Alyssa “Twist” Light is a professional speaker who helps businesses grow by utilizing the power of storytelling in every aspect of their operations, especially marketing.
She does it on the spot. Right there. With business owners and sales people she’s never met before, Twist asks a few questions and like magic comes up with marketing design, hashtags, positioning, value props, and branding.
Her most recent success outside of her speaking work is Social Innovation Monthly, an offline subscription of social media “recipe cards” that help businesses engage in more powerful and consistent storytelling. Twist has spoken at Landscape Ontario’s Congress, Ontario Irrigation Conference, CreativFestival, Halton Police Service, Go Camp Pro, Social Tenacity, HortEast, and the Ontario Camp Association among others. A self proclaimed lover of conferences, Twist’s mission is to make event planners look like superheroes and delegates feel like rockstars.
She has also been a guest on dozens of podcasts, including The 6 Figure Events Podcast, Authentic Influencer, Service Business Mastery, and Podcast Domination.
Here’s what we covered on the episode:
- How Twist and I met at Sage and Tarzan’s Legendary Life Event in the fall of 2019
- The story behind why Twist stopped using her first name (Alyssa) and now goes by her nickname and why it’s important to get names right on work
- From her stage work to her design work, Twist is continuously thinking about how the work she’s doing will be received and how it will help somebody experience belonging and also create it for other people
- Why Twist feels so strongly about creating a sense of belonging and why she wants to put that into business, marketing, and everything she creates so the community she builds is strong and powerful
- Twist shares a couple stories from her childhood highlighting her entrepreneur skills from a very young age and shares that she’s had a couple of jobs, but they didn’t work out because she has really big ideas and sees things differently than other people do
- When Twist first started, she had to figure out her way through trial and error and explains what that process looked like, she also explains how she fell into speaking
- Why speaking made Twist want to have a portfolio because of one her biggest challenges with speakers are those who get on stage and say a lot, but don’t have experience to back it up or don’t have a willingness to go out and make those things happen for themselves
- Twist shares what she’s doing now since the speaking industry is on hold due to the coronavirus such as, Social Innovation Monthly, which is a deck of storytelling recipe cards she sends out; each have a prompt, instructions on how to create your own post, why you’re doing it and a sample, organic post
- Another thing Twist does is creates course enhancing assets for people with digital or in person courses and walks us through how she does that
- Twist talks about how she works with people to go through their client journey process and looks at different aspects of it so they can create a client love process, which is onboarding and offboarding, but also acknowledging the milestones in between to enhance the relationship
- Twist shares her love for quilting and explains how she got experience by wanting to make the industry she loves even better, so she started by helping a quilting business redesign everything start to finish for their business
- How Twist prepared herself for the speaking industry and stresses that every speaker’s process is different and in order to get clients, you need to make sure what you’re saying makes sense and communicate that to an event planner
- Even if you aren’t being paid to speak, Twist says there is plenty of opportunity to get clients afterwards
- Twist shares that finding a local networking event that is looking for speakers can help you practice new content and says to have a strong point that the audience can do something with and then find out what they did with that information
- As you grow your business, Twist suggests looking for paid event opportunities that are within associations because they often have funds to pay speakers
- Twist suggests putting on your own event, such as a live video on Facebook and says to record it so you can watch yourself after and learn the language, body language, tone of voice, volume of your voice, etc. that you are using
- Why Twist started offering course enhancing assets for course creators because she became frustrated with courses she would take that offered no documents or interactive activity to reinforce what was being taught
- Twist gives real examples so we can see how not having documents or interactive activities can hinder your audience from actually learning
- Twist explains gamification, which can be very simple – the main goal is to make our audience feel like they achieved something and give them quick wins, whether that’s checking off boxes, receiving stickers, or formatting your copy a certain way
- How Twist came up with the idea for Social Innovation Monthly through her passion of helping people express information and by realizing people needed an easy analogy to understand, which is how she picked recipe cards
- Social Innovation Monthly was originally thought of for just social media at the time with the idea of helping people tell better stories and tell stories better
- Twist shares that she started funnel hacking other people that were giving away or selling prompts and was not impressed with what she was given and thought about what was missing
- The thought process Twist went through to create Social Innovation Monthly and how it is completely unique and goes above and beyond for the subscribers by offering prompts, questions and templates
- The story of how Twist drove 40 minutes to print her sample recipe cards and glued them together by hand and took her idea to social media to see if there was an interest and how at the time of the launch Twist was doing everything herself
- What Twist had to learn and overcome while working on Social Innovation Monthly and how they made the decision to make it a membership and only do 12 months of content
- Check out Social Innovation Monthly to find out more information- Twist talks about their new system of doing open cart only through affiliates and asks if I would like to be a partner so my listeners can get access
- Twist suggests having another episode where we talk about the client love piece, so stay tuned for another episode with her
- Connect with Twist on Facebook
Links mentioned:
Social Innovation Monthly (affiliate link)
Connect with Twist on Facebook
Like what you heard?
Click here to subscribe + leave a review on iTunes.
