In Champ Life Series, this month we have Molly Mahoney a.k.a The Prepared Performer. She is a digital growth strategist who focuses on making authentic Facebook visual content and leveraging Messenger bot marketing to take client sales to success heights.
She offers the magic of Facebook Messenger Automation as a way for her clients to build one on one relationships with thousands. Molly loves showing business owners and their teams how to bring a sense of stage presence to their everyday lives.
If doing Facebook Lives has been on your radar for a while as a way to grow your reach and connect with more people, but you’re nervous about showing up on social media, Molly Mahoney should be your go-to galpal!
When she’s not helping her clients attract a flood of leads, you can find her singing jazz with her bass-playing husband or teaching her kids #stand4joy from their home in California.
Molly Mahoney – The Prepared Performer
How did you get into the world of online marketing? What made the transition from what you were doing?
First of all, how I started in the world of marketing, we have a marketing agency and a consultancy right now, where we help experts and influencers to monetize their visibility and grow their visibility using mainly live videos. And I actually got started in the space back in 2013, when I launched my business “The Prepared Performer”.
How did the idea of The Prepared Performer come about? What makes the brand unique?
I was actually a voice teacher a singing teacher. I had a really successful musical theater performance career. I wanted to help other performers to be able to build their careers as musical theater performers, singers, dancers, that kind of stuff. So I actually got started as a performance coach.
In 2016, when Facebook live came out, we decided to flip flop everything. Instead of teaching performers how to have a business, we started teaching business owners how to perform and it has been super fun.
The other thing that helped us to make that shift was in 2017, Messenger Bots came on the scene, and we jumped into the world of Messenger Bots, Menu Chats and we were one of the first people that combined Messenger Bots with Live video.
And combining those two together, it was like magic happened. That’s how we got started there.
And that’s really the thing that makes us stand out I think, is that we combine that performance experience, you know, I’ve done loads of TV work, and with my musical theater experience and you combine that with my ability to understand the weird crazy Tech stuff.
So it’s just an awesome combination of performance skills, how to share how to show up yourself authentically on camera, mixed with all these ninja magical Tech and marketing strategies, that we love to share with our clients and students.
So that’s cool.
Molly Mahoney – The Camera Confidence
We saw that you had launched the course “Camera Confidence”, how did that idea come by?
When I launched “Camera Confidence”, it was actually a pretty fun experience. So it started with a disaster.
I had a program called “Prepared Performers Profits”, which was based on helping performers to be able to build a business using their creative talents.
And we had 15 people on the program, private program, and we launched with full force. We went out with a bunch of Facebook ads, all kinds of craziness, and we had zero sales. So that was “fun”.
But in that disaster, it caused me to really look and figure out what was working, and what wasn’t working.
And what was working? I’m going to tell you in a second.
But what wasn’t working was the tagline on the program was, “How to cure the starving artist syndrome?” and I thought it was so catchy and so true, and it turns out when you call someone a starving artist, they don’t actually want to purchase from you.
Because they don’t see themselves as someone who would invest.
So, I realized that I needed to switch my messaging a little bit and I recognized that with the dawn of Facebook Live, with my video really being the big thing on this screen, a lot of people needed help showing up on the camera.
So, I kind of combined what I was already doing, I combined those strategies of the Live video stuff and the marketing stuff that I was doing, with my performers and I just switched the audience, just one little tweak. And it was so cool.
I actually only had one empty Facebook group and a payment link.
And within three months, after launching the program, we delivered the whole thing Live, in the first couple of months, and then we started to systematize it, within three months we had about 50,000 dollars in sales.
It was so cool.
So, it was pretty awesome.
Molly Mahoney – The Wizard of Facebook Live Sessions & Facebook live ideas
How can one end up getting organic attention on Facebook Live Sessions?
So the secret to this is really just two things. Well, there are actually a lot of secrets. I’m going to share a couple of them.
First thing, constantly putting out content, and I’m gonna give you more about what that content should be.
So, consistent content and consistent connection.
Now, the connection can come in one of two ways.
One is by actually talking to human beings, as yourself or somebody else on your team talking as human beings.
Or using Facebook ads to pay for those connections.
So, you get to decide whether you want to put your time in, or your money.
But you have got to do one of the two. That’s the connection piece.
The content piece is what we suggest you show up every single week. You do what we call a “Value Video”, you provide lots of value, and you use our “Map to Millions”.
So the “Map to Millions” is a system that has helped a lot of us reach million organically.
Here’s what it is.
It includes an A and a P and an R! So, APR!
The A is for Announce.
You’ve got to announce that your show is coming.
Preschedule your videos, using b.live, And it will be awesome.
You can actually use an in-video to create a little announcement, to tell your audience where to go.
We use Messenger Bots to help with that.
We feel that Messenger Bots really help accelerate that.
We also send an email.
We send a Bot text message.
We do all of these things to tell people that our video is happening.
Then you show up you do the video and you do the P.
The P is Pretend.
So the A was Announce, the P is Pretend.
So, when you’re doing your videos, which is kind of what I’m doing right now and it is kind of awkward because this is prerecorded *chuckles*, you’ve gotta speak to one person as if they’re actually there.
So we call this a “Mr. Roger” style conversation.
Instead of saying “Hey everybody on Facebook!”, like Mr. Roger never said “Hey everybody in the neighborhood.”, he said “Hey neighbor. Are you experiencing this problem? Because if you are I’m going to solve it for you today. Let’s go dig in.” He didn’t say “Hey everybody in the neighborhood. I am Fred Rogers.”, he talked to one person, listened to that one person, and spoke from his heart.
So that’s what we suggest you do on your videos.
Then the R, so Announce, Pretend and then the R is for Repurpose.
And so we have a whole system on how we group certain videos, download, chop them up into bits and pieces, and it is super dope.
We create Gifs, we create graphics, all kinds of stuff.
Can you please discuss a few of your inspiring Facebook Live Ideas that get you the most eyes?
I like this question.
So, why Facebook Live?
For me, there are two things to look at.
What platform do you actually enjoy? I happen to love Facebook. *giggles*
So ask yourself. What platform do you enjoy?
And where are your ideal clients?
So for me, my ideal clients happened to be on Facebook and I happen to enjoy Facebook.
It was no brainer.
Like if you’re someone who really doesn’t like Facebook, I don’t suggest that you force yourself to use it.
Now, if you’re saying that you don’t like social media and you don’t want to be on the computer, then “good luck to you”.
But if you actually want to see a difference in your business, especially right now, you’ve got to show up online somewhere.
So if that happens to Instagram, you can do an Instagram Live and use the same strategies that we are doing right now.
You can use YouTube and do the same thing on YouTube.
The problem with LinkedIn is that not everybody has access to the Live videos.
Live video is the best way to show that you are a real human being and you connect with people in a way that scales, build relationships that scale.
So, LinkedIn, not everybody has access so that’s tricky there.
Instagram and YouTube, there isn’t the same social group type feeling you’re not creating communities in those places, the way that you can on Facebook.
So when we have a Facebook Live video, it stays there and it becomes searchable on the platform.
It even shows up and in the search results on Google.
That doesn’t happen with Instagram.
On YouTube, you don’t have the same community feel.
So on Facebook Live, you can bring people into our Facebook group.
These are all these things that we can do.
And also on Facebook, which is different from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube is that people have to use their personal information.
On YouTube or Instagram or on TikTok, they can have some fake weird account.
We are all about building relationships with real human beings, as being real human beings and there are 2 billion of them on Facebook.
So I think it’s a good place to play.
When we talk about traction, what role did Facebook Live play in gaining you that oomph?
Legitimately, for me, live videos are everything.
So I started showing up on my personal profile with live videos. And that’s actually what caused me to realize, “Oh my gosh! People are paying attention.”
This was way back in 2016, I did a six week series on the “Cure of Starving Artist Syndrome” and what I noticed was that it was an amazing way to build one-on-one relationships with thousands of people at one time.
And when I stopped the series, it was the day before Easter egg drop and I was in the park with my kids and I got all these messages from people saying “Hey, where are you? Where are your Live videos?” and I was like this the series is over.
But I realized by showing up consistently and solving their problems and speaking to that one person, so many people reached out wanting more.
So, could have I made other platforms work? Yes.
Am I like super grateful that Facebook Live exists? Holy Smokes YES!
There’s one thing that’s better than live video and that is having a real conversation with a real human being but eventually, you’re going to run out of time
And right now, like the current state of the world, while I recording this video, is for the most part we’re keeping our distance from people in real life.
So, you know, the more you can actually create that experience online the better.
Molly Mahoney – The Social Triangle of Leads
Please shed some light on The Social Triangle.
So the social triangle is; You have to actually show up and put stuff out there.
You also have your ideal client. So, you have to show up and connect with your ideal client. That means liking their posts, commenting on their posts, sending them messages.
And what happens when you start to do that is you are feeding the platform.
So, when you have those three things happening, you showing up, you connect with your ideal client, and you feeding the platform keeping people on the platform longer, this creates a social triangle, which really is the key for unlocking that magical thing inside the algorithm so that people start to see a post. You’ll be able to see the things that you want to be seeing.
And even like ads, it will start to feed you the right type of ads that are relevant.
For example, I love commenting on ads of my friends, of my power partners and like that, and when you play right within Facebook or any other platform normally and you unlock that social triangle, that is the key to the really long term organic results.
It’s good.
Which one should one go Live from to get the most engagement, Facebook Page, Group, or Profile?
There are so many details that I can go about when it comes to the Facebook group, the page, the profile, but the key is when you’re going Live you want to make sure that you know what your objective, is like why you’re doing it.
So here’s the strategy that we use, we actually suggest that you do three videos per week.
One is a value-based video that happens on your business page and you do this on their business page because you actually have a business and you want to be able to retarget people via your Facebook ads, and if you only do business on your personal profile that is against the terms of service on Facebook and you get in trouble.
Value-based video on the business page now.
In the camera confidence video program, we have 15 types of different videos that we suggest you pull from and I’m going to give you two of those right now.
One is on your profile before you do your video on your business page.
You do a teaser video.
So two examples of a teaser video that I did this week are that I did my makeup in the bathroom before I went Live on my business page.
While I did my makeup. I talked about the fact that I’m going to get ready to go Live.
So super casual, and it’s usually about 15 minutes, I can use that kick off the personal profile algorithm and people pop in and out.
It’s not repurposed.
Just kind of conversation.
Another example, I made really cool toaster quesadillas yesterday and I put it on TikTok.
And I recorded it in my kitchen and then I mentioned, “Oh! I’m coming up and I’m going to be doing this video on my business page.”
Okay, then here is the other thing, the other type of video that we suggest you do is either an adventure video.
An adventure video, I will probably do on my personal profile, and it’s like all this sunset or a lizard in your house, like different things that happening in your surrounding that make you go; “Oh, let’s just go live.”
Okay, if you want to do something in a group, what I was suggesting a group is like a Q and A.
A really deep dive into something, so that the group is you like your private little playground and you’re inviting people in and giving them more value so that you can move them into your other products and your services.
You call Facebook Groups to be Lead Magnets, why?
I do call the Facebook groups “Lead Magnets” because people can actually you can put stuff in your group in order for people to get access to your group, they can get access to your free gifts.
So your group can be your lead magnet that can track leads, which is also really awesome.
