Dominique Broadway is an award winning Financial Planner, Personal Finance Coach, Speaker, Finance Expert and founder of Finances De•mys•ti•fied. Dominique shares fantastic marketing activities that she used to build her thriving business, such as:
- How and why to use free events + challenges to build your email list (and business)
- Why consistency is key on social media (“I don’t have time for anybody’s algorithm!”) 😂(Click to Tweet!)
- How she trusts herself to keep moving forward and serving the people who need her – even when she can’t see her destination.
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Eva Jannotta: How many years has Finances De•mys•ti•fied been in business?
Dominique Broadway: I think we may be going on the sixth year, which is weird. I didn’t catch my stride until about two years ago, when I really got clear about what I was doing. I feel like I’m two years old, but I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur for about five or six years.
Eva Jannotta: I’m glad to hear you say that because I’m halfway through my fourth year, and I feel like I’m starting to get it and I’m starting to be more clear on what strategies I want to use and where I want to move towards in a way that for the first few years things felt haphazard.
Dominique Broadway: Totally agree!
Two Free Email Marketing Tactics To Build Your List
Eva Jannotta: In your experience building Finances De•mys•ti•fied, what are the best marketing strategies that have worked for you?
1. Host Free Events to Build Your List
Dominique Broadway: I started Finances De•mys•ti•fied by doing free Happy Hours to generate leads. That way I could touch people in person and they could see my personality.
We would have these free events and maybe 200 people would sign up. My rule of thumb is anytime you do a free event, only 30% of the people are going to come. But even if 30% or 40% of people would come, we’d still have all 200 people’s email addresses.
That’s how I was able to successfully start growing my list. The first couple thousand people that were on the list were super engaged because they met me. They didn’t just fall into my funnel off a random ad. So I had a stronger touch-point, which was good because it also made the word-of-mouth better.
2. Host Online Challenges to Build Your List
Another effective tactic for me has been hosting challenges. People love a challenge and doing these challenges has been great to grow my list. Partnering with other entrepreneurs to do challenges allows us to mutually grow our lists.
I put together a challenge in a week with a friend of mine and we got close to 4,000 people that signed up. Between 40% and 60% of those were new people! And even though we had people signing up that were already on our list, it’s re-engaging them and preparing them for a potential sale. Plus we had all these new people that had never heard of us before who were coming on. It’s a very effective marketing strategy.
How to Build Awareness and Entice People to Attend Your Event
Eva Jannotta: When you were first starting, did you rely on your personal network? Inviting friends and asking them to invite their friends? Beyond that, did you use Meetup or Eventbrite? How did you grow awareness of these events?
Dominique Broadway: I was hustling, inviting everyone that I’d ever met! Instagram wasn’t even around, so it was just Facebook and Twitter and I would definitely use Meetup.
I would sit for hours on Twitter and @ the DC Young Professional Group or whoever. I would be like, “hey, come to this event.” So it was a personal invitation and a lot of times they would retweet it and their people would come.
That was my strategy and it worked. It also helped that I was hosting those events in a city that I was from. But surprisingly, a lot of people that were showing up were people I had never met!
One other thing that I would do is I always had events at super dope venues. People were already going there for Happy Hour anyway. I did one at The Park. Everyone loves The Park! It’s one of the hottest happy hour spots on Thursday.
And so I was having events at those places and negotiating with the venues to get the happy hour deals extended. Sometimes I would ask certain venues if they could even send out the event to their list. So it was really just asking and putting myself out there.
Eva Jannotta: There are a lot of things you were doing strategically there:
- relying on your personal network, but also
- putting in the time to have these one-on-one invites and leveraging social media for that, and then
- leveraging the venues, not just the reputation of the venue itself, but getting special deals and working with them to extend offers and ask if they could promote to their crowd.
What I like is the combination of high-touch, investing your personal time AND using social media to support it. You weren’t knocking on doors or handing out flyers but you were putting in the time via the Internet.
Dominique Broadway: It definitely paid off.
Why People Love Free Challenges
Eva Jannotta: The other thing you mentioned was the hosting challenges. What network do you use for your challenges?
Dominique Broadway: I did one this year called Your Wealthy Year, which did really well. We kicked it off in February and it was just five days of emails and a Facebook Live every day and it was great.
It was great engagement and it introduced Finances De•mys•ti•fieda to a whole new group of people. Now, because challenges have been so effective, I have brands reaching out because they want to partner with me, which is great because we’ll be able to create even better content and start giving away prizes. That’s going to make the challenges even more exciting.
Eva Jannotta: What do you think people find so compelling about challenges? If you’re not dangling a carrot in the form of a prize then is it the community? Is it the connection with other people who are following the same steps? What is it about these challenges that is so resonant?
Dominique Broadway: I’m in personal finance. It’s not the most exciting or sexy space, right? People like the fact that challenges are condensed. It’s five days that you can dedicate to get your finances together and people are like, this is what I need. I need the kick in the butt, I need the daily activities in there.
They’re looking at it as free content, a free class, a free opportunity to work with me. That’s what’s so enticing. It’s like, wow, here’s an opportunity to work with this person. And people love anything where they feel like they can fix their life in a few days’ time. (Click to Tweet!)
Why “Pre-selling” Is Critical To Actual Selling
Eva Jannotta: Now I want to flip it and ask you: what are some of the marketing experiences or tactics you’ve tried that have totally sucked?
Dominique Broadway: There’s been a lot. It’s usually more failures and successes. One thing that has flopped is not warming my list up for sale for a specific sale. Not prepping them. So I never do that. I pre-sell everything. (Click to Tweet!)
Forget the Marketing You Know…
I try to be strategic in the things that I do. I try to listen to my audience so that I’m not wasting a lot of time and money. When I first got started and I didn’t have as much market research, and marketing myself was different than the marketing I used to do when I worked for big firms. When I started Finances De•mys•ti•fied I had to literally forget all of that high net-worth marketing I used to do so that I could remember how to market to myself.
And I think that’s when things started to click for me. Instead of trying to market to people as if you were trying to get these high net-worth clients, it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Come off your pedestal. Get to people on their level. Relate. (Click to Tweet!) That made things work. Trying to market the way traditional companies did just didn’t work for me.
Eva Jannotta: I like hearing that because there’s so much marketing advice and it’s not that it’s bad advice, but it’s critical to consider your own tone and your own audience. Sometimes that means forgetting the conventional strategies or good ideas that aren’t suitable for this stage of your business, or for the audience that you’re serving.
Dominique Broadway: Exactly.
Consistent Connection Makes The Sale
Eva Jannotta: Speaking of big firms doing marketing, I’m wondering if you have a favorite commercial or piece of marketing that you were on the consumer end of that really worked on you.
Dominique Broadway: It is so hard to sell me! But there are two Internet marketers that get me, I don’t know why. One is Russell Brunson. I mean, his products and stuff are great, but they’re not amazing! Yet his tactics always gets me. The other is Ramit Sethi. He puts out the most amazing content. I bought something from him and I think I’ve had it for two months (without using it) which is sad to admit.
Because I am such a hard sell, because I am a salesperson at the end of the day, it’s about timing. It’s being sold to at the right time. If I’m not ready for something, it’s very easy for me to click away.
The same is true in our business and personal finance. People have to be in the right state of mind and have to be ready to tackle their financial situation. It’s a matter of finding people at the right time. I’ve noticed that marketing, it’s not about reaching out to people once, it’s those constant reaches because you never know when you’re gonna hit that person in the right day. (Click to Tweet!)
Eva Jannotta: There are a lot of capabilities with paid ad targeting that can be very specific about what someone is researching online or what they’re going through so you can try to understand when is a good time to sell to them.
But what you’re speaking to is how critical it is to build an email list and to build an audience just by being consistent and friendly and available because you can’t control what they’re going to be ready. But if you’re ready to be a resource to them when they are ready and you have that rapport, then that’s only going to help the growth of your business over time.
Have You Asked Your Clients What They Want?
Dominique Broadway: I did something recently that was just testing this out: I sent an email that said, “Hey, I’m going to do one-on-one consultations at 50% off.” And I was thinking, people may buy. And over 30 people bought! It was crazy.
It showed me that this is what people wanted. They wanted that one-on-one time, I just hadn’t asked them. We sent it out again and more people signed up. Afterward people were saying, wow, I’ve wanted to work with you, or the session was exactly what I needed.
We made money from it, but I was also doing it because I’m the process of building out new programs and so all this information that I’m getting, when they’re filling out the form telling me what their pain points are, telling what they want to talk about, it helped me to do market research to understand, what do you guys need? Do you need more in-person? Do you need more group stuff? What are you dealing with?
Eva Jannotta: That’s a great reminder to diversify your offerings. If you don’t ask or if you don’t offer, you may never know what your audience is quietly hoping you’ll give them.
Dominique Broadway: Exactly. I was surprised. I was like, this is what you want!?
Instagram: Consistency > Algorithm Hacking
Eva Jannotta: You have a huge following on Instagram and I’ve heard from other Instagram marketers that with new algorithm changes, they’re seeing engagement rates plummet. Have you been adjusting your strategy?
Dominique Broadway: I try not to overthink Instagram. You can waste a lot of time trying to keep up with, oh no, Instagram changed their algorithm. Really? I don’t have time! (Click to Tweet!)
What we’ve been doing is trying to keep the content consistent. I’m actually in the process of splitting my personal account, Dominique Broadway, from my company account, Finances De•mys•ti•fied. So that’s going to be interesting.
I just approved all the Instagram content for the next 30 days, and we’re just going to keep the content consistent. We plan our content out a month in advance, and we only do 30 days because stuff changes and there’s different things that come up, especially in finance, and we may want to add something.
And then also Stories – I love InstaStories. We get really good numbers with them. Plus, with the ability for people to swipe up you get higher conversions. The Instagram analytics on the backend are getting so much better. It’s interesting to see the things that people are swiping up, and when they’re swiping out. After maybe four or five stories people swipe to the next person.
I try not to overthink it because I think that if you’re consistent, it’s fine. I haven’t seen any huge drops personally. I am noticing that people tend to like pictures of me? Weird! Anyway, as long as I’m posting pictures of me doing stuff and having motivational stuff in the bottom, it’s fine.
Eva Jannotta: What was the motivation behind deciding to split Dominique Broadway and Finances De•mys•ti•fied brands on Instagram?
Dominique Broadway: I really want Finances De•mys•ti•fied to be its own thing. I want to be tied to it, the vision for it, but I would love if somebody bought it one day, I would love that! But no one’s going to buy Dominique Broadway.
The new Finances De•mys•ti•fied Instagram is something that I’m still the face of, but it could run without me. And that’s what I want. Having a separate Instagram for my name will help with personal brand partnership possibilities and speaking. Speaking is a huge part of my business.
But I want Finances De•mys•ti•fied to be that go-to place for all things personal finance. That’s why I’m splitting up the two. Honestly, sometimes I get tired of talking about personal finance!
Eva Jannotta: Sometimes you just want a break from your main gig and you want to talk about other stuff!
Dominique Broadway: I just want to talk about traveling. Sometimes I want to talk about food. Sometimes I want to talk about business stuff. I don’t want to just talk about budgeting all day.
How Trusting Yourself Lets You Serve Others
Eva Jannotta: That’s a great segue into the final question I want to ask. I would love to hear about a time when you had to really trust yourself, listen to your gut instincts, make a decision that was unpopular or went against the grain or felt uncomfortable but was the right call.
I love hearing stories about that because I think it’s so important that we cultivate trust in ourselves rather than always Googling the answer to any question.
Dominique Broadway: You always Google first, right?
I would say this whole entrepreneurial journey has taught me how to trust myself. Quitting my job to start this was crazy. I didn’t even know I was starting Finances De•mys•ti•fied. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I just knew I didn’t want to do that anymore.
They say entrepreneurs jump out of the plane and build a parachute going down. That’s literally what I was doing. I jumped out of the plane and just hoped and prayed that there was a parachute in this backpack.
Even from there: starting the business and having tons of money saved and going broke and my house entering into foreclosure and having to trust myself to push through that. I had to just trust myself the whole time. I could’ve given up on myself a long time ago. It would have been easy to give up and just go back and get a job. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if I had done that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t have the business I have today. I wouldn’t have traveled the places I’ve traveled. I wouldn’t have helped the people that I’ve helped.
When I look back on it, I understand that me trusting myself wasn’t just for me. It was for those people who needed my guidance. Who, if I didn’t trust myself, I wouldn’t have been able to help and turn things around for them.
This whole process is about learning to trust yourself, having faith in whoever you believe in (for me it’s God) and understanding that where we are, where we’re supposed to be, the things that we go through… in the moment you’re like, really? Why am I going through this!? I learned through all of that, that entire experience, it’s given me a whole different level of education and now I can help more people.
Eva Jannotta: A lot of entrepreneurs are motivated by discomfort, by not liking what they have, but not necessarily having a clear vision of where they’re going. When you’re in the dark, you have to trust yourself and it’s very easy to get impatient and to have a lot of doubt and uncertainty. I appreciate that reminder that you’re meant to be where you are and to cultivate faith in that. That is incredibly powerful.
Dominique Broadway: It really is.
Eva Jannotta: Thank you so, so, so much for your time today. This was a fantastic conversation.
Dominique Broadway: This has been so fun! I enjoyed it.
Eva Jannotta: Is there anything that you’re promoting right now or that you want to share that’s going on in your business and your life?
Dominique Broadway: Right now we’re in this rebuilding, rebranding stage and nothing super exciting is launching right this second, but please make sure you go to DominiqueBroadway.com or FinancesDemystified.com. Get on the email list, follow me on Instagram. We are giving away a bunch of money in the next couple of weeks, so make sure you follow us there. And stay tuned. I have some exciting things coming down the pipeline!
Dominique Broadway is an award winning Financial Planner, Personal Finance Coach, Speaker, Finance Expert, Entrepreneur and the Founder of Finances De•mys•ti•fied & The Social Money Tour. She has a strong passion for working with young professionals, entrepreneurs and people of all ages to bring their Dreams2Reality. Shortly after launching Finances De•mys•ti•fied, an award winning organization that provides Personal Finance Coaching & Financial Capability solutions, she was named one of the top Financial Advisors in the United States for Millennials, at the age of 28. Prior to that, Dominique worked at major brokerage firms such as UBS Financial Services and Edelman Financial Services, at the ripe age of 21, focusing on clients with $10 million and up in investable assets.
