6: Marketing Matters with Guest Gwen Murray, Marketing Strategist

You never know what the right thing is to do, and as soon as you learn what the right thing is to do in marketing, then they switch it up on you.

I actually hired someone to help me with social media presentation and how to do things, but after a year, the rules— I don't know the terminology, but the rules changed and how people saw your content. And I'm like, I don't— I need someone else who can do this for me because it's very difficult to understand.

I really enjoy helping people and making an impact, especially for these smaller businesses, solopreneurs, startups, and getting to take them on a growth trajectory and help them drive their revenue, their market share. Like, that's the real payoff is my success is really my clients.

We're Erika Radis and Marie Lifschultz, a San Antonio area realtor and lender. But most importantly, we're working moms.

The goal of this podcast is to provide support and a sense of community to San Antonio area working moms like us. So join us in trying to find a balance between career, family, and everything in between.

Welcome to this episode of the Working Moms of San Antonio podcast. Today we have a guest, Gwen Murray. She's a fractional CMO and a marketing strategist. And so I'm going to let Gwen introduce herself and tell us about her work. Sure.

Great. Well, thanks so much for having me on. It's really fun to be here. I really enjoy the Facebook group and the community that y'all are building, so I'm happy to be part of this podcast initiative with y'all. So like you mentioned, I'm a fractional CMO and marketing strategist, and what I do is I help companies that know they need marketing but don't know where to start and don't know kind of what that looks like. So I help companies with their brand identity, really getting a clear voice and clear message. We then move into marketing strategy, which is thinking about which channels do you want to use to spread your brand message, to drive engagement, to drive revenue, things like that. And then I work on campaign execution. So I help them make sure that any campaigns that we put into the strategy get executed. And I do that by either onboarding their team or by helping them put together a team of freelancers.

Oh, wow.

Wow. That's so much.

Yeah, I, I, I do a lot. I have, um, a lot of experience. So I feel like when I'm able to help and really add value, that's like what lights me up.

So how long have you been in your industry?

Yeah, so I've been in marketing 20 years, a little over 20 years. I don't like to tell on myself sometimes, but, you know, I bring all that experience to the table. I've done everything from like traditional direct mail to billboards. And then like as the industry has grown, definitely really caught on to more digital, uh, tactics, you know, understanding the full scope of online marketing, um, as well. So I've been at it for about 20 years, and I've had the good fortune to work at some big name brands like Amazon and L'Oréal, and then also head up marketing teams for some, you know, really small scrappy startups with, you know, just a 2-person marketing team to start. Um, so I've gotten to kind of run, you know, both sides of that— the executive corporate world and then the executive world within startups. So, um, it's been, it's been a good ride so far, and now I'm doing my own thing.

Yeah, that's awesome. So have you always been in marketing, and, and how did you know that's something that you wanted to do?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I, I did kind of always know I wanted to be in marketing. So my first company was a big corporation, and it was really interesting because I started off in merchandising, and it gave me— to be in such a big corporation gave me an opportunity to think about, do I like finance? Like, what's going on over there? Do I like operations? What's going on over there? And I eventually worked my way into a marketing role and I was like, oh, this is so fun. And then I went back to school and got an MBA with a focus in marketing. And that's where I really, you know, made that connection and made that, um, you know, intentional leap in my career. Um, into the marketing arena.

Well, it seems like a, a career that you can continue to grow because obviously the platforms that you market on changes often. I know that when we started my industry, you know, we would— Facebook was a big deal, and I actually hired someone to help me with social media presentation and how to do things. But after a year, the rules— I don't know the terminology, but the rules changed and how people saw your content. And I'm like, I don't— I need someone else to do this for me because it's very difficult to understand. So obviously it's a growing business for you because you have to learn all the time.

Yeah, it's always changing. And Google and Facebook change their algorithms— is, is the term for that? Their algorithms, sort of the backend technology on how they throttle ads and how the targeting works and the bidding works. And they change it all the time. And it's kind of unfortunate in the way that they really hold a lot of marketers hostage, candidly, Google and Facebook, because they are such primary channels of communication. So if they say, well, like one example, if they say, well, if your mobile website isn't optimized, if your website isn't optimized for mobile, then we're not going to surface that in our top results. And it's like, how do you know that? How do you learn that? Right? And you always have to keep kind of tabs on what's happening with those companies, what their policies are, what their changes are. So it's It's definitely always learning new things.

Wow.

Yeah, I feel like I struggle with that so much in my business as well. I never know what the right thing is to do. And as soon as you learn what the right thing is to do in marketing, then they switch it up on you.

Yeah, it's definitely a lot of test, learn, optimize, and grow.

I even noticed, Erika, that when the minute we said, hey, maybe, maybe a podcast would help our working moms group, right? Now all of a sudden, that's all I hear. Like, it's across the board. Everyone's doing a podcast or doing something to help with the, the growth of whatever it is. And our goal, obviously, was just to help the working moms in our, in our group to, to help, you know, advertise your business or tell, you know, about services that their particular business can help working moms. So for you, Gwen, um, what are some services that you offer that might help some of the moms in our group?

Yeah, absolutely. And then just to jump back a little bit when you talked about podcasts, so that's really on trend with content marketing right now. So content marketing is a huge trend and really it's about adding value, whether that be podcasts or, or blogs or video tutorials. That's a great way to grow your brand and grow your message. And, and it's, it's free. I mean, it takes your time, right? Obviously. But content marketing right now is huge. So the fact that y'all are doing a podcast is like kudos to you because that's, It's a lot of work, so kudos to you. And then I think the second part of your question, so for the work I do, I really like to focus on the foundations of brand and getting your brand identity, your brand voice really clear. So any companies that are struggling to kind of say, you know, who are we? What do we stand for? How do we differentiate ourselves in the market, right? What is our unique value proposition that's going to make us stand out? Brand work is a lot of what I do. And then strategically thinking about different platforms channels, budgets, and then making sure the campaigns get out the door.

Got it.

Yeah.

So many of our members have small businesses, myself included. And so I just wonder, like, do you see any common mistakes that small businesses make when they're trying to do their marketing?

Yeah. And I mean, honestly, like, I've made mistakes too. You know, I'm not perfect. So I just kind of, I know how to play the game a little bit. But I think the biggest mistake, and it's a mistake that I made and that I see, you know, small businesses make, is trying to do all the things, right? I gotta get my website, I gotta get my CRM, I gotta get my social going, I gotta get podcasts, blogs, all this stuff. And so I think for, um, smaller, you know, business owners, it's really about focus, right? So if you get your brand right and you know who you are and what you stand for, who your ideal customer profile is, right, you kind of go through some preliminary foundational work, then you can think, okay, now where are my customers? Are my customers online? Are they searching for me? Are they on Instagram? Are they on TikTok, right? My customers are on LinkedIn. So for me, I really— I've just decided to really focus on a couple main tactics and strategies, and that way I'm not getting, you know, too scattered. And, and the other thing that I see, um, and it was a mistake I made— again, you know, we all are um, was to really spend a lot of money from the start on like the most beautiful website and the most beautiful logo and like, you know, all of those things. And I spent, I mean, thousands, too much money on trying to put together, um, you know, my logo especially was so important to me. And so my secret tip and trick to all you moms and small business owners out there is to use artificial intelligence. Sounds scary. Yeah, sounds scary and weird and like, what do you mean? Um, but there is a tool called Looka, looka.com, right, uh, or just go find it. And if you want an amazing logo and if you want amazing suite of assets, like I'm talking about PowerPoint templates, brand guidelines, newsletter templates, they will put it together for you and give you a whole bunch of options for like $200. And I can't even tell you like what a relief it was to find this tool and create a logo that I really love and not have that back and forth and all that, those things. So I think, you know, lack of focus is a mistake in terms of like trying to do everything. And the other mistake is, you know, not taking advantage of some of these new AI tools that will make your life so much easier. So don't be afraid of, of AI. It's easier than you think.

So when, if you were going to advise someone like they're just starting out to promote their small business, first thing they should do, would it be, you know, videos or would it be a blog? What would be the first thing if they need to focus on one thing up front? What should that be?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great, that's a great question. And I think, you know, the answer is it depends, right? I think one of the things that I don't see enough small businesses doing is asking for reviews. So this is something you can do for free, right? As you're trying to scale. And if you are a hair salon, if you're a real estate agent, if you are, you know, in the service industry, ask for reviews, right? And you can ask for them on Google. You can ask for them just via email, and you can take those reviews and put them into your marketing material, like create really great social graphics with with those reviews, put them on your website. So I think, you know, underestimating the importance of word of mouth, like at the end of the day, people buy people and people want to know that you're experienced, that you're easy to work with, that you're an expert in your field. And one way to really tell that story is by having other people tell it for you, right? And getting reviews. So, you know, from my perspective, that's just an easy kind of out the, out of the gate thing that you can do to like brand yourself. But really, for me, the first thing that you want to do is focus on your brand, is get your one-liner together. What's your tagline? What do you stand for, right? Figure out who your ideal customer profile is, right? It's really the foundation is brand. And once you have your brand and your messaging and that clarity and know who your ideal customer profile is, then you can think about, okay, where are they? Are they on Instagram? Are they searching on Google, right? Where should I be investing? And you can make informed decisions in that way.

Oh, I like that.

I like that.

And it makes it sound not so scary.

Yeah, you know, I, I thought the review thing, asking for the business was difficult for me in my line of work. I had a really hard time with it. Um, and asking someone to please do a review wasn't so bad. So typically after a transaction for myself, I give it a week or so and I reach out and ask them to please leave a review. And I used to use Facebook as a way for, can you please leave a review on my Facebook page? Well, then I started getting all this spam on my reviews from people. It was, it's really odd and I'm unable to remove them. I can hide it, but I can't stop it from happening. So then I stopped asking people to go and leave a review there because I would get these weird, weird spam on there. So it was very odd, but I didn't think about asking them just to send it via email and then creating a social post with it. So that's a really good idea. I like that a lot.

Yeah. I know for me, I was also guilty of just trying to do every single thing, like anything you hear, right? It's like, hey, this is working for that person, so it's going to work for me. I've got to do this and I've got to do this. I've got to do this. What is your advice? Like on a timeline, how long should you try one thing to sort of let it do its thing before you say, hey, maybe this isn't working in my industry, or maybe this isn't for me, maybe I need to move on and try a different strategy?

Yeah, that's a good question. And, you know, again, it depends. Um, it depends on how much time, how much budget you have, you know, how you're prioritizing your time. So I kind of look at it based on like low effort, high payoff versus high effort, low payoff, right? And kind of map it out in that way. And then when I map out my marketing activities in that way, I can say, huh, It is taking me a heck of a lot of time to send these email newsletters, to design them, to, you know, get my list together to go, you know, and I haven't gotten any bites. Like, X, right? High effort, low payoff, right? That, that goes out the door. So in terms of the amount of time it takes, I mean, it does take time for Google's algorithm to, to build and to give you the credibility to rise in the search ranks. It does take time for Facebook to like recognize that you're a legitimate business and that people are engaging and stuff. So I think with social media, like 3 to 6 months is probably a good one, but really like you have to have evergreen content on these platforms. Like, so for me on LinkedIn, I'm posting every day and it's not paid posts, but it's, you know, organic content that I'm hoping add values to the, adds value to the community and helps set me up for success as a subject matter expert. So again, I think looking at that high impact. High, or high, high effort, sorry, high impact, high effort, low, low impact, low effort, and mapping them out in that way can help you kind of set up a framework.

And, and for, yep.

And for those listening, when you say evergreen content, what does that mean?

Oh, sure.

Evergreen content means something that's always on, always on, right? So you always are running, at least one, you're always doing like at least one blog post a week, right? That's evergreen. Evergreen that's always going to be on your site, or you're doing at least like your social media profile page is evergreen, right? And that's not going to be updated constantly, but you have that kind of like static evergreen content. Evergreen content just sort of means like things that like live forever and that aren't going to require a lot of updating, but, um, they're out in the universe. So versus like search ads, you know, you're always changing, you're always flipping, you're always having to optimize, and you're always having to think of new keywords and stuff like that. So evergreen Evergreen content just means that it has a long shelf life.

Okay.

Got it.

And would you say that most of your clients are running ads and things like that on social media? I know that I've tried to dabble with that in the past. I didn't really find very much success with it, but I'm sure I was doing it exactly wrong. There's so much to sort of know about that. And when would you say that most of your clients are utilizing that?

Yeah, but what's really interesting is that, yes, so there's paid social, right? You can obviously pay to run ads on Instagram and Facebook, and that's, that's an effective strategy if you really, um, have someone, or you can be very sophisticated about your targeting and your bidding. That can be a good strategy. But what I'm seeing more and more of is this organic content, right? Like what y'all are doing, like podcasts, right? Or, um, articles on LinkedIn or blogs or how-to videos, right? So providing free content and free, um, information, right? Like, I work, uh, one of my clients is— it's so funny, but they do, um, custom glass and shower doors, right? Oh, who even knew? Like, companies specialize in that, and they do it all online, and they ship you glass and all this stuff. And so they have a hugely robust content library of like how to measure to, to get the right shower so you know how to install it, how to install a shower door once you found your replacement, right? 5 tips and tricks for do-it-yourself home builders. And so by having that content, they can post it on their page for free and get a following and get an audience and get people to like their page. So they're not bypassing Facebook at this necessarily, but they're using different tactics that are going to help them grow organically and, and not be so beholden to Facebook's algorithm and, and all of their, you know, quirks and changes.

Right. Okay. I mean, it sounds like things are getting less salesy, you know, which I think is, is good. You know, a lot of times—

that's exactly right.

Yeah.

A lot of times we're out in the world and you don't always want to hear that sales pitch. So if things are going the other way I think that's great.

It's really about subject matter expertise, I would say, right? So when people think like, gosh, I need to buy a home, like, I don't know who to talk to, right? They think Erika, because they know you're an expert because they see you posting about interest rates, right? They see you posting about lack of inventory in the San Antonio area. They see you posting about military families and how, you know, they can go about choosing properties, right? So you're cultivating your brand and you're cultivating your subject matter expertise so that you become a go-to person in your industry when people are like— so that's— I'm really fortunate that I get a lot of referrals because people know me from my LinkedIn posts and they say, oh yeah, that startup, they really— their marketing is a mess, they need help. You should talk to Gwen, right? Right.

Yeah, that's true. And I think in any, pretty much any industry that you're trying to build your business, is being that, that market or that subject matter expert in your field is really, you know, showing that off. So that's great advice. Yeah, things that you don't always think about, but you just don't think about it. We're always so worried about the other things. We were just talking about, you know, So obviously the podcast was something we thought, hey, let's get our— get it out there and help other people. Obviously being— I'm big on, you know, providing a service of some sort, being, um, being of service. So helping our working moms out there, and, and maybe at one point they might think of us if they ever needed to sell a home or buy a home or whatever the case is. Oh, remember that, those two ladies in our group, and I do it, right?

Exactly. It's a, it's a give and take.

Absolutely.

But you gotta give to get.

So, favorite thing apart about your job, Gwen? What's your favorite part of it?

My favorite part of it, gosh, um, well, you know, I think being my own boss is really liberating and lets me make sure I spend time with my daughter and lets me make sure I spend time, you know, exercising and things like that. And getting to set my own schedule and, um, you know, I'll work on the weekends and maybe take a Friday afternoon off. So I love, you know, being my own boss is is just such a great freedom. But at the same time, like, I really love helping. Like, I love helping. And I feel like, you know, my ideal client, I think I said it, you know, are these, these people that are like, ah, we need marketing, but we don't know what to do. And right. And I really feel like when I come in, I can help and add value. It's just like what you were saying. Like, I really enjoy helping people and making an impact, especially for these smaller businesses, solopreneurs, startups. And, and getting to take them on a growth trajectory and help them drive their revenue, their market share. Like, that's the real payoff, is my success is really my client's success.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I love it. I love that. I know, the field gave me all the feels.

And then I guess lastly, if you just want to, um, let our listeners know how they can get a hold of you and stuff so they can reach out to you for your services.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Gwen Murray. The name of my business is Up and to the Right Solutions. So I think about where you want that growth trajectory to go, right? Up and to the right. That's where I named my company after. So I'm in marketing, so I have to have a good name. So upintothrightsolutions.com is another great way to reach me, and my Calendly links are on both my Facebook, or excuse me, my LinkedIn profile and my website. And, you know, I'm happy to, you know, receive DMs on Facebook as well, like whatever is the easiest way. And just love, again, that y'all are doing this for working moms. I love the community that you've built, and I love how we can come together and support one another and really, you know, share our stories, provide guidance, and, you know, just— we're being a working mom is hard. It's like the hardest job because you got two jobs, right? You know, at least two jobs, not to mention like chauffeur, cook, you know, all the other things. So, um, I think it's wonderful to have a community that is focused on working moms and really a supportive, safe space where we can all come together and, um, you know, be partners and, and be friends and, um, and help one another.

Yeah, we need to hang out with Gwyn more. We get our love. It makes me feel good.

It's a great— yeah, it's a great group. I recommend this group to a lot of people, actually. I recommend, I recommend joining this group to a lot of people.

You know, we hear that a lot about the group. The group is— it has a really good structure to it, and I think— I mean, I know when people refer within the group everyone's really happy with it. So I think we have a lot of really good people that are there to help each other, and that's just about the community, right? And also, I hope it represents what a lot of San Antonio is. I mean, we're a community that likes to help and be there for each other. So, um, I know that you moved here, right, a few years ago, you know, and kind of joined our group, I think, when you moved here. And hopefully it had that embracing feel for you.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

So, well, I just want to say thank you so much for being a guest. I know I learned so much information.

I did.

Turn around and go back and implement in my own business.

So I know. Awesome. That's wonderful to hear. So thank you so much for having me.

Yes, it was great.

Um, and so yeah, that's going to be this episode of the Working Moms of San Antonio podcast. And thanks so much to everybody for tuning in, and we'll just see you guys next week.

Bye guys, thanks.

Thanks so much for tuning in to the Working Moms of San Antonio podcast. Be sure to follow us on social media at our respective Instagram accounts or join our Working Moms of San Antonio Facebook group. Those links can be found in our episode description. If you have an episode topic suggestion or question, please email us at office@erikaradisagent.com. And be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. See you next week.