MBA2148 Guest Teacher – Lorrie Thomas Ross – How to Create a Sustainable and Effective Marketing Strategy

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Promote perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Doll RBA Show. Because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episode today we have Lori Thomas Ross. Lori Thomas Ross founded Web Marketing Therapy, a unique organization that helps small businesses get their marketing in order. Lori was sick of seeing small businesses spend lots of money on products and services that don't really help move the needle for businesses of their size. So she started teaching people how to actually use marketing strategies and a framework that actually works for them, that actually gets them customers, that actually builds a long lasting brand. And that's why she's here today to teach you a guest teacher lesson. She's going to show us how to create an effective and sustainable marketing strategy. Having a strategically thought out marketing strategy for your business will allow you not only to get more customers, but to have a memorable brand. What are some small little tweaks, small little changes you can make to your marketing strategy that can make you more memorable, that will build your brand affinity with your customers and having them come back for more and more business with you. That's what today's lesson is all about. Now let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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A lot of people I speak to in person, at conferences, over email, online, on Twitter are totally confused about what's important when it comes to marketing, how to create a marketing strategy and what strategies actually work for their size business. That's why I was so glad to see Lori Thomas Ross reach out to me to teach today's guest teacher lesson. I'm gonna pass it on to Lori, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways. But for now, take it away, Lori.

Greetings. My name is Lori Thomas Ross, AKA the Marketing Therapist. It's great to be here with you all. Having an optimized and strategically managed marketing presence is key to branding. Building and boosting success comes from more than having the tools and technologies in place. A happy, healthy, wealthy foundation needs to be in place to drive success today. I'm so excited to be teaching you how to create a sustainable and effective marketing strategy. Let's get started. Just like a pencil, Communication also needs to have a good point. I want to get right to the point and tell you about what we're going to tackle today. We're going to unlock a framework that you can use to audit your marketing today in three months, six months, five years. I'm also going to share with you a life lasting, sustainable marketing strategy that's going to retrain your brain to think about and approach marketing. I'm so excited to clue you into that. And last but not least, we're going to talk about the number one way to pump some more PAL into your marketing efforts. Before I dive in, I want to put on my educator hat. For years I taught in the university setting. The true academic meaning of marketing is maximizing exchanges. That can be traffic to your website, that can be referrals, that can be someone joining your email list following you on social media. I find the term exchanges and this is my marketing therapist hat right? A little warm and fuzzy. I find the term exchanges sometimes to be a bit transactional. And we're not marketing for transactions, we're marketing for relationships. So for the sake of our Time. Let's look at marketing as maximizing relationships. Doesn't that feel more enjoyable than marketing for transactions? I think about the years I've had my business and I look at everything as relationships. The way I communicate, my customer service, awareness, all those things. So here are the five factors that you need to have in place to make your marketing click. This is the framework to audit your marketing 5 credibility, usability, visibility, sellability, and scalability. I will go into each and every one, so don't feel like you have to write as fast as you possibly can. First piece of your marketing puzzle to audit is the credibility. Credibility is about getting people to know you, to like you, and to trust you. Ideally, know, love and trust you. Right? But how do we build that trust? Stanford University did a research study on web credibility years ago and they found, and it's a great study, you can Google and search it. But one of the biggest things that stood out in the name of credibility was, was telling your story. People wanted to see, and people want to see today, who's behind a company? Why did you start this business? Who are the leaders? Storytelling is story selling. There's an old saying that if you want to be interesting, be interested. I like to flip that in the name of today's web and social world. If you want people to be interested in you, it's time to uncover some of the things that make you interesting. Share your story. How did you get inspired to run this business? You know, be a little personal. I have on my website things that I'm obsessed with and people still comment. I can show up to give a talk and people still will say, oh, you like gummy bears, right? But only the Haribo ones. I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that still makes a mark. It's okay to be human, right? Like that's how we build relationships. Credibility comes from design. It is the best foot that we have forward. Think about if someone were to show up in their pajamas to give a presentation, that's not the impression you want to convey, right? If someone is looking at your advertising, your website, if they're hearing you give a talk, you. You need to have your best foot forward. And so image is very important. That's where branding comes into play. Language. Making sure there's no typos, telling your story. Having other people share testimonials can fall under credibility. So credibility is taking that time in the name of these five factors to really see and manage that perception. The next piece of the puzzle is usability. This is about getting people to you, either to your social media, to your store, to your online store, and helping them get through ideal relationships, coming through and staying with you. So in the name of to and through, how to build Usability is a matter of guiding people to where you want them to go. Online, it's easy. Buttons that look clickable. Words like Learn more. Contact us now. Web user scan, right? Way more than they read. Web users scan far more than they read. So what can you be doing to guide people through user experience through the layout of your blog or your landing page? If you're doing Google advertising, usability is like being mindful of what people see when they come in the front door. User experience can be just like a store, right? It's merchandising, but too many times we forget to go back and really evaluate user experience. And with analytics at our fingertips in the digital marketing world, we can see top visited pages where people go, what pages people are bouncing from so that user experience can always be refined. When it comes to email marketing, again, being mindful of using that real estate that you know the header, making sure that you get to the point immediately. If people have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find something, you've got a user experience issue. If you want them to take an action, move that up. Use your email and maybe don't have a ginormous picture that someone has to scroll through to actually get to the meat of what you're talking about. If you can measure it, you can manage it. So usability is about tapping into the analytics, but it's also about the art and heart of marketing and looking at that data and also critically evaluating how to guide people so that the ideal people are getting through to you. Visibility, right? You can be the best at what you do, but if nobody knows, what's the point? Visibility. You can be the best at what you do, but if nobody knows what's the point? How do you get out in front of your target customer and how do you stay in front of your existing customer? Your best clients are often your current clients. How are they helping to keep the love alive? Visibility can include search engine marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, which can be Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo. So many things. And fun fact, YouTube is the second largest search engine. So being mindful of not just throwing that video up on YouTube, but making sure the title has really great relevant keywords in it so that people are searching can find it. Like I have a video on the Five factors for marketing success and that's the title. It isn't video one or marketing video. You need to be crystal clear with your language for search marketing and going back to analytics, paying attention to what's working and what isn't. I've seen organizations spending spend tons of time doing free webinars in the name of quote marketing, end quote. And the data shows that this time and effort and time is money, right? That this effort, this is one random example. But these free webinars were not bringing in ideal customers, so they actually just decided to pause that effort and recalibrate. Strategy is about being willing to let things go that aren't serving you. So we've covered credibility, usability, visibility. Next is sellability. Why you versus the competition. You have to voice your value, but also your values. This is where the relationship piece comes in. Being distinct, communicating your value, being authentic about your values. These are all pieces that can build that, ooh, that's my company or that's my person. Because you want to make it easy for someone to choose you and statistic in sales. The more you require someone to do, the less likely you are to get the sale. This is where the usability comes into play. The credibility of like, ooh, the that's a gorgeous website or wow, that's an awesome video, ooh, make it easy for someone. I love to use the analogy of what would you rather eat, a warm chocolate chip cookie or a raw kale salad, right? Can you hear the chewing of the kale salad right now? I am a big health enthusiast, but I'm also a realist. And nine out of ten times everyone in the audience is the warm chocolate chip cookie. How you communicate your value and your values, support your sellability, make it easy and an average of seven times. So the average person needs to engage with an organization seven times before a sale happens. So the visibility, the credibility, the usability, all of those pieces come together to support sellability. And last but not least in these five factors is scalability. Scalability is about investing, not spending. This is where you really need to evaluate what's working for you. Not just monetarily, but time and energy in the audit process. I've seen organizations confess that their vendors can be a little difficult to work with or it's really hard to get XYZ web company to even answer an email. That's not sustainable. That is not the best use of your money. Being a pleasure to work with pays and it's really important that leaders of any organization, large or small, really respect themselves and get the best service they possibly can. So we've covered the five credibility, usability, visibility, sellability, and scalability. I'd like to congratulate you for investing in your success. If you would like to continue to learn more about sustainable and effective marketing strategies, you can visit webmarketingtherapy.com thank you so much for joining me today. And back to you, Omar At Capella.

University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the courseroom to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu.

Building a memorable brand is so important for a small business because that's your super strength. People want to know who's behind the business. What's your story? Your why? Because if they resonate with your why, they're more likely to sign up and become a customer. This is why I think a lot of people should spend some time working on their about page on their website. And don't hide your about page. Put it on your header or footer menu. Make sure people know who's behind this project, who's helping you build it. This is your chance to be proud of what you do and the team that has helped you. Give them a shout out. Let them know that, hey, I want the world to know that you're amazing and this is part of your marketing, establishing your brand and telling your story to the world. So don't skip it. Speaking of story, you're gonna get asked a lot about why you started your business as you start growing it. Whether it's in a meetup or a business meeting or even you're going to some sort of conference or event or simply after you deliver your elevator pitch, people are gonna ask, why did you start this business? This is part of your branding. Talking about your why. Share it. Say it proudly. Because it's what they're going to remember. People remember stories, so use it to your advantage. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show and thank you Lori Thomas Ross for your guest teacher lesson today. If you love this podcast, the best thing you can do is to share it with other people on social Go ahead and let them know to go to 100 MBA net so they can subscribe and listen to the podcast. Over 2100 business lessons in the archives. Share the love. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some people don't share their story often enough. They say, well, I'VE already said this before, already posted this before. I already said this on Facebook or Twitter or mentioned it in a speech. No, you gotta say it over and over and over. This is what the big brands do. They drill home their message constantly so it becomes their identities, become something people remember. I remember when I was growing up, Pepsi was competing with Coke and they wanted to differentiate themselves so they had a slogan that said, Pepsi is the choice of a new generation. And they had all these celebrities and athletes and singers and all kinds of people promoting the brand. But they made sure that when they promoted it, they said the same thing over and over. Pepsi, a choice of a new generation. The reason why they do this is because this is a message that's about them. This is a message that describes them and their values and who they're targeting. So if that resonates with you, they're going to resonate with Pepsi. So keep drilling home your story, keep drilling your values, keep drilling what you're all about, because that's what people will remember. It's going to take more than once for them to remember it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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