The Design Business Show 162: Bold Marketing Trends to Know with Erika Lyremark & Nicole Edwards

Erika showed early entrepreneurial skills when she let her brother throw a pie in her face for $5, she wheeled and dealed her way through high-school, earned degrees in Apparel Design and Women Studies (with an emphasis on China Studies), spent 9 years swinging around a dancer pole, went on to co-create a multi-eight-figure dollar commercial real estate investment company (of which she’s still a partner), wrote a best-selling book, Think A Stripper: Business Lessons To Up Your Confidence, Attract More Clients & Rule Your Market. And in 2009 launched The Daily Whip where she’s helped thousands of entrepreneurs grow their businesses through BOLD marketing & sales.

For over 15 years, Nicole has helped artists and entrepreneurs build their audiences through PR, creative direction, marketing campaigns and paid media. She’s also coached over 800 entrepreneurs on how to do their own paid advertising and build their sales funnels. From opt-in to sales page to launch, she’s helped build multiple 6 and 7-figure businesses from the ground up, as well as help scale sales for NY Times Best-Selling Authors, well-known influencers, course creators, and creative entrepreneurs from all over the world. Her clients call her the Swiss Army Knife of marketing. Her friends call her addictive.

Here’s what we covered on the episode:

Forming the Marketing Crush Partnership

We first met Nicole on episode 78 and Erika on episode 47 of The Design Business Show
How I have known Erika and Nicole for the last few years, have worked closely with them and how in the last year they have created a partnership together which they’ll talk about today along with some bold marketing trends they think people should know about
Erika tells the story of how she and Nicole met through me and how they formed their partnership
Nicole took Erika’s TripleXpert Program, her Mastermind and then became a private client – the more Erika got to know Nicole, the more she realized she wanted to work with her
How Erika hired Nicole to do Facebook ads for her triple expert program that she launched last year and says Nicole was the first person that made Facebook ads fun and exciting
Erika approached Nicole about doing Marketing Crush and she said absolutely, so they launched Marketing Crush in March to a super small list
When they first started Marketing Crush it was about creating content and creating a content plan, but as they developed it more, they realized people were not set up for success in their sales funnel, so they changed the business to focus on that and Erika says Nicole is very skilled when it comes to anything involving sales funnels
When people sign up for Marketing Crush, they get Erika as their content coach, marketing strategist, creative director, and says on Tuesdays she works with clients on their content plans, and on Thursdays, Nicole is helping people with everything sales funnel related
Erika talks about how the online space has changed throughout the years and how it can be really hard to keep up which is why marketing is so important
One of the things they always tell their clients is, when you’re creating content that is beautifully aligned with what you do, what you’re doing is creating a marketing asset that you can reuse again and again
Nicole talks about how she took my Conversion Design School program which is where a lot of her ideas and inspiration comes from
The biggest challenge Erika and Nicole have had with Marketing Crush is creating an Instagram page for it and Erika explains why that is, so they’ve decided that this point in their venture, they are not going to create a Marketing Crush Instagram page but instead use it as a billboard space

Bold Marketing Trends

A lot of Nicole’s inspiration comes from social justice and politics, while Erika’s inspiration comes from the Kardashians, and we talk about how the Kardashians have established their businesses, marketing, social media, and brands
Nicole shares something she’s always thought was important, but even more so now is creating an experience with your brand and thinking about how it makes your audience feel
For Nicole, the biggest trend she thinks is coming and has already slowly started is creating a user experience that is interactive and engaging and says this can be done through mindful design, scrollytelling, using narrative visualization, animations, typography, illustrations, 3D, etc.
Nicole gives examples of a few brands that are already creating a unique interactive experience for their audiences
How Erika personally uses Instagram as a search engine when looking for people, as do many people and says Instagram will be doing more of that when moving forward, so it will become more like a mini Google within Instagram
One thing Erika has seen changing on Instagram is there’s no longer a need to have these super glossy photos like you used to need, and she says a lot of brands don’t have highly produced photoshoots anymore
A big challenge most people have is creating high-quality, well-designed content and being consistent with it, which is why it’s important to produce different content for different platforms
Nicole talks about native visuals like, text message reminders, alerts, the things you see pop up daily on your phone and says she doesn’t think they’ll be going away in the future because they feel very organic and relevant to people
Erika talks about text accounts on Instagram where your content is just text images only and says you can be successful by doing typography, but you want to make sure that they are visually and beautifully aligned to catch attention
If you’re posting to feed on Instagram, Erika says people should immediately get that you’re an expert at what you do and that you truly live your message and believe in it
How vulnerability is important, but it shouldn’t look like dumping everything out for your audience to see, it should look like taking scary actions and risks
Erika says she struggles with posting “normal life things” because she is an idea machine she says and that excites her more than posting a family picture
Erika explains how a viewpoint is different than an opinion because it comes from your areas of expertise and experiences and talks about how to share what you stand behind in a way that truly reflects your business
Why everyone has to have a sales funnel, no matter what you’re selling and how the customer experience needs to be seamless
Based on Nicole’s experiences, email is where most sales take place so there needs to be an intimacy of the inbox that you want to capture, that’s why opt-ins that create value are still important
Erika and Nicole talk about removing content clutter, which is throwaway content that doesn’t reflect your level of expertise or add to the experience
Nicole explains what bro marketing is and says it creates a false sense of urgency, it’s overpromising and underdelivering, and can also be non-inclusive
Connect with Erika on her website at dailywhip.com, or shoot her a DM on Instagram and connect with Nicole on Instagram – make sure you also check them out on the Marketing Crush Website