans had had enough, and when her oldest boy called her Wonder Woman, she decided to launch her own business. Selle is founder and CEO of Masterly Business Solutions, a fast-growing digital marketing agency for women entrepreneurs specializing in personalized, automated and data-driven solutions to attract, engage and convert target customers.  Selle’s business hit the Inc 5000 list, and she has been named one of Houston’s top CEOs.

I can’t wait to introduce you to Selle. We’re going to geek out about all things marketing, plus the entrepreneurial journey for women of color and much more. First…

Selle Evans is passionate about helping women entrepreneurs and small business owners unlock their potential and substantially grow their business. Selle is now one of Houston’s top CEOs with a fast growing digital marketing agency called Masterly Business Solutions now ranked in the Inc 5000.

Her journey growing her own company wasn’t easy – is it ever for anyone? And as she “failed forward” in trial and error, she came to realize that understanding the target market is the key to success in any business.

As a little girl, Selle’s dad instilled in her the value of hard work, and now she works hard helping small business owners take their companies to the next level, by implementing strategic processes and automation so they can work smarter, not harder. Selle’s agency is all about targeted and personalized communication and engagement, and she’s a believer in using numbers to set metrics and measure the vision to drive results, leveraging analytics to deliver high quality services and products to companies’ target audiences.

She and her Masterly team have also started a project that serves as a directory for minority business owners called “sibhouston.com”. As a woman of color, Evans hopes her story will inspire fellow WOC entrepreneurs who have also found themselves stuck on the corporate ladder. Selle’s ultimate mission is to be a viable resource to women owned small businesses all over the nation.

Today we’re going to talk about Selle’s journey as a woman of color, how to bounce back after falling down millions of times, plus the power of personalization, automation and data analytics to make your marketing convert.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Selle Evans.

Melinda Wittstock:         Selle, welcome to Wings.

Selle Evans:                       Hi. I’m so excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, it’s an honor for me to talk to somebody who’s built a business from scratch to the Inc. 5000. Tell me a little bit about your journey.

Selle Evans:                       So basically, I have one of those very common journeys for women of color, just being underestimated throughout my entire career, always having something to prove. So I started off in accounting many, many, many years ago, and I climbed the corporate ladder because it was just one of those things that, in the next position higher up I was just never expected to perform, always outperformed, always had everybody’s mouth drop at what I was capable of, but always had that mentality that I had something to prove.

So that’s how I got to Inc. 5000, because when I started all of this, pretty much everybody didn’t think I belonged at the table. You know, you get those little smirks under the table and all that stuff, and you can just tell you’re not really welcome at that table. So it’s one of those things that I had to prove that I was worthy of my seat. But even after the Inc. 5000 you realize that it’s one of those things that you have to really learn to affirm and motivate yourself, right? Because it doesn’t matter what you do at the end of the day, you have to be able to tell yourself that you’re worthy and that you can do all of these things in order to keep motivated…

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s the biggest struggle is what we think of ourselves inside ourselves, what we actually think we’re capable of We create our own glass ceilings often because we’ve been acculturated that way. That underestimation that you talk of, which is amplified all the more for women of color.

Selle Evans:                       Yes. And it’s everything right? Because I’ve gone to plenty of… before COVID especially, I was always at all these events and things like that, and it was always something, right? Like, “Well, how old are you?” Right. If it wasn’t my age then it was the fact that I’m a minority, then it was the fact that I was a female. And it’s just, how does any of that stuff matter? What matters at the end of the day is, what am I capable of? How many hours am I willing to work in a week? How smart am I willing to be about all of my decisions that I make? How quickly am I willing to make those decisions so that if I make the wrong ones, I can bounce back?

Melinda Wittstock:         What was the biggest challenge for you in terms of once you got your business up and running? From that early startup phase to even handling fast paced growth, there’s always a new challenge. What were some of your ‘Oh My God moments that you learned the most from.

Selle Evans:                       Okay. So you make a crap ton, sorry, but you make a crap ton of mistakes along the way. Just, I mean, it’s so normal and nobody tells you that making all these mistakes is normal. But the biggest thing is that you have to be able to bounce back. People will always underestimate you, people will ultimately try to, for lack of a better term, try to screw you over in business and things like that. That’s all normal. It’s all part of the process to get to the place that you want to be. Falling down on your face a million times, just to get up a million and ten times. You have to be willing to accept the fact that you’re going to fail a lot on your way to where you want to go, because ultimately it’s those failures that really teach you everything that you need to know about entrepreneurship. If you don’t fail, you won’t learn.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. And so you have to be willing to fail. That’s the biggest single thing. I think so many people are afraid of that and women can always fall into perfectionism because of that fear of failure. It’s impossible to innovate or really do anything significant without that, because all the lessons come from failure. I’ve actually come to the point now five businesses in where I’m like, “embrace the failure.” It’s just feedback. It helps me.

Selle Evans:                       So when you have everybody telling you that you’re going to fail, right? If you have everybody looking at you like you’re going to fail and telling you that you’re going to fail, then when you fail, you can’t take that as, “this is the end. This is it. They were right.” You can’t take it that way. You almost have to just keep going. You almost have to let it fuel you and really show you the right direction. So every time you fail, “Oh, that was the wrong step. Let me go in this other direction.” Just keep going and keep going and keep going, keep going, because you can do it. You can do it. Ultimately we can all do it.

I mean, so many things that as women we’ve endured already. So many things that we can overcome and the strength that we have is just amazing. So I think just knowing that you’re going to fail, it’s inevitable that you’re going to fail and sharing that message with one another and maybe even sharing a message on how to avoid some of the failures, in a community type of setting.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. When we’re in that community and women are openly sharing their failures, and “fail forwards” I like to call them, and through our collective experience, really avoid those mistakes. We don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel over and over again in isolation, which is something that I think a lot of women fall into that trap. I love what you do Selle in terms of paying it forward to other women of color and really lifting up other women, because that’s going to be the secret really for everyone.

Selle Evans:                       Right. I think when I was on my journey to Inc. 5000, I was actually in Vistage, and I love the idea of Vistage, I really do, and it’s a wonderful organization, but when I looked around the room, there was literally nobody else that looked like me. Literally I was the only female in the room and the only minority. The idea of Vistage is wonderful. It’s so valuable to sit in a room with other people who have been through it already, because it’s basically a CEO peer group and then you also get some coaching along with it. It’s fairly pricey to sit in that room, but it’s very, very, very valuable to be able to talk to one another and really hear from other people who have been through it and are successful at this point.

And honestly my biggest dream, and I’m going to share that with you today, Melinda, my biggest dream is to have something so very similar for women of color.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh wonderful.

Selle Evans:                       Ultimately, that would be so valuable to our community to be able to take the most marginalized and underrepresented group in business, and really kind of just help each other to grow, and maybe even leverage our networks and things like that within a structure very similar to Vistage.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s wonderful because if you can really inculcate a culture of women mentoring each other, buying each other’s products, promoting each other, investing in each other. That’s really the mission of Wings and why I launched this podcast and all the retreats because women really need that so, so badly. So I’m so grateful that you’re doing that because things are so out of balance. There are so many things that have to be corrected. And I think back through everything that was going on in 2020 after George Floyd and thinking about Juneteenth and thinking about the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and what is so possible, but has been so denied. It just has to change. I think so much social change actually begins with entrepreneurship, actually.

Selle Evans:                       It does because you’re building something and ultimately that’s why I stepped into entrepreneurship. You’re building something that can outlive you. Because at the end of the day, my children cannot inherit a job. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with having a nine to five, but at the end of the day, if something happens to me, they can’t inherit that.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. You can build wealth but also build all the things around the entrepreneurial spirit. Not everybody’s a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk, that kind of entrepreneur, but small business and just being entrepreneurial, especially in an economy that’s more like a gig economy, where everybody has to be good at marketing themselves and good at figuring out who their customers are and learning how to be resilient, learning how to deal with change. All these sorts of things are just so vital, I think, in the way the economy is shifting. One thing that entrepreneurs can do if they’re smart, and not all of them do, entrepreneurs can build great businesses, but neglect their own personal wealth building along the way.

Selle Evans:                       Right. Exactly. Yes. I totally agree. And just to, to understand why you started your business and ultimately what the objective is, I think would help to focus on building some real goals around that. Because you don’t want to just build your business for the time that you’re on earth. You really want it to be something that you can build that generational wealth, because ultimately in our community, if we can build more generational wealth, that’s the only way we’re ever really going to move forward.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. Because if you have people who have wealth spinning off from their business, either in terms of it’s a great cash flow business, or they start to have exits, and they plow that money back into other entrepreneurs. It’s something that I’m really trying to encourage women to do more of, to really actually invest capital in each other.

Melinda Wittstock:         The stat that stuns me is that women who are founders of businesses that are venture capital qualified, in the sense that they could scale potentially to be billion dollar companies, or at least a hundred million dollar companies that would get investors the kind of return that they want, those women only get 2% of that available venture capital money. And that number hasn’t moved in 20 years. And that’s for women, but when I think of women of color, I don’t even know. I mean, the percentage must be very, very, very small. And I know there are some folks who are trying to address that, but it takes a while to build the results, build the companies to actually generate the wealth, to be able to reinvest it back into a community where people are doing amazing things.

Selle Evans:                       So here’s another crazy stat for you. Did you know that women of color are actually starting more businesses than any other demographic?

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, that’s amazing.

Selle Evans:                       Yeah. They’re starting approximately 275 new businesses a day.

Melinda Wittstock:         Wow.

Selle Evans:                       It is at such an astounding rate. So the fact that that stat hasn’t changed as far as funding, and we’re still starting businesses at a faster rate than anybody else. That means it’s probably just a lack of education as far as what’s available. It’s one of those things that if nobody ever tells somebody how to do something… In my first year of business I was able to secure an SBA loan with no history. I had no history in my business at all. I had a stellar business plan that I put together myself. I mean, it’s not easy to get an SBA loan, but if I can do it with no history then that means anybody can do it.

There’s so many different ways of getting funded. In fact, we released an ebook last year about how to get funded as a women owned business. It’s just, there’s so much information out there but it’s not shared, it’s not readily available to everybody to understand how to get funded. Especially right now with everything that’s going on, there are a lot of grants available, a lot of things out there that people just are not… I can’t say people, that women are not applying for. So there’s so many things available.

Melinda Wittstock:         Because they don’t know about it. So is that something that you’re doing in your community to lift other women up, just really making that widely available?

Selle Evans:                       Yes. In fact, we offer it for free and we have a lot of other resources to help women owned businesses. We have several clients where we actually write grants for them even. So we try to make sure we do what we can to make sure that we get the funding. When you’re starting off, the funding is so important. Who wants to have to worry about, “Oh, can I even afford to hire somebody to help me scale.” That shouldn’t be forefront. What should be forefront is, “Am I getting enough clients? Am I getting in front of enough people to scale my company? Am I doing enough marketing?” That should be what we’re worried about. We shouldn’t be worried about, “Can I even afford payroll this week? If you’re worried about that, it’s going to be really, really, really hard to really set up all your processes the way that you should do it and make sure everything’s streamlined.

So, I like for our clients or anybody in our network or our community to be really focused on, are your processes, are they strategic? Are you automating everything you can automate? And are you getting in front of enough people every week? So those are the things that you need to be doing to make sure that you’re scaling. So funding needs to not be one of those things that you’re so focused on. I want people to have at least enough funding to last them a year or their first few years, so that they can just focus on the other parts that’s going to set their business up for the next 10 years.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. And it’s funny because there’s so much available money in the United States, but a very inefficient system to get it to people. And all that boys’ club where it’s really who you know, so if you’re not in that network, it’s very, very difficult to crack into that.

I think one of the other interesting things though too, is that a lot of women owned businesses tend to hire too late. You need to hire before you need that person, and you need to think of them as an investment, not as an expense and tie them to what value are they going to drive in your business. So, you’re not hiring them to do something, you’re hiring them to deliver something, grow your revenue or whatever.

Selle Evans:                       Right. And one thing I want people to understand is, the first thing you should do before you hire somebody is to absolutely make sure that you have very, very defined processes, because that’s how you’re going to be able to train somebody a little bit easier. But it’s also how you’re going to be able to hold them accountable if something goes wrong.

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s so true. Oh gosh, yes. You’re so right.

Selle Evans:                       A lot of people skip that part, yeah. Then you have a headache when you do hire somebody and then you think it’s because you hired somebody. It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no.” We skipped a step in the process. We have to have a defined process. I have to be able to give you a standard operating procedure and say, “Hey, here’s step A through step Z with screenshots.” It’s screenshots and tutorials and all of this stuff, so we can easily get them up and running and we can easily get them productive.

So that’s step one, and then step two is to automate anything in your process that doesn’t necessarily have to be handled by a person.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. So give me an example of that. What are all the things that you automate in your own business?

Selle Evans:                       Oh goodness. Okay, so we automate actually quite a bit. So we automate things for our clients… Some of our onboarding process is automated, because certain parts of it are just always going to happen. So certain things that you know are always going to happen, when somebody signs their proposal and pays their invoice, we’re automatically going to start trying to get them oriented into our client portal. So one thing we automatically do is we send tutorials, we start a drip campaign and it shows them tutorials and screenshots and this is how you’re going to do this and this, this is how you’re going to do that. And then once we’ve done that, we send an email saying, “okay, now it’s time for your actual onboarding session where we’re going to walk through all of this stuff.”

So, even sending the invoice after a proposal is paid, that’s something that can be automated. You know that’s going to happen. It’s going to happen every time. So, certain things like that, that you know are going to happen every time and don’t necessarily need a human touch, those are all things that you’re going to automate. And obviously what can be automated in every business is going to be a little different, but some things are going to be the same. Especially depending on what your offerings are and your pricing and things like that… You want to have very consistent pricing because if you don’t, it really, really makes things hard on the accounting side. Being able to invoice, being able to automate certain processes like getting the invoice out or getting your contracts out and all that stuff is going to be really, really a headache if you don’t have that firm pricing. So we always start at the pricing point.

Once you have that, then you can look and see, okay, what is your onboarding? What does that look like? What are the parts of this that you’re going to do every single time that can be generated by an automation, that can be triggered by an automation or another action in this process. So once you’re onboarded, then you can look and see what are the different parts of your actual client services, can you automate? Like for instance, update emails, right? I like to keep my clients very updated on what’s going on on their account, so we automate some of those emails going out. We’re already documenting everything that’s going on on their account, so why not have it to where the system sends them some really good emails about everything that’s been done on their account this week. So that’s another thing that we automate.

What else do we automate? Let’s see. There are a lot of things for our clients. We have a couple of lawyers that are our clients, and they have a lot of clients that fill out forms and those forms turn into contracts. But for the most part, some of these contracts are going to be the same every time and the only things that differ are going to be what was filled out in the form. So we have some automations set up to where when the client fills out the form, it automatically populates the contract and it’s published where it needs to be published for the client to sign.

So things like that are definitely things that you can automate and create a very streamlined process against. And then once you have these streamlined processes, it’s so much easier to train a VA, on the parts that you don’t need to be doing every day. So we always, always, always tell our clients it’s really, really important to define the processes first, automate the parts that you don’t need anybody doing, because you don’t want to pay anybody to do something as well that you could have automated.

Melinda Wittstock:         Exactly. And so you perfect the process first and record it and then you figure out, “Okay, so who is the right person to do this job?” I think the other thing that’s so important too, is keeping team members, employees engaged, making sure that they actually love what they’re doing and they see the progression, they know what is actually going to make them a success. I think a lot of people hire someone and then just expect them to read your mind.

Selle Evans:                       Oh, yeah. Okay. What we do is we actually require a weekly meeting. I have to review what you’ve done that week. And it’s not one of those micromanagement type of things. First of all, I want to know what I’m paying for. Because we do it all off contractors, especially when we were talking about earlier, people don’t want to take on that risk. Well, hiring somebody as a contractor takes away some of that risk because you’re really only using them when you need them. Then you don’t have to worry about, “Oh, I’m paying somebody 40 hours a week. Am I even going to have enough work for them?” Things like that.

So we hire everybody as contractors. And then every week once we have their invoice, we review the work that they’re charging us for. That can then help you to pinpoint things that they need additional training on. That can help you to give them feedback, and that feedback is really essential. That feedback is so essential. People don’t take the time to give that feedback, but it’s so essential to that person’s growth and it’s essential to your relationship with that person.

And then also, you can always even find different ways in a process together that you can maybe, “Oh, well, you know what, now that I think about this, we could do this so much better.” So it’s always going back and reconciling and making sure that your expectation and that person’s delivery are in line, but it also makes sure that you guys are always doing it the best way, because you guys can always have an open discussion and make sure that this is the most efficient way to be doing whatever it is that this is.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s wonderful. So tell me more about Masterly Business Solutions in the sense that you provide digital marketing agency services primarily for women. So talk us through that. What are some of the things that you do?

Selle Evans:                       So we are a full service marketing agency, so we do everything from web design to social media management to copywriting to all kinds of other things. But Masterly pretty much was founded on the concept of, marketing and sales are going to be essential to your growth. Because I didn’t come from a marketing and sales background, but I studied it. I studied it because I understood that it was just going to be such a necessary part of growing my business. So obviously the more mature the business gets, the more I study it, and we take on more and more and more for our clients. At this point, we have a team of, I believe, 42, I think, possibly.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, that’s great. Wow.

Selle Evans:                       Yeah. We have a team of about 42. So we do brand design and strategy. So we start from the beginning. We do the copywriting, social media. We do digital ads. We do analytics, which people don’t understand how important, important, important analytics are, but they’re so important to actually look at the numbers. [crosstalk 00:25:26]

Melinda Wittstock:         Vital. But that’s the thing that people don’t do. Because the numbers tell the story, but then a lot of people don’t even know what’s the most important thing to measure and it can be different for different businesses.

Selle Evans:                       Yes. So we actually do audience research and analytics, for which you have to understand your audience to even know what to measure.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. So are you doing all the SEO and tracking all of that as well as engagement rates on social and those sorts of things?

Selle Evans:                       Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         What are the biggest metrics that really people should be following?

Selle Evans:                       With which.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. Let’s start with SEO.

Selle Evans:                       So with SEO, you should be really looking at how many people are visiting your website. So what’s the traffic like? Another thing you need to be looking at, what’s your bounce rate? Your bounce rate is if somebody just looks at one page of your website and then they leave, because you want them to look at more than one page on your website. What’s your bounce rate? What’s your conversion rate? There needs to be a call to action on your site. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling products or services, there should be something that you’re telling your clients or your prospective customers or whatever, you need to be telling them to do something very consistently on your site. Whether that’s buy now, learn more, book a meeting, whatever it is, there’s a call to action on your site. How many conversions are you actually getting?

Then another thing is going to be your website speed. It doesn’t seem like it’s a big deal, but it actually is. With SEO, website speed is huge. If you have a slow website, a lot of times people will actually leave before they even load the page. So, those are some of the most important ones. Those are the first four that we actually start measuring is, how many people are you actually seeing come to the site? How many people are going to more than one page once they get here? Then we start looking at how many people are actually converting on your website and then how fast is your website?

Melinda Wittstock:         When you see problems, for instance, say people are bouncing, is that to do with either the speed or just a lack of an intuitive flow, or it could be copy? It could be so many things that’s causing that.

Selle Evans:                       It could be so many things. So what we do is if we see a really high bounce rate and it’s not going down, especially after we’ve come in and we’ve started to make changes to your site, we start recording sessions. What does that mean? That means if somebody goes to your website, we don’t know who they are, but we can see what they’re doing.

Melinda Wittstock:         So you use something like Crazy Egg or something like that to see…

Selle Evans:                       Yeah. To sit and watch and see what the consistencies are. So if people are always getting about mid page or something like that, and bouncing, then we know that there’s something wrong with this section of your website. If everybody’s going to this particular page and then bouncing, there’s something wrong with this page. So it helps us to understand the behaviors of the potential clients and helps us to make changes, and then we can start doing A/B testing. So then we can start trying to test different aspects of what may actually help with your conversion rate and to lower your bounce rate.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. So smart. I mean, because there’s a whole bunch of things. There’s so many different factors. Is it the copy? Is it the flow? Is it the user experience? Is it this? Is it that? If you don’t know, there’s nothing you can do about it. But I think the A/B testing or even multi-variant testing is critical to drive those conversion rates. So you’ve got the website as one component of all of this, but then social media as well. I see a lot of people posting all kinds of stuff to social media, and it just goes out into this kind of clutter or infobesity of just… It’s overwhelming, and making that convert is tricky…

Selle Evans:                       So, social media, nine times out of ten, I have to tell my clients something that they hate. I always preface and tell them before like, “Hey, what I’m about to say, you’re going to hate it.” But you have to go lie. You’re going to hate it. There has to be a personal attached. They have to like you. At the end of the day, people are going to do business with you. So, that’s usually what I have to tell people is, Yes, you can have this great social media content and you can be posting all the time, and it can be beautiful, but if they don’t see a face, if they don’t hear you speak, if they can’t build trust with you, then ultimately they’re not going to convert in that way.

So, you’re going to have to figure out where does your ideal client hang out? So is that Instagram, is that Pinterest, is that Facebook? Where does your ideal client hang out? Because that’s where you need to be, and that’s where you need to be spending most of your time. I know for Masterly, we find most of our engagement in actual Facebook groups. So we have to engage a lot in Facebook groups versus any other place, so that’s where we spend most of our time.

Melinda Wittstock:         Actually on the engagement, having conversations with people. That’s super smart. So who’s your ideal client? I know you’re helping a lot of women and women of color. Beyond that, what do you look for in a client?

Selle Evans:                       So we love minority women, specifically coaches and consultants, anybody in that space where we’re going to try to take it all on by ourselves.

Melinda Wittstock:         Do you ever take any white chicks like me?

Selle Evans:                       Yes, we do. Of course. No. We take on anybody, to be honest. We have plenty of men clients too. It’s just that we have a bit of a sweet spot for minority women, but definitely we have white women, we have white men. Our demographic really varies a lot, but we pour into our community as much as we can just to make sure that we don’t stay underrepresented. So that’s really the reason we focus most of our marketing efforts on them versus…

Melinda Wittstock:         We qualify as a diverse team. I think one of the things that’s frustrating for a lot of people is it’s really hard to find a really good marketing agency, because there’s so many people all saying they do the same things and how do you know?

Selle Evans:                       So, the way that you’ll know if a marketing agency is right for you, is that when you get on the phone with them, don’t hire a marketing agency without getting on the phone. Just don’t do it. Don’t do it. They need to care though, and you need to be able to hear it in their voice that they actually care. If it sounds like they’re giving you some sort of rehearsed speech that they’ve told 10 people before you, then they’re not the one. So you really have to be able to trust your marketing agency. This has to be a partnership. So when I tell you that I’m going to deliver this for you or that for you, you need to feel that passion in my voice. You need to feel it, that I care about you and your business and that I’m just as invested in your success as you are. So that’s something that I’ve taken great pride in with our clients is, “Hey. If you fail, I fail. Period. So if something is not going the way that you think that it should, let’s have a conversation and I will fix it.”

So if you don’t feel that, if you don’t feel like they’re invested in you and invested in your outcome, that’s not who you want to hire. It’s a partnership, just like everybody else in your business. When you hire anybody, even if it’s your VA or anybody else, it should be a certain sense of trust and community that you feel in that person, so they should be a good addition to your company and your culture.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s wonderful. So there’s so many different, new ways that you can market. I think a lot of business owners get confused like, “Oh man, should I put everything into Facebook or Instagram? Or what about TikTok? Should I be doing that? Should I be doing Pinterest? Now there’s Clubhouse. How much time should I be spending on Clubhouse having conversations? Should I be podcasting? Should we do this, that, whatever?” How do you run people through that gauntlet of figuring out… because there’s a risk of trying to boil the ocean. It’s hard to be good at a lot of things simultaneously. So how do you help people through that?

Selle Evans:                       So, the first thing that we do with any of our clients is we have to form a client avatar. Because ultimately where you put your efforts is going to be where your clients are. You don’t want to spend 40 hours a week on Instagram, if all of your clients are over here on TikTok like you said, or they’re on Clubhouse. So the first thing you have to do is understand who are you talking to? But once you understand who you’re talking to, then we have to understand, well where does that person hang out? What does that person enjoy? And that’s how you’re going to learn how to talk to them. So those are going to be really, really, really important, before you get started with anything. And you can do some testing and look at your analytics. You see how that came up again. Analytics. You can do some testing and look at your analytics and see where you’re finding most of your return.

Selle Evans:                       So when you start with a new business, right, it’s all about testing every possible scenario. So once you understand who your client avatar is, you’re going to try different things and continually look at your analytics to see what they’re responding to. Yes, you can do as much research as you would like, but ultimately it’s going to be all of that testing that really delivers the results eventually.

Because even when you’re talking about Facebook ads, every agency knows what the best methods are, but ultimately they still have to test. We know what the best methods are for specific types of demographics and specific types of individuals and things like that, but ultimately you still have to do some testing. It helps you do testing a little faster when you understand the demographic a little better, but even with digital ads, you have to do some testing. You have to try different graphics and different creatives. What if we put the 50% off sign in red versus blue? What if we put sale ending soon? So, just different things that you have to figure out what resonates the most with your audience. What is really going to make them act? What is it going to get them through the actual sales funnel, to the point where they’re ready to convert?

Melinda Wittstock:         These are vital, vital things. So Selle, I want to make sure that people know how to find you and work with you, because you’re obviously delivering a lot of value to a lot of people. What’s the best way?

Selle Evans:                       Okay. So we have our website, which is masterlybusiness.com. We also have masterlyceo.com. So those are two of the best ways to get in touch with us. There are a million call to actions on both of those websites. You’ll even see my face on Masterly CEO, all over it. So, definitely reach out if you guys need any help. We do offer a lot of free strategy and everything like that, to especially people who are new, new, new, and don’t know what to do at all. We donate our time to a lot of different people in the community. So definitely reach out. There’s something here for everybody.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Selle Evans:                       Thank you, Melinda. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.