187: Andy Buyting — Strategic Marketing for the 2020s

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Well, marketing, marketing, marketing. We've had a lot of requests for marketing later. So here's a show in the world of marketing. We're going to integrate old school, new school marketing. Talk about how to make it relevant and effective, integrate all the things together and do it in a cost effective, repeatable way as well. The there's a book offer not mentioned directly, but if you go to the link at the show notes at the end of the show, you can get a free copy of the book there. So listen in. Great show on marketing. Well, hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher.

On the show with me today is Andy Biting.

So Andy's longtime guy around the world of scaling up started way back when as a disciple, as a student of the Rockefeller habits in the world of Scaling up and he coaches folks but he owns a media company. We've been focusing more and trying to put some more emphasis on marketing stuff lately. So. Marketing stuff, Andy knows a lot about it and he's moved his own company and client companies through it. So welcome to show Andy.

Thank you.

Bill, where are you today?

I am in Canada. I'm on the east coast of Canada right now.

Nice.

Well, it's probably cold as hell.

It's, it is cold as hell.

If hell is just broken out here for a little bit just to make you feel good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I appreciate that Bill. I really do.

You're welcome. And It's a balmy 56 degrees Fahrenheit, which I don't know in, in metric units.

Well, we're probably in the 30 degree Fahrenheit, so right around freezing, plus or minus.

Yeah, so. So guys, so. And he's been around a long time and I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you tell your story, but he, he does a little coaching. He also has his Tulip Media group been a TEDx speaker. So talk to us about, tell folks your background. We've had you on the show before on related topics, but I think it's a timely and good thing. We're going to share some stories today of companies you've worked with and the lessons from them, but give folks a little bit of sense of your background as an entrepreneur and in the world of scaling up and all that.

Sure, sure. So it all started way back when. No, for me, Bill, it really started. I, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. In fact, I grew up on a farm and my father and my uncle were farmers. So I grew up working at a young age. And when I was a teenager we got into retail. Retail home and garden centers, my parents did. I ended up in that business. And actually I took over the business and grew it, we grew it very quickly into multiple locations. And it was around that time that I actually started I met Vern Harnish. I went through a program called Birthing a Giants in Boston at mit. And it was there that I was really introduced to the Rockefeller habits, you know, the whole methodology that ended up becoming scaling up. And you know, we grew the retail business exponentially. It was a family business. And yeah, you know, it was a really fun ride. We had our own, our own scaling up coach or Rockefeller habits or Gazelle's coach, I guess what it was called back.

Who was your coach back in those days?

Les Rabunovich.

Oh yeah, Les.

One of the originals. Yeah, so Les is great. So we actually, I think we were one of Les first clients and he was my coach for about five years and worked with him. He was just getting going. He had been going, wasn't one of his first, but it was early on. He had been going maybe for a couple of years at the time. And yeah, we were going along building the business. You know, it was about that time. I always had a real keen interest in marketing. That was always my passion. And you know, I was in charge of running the retail stores. We had other, other people, you know, was a family business, so others were in charge of landscape construction and different parts of operations, so on. But I kind of ran the marketing and a lot of the operations for the retail stores and always had a keen interest in marketing. And it was during my time at Birthing giants when Verne Harnish was talking about this concept, he said, you need to own the ink in your industry. I'm thinking, what the hell is Vern talking about? And he said, you know, whatever your customers are reading, have it come from you. You need to be the authority in your marketplace. You need to position yourself as the thought leader, as the authority. And, you know, it was about the time, this was the early 2000s. So at that time, we were doing newsletters. We had been doing that forever. Quarterly newsletters for our customers. Expensive to do direct mail and everything else, but it was our best form of marketing. And, you know, this was the time that blogs were just starting to become a thing. I remember I learned what a blog was at Birthing of giants. I'd never heard that term before. And so we started. We really embraced that strategy in our retail stores. We came back and remember Vern saying, why don't you guys writing a series of gardening books or why don't you publish your own magazine? I thought, wow, that's a cool idea. We could. So we took our newsletter, we. We killed the newsletter, replaced it with a magazine, a custom magazine that we were doing. We got some ad sponsorship from suppliers to help pay for it, and it became a really cool differentiator for us in the marketplace. You know, we were the only retailer publishing a magazine, a quarterly magazine on home and garden topics. And we also get into. We started a blog, we started doing YouTube channel. You know, as YouTube was starting to get popular, we did a YouTube channel doing how to videos. So we really embraced all this stuff. And even I remember learning about Facebook for the first time. I think it was in 2007 or 2008 when I. When we started our first Facebook page. And, you know, it wasn't just in a blink of an eye. We had 3,000 followers. And, you know, learning the power of Facebook advertising before anybody even put those two words together, it was really interesting and I just always really loved that. So I grew up. I grew up in family business, grew up in retail, grew up in retail too. If you knew how to market really well and you knew how to merchandise well and you knew how to give good service, you sold stuff. And we did that. You know, we did that for a lot of years. And. And that's when an interesting transition happened. So this magazine, actually, the magazine idea that I was doing, I shared it. I always kept it close to my. To my chest in the industry because I didn't want people to know what I was doing because I thought this was a really cool idea.

Secret.

It was a secret that I was sending out like 30,000 copies a quarter. So it Wasn't a great secret, but people, it really worked for our customers. But others in the industry caught wind of this. And I remember being approached by a garden center operator in a whole different part of the country and said, you're the one that makes that magazine, right? I saw that, my cousins showed me it or whatever, and he said, could you do the same for me? And then other people said, could you do the same for me? Could you do the same for me? And they say, you know, we keep a bunch of the pages the same because it's all relevant information, but we just want one for our store. You know, just customize a handful of pages. And so we came up with this program essentially where the 32 page magazine, half the content was going to be the same in every version, but half of it would be customized for different stores. And I went in, because marketing has always been my first true love, and went into this meeting with a bunch of these garden center operators, these independent garden center operators. And I thought, you know, what, if I come out with, you know, six interested stores, maybe there's an. There might be interest here. You know, there might be something interesting here as a side business or side project. Um, well, half an hour later, I walk out of the room and I have 12 purchase orders. And because we were growing a magazine company on the backs of, instead of building like a traditional magazine company, you know, growing by one subscription at a time, we were basically leveraging other people's mailing list. And we were growing by 20,000 names at a time, was the average size. And our very first issue. So I'm located in Canada, Our very first issue has a print run and distribution that is four times the size. As the largest home and garden magazine in the country. Canadian Gardening magazine, which had been in print for like 120 years, our very debut issue is four times the size.

Yeah.

So I think I'm thinking to myself, this is interesting. So sharing it with some, you know, my business forum, I belong to EO and another birthing giants alumni group. And those, those two groups really encouraged me to pursue this idea and turn it into a real company. So we did that and launched this company and, you know, embraced and also integrated digital marketing along with that because I had a passion for that. And it really just carved out a unique spot in the, in, you know, in the marketing industry. And it's been, you know, it's, as they say, the rest is history. But it was, it was an interesting evolve, you know, evolution of just a concept we were using in a Family business to something that is, you know, much, much larger than that. In all of the while, you know, I always had. I'm like you, Bill. I call myself a learning junkie and I love learning.

Unlike me.

No, I said just like you. I am like you. Not unlike you. I'm like you. So I've always considered myself a learning junkie. And you know, I. I started building my life by design, you could say so, you know, looking at the things that I enjoyed and I only want to do things that I enjoyed. So Les is the one who talked me into becoming a gazelle coach back in 2009, 2010. And I started doing that and started working with a few clients. I've always kept a handful of clients as well as being a partner in this media company. And yeah, that's why I'm part of the whole scaling up community and really, really enjoy that. I do that. That's my passion. Right. That's marketing and the whole scaling up, helping companies. It's my happy place.

Yeah. Well, let's talk about some examples then. Let's talk about some of the clients and projects you've done. I don't. You know, you could talk about the med spot, you could talk about Cane Insurance. Yeah, what's.

Yeah, so one of the interesting ones and yeah, you mentioned can insurance. So, you know, I'm doing these garden magazines and doing them for I don't know, one or one maybe the first year. And my insurance company, my insurance guy, you know, I know him quite well and he was saying, you know that, that gardening magazine that you're doing. He said, you know, I'm in the same boat as you guys. You know, I'm not facing Costco and Walmart and Home Depot. He said, you know, my competition is the geicos of the world, you know, the national companies that are taking a piece of our. A piece of the market and eating into the. Into the local market with. For these insurance agencies. And he said, you know, one thing. And he's partnership with his brother. And so one thing Dan and I talked about, the one that I work with, his name is Luke. So Luke says, you know, Dan and I were talking that we really want to focus on our commercial insurance and we want to grow our commercial insurance business. And could you help us do that by doing a business magazine? And I thought, sure, why not? You know, I know business. I knew the thought leaders, I knew the business concepts. I could help with some business content and we could do a business magazine. So we launched Cain Insurances and We call it Risk in Business magazine. Well, we get the first magazine out there and it is received so unbelievably well that all of a sudden this little keen insurance agency that has like 40 some employees in small town Canada now all of a sudden is being recognized across the province as a big player. And he said, you know, people think we are huge because we're publishing our own magazine. So I take this concept and I showed it to a few other people that I know in the insurance space. The second, the very first person I brought it to is Steve Kearley in Toronto from Benson Kearley ifg I've Steve through EO and he said I love it, we'll do it. So then all of a sudden like within two years we're doing like millions of copies of insurance magazines for commercial insurance agencies. And Luke, you know, I talked with Luke and he's, he was the first one on that platform, you know, five years ago or so and five, six years ago. And in talking to him, I remember a couple years later I was sitting down with Luke and chat with him and said Luke, tell me how are you measuring the success of this program? And really wanted to understand why he loved it so much. And he said, you know, Andy, he said when we started that we identified that we wanted to differentiate ourselves, we wanted to grow our commercial insurance business. So we started this custom publication. And he said in two years time he said we've grown our commercial insurance business by 42%. And he said the only thing we did different is this magazine. That's it. He said everything else was the same. He said the perception in the marketplace is that we are the authority, we're the experts. And the way he put it, he said we have our foot in the door before or we ever have our literal foot in the door and people know who we are when we knock on a door or we request a meeting. He said we used to get turned down all the time. You know, we might get one or two meetings at a 10. He said now we're getting eight or nine meetings out of 10 because people are saying oh yeah, kid insurance. Yeah, yeah, I've seen your magazine and you know, it just, it elevates their profile.

Interesting.

It is.

So what are they actually putting in an insurance magazine? Right. I know if you were in the industry it would be but like what does their customer base, Prospect base.

Yeah. So this is where the whole strategy behind and I call it, it's content marketing at the end of the day, you know, content marketing Comes in three forms, digital, print and interactive. When you're talking with person face to face and you know this magazine is an extension of content marketing. It's print content marketing. So when we first sat down, he said, okay, how many articles did a magazine? Well, you know, 13, 15, depending on, depending on different factors. He said, great, okay, so we need about 15 insurance articles. Whoa, whoa, whoa, timeout. You put out a magazine that has 15 insurance articles in it. You know, if a person opens it, it's going to be the first and last time they open it. Because one thing we had learned with our experience is a, yeah, you need to have content related to your product or service. That's where, that's the money making content. But to be of value to the end reader, you need to give value to the end reader. You, you need to give them some, some value in the content. But also there has to be an entertainment value there. So we took the approach and that's where we came up with the basic concept or the basic structure of the magazine is where we would coordinate some general business topics, business articles on hr, on marketing, on sales, on business strategy. So we would cover different topics. The customized content that we coordinate for our client partners is the industry specific content. So you know, let's say in a 32 page magazine there's, I don't know, there's eight or nine articles of general business topics that are of interest to the end reader, that complement his brand, that still helps him become an authority in the marketplace because he's providing the information, but at the same time he is providing some industry specific content in industry specific articles around insurance.

So he's got topical stuff directly related, but then a lot of other things that covers the interest. So, and this is business oriented or homeowner type?

No, this is business oriented. So it was, the whole purpose was to build this commercial insurance business. So it is going to a business audience. We're providing general business content. And then the, and this is where the evolution gets kind of interesting is with the, with the custom content that we're creating for them and the whole product, the whole service that we offer client partners is that it's done for you. It's, it's turnkey. We will actually even take care of writing the articles. You know, you can leverage a ghostwriter. But so where we brought in the original.

That's a really good point because there's a million people today selling like training or consulting package and far fewer selling a done for you thing unless it's like horribly expensive. There's not a lot of people willing to do something that's packaged like that, which I think is kind of cool. And then also like the, the fact that you still do so much. I know you compliment with online things, but you still do a great deal of print, which. Which nobody talks about or thinks about much anymore. And yet of all the communications that I get, one of the things I got recently from a business group I belong to is this a catalog and calendar of events. And it was like a catalog of things they're going to do in the coming year. And I. I like look through it and I poured through it and I love the pictures and the way it was set up. And it had a massive difference in the typical, like email that the group used to do year after year. So they've started doing postcards and, and mailers and things like that, which is still very economical. But we're so used to just blasting people now I filter the vast majority of my email. Anything with like an unsubscribe, I probably am never going to see it.

Y. Well, and to be honest with you, Bill, you look at the stats, the response rates with email has gone down consistently for the last eight years. The interesting thing, the response rates for print has gone up consistently for the last eight years because everybody got away from print. So much so that your most uncluttered inbox that you own is the one outside your front door. It's your mailbox. So, you know, even the biggest marketing gurus around, like Joe Polish is a huge pushback to print. Joe Polizi, who's like the king of content marketing, is saying print is the next way to go. Now, I don't believe so. The way we approach it is when we work with a client partner is, you know, and this goes for any industry. You know, it could be a scaling up coach. You know, we want to work with you with your content. We will start every engagement with. Part of the onboarding process is we do a competitive analysis so we have insights online as to how your website performs online versus your competitors. We also learn what are the keywords that are driving people to your website. What are the keywords that are driving people to your competitors? Website, what are the competitors?

I think that's a really critical thing that not enough people do is what are the keywords that are really working and the content that's really working on your competitors. And how could you hot hijack some of that?

And we, we give, we. So we do a whole analysis where we give that to you and then we come up with a strategy. So at the end of the day, we look at all kinds of factors and it all depends on where you're located in the country. You know, what, what type, you know, what audience you're trying to. There's a hundred different factors that go into it. But at the end of the day, we try to figure out what are the keywords that we want to leverage, what are the anchor keywords and the title keywords that we want to leverage that are going to be right for you. And it's different for every single client, even identical clients in different parts of the country. You know, what works for one person, one insurance agency in one state is totally different for another agency in another state. So we'll look at what's right for you, we'll come up with a keyword strategy then. And this is the cool part. So we have a whole strategy behind creating content and doing this. Keyword strategy, keyword optimization strategy will give you a list of, you know, 20, 30 potential topics that you could write about that you may not have thought about before. But because they're low hanging fruit for keyword optimization, let's write an article about it, right? And once we write an article that's keyword optimized, our ghostwriters now all go through every piece of article that we create. Where a client is also doing the keyword optimization, they have to put it into this platform and then they have to score where it pre rates the effectiveness of the article. So the article we needed to rate at least an 8 out of 10 or greater for keyword optimization. So we plug in the keywords, put in the article with the title, the subtitle the article, and it'll give a score as to how effective this article is going to be online. If it's not an 8 out of 10 or greater, they have to rewrite it or tweak the article so that they hit 8 out of 10 or greater. Once that's done, articles finish, it goes through editing, proofing, then we leverage it. We leverage the hell out of it. We put it first of all, it becomes a blog post for you. And that's where you get your keyword, your SEO ranking. You have a continual source of, of content going to your blog. The second thing, and that's where I'm a huge believer that once you go through all the trouble to write a great piece of content that is keyword optimized for your specific strategy, leverage the hell out of it. Put it everywhere. So put it out there. As a blog post put it. But you also have a great article. So put it in print. Like it takes no extra effort to create a magazine. You get, you know, half a dozen blog posts that are really performing well for you. It rolls into a magazine or vice versa quite often. We start with, we create the keyword optimized content, put it in magazine, then it gets pushed out in the blog as well. But leverage it across both digital and print. And then we take it another step further. We will take that article and we can rewrite the. Rewrite the article into a script format, have it voiced over and create a video out of it. So again, keyword optimized for the specific keywords leveraged on on and pushed out through YouTube for. Because you know, Google loves YouTube and SEO and everything else. So when you have your blog on your website, you not only have the, the article there, but you have a video related to that blog post. So if somebody doesn't want to read it, they can watch it. And even the video is keyword optimized. So it's actually very powerful. And the beautiful thing is that we take care of all these details behind the scenes and we optimize the strategy, we make it effective, we leverage it across multiple platforms in different formats. Video in writing, and we'll do infographics, different things like that. But the beautiful thing from a client's perspective is this all stems from maybe a 10 minute phone call with a ghostwriter. Or what I do is I use my recording app on my smartphone and I just ramble into that for five or 10 minutes and I send that recording to my ghostwriter. You know, I know a lot of stuff. I'm not an English major, a writer. If I had to write an article, it would take me three hours and it would be half as good as a professional writer would do in 20 minutes. And I'll edit the hell out of somebody else's content or somebody else, you know, somebody else's writing to, you know, admit it's my own ideas. You know, the writer writes it, I edit it to make sure they hit the points I want to make and then it's done. It's so easy. It's so easy. And it's keyword optimized and it's pushed out in several.

When we think about content marketing, if you've done any of that before, you're already familiar with the idea of picking and developing content and doing SEO work like that. I think the thing that I hear new is we're massively leveraging that against a variety of channels, you're. You're taking that standard, like textual stuff. You're also then doing video content around the same thing that you're. That is an easy port. Do you do both video and audio or just the video?

We do audio as well, but audio is, you know, usually when we have an article, it turns into a nice two to three minute video. Audio clips, you know, as, you know, with podcasts, audio clips, we might string a few of those shorter messages together to make a 10 minute podcast, that type of thing. But yeah, so we do some audio. Not a lot. So both.

And then. And the video's compelling. People are loving that these days. But it's, it's a voiceover. It's other talent that's doing the video for you. You're not doing it yourself. Or both.

The option there is for both, Bill. But mostly what we really focus on, and one of our core tenants is we really try to make it as easy and effective for our client partners. So our whole thing is that, you know the importance of this stuff, but you don't have time. We can do it and we can take care of everything by a few phone calls on your drive into work, you know, over a period of a couple weeks or one or two weeks.

Well, and then, but that, and then you're complementing it by going into print and adding that other piece to it that I think is really cool. Like building a whole magazine out of it, which breaks out of. I mean, we need. I've benefited greatly from having terrific SEO. But, but that visibility then in the traditional analog, real physical world is different than looking at pixels on the screen.

Yeah. And the nice thing with this process, it's just done so easily. We print millions and millions of magazines a year and the leverage, the economies of scale we get with our production process, it's very, you know, very cost effective to do so. And you know, you already have the content. The way I look at it, you have the content documented in one place. We can leverage it and push it out multiple different avenues. You've got 80% of the work done already. Let's leverage it by documenting it somewhere. Let's leverage it. I mean, we've done, we've even taken. We do so we do Joe Polish's magazine. And whenever we're doing a production, you know, Joe's team gets on there and said, oh, we talk about the strategy, what the content lineup's going to be, and they literally send us, okay, here's, you know, for articles one through eight that we talked about. Here are the eight podcasts have articles written on those podcasts that are SEO optimized and interesting. You know, Joe doesn't even have to do anything for like he, you know, they, we just, we have the writer listen to the podcast writing art, you know, whatever it is, an 800 or 1200 word article based on that podcast. SEO optimized for these keywords and they don't have to lift a finger or type a single word.

Tell us a different. I know you've done quite a bit of insurance. Is it any different when you've worked in different categories? I know you shared an example as we're getting ready for the show about the medical spa. Is that, how is that different than any of that, the insurance category?

So we, yeah, and when we started, we started working with garden centers and with insurance agencies and we focused on those two for the longest time. But then we just, whenever people had interest, we started working in different industries because it's the same process. It's just like it's the same structural process, same manufacturing process, so to speak. It's just we're painting different colors on it. It's different target audience. So we have worked in a number of different industries from real estate to, well, to wealth management or investment advisors to consultants to, you know, manufacturers. And yeah, the, the other story we talked about is in the medical spa business and for that, you know, in that example it's Allure Medical Spa in Detroit. And, and you know, I met Dr. Mok, Charles Mok a few years ago and, and when we were, when we were very focused on the insurance space actually at that time growing that. And he said well, if you want to do one for my medical spa, I'd be interested in talking and said okay, you know, leave this with me. And yeah, well, we might, might reach out. Well, later on that day I looked at him, I said what the hell? Why, why wouldn't we do it? I mean it's the same process, different audience. Let's get our head wrapped around it. So we did a, we call it our health and wellness program, Health and Wellness Silo where we coordinate content around healthy living wellness and again taking the same model and there's custom content in there as well. So Allure does this magazine.

I think that's really key. You're building a variety of topics that are of interest to you, that are of service to your listeners, that aren't all self serving. So it's not simply the work that they do, but all the things related to the concerns of health that their audience, their. Their target customer would have, or their prospect world. And you're building stuff, then that attracts and. And connects to them, which, which builds your authority, and you're doing that for them. I think the other thing is not everybody's gonna, like, reach out to you and hire you and all that, which. And we don't want it to be an infomercial here in this conversation, but like systematizing it, creating it as a regular, repeatable thing. This show that's been effective for us and for our listeners is not so because of one or two good ones, but the fact that we've been doing it week in week out for three years, consistently, efficiently, in a way that we can sustain.

Right? That's right. And I'm a big believer, you know, if you can't do it easily, it's not going to. You're not going to continue doing it. So if it's too much of a hassle, if it's too much of a project every week or every month or every quarter, whatever it is, you're not going to sustain it. And with marketing, you know what the true power of marketing comes. You can benefit from the true power of marketing when you are consistent. We have case studies where a company in Virginia doing a blog every month consistently that was keyword optimized, increased their website traffic by like 780% over a period of six years. And really incredible stuff. And then the guy left, the guy who did the blog, and in a period of 10 months, the website traffic dropped by nearly 60%. So you gotta be consistent. You got to be consistent. And, you know, people ask me, well, how often should I blog or how often should I publish a magazine or how often should I do this? I said, you know what? If you're going to commit to blogging, you know, a great. If you want to go at it and do one a week, you know, great if you can sustain it. But my recommendation, do one a month, because I'd rather you do one a month. And if you get really ambitious and create three of them in one week, well, there's three months worth of work. Like, just be consistent. And same with print publications. Put one out every quarter. Don't go gangbusters and do one a month. Just do one a quarter. It doesn't have to be huge numbers, but you got to be consistent. And the power is inconsistency. If your name is always out there on a regular basis in a predictable manner, you and your podcast bill, I mean, you're doing it and you're putting it out every week. You're consistent. That is hugely powerful. If all of a sudden you went silent for three months, your engagement would plummet even though plummet.

People would move on. They'd find a new thing to fill that time in their life.

Exactly.

Well. And instead we're thinking about how do we launch a second and third show a week now? How do we get good at that? So we are tweaking and building things like that so we can give that audience something else in a slightly different format that hopefully they'll love as much and we'll expand the number of people that want more.

Well, so. And another way to look at that though too is, you know, you're doing this blog or this podcast weekly, which is fantastic. It's, you know, it's incredible really that you, that you've sustained this. And kudos to you. I mean, it really, really works. But my, you know, the low hanging fruit might be. How do you leverage what you're doing now to an audience that may not be listening to podcasts? You know, how do you leverage the people that would rather see that content maybe in video or in written format or in infographics, like creating an infographic for your podcast every week and pushing that out through social media as a different. Again, not taking any more time on your part, but you're reaching a different audience. Because one of the interesting things when it comes to digital content marketing, people consume content online in one of three different ways. They either like to watch it, read it, or listen to it. And, you know, they all have their own merits. You know, listening to it is great because people can do it while they're driving or doing exercise or, you know, doing household chores, whatever the case might be. They can do it while they're doing other activities. Watching it with videos has its benefit because you're consuming, they're consuming it through two senses, through the visual and audio. The downside of video is that, you know, as soon as you see a video, I see a video of interest. The first thing I do is look at the time and I subconsciously, I'm making a decision. Do I have six minutes to invest in this right now? You are. And if I don't, how often do you flip through your LinkedIn feed, see an interesting video, pass by it and go back to it? You don't. You either consume it in the moment or you don't reading it. You know, some people just prefer to read it or they like to watch it, but they're in a doctor's office and they don't have their headphones or, you know, so they, they would rather read it. So my big thing, you know, you, you know, with yourself as an example, doing the podcast, you have so much value in content already documented. You know, I, I would be, you know, it might be an idea, it might be an opportunity to really leverage that and push it out through video or through the written word, either in the form of articles, listicles or infographics, something like that. Maybe some low hanging fruit for you.

Yeah, we do some posting right now of the show in the show notes, but I think that they're too closely related. Like it probably would benefit from having articles written on each one where we explore it more than we do just with the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, potentially, yeah. And, but it's, but whatever you do, you want to be consistent because, you know, at the end of the day, marketing is about building an audience and sustaining that audience. And if your audience expects you to have a magazine every quarter, put it out every quarter. If your audience expects you to have a podcast every week, make sure that gets out there every week. Because the minute you start becoming inconsistent, you know, in. I've even read tons around, you know, if you do, you know, if you release a podcast as an example every week, you know, if it's 10am Eastern on Tuesday every week, like don't do it at 10:30, don't do it until 12 noon, like do it 10am Eastern every week. Be so consistent with the timing. One of my favorite email newsletters, you know, is one that comes out every Friday afternoon at 1pm Eastern. And I can count on it. Like I can, you know, I, I can count on that podcast coming out better than I can count on my family being home. When they say they're going to be, you know, it's right and it builds an audience. That consistency is hugely powerful and is often overlooked.

Well, before we run out of time, I think that there are some things that we can recap that I think are really useful. So first of all, understanding or thinking about who are you trying to reach? How often are you trying to reach them? What are they interested in? I hear throughout all of your examples expanding the perspective. They're not just interested in hearing about my product or service, but there's a whole world of concerns that that core customer, that target profile that we have is interested in. And so then you're building, you're looking at keyword and content research, what are the topics, what are the words that kind of thing. You're looking at competitors, you're applying all that stuff then, then you're building it and doing it in a systematic way so that you can be consistent over time. And you're looping in. So anything that you create, you're doing across multiple channels. And you're not forgetting the old traditional stuff of the print media. And in your case, you're actually building magazines for people and sending them out as they're building their own magazine that goes out and that, that is got an increasing thing in a world that's become increasingly digital. It's hitting people in a way that they've been getting less touch with. Right?

Yeah. So. And when it comes to the print, we do, we do the magazines and newsletters. We also got into book publishing because clients were asking for that. So we'll help people self publish books. But you know, when it comes to print, the evolving importance or the evolving role of print in the digital world is that print is becoming more valuable and it's becoming more of a differentiator. You talk to any, anybody we've worked with or anybody that embraces both print and digital and they'll tell you that, yeah, digital gets them out there on a regular basis, does a lot of good, and yet you have to do it. It's so valuable.

For sure, you have to optimization.

However, when you hand over a copy of your magazine or a copy of a book that you published, there is no better instant credibility builder than something in print. So don't discount print. Absolutely. And it's more credible, it's believed more. It's just, it has value.

We've had folks that talk about different ways to get a book out there and build that before, but this whole world of content being a resource of information to your customer base. So look, whether or not you would ever work with a guy like Andy and his company, I think it's useful to go check them out. You'll go to tulipmediagroup.com and understand what they do. Think about how it could improve your thing and if you want to talk to them about working with them. But, but our. Of course we're not trying to create something that directly sells. You know, I'm not trying to just pimp you out there, Andy. But, but because you can't work with everyone. But, but everyone who's listening can learn from this. And you, if so if you want to go do more work, we'll put the link in the show notes as well. But you'll find that@tulipmediagroup.com and of course our website's chock full of articles and posts and audio clips and even video clips and things like that. In the world of scaling up, all things to do with people, strategy, execution, cash. And speaking of print, I'll give you a free copy of the book Scaling Up. If you just pay the shipping and handling, you'll find that offer right on our website@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com is where you'll find all of the back catalog of our stuff plus that where she can find it also wherever you find your podcast content. So we have stuff under Bill Gallagher over at YouTube but but also itunes, stitcher, those kinds of places. So there you go. Tulip Media Group, scalingcoach.com Two great websites for you guys. Have a great time. Thanks Andy for being on. We'll talk to everybody again next week.

Thank you Bill.

All right, again a reminder, if you want to get a free copy of Andy's book, go to tulipmediagroup.com and of course if you want all the things in the rest of our world, go to scalingcoach.com Special thanks again to the originator of all things scaling up, Vern Harnish, who created our world and the Rockefeller habits to selling the best of so many things around growth tools for companies. The show was produced by Lucy Summers. The audio production is done at Potfly Productions. The audio is edited by Albert Burge. Our show notes are compiled by Kodina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you love this show, please give us a positive review over on itunes or wherever you get yours and and then pass it along to somebody else like it. Subscribe to it to get them every week. You can ask for more of what you want or give us some feedback to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep Scaling up.

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