Creating Free Pregnancy Resources, Hiring a VA, and Transparency With Your Doula Clients
Have you been struggling with getting your freebie “right,” been curious about outsourcing tasks to a birthworker VA, or are you having issues with getting ghosted by potential doula clients?
If you’ve been wondering how to create transparency with your potential clients and team members, then get out a pen and paper, this blog post is for you.
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
"How do you know that it's time to create a new freebie for your doula business?"
"Do you have any tips on how to effectively communicate, systemize, and streamline the entire process of hiring a VA for my doula business?”
"How can I prevent my potential doula clients from ghosting me?"
Every Friday, I answer your biggest questions right here on the Birthworker Blog AND the Birthworker Podcast.
To submit a question for next week’s podcast, click here.
"How do you know that it's time to create a new freebie for your doula business?" -Angel
Most of the time, you should not create something new. If something is not working, it means that your messaging is off. I never want anyone in my community to launch something in their business, nobody buys it, and they think it’s because something is wrong with their offer. It has much more to do with your messaging and copywriting.
So how do you know if it's actually time to create a new freebie? I recommend creating a new freebie only if you have changed the messaging several times and your audience continues to show no interest. Go into that very analytically, not emotionally. In order to know if your freebie's not converting, look at the landing page statistics. How many people are hitting that landing page vs how many people are actually signing up for your freebie?
A good benchmark is 40% or higher. For example, if 100 people hit your landing page, we want at least 40 people to sign up for that freebie. If that number is lower than 40%, it doesn't mean your freebie sucks, it means you need to fix your landing page.
Another break in the funnel to consider is if not enough people are even clicking on your landing page. If that number is really low, (between 1 and 10 people per week) you don't need to change the freebie. You need to change the copy on your social media posts to strategically lead people to your freebie.
What I want you to do is figure out what's not working and fix that. The problem is rarely the freebie, because a lot of time, people haven't even gotten the freebie yet. The freebie could be totally amazing, but the marketing around it might need a little bit of help.
PSA: There are several freebies that are overdone in the birth community. Choosing one of these overdone freebies isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but just make sure the freebie is positioned uniquely for your niche.
For example, when I started, I worked with the “take-no-shit” moms who don't want anyone telling them what to do. If I was going to create a freebie, would a birth affirmations printout be appealing to them? Or would my niche benefit from a different type of freebie?
When making a freebie, always consider your niche audience and what they want.
"Do you have any tips on how to effectively communicate, systemize, and streamline the entire process of hiring a VA for my doula business?” -Taylor
Hiring is one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do in my business. That's not to say my people aren't amazing, because I have a small team of two girls with me right now that are phenomenal. I just have to say it's not smooth. I don't want you to go into it and have a hard time and then decide to never hire anyone again, but I want you to have realistic expectations from the start.
You should not hire anybody in your business until you know how to do the tasks you want to outsource inside and out. You know exactly which buttons to push, the exact content creation process that works for you, etc, because you need to hire this person to do that very specific role. If you're not 100% sure how to do that role, then how are you going to train them?
Sometimes you won’t have time to learn something to do it yourself and you have to hire out. But in a situation like that, you’ll end up hiring someone who's fairly expensive, and for a good reason. They will come in and you don’t have to tell them what to do. They can figure it out on their own. That's a unicorn.
So the more realistic advice is to systemize everything, have a crystal clear process of how you do these tasks on your own so when you hire someone, you can just hand over those documents and they’ll have step-by-step process of what they need to do.
So, for instance, if I'm hiring someone for my podcast, I would have an entire workflow document of how to upload the podcast to Buzzsprout with every single button they need to click and every step they need to complete. We call them workflows in my business, but they're typically called SOPs– standard operating procedures.
Another recommendation if you're bringing on a new hire is that you meet with them on Zoom almost every single day for the first couple of weeks. That definitely helps. That's not something I did at first. I used to do weekly meetings with my staff, but I had too high of expectations that were really unrealistic for them. So now I meet with them typically every single day for the first couple of weeks, maybe an hour at a time, we go through some of the tasks that they're going to do, and then I leave them with some homework.
The last tip I have is that I always give all of my new hires 90 days. I do not expect them to be perfect at anything for 90 days. That gives us both a buffer so I don't get upset that they're not working as quickly as I hoped, and they’re not stressed about not being perfect right away. It gives me enough time to train them thoroughly and it gives them enough time to really learn what I'm looking for and figure out how to complete all of the tasks I need help with.
"I feel like my potential doula clients that are reaching out to me are sometimes ungrateful for my time and energy. They're doing things like canceling at the last minute, ghosting me, etc. How can I prevent this from happening?" -Natalie
If doulas are not upfront with their process or pricing, people are going to schedule consultation calls and they're going to ghost. That’s the reality of it. So give them the energy that you want to receive. Be extremely upfront with them because we want them to be upfront with us.
I see this all the time and it really comes down to transparency, On your sales pages where you list your doula packages, make it extremely clear what's included, pricing, and what the next steps are. For example, click the button below to schedule a consultation call. After you choose a date and time, you're going to get an email, etc, etc.
Let them know exactly what they're getting into, because when they’re ghosting you, it’s because they're just signing up for the consultation call for a little more information. Once they get that information, they realize, "You know what? I shouldn't have to get on a consultation call with this lady to find out XYZ,” or they feel like, "Ugh, why did Natalie make me jump on this call to just find out the pricing?"
Make it simple and just put everything on your website. Be extremely transparent with your pricing and packages. That one simple switch is going to go a really long way.
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If you were reading this post and thinking, "Oh my gosh, I just want to ask Kyleigh all of my questions day after day, and I don't want to have to wait until next Friday to get my questions answered, and I am ready to go all in on this whole birth business thing," then I want you to shoot me a DM on Instagram because I think that the Birthworker Membership is going to be the perfect place for you.
It's my business-only membership. We do not talk about birth, we only talk about growing a sustainable business. So if you are ready to go from side-gig doula to full-time birthworker, and if you're ready to quit your day job, stay home with your kids and impact lives all over the world, then send me a DM. I cannot wait to hear about your goals and help you hit them so much faster.
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.