Jared Judge: 0:01

What's up? Denver event professionals, welcome back to another episode of the Denver NACE podcast. I am your host, jared Judge, founder and musician for Extreme Strings Electric Violins, and I am joined by a very special guest who we actually had on this podcast several episodes ago, when we had a panel recapping the amazing things that happened at the NACE Experience Conference, and so I would love to reintroduce you to Elizabeth Marbury. Welcome back to the podcast.

Elizabeth Marberry: 0:29

Hi, thank you so much for having me, and we actually talked about wedding MBA when I was on.

Jared Judge: 0:36

Oh, that's right. I'm not sure why I thought there's so many events in our industry right now. We're in the middle of the MIC conference here in Denver. Have you heard of that one?

Elizabeth Marberry: 0:47

I have. I actually recently heard about it for the first time and I'm not able to attend this year, but I've heard it's incredible and I need to be there next year.

Jared Judge: 0:58

For sure. I'm actually performing tonight at one of the cocktail hours, but obviously I'm not attending the sessions here. I'm chatting with you today, yeah, so I'm excited because you are a master of many things, one of which is teaching people how to dance at their weddings. You are the wedding dance coach, which is amazing. And then you are also a master of Instagram and coaching other businesses, just like mine, to use their Instagram and social media effectively, which many of us feel like we're just spinning the wheels. So would you mind just kind of giving us a background of yourself and why you're so awesome, and then maybe we'll get into some specifics.

Elizabeth Marberry: 1:38

Oh, you're so nice. Well, thanks so much for having me back on the podcast. I really appreciate it, excited to share with you in the community today. So I am Elizabeth Marbury and I launched Wedding Dance Coach 15 years ago and, like many of you, it's like when I first launched my business I was doing all the things. I was teaching the lessons, I was running the business, I was trying to figure out marketing and sales and all of that Fast forward 15 years. I no longer teach any of our lessons. I have a whole team of instructors locally in our Denver studio. We also have a virtual studio where we coach couples worldwide and I get to be in the CEO visionary seat of running that company, the company really. It's like this beautiful plane that flies on its own and I get to just be in the CEO seat, which is really fun.

Elizabeth Marberry: 2:32

That business is all about helping nervous non-dancers and madly in love couples rock their first dance with total confidence. We love creating super unique first dances simple yet impressive choreography that people can totally rock, whether they have two left feet or they have prior dance experience. But everything is really customized to the couple, their song, their vision. It's super, super fun and of course we do. You know parent-child dances and wedding party dances and all of that, so that business is really growing year over year and it's a really fun industry to be in a very niche market that I essentially created 15 years ago because there wasn't. Now there's definitely more wedding dance lessons being offered thanks to social media, but when I first launched the company, we were the first company to exclusively focus on wedding dance lessons. So that was pretty awesome because we were kind of the OGs in the market.

Elizabeth Marberry: 3:33

And then, about six years ago, I went all in on our social media marketing efforts, and what I mean by that is that I didn't spend any money on paid ads. I just started really learning about how social media marketing works. I started learning about how to create the most compelling short form videos, because at that time, you know, tiktok, of course, was blowing up in 2020. In 2021, instagram launched Reels. Of course, we know YouTube is now doing YouTube Shorts. Linkedin is now pushing that vertical short form video formats.

Elizabeth Marberry: 4:12

So I really went all in on our social media marketing for my wedding business and within 12 months, we got over 50,000 followers on Instagram, over 40,000 on TikTok. I got 5,000 hot prospects on my email list. We increased our revenue by 84% and that's when I completely fell in love with Instagram marketing and launched my second business, which is really where I focus like 95% of my time and efforts now, and that is my coaching, podcasting and speaking business, where I coach other wedding pros, creative entrepreneurs, small business owners to understand really how to play the game that is Instagram and create organic content that, of course, builds their following, boosts their visibility and drives more leads and sales. So that is the long story, short on who I am.

Jared Judge: 5:10

Awesome. Well, I could tell right from like the very first thing you said that this is going to be a masterclass in marketing and sales, because you clearly identified who was your target prospect. What did you say? Like nervous non-dancers who are madly in love. Not everyone in our business can articulate quite as clearly who their target audience is. So I'm wondering if you could kind of speak to that and I'm wondering is that like the pinnacle of the whole social media game, knowing who you're talking to?

Elizabeth Marberry: 5:42

That's definitely a crucial first piece.

Elizabeth Marberry: 5:45

I always say it's like the unsexy pre-work it's fun to go in and be like I'm going to create a reel or I'm going to create a post, but where we need to be spending a lot of effort is optimizing our Instagram profiles and all of our social media profiles to act like a magnet to attract our ideal clients.

Elizabeth Marberry: 6:03

And to do that, you have to know your ideal client or customer like the back of your hand. So that's exactly what you're saying is, you need to be really clear on who it is that you're talking to, who you want to work with, and then comes the messaging piece right when you're clear on who that person is, how do we speak to them? How do we speak in their words and their language, so that way, when they read our content, they're like oh my gosh, how did Jared just like crawl inside my brain, like how does he know exactly what I'm thinking? Well, he's done his target market research. So, yes, you have to absolutely know and be able to define your client avatar or your target market of who you really want to work with and who you want to serve.

Jared Judge: 6:50

Yeah, that's fantastic and I know, like I mentioned, a lot of us don't do that research and then we try to target everybody. What are kind of the consequences of not focusing on one specific target market?

Elizabeth Marberry: 7:02

Yeah, well then it's essentially your marketing efforts are just going to fall flat. You're going to feel really resentful. Nothing's going to work, nothing's going to drive any kind of conversions and you will not stand out in a sea of sameness. You will just kind of blend in. And I feel like, especially if we're talking like the wedding and event industry, you know, if you go to different wedding pros Instagrams, if you just quickly glance at them, a lot of them look the same.

Elizabeth Marberry: 7:31

So you really have to think about how are you going to stand out in the crowded marketplace? And, spoiler alert, it's you. It's you, it's your thoughts, it's your experience, it's your opinions, it's the way that you do things, it's your personality, it's your vibe. Nobody can. Your opinions, it's the way that you do things, it's your personality, it's your vibe. Nobody can copy that right. So that's a huge part of succeeding on social media right now is if you can be willing to allow yourself to be seen or let your voice be heard on a reel, or that's how you're going to be able to stand out. But yeah, if you don't do that work, it's going to feel really frustrating and you're probably going to burn out pretty quickly because it's not. It's not going to be very effective. Your marketing is not going to be very effective.

Jared Judge: 8:15

Yeah, for sure, cool. Well, that's amazing. And then you, you mentioned spoiler alert. It's you, let's dive into that. What do you mean by that?

Elizabeth Marberry: 8:30

Yeah Well, I think what's doing really well on Instagram right now and it's not just Instagram, it's TikTok, it's YouTube, it's LinkedIn is the business owners, the brands that are willing to show their face like people buy people, not products or services. So I totally feel the pain of, like some of my clients are like Elizabeth I am like my zone of genius is in operations, like I do not want to get on camera. You know things like that. So there's different ways that you can go about it. But if I was work, if I was starting from scratch, trying to build a brand on social media, learning how to show my face on camera, learning how to speak, and even if it's not my face on Instagram, you can create videos and reels where you're doing a voiceover so you could show, like behind the scenes, content of what you're doing and then you could speak over it. But you want to think of content that no one else can copy right, like no one else can be me, like if I show up in my reel, like you can teach the same concepts but you're going to teach them differently than I'm going to teach them right, or I have a different approach, and so I feel that the brands and businesses that are willing to literally like, show their face on camera, whether that's just an Instagram stories, you know where, where it, and maybe it's not you the owner, maybe it's a team member you have, or but people really want to know, like the faces behind the brand, and they want to hear your voice. They want to, they want to connect person to person.

Elizabeth Marberry: 10:06

I mean, a lot of times we forget that social media is not a portfolio. It should not feel like your portfolio. It should feel like a conversation with your ideal clients and it should invite them into conversation. It's not a monologue, it's like a dialogue, back and forth. So that's another reason why a lot of people I think are resentful of it is they're not getting into conversation, so they just feel like they're shouting into the void. So there's different ways that you can do that by asking questions, by taking a stand in your industry, knowing that it's going to repel some people, but that's OK, the right people are going to want to work with you. It's being brave, it's being bold, but it does take practice and courage and that's part of why I love mentoring my clients so much is it's easier to take some of those bold steps when you know that you have support and mentorship. You know guiding you along the way.

Jared Judge: 11:05

Yeah for sure, and you mentioned that you kind of dove headfirst into all of this six years ago. I'm curious if you could kind of describe that journey of what does it mean to actually take social media seriously and how did it feel once you stumbled on some of these key concepts that you now teach?

Elizabeth Marberry: 11:22

Well, you know, I made all the mistakes in the beginning. Like I just want to say, like part of why I feel like I'm a good teacher is I have made all the mistakes. So one of the mistakes that I made in the beginning which, of course you know, fail forward, you learn by doing is for my personal brand. I was talking about way too many different things. So if you came to my page and you consume my content, you wouldn't have like, known very quickly exactly like who I help or how I help them. Right Cause and I think a lot of us, especially in the wedding event industry if you, if you're creative, you probably have lots of different, like you know, different parts of you that you'd love to share or different dynamics of your brand. But sometimes, if we go too wide in what we're sharing, it's just not effective. So that was something that I learned is that the more niche down you can be in terms of just your content focus, the faster you're going to grow on Instagram. So in my wedding dance business, we were always very niche down, of course, because we were that's. All we talked about was wedding dance. But in building a coaching brand and a Instagram marketing brand. I was just talking about so many different elements and I was a little bit too scattered, so that would be one piece.

Elizabeth Marberry: 12:51

I think when I first started like literally filming the content, editing the videos, editing the hooks on the screen and the captions, it took me forever. You know, like I remember the first reel I did, it took me three hours and it was like basic, like there wasn't. But it's like in the beginning you know, when you're learning a new skill, you don't know where any of the buttons are, you don't know how to do things, and so I think it's. I think it's funny because I a lot of people get really frustrated in the beginning of this process where they're like oh Elizabeth, this is taking me so long, I can't have it take this long. And I'm always telling my clients, like if you can just stick with it for the first, if you can get through that resistance for the first three months, I promise you everything will get so much faster. Like I can create reels now in like 10 minutes and they could do really well what used to take me three hours. So it's kind of like anything else.

Elizabeth Marberry: 13:51

Once you decide to invest in learning that skill, just give yourself. Grace that it's going to take time. We all start there, like I definitely did, but now it's a skill that I can apply to. I'm now repurposing a lot of my vertical videos over onto LinkedIn. Linkedin is really heavily pushing video this year and it's incredible, so it's like to me, it's a skill worth investing in, especially if you are on the marketing side of your business, which, if you're a solopreneur, you are the marketing team, right, yep, but some of us actually have a marketing person Great. But to me, it's a skill worth investing in, and I do remember, though it took me time in the beginning to learn it.

Jared Judge: 14:35

Yeah, for sure. I mean from your story it sounds like it was well worth it. I'm wondering if you could share a couple of your clients' stories about what happened to them once they started diving into this process photo, like picture frames, and she has just different, like custom gifts that she creates.

Elizabeth Marberry: 15:01

And she had been very resistant to social media. She like would cringe at the sound of her voice, she would cringe at, like just seeing herself on camera, and but she knew that she really wanted to take her business seriously and she wanted to scale it and she knew that social media was really a non-negotiable part of that which is, I would argue, that is, marketing of 2025 and beyond. Is social media is so important? It's like social media is the new Google, right, it's just it's so important. And so in our work together, I really helped her to break through some visibility blocks of being seen, because a lot of us have those blocks where it's like, well, what are other people going to think? You know, before we even hit post, we're just like destroying ourselves and we're comparing ourselves and all of that. So that's honestly one of the things I love about social media is it's to me it's like a personal development journey, because it's going to kind of bring up like all of your shadows and all your muck and all of your worthiness wounds and you know if you struggle with comparison and all of those things. So that we did a lot of that work. But she started to, through the different strategies I teach, she started to post really consistently. And I like to challenge my clients to. I have a group program called Hot Reels. It's a 12-month Instagram content lab and in the first 90 days I tell them, if you post at least three reels a week for 90 days, you get this like fun bonus, you know with me, like a coaching call with me. So it's just like kind of a, it's kind of gamifying the process. So, anyways, some of these, some of my clients, are so competitive and they're like I'm going to get that, I'm going to win, you know. And so, anyway, she did this and she started to post all the time.

Elizabeth Marberry: 16:59

And here's what happens when you do this In the beginning, when you start posting consistently, your content's not going to be very good, right, Like that's just the truth. It's not going to be very good, but it's just like anything else. You get those reps in. The more content you create, the more confident you become, the more you discover like, oh, that's so interesting, that video got 5,000 views and this one got 500 views. What is the difference between these two pieces of content? You start to make more educated, strategic decisions with what you're creating.

Elizabeth Marberry: 17:36

So she just kind of kept learning as she went. She started at 2,500 followers and she's now at over 34,000 followers and we've been working together for seven months and it's because she's been so religiously like consistent with posting. So that's the first piece is like consistency, and then second is just constantly trying to refine her messaging, refine her strategy. So now she's really grown the audience and we're really working on her conversion strategies of it's one thing to get the followers, drive them into that next step, which is getting them off of Instagram and onto your website or your sales console call or your freebie, your lead magnet, your email list, your blog, like whatever it is that you own.

Elizabeth Marberry: 18:31

Whatever your next step is with your customer journey. That's really important that you know that and you have a plan of, because I guarantee you everyone who's listening right now. You have people in your audience right now, like without even growing your audience. You have people right now who would probably want to hire you, but you're just. You need to invite them into that next step with you, and so that's really what we're working on now. But she's such a success story because it was like literally like couldn't show her face on camera, cringing at the sound of her voice. Now she's showing up all the time. Does she still struggle with confidence issues? Of course it doesn't go away overnight, but she just watching her like grow leaps and bounds has just been so fun.

Jared Judge: 19:14

That's amazing and what a success. Do you have a quick tip to like? Give yourself either a boost of confidence or the courage to do it, even if you don't have that confidence.

Elizabeth Marberry: 19:24

Yeah Well, two tips come to mind. One is, I think what feels so intimidating when we, you know, open the camera and we're about to hit record, is we just feel like overwhelmed at talking into the void. Right, like it just. Or if you, even if you have 500 followers, you're like I can't talk to 500 people you know, you just kind of freak out. So one of my tips is I want you to imagine a person that you actually know in real life, like whether it's a client, whether it's a friend, just an actual person you have a relationship with, and I want you to speak to the camera just like you're speaking just to that one person. So, no, like, hey guys, how are you? Like, don't talk to the general public, I want you to talk to that one person, and every time I do that, it really, really helps me and it makes your messaging more effective. Because you want to think about how people are consuming the app. Like if, let's say, I'm watching Jared and his stories and he, and it feels like he's speaking just to me, it's a totally different vibe than if he's speaking to like a collective of humans, right, it's a different vibe. So you want to think of it as like a FaceTime kind of vibe where it's like how would you be if you were just like FaceTiming a friend, right, so that hack can be really helpful.

Elizabeth Marberry: 20:49

Now, if you're really, really shy, I totally recommend that you start trying to speak in your stories. On Instagram stories they go away within 24 hours. It's not like they're living on your profile grid forever. You could put on some sunglasses, go film in your car or somewhere where you know no one's going to walk in on you, hide behind your sunglasses. It's fine, it's totally fine. We all have to start somewhere. But I suggest start practicing speaking in your story.

Elizabeth Marberry: 21:20

And I will tell you, jared, when I first started speaking my story, I seriously was so awkward I really was. I was so awkward. It took me forever to say anything. I didn't feel like what I was saying was that interesting. I didn't really have a strategy. I was like why would anyone care what I have to say? But over time I really boosted my confidence. I became a better speaker and this is a little extra tip for your audience is I would love to see you guys get on your story, say and introduce yourself and say hi, I'm Elizabeth and I help, and then say who you help.

Elizabeth Marberry: 22:04

So like, let's say, I say I help nervous non-dancers and madly in love couples rock their first dance with total confidence. Okay, so that's your one liner of who you help. Okay, how you help them. Then I want you to say why you are so passionate about what you do. That one piece makes such a big difference. People want to work with people who are excited about what they do.

Elizabeth Marberry: 22:24

Okay, so talk about why you love what you do, and then the final step is have a call to action. Okay, I would love to create an incredible first dance for you. If you want to learn more about our Denver dance lessons, reply to the story Denver and I'll send you the link to learn more. Okay, and this just takes time and practice. I do this every day, so I can just like I can just go off and do it, okay, but it takes time. So introduce yourself, say who you are, who you help, how you help them, why you're so passionate about it, and a call to action that's your homework, that's how you're going to get started. If you have to put on your sunglasses, totally fine, just speak to that one person and start to show up in your story and I promise, if you do this consistently, not just once every week, week after week, month after month and six months from now, you're gonna have a totally different business, trust me.

Jared Judge: 23:24

That's awesome and congratulations on being the first guest of our podcast to ever assign homework.

Elizabeth Marberry: 23:32

Of course that's me. I'm the teacher, I'm like here's your homework.

Jared Judge: 23:36

No, this is great. I wish we had like another two hours to dig into this, but unfortunately we are at the end of our recording time. It went by so fast. I want more, and I'm sure our listeners want more. So, elizabeth, would you mind sharing to our listeners how we could find out more about you and how you can coach us to be better at Instagram and social media in general, and social media in general?

Elizabeth Marberry: 23:58

Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. You're such a great interviewer. I just have to tell you you ask such good questions. You're so good.

Jared Judge: 24:07

I can see why you have this gig.

Elizabeth Marberry: 24:09

So, okay, yes, well, if you're listening to this, that means you love podcasts, which means I would love for you to listen to my podcast. I drop new episodes every Monday with the latest and greatest tips and strategies as to exactly what's working on Instagram right now. The podcast is called Strut it S-T-R-U-T-I-T. Strut it Bold Visibility Through Instagram Marketing. Because we're going to strut it, we're going to show up with no apologies, right, we're going to be bold. Every Monday, I drop new episodes. So definitely, definitely, follow the show. Binge the podcast. You're going to get so much out of it. I practice zero gatekeeping, so that is a great free resource. If you're wanting support and mentorship with me, definitely head on over to my website. Head on over to my website Elizabeth Marbury, m-a-r-b-e-r-r-ycom. You'll see all the stuff over there. I do complimentary Instagram breakthrough calls if you're interested in private mentorship, and right now I'm actually building the wait list for my group program, hot Reels. If you're interested in that, you can message me hot H-O-T on Instagram and my robot assistant will send you details on that.

Jared Judge: 25:24

That is amazing. Well, thank you so much. I can't wait to check out more of your stuff and hopefully see you at a NACE meeting coming up soon and speaking of which, in case you are a listener who is not yet a NACE member and you're interested in networking with amazing people like Elizabeth and the other guests we've had on this, please go to nacedenvercom. That's N as in national A-C-E-E. Spelled that wrong N-A-C-E-Denvercom. Our next meeting is April 8th 2025, where we will be presenting the best of Denver at our Legend Awards. So come, check us out and then we'll get to hang. So, Elizabeth, thank you so much for doing this episode. I hope that a lot of our members come and check you out further and I hope that we get to see you again soon. So thanks again.

Elizabeth Marberry: 26:11

Thanks for having me.

Jared Judge: 26:13

You're welcome To our listeners. Thanks for tuning in and see you at your next event.