Expand Your Fempire Podcast #134 Transcript

The Importance of Confidence in Marketing with Melissa Kellogg Lueck

Welcome to Expand Your Fempire with Caterina Rando, the podcast for women in business on a mission. Sharing ideas to support you to grow and thrive. Now here’s your host, Caterina Rando.

[00:00:24] Caterina Rando: Welcome back to another episode of the Expand Your Fempire Podcast. I’m your host, Caterina Rando, and I am so happy to be with you today because we have a very special guest, Melissa Kellogg Lueck. She is a business and marketing coach and strategist for women in business.

[00:00:52] She is super fun to be with. She has a smile that lights up the room. And today we are going to talk about you, about your business, and marketing. Now we’re going to probably talk about some perspectives that you don’t necessarily talk about. So don’t say, “Oh, marketing, marketing.” This is marketing excitement that you’re going to want to listen to.

[00:01:19] Melissa, thank you for being here.

[00:01:22] Melissa Lueck: I’m so glad to be here.

[00:01:25] Caterina Rando: Melissa, before we get into all the marketing discussion. Let’s talk a little bit about you. First, let’s hear about you and your life today. And then I want to hear how you got from amazing young woman to marketing queen that you are today.

[00:01:44] Melissa Lueck: Yeah. So I live and work in Northern Colorado and I was born and raised here. And right after I graduated high school, I left. I had to go see the rest of the country, so I lived in and studied in Southern California. And then I ended up getting my MBA in marketing in New York and lived out there for a while and then came back to Colorado.

[00:02:15] And so that’s a whole other story, but I am married. I have 2 kiddos and so the way that I got into the business that I’m in is I was in New York on 9/11. And I lost friends, colleagues, classmates, 31 people from the town that I lived in perished on 9/11. And what really struck me was that all they did is went to work that day.

[00:02:49] And I was a young, I was 30 years old, I guess recent graduate school grad and working a ton. All of my friends, we were all working a ton. So what that experience meant to me was “if I get up and go to work tomorrow, is this how I want my life to end?” And the answer was no. So I knew I needed to make some changes.

[00:03:18] And one of the changes that I decided at that time was I knew that I wanted to be in business and have my own business and create an impact in the world through my work, right?

[00:03:32] But I decided at that time, I wasn’t going to do that at the expense of the rest of my life. I wanted to have balance in my life. I wanted to have a family. I wanted to get married. And so I said, if I’m going to be as successful as I want to in business, I want to do it on my own terms.

[00:03:52] And so that really has driven all the decisions that I’ve made in forming my business and, and laying out my life because I wanted my life to be a tribute to those people that perished on that day.

[00:04:11] So I started my business 18 years ago. And so I was in marketing services and have really noticed the more clients that I worked with, that there was some pieces missing and really helping them get great results.

[00:04:30] And so I could create all the great marketing for them, but without confidence and believing in themselves and their work and what they were doing and this was work I was doing on my own self too, that our results were suffering. And so that’s how I discovered coaching.

[00:04:51] Caterina Rando: I love it. I love it. I love, well, first of all, your story’s beautiful, Melissa and I’m wanting to shine the spotlight here on this piece about the importance of confidence in marketing. We know it’s important in business. Say a little bit more about why is confidence key to marketing success, particularly for women with businesses.

[00:05:20] Melissa Lueck: Yeah. So confidence is important because it is the underpinning, the foundation of everything that we do, the thoughts that we’re having about ourselves and our work, the thoughts we’re having out about our business and our clients that all creates the energy that we go out into the world in.

[00:05:43] And so how that shines through in our marketing is that is the the light that shines through the actual activities that we do, right? So I can tell my clients. “Okay. I want you to go out and, you know, post 10 times a day on social media.” But if the whole time they’re doing it, they’re thinking, “Well, I suck. I’m bad at business. No one’s going to hire me.” That’s the energy that comes through. I mean, I’m being very dramatic, right? That’s the energy that comes through and the marketing isn’t as effective.

[00:06:18] So when we deal with that confidence first, it actually makes marketing so much easier. So much more efficient.

[00:06:28] You don’t have to create as much stuff to really get your energy, your value out into the world. It takes less time because you’re not overthinking or questioning or second guessing every little thing you do. Like so many of us do. I do that too. So that’s how having great confidence can really expand your marketing.

[00:06:51] Caterina Rando: And that means that really, it’s not just about the marketing. It’s about that we keep working on ourselves and building confidence. And I think you’re absolutely right.

[00:07:00] You know, one of the things I talk about is the importance of being loud and proud about the value you bring. If you don’t have certainty that you have massive value to bring, it’s harder to open your mouth and be loud and proud about it.

[00:07:17] Confidence. You, you call it confidence. I like to think of it as certainty, you know, the self assuredness that we can absolutely make a difference in our clients lives and that we do have the solution.

[00:07:31] And this is really important for women. And I love that you’re talking about this, Melissa, because a lot of times it doesn’t matter what great strategy they have if they don’t have the confidence to implement it.

[00:07:48] Melissa Lueck: Absolutely. I noticed that a lot with so many of my clients and students you know, they, they asked me, “What should I do? What should I be doing? What do you want me to do?”

[00:07:59] And I could give them a full laundry list of things. And if they don’t have that certainty, that belief, that confidence, they’re either not going to do the things or they’re going to do the things with that energy that we talked about earlier.

[00:08:17] And for most of us, for most of my clients, it turns out not doing the things right? And then they’ll say to me, “Well, I know all the things I should be doing, but I’m not doing them.”

[00:08:27] Caterina Rando: Right. And maybe that’s a good place for someone to look if they have all the things they know they’re supposed to be doing, they’re not doing it, then maybe it’s not about time or priorities. It’s really about confidence.

[00:08:44] Would you agree?

[00:08:45] Melissa Lueck: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, I say that a lot. It’s like, it’s not that you’re lazy or you are bad at business or any of those things. It’s that perhaps your confidence is just lacking in that area.

[00:09:03] And confidence is really a spectrum, right? Because I know every single one of us is confident that we can stand, you know, most of us can stand right?

[00:09:14] The adult human, our physiology is made for standing, but there was one time in our life when we didn’t know how to stand and we had confidence that we would ever stand.

[00:09:26] Caterina Rando: Right. Well, I love this because, you know, part of the thing that I think is that we are many of us very confident women, but there are certain places in life or certain places in business where we don’t feel as confident. Of course, around selling, around speaking, around writing. These are all areas where an amazing gal could not have confidence.

[00:09:53] And so I would say if a woman wants more speaking confidence or selling confidence, her job is to go speak and sell more. What would you say is your recommendations, three super tips, Melissa, for building confidence?

[00:10:12] Melissa Lueck: Yeah, the first tip would be to acknowledge that you have that desire to be more confident in a specific area, right?

[00:10:23] And then decide, I’m going to develop my confidence in this 1 area. Say, for example, public speaking, right?

[00:10:30] And then I really like to encourage my clients to go into a confident place. Like, just have an imaginary, you know, time and say, imagine you are 100 percent confident onstage speaking.

[00:10:49] Okay. “So Melissa that’s 100 percent confident about speaking. What does she think? What is she thinking about this speaking opportunity that’s coming up?” And list out all those thoughts and really just begin to get into that mind of that confident person.

[00:11:08] And practice it like you said.

[00:11:09] Caterina Rando: Wonderful. I do agree. The visualization really helps. And also we can think back to times when we’ve been confident before, you know, building on past successes and how did that feel and then transferring it here.

[00:11:24] I love this as a really important insight for our listeners to see if they’re not getting the stuff done, maybe it’s got nothing to do with tasks. It’s really about this. Beautiful.

[00:11:38] Melissa, we could go many, many different directions in terms of discussing marketing, one of the things that’s on everybody’s mind these days is AI and how to embrace AI in our business with marketing if we choose to do that, what are your thoughts on it? And any ideas for our listeners on how to embrace it effectively?

[00:12:04] Melissa Lueck: Yeah, I am fascinated by AI and I’ve been playing around with it as a tool. And I know, for example, on chat GPT, you could, you know, have it write a chapter in a book for you or write blog posts for you or all of these things, right? And yes, it has all these capabilities, but for me and, and what I, how I talk to my clients is, “is that the way we want to be using it?”

[00:12:34] So yes, the tool has all these capabilities, but we always want to be asking, is that how I want to be using it for me and my business?

[00:12:42] So what I have found to be the most useful is to look at your task list of administrative things that you do. For example, writing I mean, I’m just thinking about my own, like writing an email for my podcast episode that’s coming out, you know. Or I’m coming up with ideas for hashtags for a post that I’m doing.

[00:13:07] And so I like to use AI, copy AI like chat GPT for coming up with ideas for things. Like having it give me some suggestions for titles for a webinar that I might be planning or, you know, like I said, the hashtags or captions for social media posts.

[00:13:28] So I use it for ideas like a good starting point. The one thing that I think would be super useful is using AI, there are graphics AI which I haven’t really started using those yet, where you could say, “Okay, design a logo for my webinar coming up” or something like that. And it will do that for you. So I like to use it for some idea generation and then put my own spirit, my own flair into the actual copy that gets published.

[00:13:57] Caterina Rando: Yeah, I think that’s a really good use of it. That’s what I use it for is for generating ideas. I also use it to find the origins of set of phrases. If there’s a phrase that is part of the vernacular of communication but I don’t know where it comes from, I like to ask AI to tell me where it came from.

[00:14:19] That’s where I asked about, “it’s not personal, it’s business.” And it told me that they’re not sure where it comes from. It’s of course, from the Godfather movie, but they think that it might be from an accountant in Chicago who was working for the mob in the forties. So anyway, I like to use it for that. And then how would you say something in Latin or, or how do you say this in Italian or something like that?

[00:14:49] And then I just used it for quiz questions. I’m doing an afternoon tea. It’s got nothing to do with the business, but I’m hosting ladies for afternoon tea. And so I said, “What are 20 questions we could ask about afternoon tea and tea etiquette” and things like that, that you could put in a quiz.

[00:15:09] So this is not necessarily a business application, but I think it’s really great. I’ve used it for other things like give me some questions about a particular topic that could also be for story prompts, but I’m thinking of it more for social occasions.

[00:15:30] Melissa Lueck: Yeah. And one other thing that I always think is really fun is you can have it put a spin on an idea. For example, I did this with my client. She was having a webinar. And she’s a coach for over-drinkers. And so we ask chap GPT to come up with some ideas, but her target market is like women and kind of the “mommy juice wine culture” with women. And so I asked it to come up with some sassy, you know, female-focused webinar topics and they were hysterical or like humorous and cause you can filter it and say, well, okay, do that, but then make it humorous and it will come up with funny things.

[00:16:12] And it was hysterical.

[00:16:15] Caterina Rando: I love that. That is so fun. That is so fun. Anything else about AI that you’ve noticed that we want to let our folks know about?

[00:16:25] Melissa Lueck: I just think it’s going to be fascinating and how it changes so many parts of our work. But I think at the end of the day, it’s never going to replace humans because at this point in time, you really can’t duplicate the human spirit. And, you know, the energy, even as many filters as you ask AI to, you know, come up with humorous or make it sound like, you know, a Reese Witherspoon or whatever, it’s not as accurate as a real human.

[00:16:54] Caterina Rando: That’s for sure. Melissa, I know you’ve said many years, you’ve been working 18 years in your business. Let me ask you this. What was something that surprised you about women in marketing or what’s something that made you super bliss about women in marketing, either a particular situation or in general.

[00:17:15] Melissa Lueck: Well, in general, I think what has always well, what gets me out of the bed in the morning and going through my business when times are tough is that women start businesses because of something they believe in and that they’re passionate about. And I just think that is so beautiful. And that’s why I love working with women.

[00:17:40] Because when I was in primarily male-dominated industries, I really became disillusioned with all this focus on, you know, flair and profit. And I always craved that authenticity and that purpose-driven business. And so, The rise of more and more women being involved as entrepreneurs in our economy is so inspiring to me and seeing how they are so passionate.

[00:18:08] Caterina Rando: Makes me bliss. Melissa, let’s tell everyone how they can get in touch with you.

[00:18:14] Melissa Lueck: Yes. So my website is melissamkellogg.com and I’m sure Miss Caterina will have it in the show notes.

[00:18:23] And great places to find me online. I’m on Facebook at Melissa Kellogg Lueck and Instagram at melissa_m_kellogg.

[00:18:34] And I also have a podcast. So those are all the funnest places to connect with me.

[00:18:39] Caterina Rando: My friend, what’s the name of your podcast?

[00:18:42] Melissa Lueck: So it won’t be surprising. My podcast is Doing Business Like a Woman.

[00:18:47] Caterina Rando: I love that. How exciting, my friend, and do you have a free gift for the ladies?

[00:18:53] Melissa Lueck: I do. I have, if you visit my website, I have an amazing guide that is 12 brilliant marketing topic ideas. So if you ever hit that wall where you’ve got to sit down and write a post or An email and you’re like, “I have no idea what to say to these people,” it’s a series of prompts that will help you really get into the mind of your ideal client and really provide them some value.

[00:19:18] Caterina Rando: Love it. Thank you, Melissa. I love our discussion today about the importance of confidence before marketing is going to be effective and/ or consistent. And everybody, hopefully everyone you’re embracing AI to the extent that it’s feels good for you, or at least you’re playing around with it.

[00:19:38] Melissa, thank you so much for being with us today on the Expand Your Fempire Podcast. Everyone, remember you have massive value to bring. Keep bringing it and we will be with you again very soon.

[00:19:53] Bing, bing, bing.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Expand Your Fempire with Caterina Rando.