Okay, welcome everyone. This is the first podcast in what we hope to be a series of podcasts, trying to help small businesses or small business owners and small business marketers to get the most out of their marketing and their content marketing.

Today we’re going to be starting broad. We’re going to be looking at the basics of marketing. Today’s topic is marketing essentials. I have to look down to know that. Marketing essentials, how small businesses can leverage marketing for growth. So yeah, if you’re a small business owner or you’re looking to get into that space or you’re a marketer, stay tuned. Hopefully there’ll be some interesting information here for you to pull out.

Joining me today in the studio, I have the lovely Amanda. Are you going? Hi, Jimmy. How you going? Good, thanks. I’ll give you a quick intro. You are a certified and practicing marketer with experience across multiple brands, including Masterfoods, Helgas, Uncle Ben’s, SunRice, Weightwatchers, Dorf and I’m going to say it wrong again. Lancôme. Very good, very good. It took me a while to get that one. Okay, so in 2021, you founded Pencil Box Marketing, which is a full service marketing agency based on the Northern Beaches. And Pencil Box’s goal, which I love, is to champion fairness. So sharing big end of town marketing know how to empower SMEs to step up and do the right type of marketing.

Thank you. I’m very excited to be here today and it being your first podcast. I’m privileged.

Yeah. Let’s see how we go. Hopefully not the first and last. We’ll see how it’s so far away.

Yeah.

Well, it’s it’s feeling good. It’s feeling good.

Okay, so we’re going to kick off, and I’m going to ask you your favourite saying. Oh, well, I think my very favourite saying is progress is more important than perfection. And particularly as someone who’s had her own startup, where it’s easy to get caught in the world of being a perfectionist and then nothing happens. And so it’s better to do stuff and progress forward, than holding yourself back. So for me, this is definitely one of my big mantras.

Yeah.

Perfect. It’s funny. I think my, well I have two favourite sayings. One is why can’t you put the bunny back in the box? Nicolas Cage, Con Air, for any fans out there. But the second one is done is better than perfect. But I might change my saying because I think in marketing, nothing’s ever done, nothing’s concrete. It always changes and evolves.

So progress is a nice way of, changing that up. And then maybe we can workshop some new great sayings along the way today.

Absolutely.

Okay. Cool. Well, let’s kick off. So a big question to start with. Marketing, what is it?

Well, when I get asked this question and I think the most basic answer would be marketing equals eyeballs. And what I mean by that is that the reason we all market what we sell, whether it’s a product or service, is because we’re trying to make as many people aware of what it is that we’re selling, hence the eyeballs.

So brands that we know and love. Big brands like Woolworths, Nike, McDonald’s, those brands have mass awareness. So pretty much every Aussie would know what those brands are. And those brands have been around for ages, so they’ve had a lot of time to grow the eyeballs as such, to grow their awareness. But they’ve spent a lot of money in growing that awareness over time as well through advertising. But when we start out thinking about marketing as eyeballs and what are those few things you can do to start getting word out there about what it is that you’re selling, that’s a really good way to filter down and decide what it is you should do in the land of marketing. Eyeballs.

Yeah, I think sometimes we get, I think, caught up in the activity of marketing, but it’s nice to take a step back and actually think in simple terms, you know, where do you start? Get those eyeballs, get that awareness.

Well, I think it’s a really good way to, I suppose, use it as a lens, as you start working out which marketing tools you want to use. Because it’s easy to do marketing that you like, that is your favourite, that you feel is fun, but is that the right marketing that will actually attract the eyeballs and grow the awareness of your brand or your business? It might not be.

So it’s a great lens to use to make sure that what you are doing is always growing that brand awareness. And sometimes you might be comfortable with one type of marketing. You might be experienced in that. So you might naturally draw to that. But is that for the product, the service, the brand, is that the right choice? Maybe not in some cases. So you have to really you know. consider that and those eyeballs. What’s going to get you the right eyeballs, I guess?

Well, it is about the broad eyeballs and then about target audience. So lots of small business owners I’ve chatted with feel familiar with Instagram and Facebook, for example, because they use that at a personal level. So therefore they then will start using that for their business. But is it fit for the target audience? Is where the target audience is? Is it the right platform to place the messaging you’re wanting to place? Will it be perceived and received the right way?

So it’s easy to go with the familiar space? I think it’s something that we always do. But again, apply the lens, are these the right things that I could be doing to grow my brand or my business awareness? I think we’ll chat more on that a little bit later and go into a bit more detail. But I guess, yeah, a good takeaway point from here is, start off about awareness and also it’s not it’s about maintaining awareness as well. Those bigger brands, they have such a great awareness now it’s probably hard for them to lose that awareness.

Well you’d be surprised.

Yeah.

Yeah, you’d be surprised.

So there is a reason why with big brands you tend to see them on TV, or wherever it is you’re exposed to the advertising, whether it’s online or through traditional media. And that is because memories are fragile. So unless we are constantly reminded about the existence of that brand or that that business, the service, the product, we’ll forget. We get busy with our day and all of the stresses of life and having a job, etc. that we’re not always thinking about that brand.

So, for example, if you look at what’s happening at around Christmas time when brands start advertising, particularly the grocery retailers, they’re staying top of mind so that when you go to do your Christmas shop, you’re going to go to that particular retailer because it’s the first brand that pops into your mind. And something else I wanted to mention is that it’s really important that what you’re selling is easy to find and easy to buy.

So whether you are a a retailer with a physical space or you have an e-commerce store or you’re trading through a website, or you are offering a service such as a tradesman, for example, it needs to be really easy for the client to find you to understand what it is you’re selling and to buy from you. If it is complex, then they’ll move on. And the other thing I wanted to add is that popular brands are thought of by more people across more buying occasions.

So I don’t know, the last time you thought about a brand that you didn’t know, that’s impossible. You can’t think about a brand that you don’t know because you don’t know they’re there, right? So that the brand, the brands that are known to us as brands, we will think about more often and if we receive more marketing messages from those brands with time, so we constantly aware of them, we are, give or take, more likely to consider or to purchase those brands.

Okay, so that’s a nice way to sum up marketing and define it, I guess. But let’s move on now and talk about the tools of marketing.

So yeah, what do we what can we do with marketing? Goodness me. That is a massive question, Jimmy, because there is so many ways to market today.

So once upon a time, for those a little older who are listening, we had, while we still do, it’s traditional media, traditional marketing. So if you think about, outdoor billboards along highways, bus stop advertising, bus advertising, brochures that you might receive in your mailbox, fliers, pamphlets, car decals, merchandise that has branding on it. These are all sort of more in the physical sense right, They’re a physicality, if you like. So they’re not online, they’re a physical item. Those are traditional ways of marketing.

Then you have online marketing, right. And so for a lot of us out there, that’s the world that we that we know and that we thrive in. It’s also a really complex place for marketing as well, because there are so many options, it’s quite impossible to stay on top of it all. So if we think about blogging, vlogging, social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.), Google ads, content creation, remarketing, programmatic advertising, search engine optimisation, even a BVOD, which stands for broadcast video on demand, like SBS On Demand, so playback TV. All of these are online avenues where brands will market. Right.

So you’ve got a massive choice. And all of these items have different price tags. So you can appreciate if you’re wanting to market and you’re a big brand and you take out a huge billboard along the M5 and it’s up there for two weeks, that’s costing you lots of money. I might have to stop you there because I’m already feeling a bit overwhelmed. That’s a huge list of tools.

So do we need all the tools? How do we pick our tools? How do we specialise in tools? Where do we go from there?

Right. I want to use an analogy, Jimmy. So, let’s pretend you’re a plumber, okay? And you’ve had a call out and you’ve turned up at a home, and you’ve grabbed your bag out of the car, your tool bag, and you’ve gone in to look at what is going on under the kitchen sink. Except when you open up and have a look, you realise that in the tool bag you brought an axe, You brought equipment that you didn’t need to fix what was under the sink, right? So you have the wrong tools in your tool bag.

So if we use the same analogy when it comes to marketing, right. Your marketing tool bag is essentially let’s call it your strategy. That is sort of what you’re coming to fix, what it is that you need to do. The tools in your marketing tool bag, therefore, are the pieces of marketing, whether the traditional or online choices, to get the marketing job done.

So when the plumber arrives on the job, he knows he’s going to need a chisel, he might need his gloves, he might need some new piping, etc. he has the right tools to get the job done. Same applies to marketing. The first point. The first part is understanding what it is you’re trying to get done in the first place, to then bring the right tools to get the job done, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

So having that the tool that fits the purpose. But I also think as well that it’s an overwhelming list that you don’t have to ever, you know, you may not ever need all those tools. As a business, some may, but if you do, you’d have help. So don’t let that scare you off. I think when you’re looking at your tools and working out which ones to use. And I think like a plumber, they’ll be some tools in your tool bag that you use every day. Yeah. And that’s going to be the same for businesses marketing.

So fewer bigger, better. The few tools that you need to get the job done, and then over time, you might expand your tool bag and put some new tools in there so that you can do a little more.

Yeah. So we will revisit tools I think a little bit later. Yeah. Maybe look at some examples of what types of businesses might use certain types of tools and how that might come together.

From here, we understand now what marketing is. We know we’ve got tools. Do we go out straightaway, do we start booking trade shows? Should I be putting up online ads? Is there a step before this? Or what happens now? All right.

So we have to start at the beginning.

Okay. It’s a great place to start.

We need to start at the beginning. The first thing as a business owner a start up, a one person business is you need to understand what it is you’re trying to do with your business in the first place.

So, clarity around your overarching goals and objectives. Because the role of marketing is to contribute to achieving those overarching goals and objectives, right?

So if you have defined your overarching goals and objectives as your first step for your business, the second step would be to think about, well, what is my marketing strategy? What is the role of marketing to unlock those goals and objectives? Once you’ve been able to articulate that, we then move into the third space, which is you then create a marketing plan.

So the marketing plan is the how. How I will achieve that marketing strategy that I know will help me achieve my overarching business goals and objectives. Right.

So the marketing plan starts getting into the land of the tactical. And then of course, the fourth part would be your actual tactics. What are the different marketing tools that you want to use in your tool bag that form part of your marketing plan, and therefore tap up to your strategy and tap up to your business’s overarching goals and objectives.

So what I’m saying in a nutshell, is that marketing needs to work synergistically with what you’re trying to achieve with your business. The two need to correlate and marketing needs to serve a predetermined purpose. Otherwise you might end up wasting money because you’re not able to bring in the gross revenue or the net profit that you need to bring into your business to keep it alive and functioning. And time, if you start going off down the wrong track. Yes, and if you make mistakes, it can be costly because there’s not many ways to market these days that are free. Usually you end up paying in some way or another.

So you don’t want to make mistakes. That’s really important to helicopter up and spend some time thinking about what it is you’re trying to do with your business and therefore what the role of marketing is. I think that’s some very wise words. And I think for us as well in content marketing, we love to have a good brief that has all these facts and this information, so we get a real good top overview of what’s happening, what the business wants, what the business goal is, what that objective is and then having that in mind influences everything later on down the track. But if you haven’t got a clear idea of what that business objective is or what the strategy is, you know, you can get quite lost.

Well, you can get lost. but you can also get attracted to the bright and shiny, which completely takes you off tangent. Yes. And sometimes that can unearth surprising new opportunities. But most times it takes you off down a new path that you weren’t meant to go down. And so it’s just always a good plan to think about these things first.

So say now we’ve gone back, we’ve looked at our business objectives, we have an understanding of our goals. Objective setting, let’s talk on that first of all. So if we are setting objectives for business and marketing, what do we need to consider when looking at those?

The most important thing is to think about metrics, right. So you can just get going and start selling stuff, that’s awesome. But if you don’t know what success looks like, then how do you know if you’ve achieved it, if you’re progressing the right way?

So as a business owner, you need to pay great attention to your P&L. And obviously marketing is a line on your P&L. But in terms of the tools and marketing that you’re spending money on, you need to have metrics so that you can understand your return on investment. Nobody wants to spend, let’s say $5,000 on a piece of advertising and not be sure whether it worked for them or not. Did it actually get me some new leads? Did I sell more stuff with the $5,000 that I invested? Did I sell $10,000 worth of stuff and therefore I have a really good return?

So it’s important when we set objectives that we think about simple metrics to help us understand whether what we’re doing is working or not working, or if there are ways to optimise later on, particularly for the things that are working.

Yeah, that’s a really good point. You can also set yourself a very simple objective, but they’re hard to monitor, they’re hard to track. So it’s looking at making sure it’s measurable, like you said, it’s actionable, and give yourself a more clear target as well. So something you can look back on and say you’ve achieved it.

Well, I think when you’re starting out simple things might be, for example, giving yourself a metric of I will attend three networking meetings every week. I will at those networking meetings meet ten different people and I will connect with all of them on LinkedIn or through your socials. That could be one. Another might be, if you have an active marketing sales funnel if you’re in B2B, that you want to again, you want to go out and let’s say once a quarter you’ll have a small standard, an expo or trade show that’s relevant to where your target audience is. And from that, at each of those trade shows, you might like to secure twenty new leads. Of which, after phone calls and communication and nurturing, maybe five of them become really warm leads and two of them convert, and one of them buys something that’s worth over ten grand. Simple little ways to get started and you can nip and tuck as you go because we need to start somewhere. But it’s important to have these metrics or goals to keep you really focused so that you do the right work. Yep. Great. And I think it’s having that nice cascade as well. You start off with those business objectives and then anything that comes below that still references that and bears that in mind.

So if you are going to networking events, it’s still having that business objective in mind is that going to be the right thing to do to grow that business objective, or achieve that business objective. And if you’re networking, you want to be choice full about where you are going to network because you’re wanting to meet either people who could be your clients or customers, or they might be, other types of complementary type businesses, let’s say, where you could form a collaboration. Or maybe there’s an opportunity for you to step up and show your expertise with one of these networking groups by actually being a presenter on a panel.

So there are lots of different ways to, I suppose, like we said, attracting eyeballs and growing awareness around your business. But it all comes down to having the right metrics to track to keep you, you know, on target. Because if you’re not fueling the business with, leads and paying clients, you might not have a business. Yes, exactly.

Okay. Cool.

So, we spoke then about. looking at the business, understanding the strategy. Are we ready now to go out and start marketing? Or is there anything else we need to look at? I’m getting excited. I know you’re jumping out of your seat, Jimmy. I know I can feel it.

Look, the one thing that I didn’t mention was what we would call the ‘Why’. Why do you do what you do? What is the ‘Why’ for the business. So there are three really key questions. And these questions as a business owner you need to be able to answer. And may I say it, they might even be on the homepage of your website when they’re done right. Question number one, what do you sell? And how you articulate that in a real easy to understand intuitive way. Question number two, what problem do you solve?

So if you think about your target audience, what is it that you’re selling them? Do they need what you’re selling? Do you actually solve a problem for them? Or is it just something maybe you have something that they need to enhance their lives. But what is it that they need?

Right. And then the third question is, why should they care? So if I’ve created a widget and my target audience needs that widget because they’re going to sleep better at night, but there’s already a whole lot of other competitor widgets out there, why should they care about my new widget? And those are the three key questions that form the proposition around what it is you’re trying to do with your business or your brand, who you’re trying to sell to and why they should buy from you. And if you can’t formulate that succinctly in a really short paragraph, then you’ve got to go back to the drawing board to get it right.

Yeah.

Absolutely agree. It’s spot on as well and it’s again something that a lot of us we maybe do the first question and then we think we’re ready. But it’s setting yourself up to stand out, making yourself unique, it’s vital. And I think as I mentioned the other day an old company I used to work for, they made every employee, they made every employee learn the articulation for the business. And they brought us back in, they tested us. But it was genius because you then when you’re at a pub, you’re chatting to someone, it flows and you’re not just reciting words either, you’re delivering something where you can sound passionate about it, you sound believable, it’s credible. But then it inspires you to know about the business, you’re proud then to talk about that business.

And that’s a really valid point because that then taps into the land of branding and the importance of branding. And so for a business that employs multiple people, especially if a lot of those people are front facing, with leads and clients, the brand needs to turn up and be the same experience for every single person. Your employees also experience your brand in your business, which is why the culture within a business is so important. But you want every touchpoint that you, I suppose that you can curate through your staff or through what you do in the world of marketing, you want everything to be consistent. And oh, I should add also, I wanted to give you an example.

So if we think about, you know, the why, what do you sell, what problem to yourself? Why should I care. Right. I want to give an example.

So do you know the brand Estée Lauder Yes. And so Estée Lauder sells makeup and in particular a lot of lipsticks. Right. Famous for lipsticks. So if I said to you Jimmy what does Estée Lauder sell?

Well I would have just said products. But now you’ve got me, so I’m going to have to go deeper. Dreams?

They could sell dreams. Estée Lauder will say they don’t sell lipstick, they sell hope. And if you think about it, why do women put lipstick on? Because we want to look great. And why do we want to look great? Well because, you know, we might be out there looking for a husband. We want to look nice. So selling hope. And so by sharing that example, it’s really vital for businesses to think about those three questions. What do I sell? What problem does it solve? Why should I care? Because it will help them get to that emotive state. The big ‘Why’. Why are they doing what they doing and what is that emotional, high level need or feeling that that they’re tapping into. Also, from a content making perspective as well, having that knowledge in a brief when we start making a video, having those emotive reasons to make that video, you then have a much stronger piece that people can connect with.

So it’s not just at the top level, it does then cascade through everything.

Yeah, absolutely. And when you can sell through emotion, it’s a much easier sell than just selling features and benefits. People buy into emotion and they buy into having a problem solved. So yes.

Right, so let’s talk then about what else we need to do as a bit of housekeeping, I guess, for a business. You’ve got your articulation now. You know how to promote yourself. You know what to say. But how do you use that? And what do you do to set up, I guess?

Look, let’s just say you’ve laid out your business goals and objectives, you understand your marketing strategy and the role of marketing in achieving those, you’ve got down to the level of, you know, marketing plan and maybe thinking about some of the tactics. Which is a place a lot of us jump to straightaway, because it’s fun. It’s fun. For a lot of businesses, when they’re new and sometimes when they’ve been around for a while they still need to wind back to what I’m about to say here, it is about brand.

Okay, so you know what it is you’re selling you now think, well, what does it look like? And brand is really important. And like I mentioned before, so is the consistency and how the brand turns up. And so before you start marketing outwardly facing to attract those eyeballs, you need to make sure that your brand is, really robust. And what I mean by brand is I’m talking about, some of the structural stuff. My brand logo, and there’s one brand logo that’s used everywhere, not multiple versions of the logo. And there are really strict, I suppose, parameters around how that logo can be used. It can’t go on a black background. It can’t go on a green background. It must go on a white background, whatever it might be. And also around font types, colors, etc. And it doesn’t have to be a complicated piece of work, but it is a really important piece of work, because then all the marketing materials you then create when you start getting to the pretty fun tactics are all going to look like they belong to the one family. Super duper important. Secondly, with branding it’s also around the brand’s communication style, tone of voice.

So if you think about your brand as a person, how would my brand talk? Is it friendly? Is it professional? Does it joke a lot? Is it a jester? Is it a trustworthy brand? And therefore, is it a professional brand, so I need to talk in a more stilted way? What is the way of communicating and therefore also the tone of voice?

So those along with the, physical attributes of a brand around logo, colors, fonts, etc. all need to be defined and a graphic designer can certainly help with something like that. That’s super duper important. Also, before you start doing your outwardly facing marketing, and you might have already done it as you were thinking about what you going to sell, is understanding your competitors. What are your competitors doing? What are they doing really well? What are they not doing so well? And what are the opportunities, you know, that might be open to you, for you to change the way things are done? So that your product or your service is marketed and presented in a better way than the competition. Or your website has a better user experience than what the competitors are doing.

So you should think about those competitors as well. And then start thinking about the first place where a lot of people will go, a lot of your customers they’re going to hit your website. If you’ve got your branding sussed out, you’ve got your answers to your three questions of What do I sell? What problem do I solve? And Why should my target audience care? Which helps fuel the copy that would be on your website. You’ve got a website that’s created using a search engine, SEO optimised style of copywriting, with headings, paragraphs, etc.. And you’re also thinking about the user experience.

So I said before that customers are more likely to buy when they can find you and then buy you. So if your website has a really awesome customer experience, you’re more likely to nurture or convert the person who hits your site, right. So it’s like setting up the 101 like that foundation of your house before you start telling everybody the front door’s open and come over for a barbecue. You’ve got to have the foundations there first.So branding, competitive and competitor research, super duper important.

Yeah, absolutely agree. And again vital. A lot of people do get in the trap of, and this is a going back to the done is better than perfect, not always the case because sometimes you can do something and if it’s bad, then it actually it goes against what you’re trying to achieve.

So I think these are the key areas that you really need to spend a little bit of time and consideration on. And not always… these are areas I definitely recommend not doing yourself. I think when doing some marketing activities, potentially you could learn some things with like online advertising. But if you’re not a designer, you do need the help of a designer to really set your brand up. To do it right. And I will also say this, many small businesses when they start out hit up some of those logo design platforms where you can create a logo for $25. Happy days That creates further problems down the track.

So if you’re serious about your business and you want to trademark, you might find that what you just got delivered through one of those platforms is used somewhere else for another brand in Australia, or there’s a brand that looks really similar. You are always, in my view, better off to write a tight brief about what you’re doing with your business, who you serve, what you sell, etc. and using a graphic designer to design a logo for you that is unique and bespoke and yours. So if you want to go and trademark it, you can feel certain that you will successfully be able to trademark it in the category that you’re looking for. And trademarking is important of a logo because you need to protect your brand and protect your business. Because otherwise copycats will come in, create a logo that looks just like yours, and then you’ve got a problem.

I think one thing to add, when you’re looking at all your research, you’re looking at your competitors, also have some consideration of your audience. Again, in briefs that we receive sometimes, we don’t have a very tight definition on the audience. And, you know, you could use a profile where you just look at gender, age, location, you can kind of estimate some of these. Better to search channels where you can go and review if you’ve got a customer base. But if not, and you have a target you’re aiming at, be clear what that target is.

Well, and this is a really interesting one because as humans we are innately lazy. I am to. If there’s an easy way to do something, we’re more likely to take the easy route. When it comes to understanding your target audience, most businesses I’ve spoken with don’t even speak to any of them. And especially when you’re in an existing business, you’ve got the benefit of having had clients to go and talk with. And it is quite fascinating when you start digging down to find out who your target audience is and what motivates them at those deeper levels. What informs the choices that they make? What are some of their psychological biases? Because all of that can become a playback when you start working out your marketing messaging so that it highly resonates.

So I’m thinking, well, it’s Sandra, she’s 35, she has a dog and a one and a half kids and goes to Fiji, I’m going to try to make some marketing and I’m going to structure my messaging around Sandra be completely off mark. Because I’ve actually just made Sandra up myself. I haven’t bothered to chat with anyone, because my audience might be different and there might be multiple audiences as well. So my biggest, biggest ask is to please go and speak with people who you want to market to, who you think are going to be the people who buy what you’re selling. Really vital. And it’s the gold. Marketing gold is waiting for you by doing that.

Okay, great.

So I think we’re now in a position to roll up our sleeves and get going with the marketing. This is the exciting part for some. I thought what might be a nice way of looking at this is if we take three businesses, and have a think about what marketing tools from that big, overwhelming list that we’ve got at our disposal in our toolkit, where we should start, maybe what we should consider. And we’ll focus on small businesses that maybe have a limited budget. Why don’t we start by looking at a local service business? So how about if I was a tradie? If I was a tiler, looking for business, looking to promote myself, where do I begin?

All right, so I’m just going to roll out a few quick ones. So car decal. Uniform. Being found, so business present on local directories as well as Google. Google reviews, massive, that’s huge. And also thinking outside of the box what you could do through networking and meeting other complementary services. So a tiler might need a builder, might need a plumber. Having a network of like trades so you can all bump each other onto different jobs. That would be my start point for a tiler.

Yeah, great. Like you said if they’re looking at similar businesses that may refer them, marketing to those businesses, you can crossover a little bit into sales there. It might be almost a cold call. But there’s definitely some really nice marketing activities you can do that to get going. And some of those you can definitely do yourself quite easily, quite cheaply.

Some would be paid. SEO is free once you’ve got it set up. It’s then just adding to a website, getting over the test of time. You could look at online advertising, potentially. That can scare people off a little bit, but that’s something you could learn yourself or you can get an expert to help you.

Yeah. And I think the paid advertising, so let’s say pay per click on Google, and also investing in SEO because I mean you need a minimum of about $1500 a month to do that. So that you can appear in a particular area if someone Google’s ‘tiler near me’. Those are really good spaces. But you might find you want to get a little bit of cadence first before you feel comfortable with investing in the higher spends around the two that I just mentioned.

Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. What would I do differently if I was, I run a small jewellery business. So a product.

Okay, let’s say you’re a jewellery store. So the biggest, most amazing physicality you have is the store itself. Okay. So it’s your window displays. It’s how you show up. It’s the experience of a shopper walking through the store. And when I say experience, if we think of the five senses. What are they seeing? What are they smelling? What are they touching? Right.

So there’s that part of it. Another would be online or physical brochures. You could be involved with whatever’s happening in the shopping centre, in which your store is. But also online as well, particularly campaignable ideas. So you might be doing a little bit of online advertising, say, in the lead up to Valentine’s Day. Or gifting season around Christmas. So that you are part of a consideration set when somebody is looking for a gift. Also thinking about what you’re doing online on your website, some people can’t make it to your store and they’d like to buy online.

So making sure that the website is easy to navigate, it’s a smooth journey. It might be that you’re offering a promo, so spend $200, get x, y, z, free. Or get a 5% discount off your next purchase or whatever. These little incentives would help the jewellery store. Not to mention, if we move into the land of magazine write ups or PR, etc., influencer marketing, someone famous wears a piece of your jewellery from your store, that’s going to be a popular one. Touching on that, anyone you bring in to represent you, employees, partners, sponsors, they represent your brand.

So you’re a tradie, you’re a tiler, you go on to site, the way you show up, the way you interact, that’s marketing still.

Well, it is and I will say one way to kill your brand or your business if your tradie is to turn up on a job with your dog that’s not on a leash and then the owner has a cat. You won’t be getting any callbacks. So it’s about being conscious about, you know, especially if it’s a if you’re a male tradie and you’re going to the home of an older female, being conscious about who you’re there to serve and making sure that their experience of what you’re doing there is nice, and then you know that you’ll get callbacks.

Yeah, it’s the same walking into a shop, I guess. Someone’s on the phone, doesn’t look up, doesn’t say hello. It’s a very different experience and then I have negative connotations that I apply to that brand. Negative thoughts. It doesn’t feel welcoming. You weren’t acknowledged when you walked in. Or the complete reverse, when you look inside a store and there’s three bored sales assistants just staring at you and then you don’t go in because you’re too scared. So again, it’s finding that sweet spot.

Okay, cool. Let’s look at online then. So what if we’re an e-commerce store? What might they do?

Well, look, the number one point is the website. An e-commerce store need a really sophisticated, smooth running website because it needs to do a lot of things.

So if you think about how an online shopper will navigate what you sell, you might want to, I suppose present your wares by category, and then by subcategory, and then different filters are applied. So you’re making it really easy for a person to find what it is they might be looking for. Or if they’re browsing, you’re making it really easy to find new ideas and inspire them for what they might need.

So the website is number one. Now in terms of promoting your online business, you do fall into the land of a little bit, a little bit more expensive land. You do need to invest in pay per click, so whether that’s Google ads or programmatic advertising or whatever it might be, you need to advertise online. It might also involve Facebook ads. You might dive into the land of and I know we haven’t discussed it, but the land of marketing sales funnels. Where you have a shopper clicking on a Facebook ad that takes them to a landing page. Let’s say, for example, where they watch a video about a product or service. They might download something or they might click through to, you know, read about the features and benefits. You’re leading them step by step to press the buy button.

Right. And another thought around that would be user generated content.

So if you are selling something online that’s, you know, hotcakes, and you’re selling it by the thousands, it might be a nice way to sell more by, running a promo or a competition where users can film themselves using or consuming your product that you then use as part of the way you advertise. And that can often be a really economical way to advertise your brand.

Yeah. I think website again for sure is the key for this one. This is where you might not want to try and pull something together yourself, when you need an expert.

Look, it’s pretty easy to, let’s say, to DIY a website, but there are a lot of inherent dangers. It’s easy. There’s so many platforms out there to do it. But my advice is, if you want to DIY, great because it is good to learn. But then perhaps bring in the web designer when you’ve finished and ask them to polish it up for you, because there are a lot of intricacies that you just won’t realise when you’re starting out. But a web designer will be able to fix stuff up for you. I did that with my first website, because I wanted to understand. It took me six weeks to do it. I was very slow, but I understood it after that. And then I used a web designer to polish it up. And yeah, she made a lot of amends, but it was really useful. But the website is number one. It’s around points of perception.

So when someone is evaluating your brand, they’re looking at the website. They might be looking at your socials. Right. And by that I mean they’re looking at Insta or Facebook or they might be looking at your LinkedIn feed. So all the points of perception and the way you then nurture a customer so that they press the buy button or they convert and buy your product, that is ultimately what you are doing. And the website plays a big role, right at the top of that funnel.

Absolutely. It’s huge now and it’s the way you house, you know everything. You’ve got your branding. Your identity’s there. You explain what you do. You’ve got your tone of voice. Content is huge. So if you’re happy, you’re confident in doing it, for sure go out and do it. But always good to get a second pair of eyes to check it over. Exactly.

So, Jimmy, I want to use a quick analogy for you, a little story. Let’s imagine it’s Saturday, right. And you’ve got all your mates coming over at midday for a barbecue at your place. What would you and your missus be doing in the morning before your friends come over? She’d be sleeping. I’d be cleaning, I think. You’d be tidying the house. And that is exactly my point.

So before you start outwardly facing marketing and bringing the eyeballs to your brand, you need to have a tidy house. So all of the things we’ve been talking about today, our 101, our start points, all of that stuff is tidying the house. Right. And we’ve covered some tools you can use when you’re ready to start doing outwardly facing marketing. But you’ve got to have the house tidy first. Because if you bring those people in and they see an untidy house, trying to get them to come back might be a little bit difficult.

I love it. Some of the people listening. are going to be inspired now. They’re going to want to go out and do something. They’re going to want to, you know, look at their brand. Explore their website, check through that, is there anything they can update or improve there. They may want to start marketing. They might want to look at LinkedIn ads. Where can they go from here? So if you have a small budget, you’re a small business, you don’t have a fortune to spend, you might need to do some stuff yourself. What kind of resources are available?

Okay, loads. And the great news is that lots of it is free. Some of it is paid, but it’s not that expensive.

All right, so the first port of call for anyone starting out is YouTube. YouTube is the repository of the how to. How to do marketing, How to do LinkedIn. How to do whatever. You’ll find it on there. So hit up YouTube first.

The second would be online learning platforms like Coursera. It’s paid platform. But you have access to all sorts of different courses, and a lot of them are certified as well. If you are a person who likes the face to face eight week course, sort of a thing, there is a local business on the northern beaches. I’m not paid by them, but I’m just saying they’re called Basic Bananas. And they are really good at what they do for small businesses. So that’s one to check out.

Of course, podcasts galore. Just type in marketing or branding and all the podcasts will turn up. And of course you have your traditional learning institutions. And one I might shout out is RMIT lots of six week marketing style courses on there.

So the world is your oyster for free or if you like to pay, it’s all out there.

Yeah. You can do you can do a lot yourself. I know recently we were looking at changes to our website, putting on some online ads and flicking between, YouTube or ChatGPT to ask, you know, how do you do this? Looking at the LinkedIn platforms themselves that give information. So there is a lot there. Sometimes it’s trickier than others and you can spend what feels like a day to solve the simplest little thing. How do I get the contact form on my website to be yellow? It won’t be. So, yeah, if you like going that deep into finding code, it’s kind of all there now. ChatGPT really helps as well to, you know, get that information to people.

So, you’ve got tools there to explore. But if you are struggling, bring in an expert. Or you know, start it yourself, bring someone in. Any other words of wisdom or encouragement you want to give us before we close up.

Just get started. And just know that like everything in life, you will have a learning curve. You will make mistakes. You will waste money. But at the end of the day, you will be smarter, you’ll be more resilient, and you’ll feel more free by being your own boss. Really, really nice. And i think that loops back nicely to what we started with, that done is better than perfect. Which what was your saying, your version of that which I think is better. Progress is better than perfection. Yeah.

So yeah, make progress I think. Little steps, don’t get overwhelmed. There are resources out there that can help. But if you are looking to, yeah, move your marketing forward, start by making progress. Everything has to change as well. So once it’s done… It’s nice to do something and have it ticked off, but you might have to revisit that at some point and reevaluate it and change it.

And also as you learn and become a better business person, you look back and go you know what, that doesn’t serve me any more. I need a more sophisticated website or whatever it might be. The other thing I wanted to add is when you’re starting out, it’s really easy to compare yourself to people who’ve been doing what you do for ten years. Right. Which I’m guilty of and it never made me feel good. So just remember, you are following your path and let others follow theirs. We all do things differently. We all start something at different times. It’s all our own individual journey. So don’t compare because it just won’t make you feel good. Just follow your path and be good at it.

Okay, great. Well, thanks. It’s been a pleasure chatting. Thanks for coming on. It’s been awesome. If anyone wants to connect with you down the track, how do they get hold of you?

Well, the easiest way to get hold of me is LinkedIn. So if you search for Amanda Beale, B-E-A-L-E you’ll find a short blond haired person in a red top holding two giant pencils. That would be me. By all means, shoot me a message. I’m always happy to chat.

Perfect. And then any questions, drop us a comment and we’ll do our best to get back on those. Otherwise, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I hope you’ve got something valuable from today’s session and hopefully see you in the next one.