Do you struggle with marketing? You know you have great ideas but you can’t implement them the way you want them.
In this episode, Jaryd Krause invites Lorraine Ball and she will share her insights on marketing so you can grow your business and generate profits.
Lorraine transitioned from a corporate career to pursue her passion for helping small business owners. As an accomplished entrepreneur, author, and professional speaker, she shares her marketing expertise through presentations, college lectures, and her podcast, “More than a Few Words.” Lorraine’s insights are rooted in creativity, practicality, and extensive real-world experience. Beyond her professional life, she enjoys photography and traveling in her spare time.
In this interesting conversation, they delve into the best content marketing strategies. The difference between old school traditional marketing and digital marketing The two most important things the best marketers focus on And why is focusing on those two things in their business and marketing what gets them the maximum amount of profit?
They also discussed how using other people’s content can make you more money in your business. Paid marketing vs. content marketing, which one should you go for?
Lastly, Lorraine will also share stories of businesses she’s worked with and how they’ve collected a lot of business from giveaways and competitions.
Do you want to be a great marketer? Then, this episode is perfect for you! Start watching this video and learn valuable marketing insights.
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Episode Highlights
07:06 What do the best marketers have in common
12:09 How can digital marketers survive adversity?
20:36 How do you measure their total ROI and cost of content marketing?
25:36 Social Media Marketing vs. Content Marketing
28:26 Things that the best marketers are doing right
40:00 Building human connection is very important for a marketer.
Courses & Training
Courses & Training
Key Takeaways
➥ “Customer-centricity” is a fundamental concept in marketing that means putting the customer at the center of all business decisions and strategies. Successful marketers prioritize customer-centricity by understanding and addressing the specific needs, preferences, and problems of their target audience or customers.
➥ It is important to understand where customers are in their buyer’s journey and the value of conversions over high click-through rates. Lorraine emphasizes the need to consider the entire customer journey, from initial engagement to conversion, and to focus on metrics like open rates, engagement rates, and customer acquisition.
➥ People often forget to factor in the costs of content marketing when measuring the return on investment (ROI) of paid advertising campaigns. Lorraine discusses the opportunity cost of spending time on content creation instead of directly selling and suggests that content marketing should be tracked as an expense.
About The Guest
After spending too many years in corporate America, Lorraine said goodbye to bureaucracy, glass ceilings and bad coffee to follow her passion to help small business owners succeed.
Today, she is a successful entrepreneur, author, and professional speaker who enjoys sharing what she knows about marketing in presentations to groups around the county, in college classrooms and in her weekly podcast, More than a Few Words.
She brings creative ideas, practical tips, and decades of real-world experience to every conversation.
In her spare time, she loves to travel and take photos.
Connect with Lorraine Ball
Transcription:
Jaryd Krause:
Why is it that some marketers just absolutely crush it and others really struggle? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast. And today, I'm speaking with Lorraine Ball, who, after spending too many years in corporate America, said goodbye to bureaucracy, glass ceilings and bad coffee to follow her passion to help small business owners succeed.
Today, she's a successful entrepreneur, author, and professional speaker who enjoys sharing what she knows about marketing and presentations with groups around the country and in college’s classrooms. And in her weekly podcast, More than a Few Words, she brings creative ideas, practical tips, and a real-world experience to every conversation. In her spare time, she loves to travel and take photos.
And in this podcast episode, Lorraine and I talk about what the best content creators do really, really well, and what the ones who need improving don't do so well. And we're not just talking about content creators; we're talking about marketers in that fashion as well.
We also talk about old school, traditional marketing like newspapers and phone books and what it looked like using that type of marketing versus digital marketing now. And also how some of the digital marketers are left with the best philosophies and how they can get stuck if they're just focusing too much on the numbers, which can be dangerous. So knowing your numbers is important, but only having your numbers as leverage can allow you to fail if the environment changes.
We also talk about what Google could do if they break it up into different companies based on the jurisdiction and the sort of things they're going through in the courts in America, which is quite interesting. We also talk about the two most important things the best marketers focus on and why focusing on those two things in their business and marketing is what gets them the maximum amount of profit.
We also talk about how using other people's content can make you more money in your business. Yes, other people's content, not just OPM, like other people's money, but other people's content, OPC. It's fascinating to hear. And Lorraine shares a bunch of different ways that you can use other people's content and why you should.
We also talk about paid marketing versus content marketing. I asked Lorraine a question, if you could only do paid marketing or only do content marketing, which one would you choose and why? She's got very good reasons behind both.
And then we move into some of the great stories of how businesses that she's worked with and businesses that she's had share stories in her books have collected a lot of business from different things like giveaways and competitions. Lorraine is coming up with almost 1,000 podcast episodes. She's been in marketing for so long; she's a world of information. There's so much value in this podcast. It's a great conversation. I enjoyed it and I have no doubt that you will too. So let's dive in.
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Lorraine, thanks for coming on to have a chat.
Lorraine Ball:
It is so nice to be here. Thank you so much for the invite.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. You're welcome. It's great to meet you. For everybody listening, we jumped on and had a great chat and connection. So we just had to hit the record buttons before Lorraine started to just spill value all over the place. So welcome.
Lorraine Ball:
There is nothing like setting the bar. Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, exactly.
Lorraine Ball:
Just setting the bar a little high. So you're creating those expectations. I'm up for the challenge.
Jaryd Krause:
No, you've got a world of wisdom. After everybody that you've interviewed, I mean, how could you not? So for guys listening, Lorraine's got an amazing podcast and we're going to share links to that at the end of the show and they'll be in the description. But you're coming up close to almost 1,000 episodes. Is that right? Wow.
Lorraine Ball:
It is. I just released, I think, maybe 905. I'm guessing I'm going to be—well, it depends on how productive I am this year, but I'm thinking 1,000 will probably be by the spring of next year. Yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
Wow. Wow. So I've got a guy that I know who's been on the podcast a couple of times. His name is James Schramko. I'm not sure if you've heard of James Schramko. No?
Lorraine Ball:
No.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. He's like a bit of a godfather of marketing in Australia. And he had his 1,000th episode and he had a really cool idea to pick parts apart from other podcasts that he's done and then put them all together. All the ones that he found were really juicy and really good. And people submitted questions to him and submitted feedback and he put the guests on the show, and I thought it was a really cool idea. Have you thought about what you might do when you get to the 1,000-mark range?
Lorraine Ball:
I think for 500, I did a little bit of a retrospective. I pulled some of my favorites and that was fun. But I like the idea of doing a live episode with a lot of different people. Because you're right, I have had a chance to talk to so many interesting people, and it's always fun and different. And even though I don't think marketing has really changed in all the years that I've been doing this, how people are approaching it and the tools that they're using are always changing and that's kind of fun.
Jaryd Krause:
It's so fun. It's so fun. I love podcasting just because the conversations that people get to have are great. And yeah, because you have spoken to so many people, after speaking to so many people and being in marketing yourself, what do you find the best marketers have, I guess, in common that they do really, really well? Or is it a way of life for them? Or, yeah, what do you think they have in common?
Lorraine Ball:
I think the very best marketers that I've met share one common belief and that is that it's all about the customer. You have to start with that customer and work backwards. And there are creative people that do fun advertising or there are people that do very well orchestrated campaigns but if they forget that number one, it's the customer.
And then you're going to laugh at me because most people don't expect a marketing person to say this, but the second thing is that really great marketers understand that it's about the numbers. Because if you don't pay attention to the numbers, you end up with award-winning advertising that doesn't sell products.
And I think that's the thing that I've loved about the transition to digital marketing is how measurable it is. You were kind of shooting in the dark a little bit before we had some of these internet tools. You'd be counting phone calls, or you'd have like five different phone numbers, and you'd be tracking, well, this phone number is only in this ad and this phone number is only in this ad. And so where did the calls come from? And the internet has just made that so easy that any marketer who doesn't pay attention to that is really missing out.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. I consider myself very, very grateful and I am very, very grateful that I came into marketing through digital marketing. And I'll shout out to James Schramko again and he talks about some newsletter marketing, not email marketing, just like letterbox marketing and how that has come back in great ways. But also, I've heard people talking about, yeah, putting ads in the newspaper. And I just think, like, how do you know what the ROI of that is? To the decimal point, right? To the cent. It's so tricky.
Lorraine Ball:
And you know what? The truth is, you didn't. I mean, you accepted that marketing was imprecise. We did a lot of creative things. In Australia, you guys may have a version of a book. We used to call it the Yellow Pages.
Jaryd Krause:
Yes, we've got the same. We’ve got yellow pages.
Lorraine Ball:
And it was just a giant phone book. And I had clients that, because of where their business was located, crossed over multiple territories. So they had to be in multiple books. And what we did was create a little code that went into each ad in each book. And when the phone rang and someone said, “Oh, I found you in the Yellow Pages,” the first thing the receptionist would say is, “Really? If you can tell me the code that's in the ad, you'll save 10% on your purchase.” Boom.
So we were doing things like that that helped. It was still imprecise. And along come Google Analytics and web trafficking. And suddenly you're like, wow, I know exactly how many people came. And I know exactly what they did. So it's easier, except now we have a generation of marketers who are addicted to those metrics.
And you're starting to see things like this from Apple, where the privacy factor is going up. And maybe you can't tell where somebody came from, or you're not seeing as much information. And I think it's going to challenge marketers in the next two to three years to get very creative, just like we did back in the day to figure out what's really working.
Jaryd Krause:
I love that. Oh, I love that you're saying that. Because it's kind of like, I was thinking about this when I was out surfing this morning. There was a mother on the beach with her kids, or a bunch of kids out there, and she was directing them where to go to the good places, where to catch the waves to the peak, right? The highest point of the wave has the most power.
And I was thinking, That's really good. It's a good cheat. But for that child, when their mother isn't around, they're losing an education on how to read the ocean really well themselves. And with digital marketing, we are blessed that we have these metrics, but as the landscape changes and we're only taught in one area, those marketers may not know how to survive in that environment, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Yeah. And it will change, and it'll change again. And this is really interesting here in the US; we're seeing the Justice Department go after Google. And the last time they did try something of this magnitude on the level of antitrust, they went after Microsoft, and they won. Because Microsoft used to have all their software bundled with computers, they had to stop doing that. And the time before, it was when they broke up AT&T, our phone company, into a series of smaller companies that led to a tremendous amount of competition.
So a lot of us are watching to see how this trial is going to come out. Because if the US tells Google they have to break up, it’s going to ripple through the world, but it's going to change search, advertising, information that's available, and metrics. So it's going to be something I really watch and figure out. If all this blows up, how am I going to run my business?
Jaryd Krause:
Wow, yeah. So if they do break up, what are some of the changes that you would predict, maybe? I mean, it's hard; it's really hard to know, but have you got ideologies or have people spoken to you about what they feel it could look like?
Lorraine Ball:
I think it's a little bit too early. I think they just started the trial. So it's hard to tell kind of where the Justice Department is—I mean, yes, they think Google is too big and they think Google is controlling search. But having not seen all the arguments yet, it's kind of hard to get a sense. Ask me in a couple of weeks and I may have a different opinion.
But I think that if businesses are smart, they are collecting data from multiple points to see if it's confirming what they know. So if you're losing your web traffic, then start watching your downloads. When you run promotions, don't run the same promotion on five different platforms. Run five different promotions. And then, when you find one that seems to be working, try it on a different platform.
But now you get a sense of, you know what? We promoted this online resource guide, and everyone loved it. Now, was that because we put it on LinkedIn or was that because it was a better guide? And so you've got to do that AB testing that moves beyond the simple metrics.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely, absolutely. And the metrics of conversions—I think a lot of people, marketers, are thinking about the numbers, like you say and the conversions are really high. But the conversions of those people in their journey to the audience—how close are they to buying? Are they very far away, but with high conversions versus lower conversions, but closer to buying and where they're at in their journey?
Which comes back to that philosophy that you were talking about before. Think about the user, think about your audience, and think about what they want and where they're at. Because I'm across numbers in my business, of course, I think every entrepreneur should be. But what's more important is that I’ll be prepared to give up a click-through rate—a really high click-through rate—if I know I'm going to run a different campaign with a lower click-through rate, but in the end, people are going to convert. And it's going to make the business more money because I understand where they're at in their journey and their buyer's journey, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, what you said there is so, so critical. Because it's not just that somebody took action; it's how close that action is to the actual decision. And click-throughs, they’re not on the same scale of vanity metrics as friends and followers. But if you are running campaigns and all you're looking at are the click-throughs, it really is almost the same kind of hollow vanity metric. Because what you want to see is, are they clicking through? Are they giving you their email address?
But then also, once you have their email address and now you're continuing to follow up with them, what's the open rate? And what's the engagement rate for that campaign? And then what percentage of those people become customers? And it's kind of a funnel and if there are holes in it along the way, you know people are going to drop out, but how many get all the way through? And is that enough to make it worthwhile to have that ridiculously high click-through rate that you're paying for?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Lorraine Ball:
Because clicks aren’t free. Not anymore.
Jaryd Krause:
No, no. And organic traffic is not typically free because you've got to create the content for it as well, right? So when you talk about the funnel, say somebody, they go through an opt-in, and they go through some emails, and then they get put into maybe an email marketing campaign, and then they go to landing pages, and they might go through a sequence of landing pages, a video series or whatever it is.
I think what people forget is that—well, I was speaking to actually my old sales guy, who was really good, made the business a lot of money and he went out on his own and he's like, “I need somebody to finish my funnel.” And I was like, “Okay. What does the funnel need?” And he's like, “I don't know.” I'm like, “Oh.”
So he hired somebody to do his funnel, right? And shout out to him; he's going to laugh at this and he won't mind me sharing because he's a student at heart. And he said, “I just hired him to build my funnel because I know I need a funnel to put leads through to get them closer to the sales journey.” I said, “Okay. So what part of the funnel is lacking?”
He said, “Well, on the landing page is a section that needs to be done, needs to be worked on. And when my old funnel, he stopped working on it, the funnel guy, I don't know what that section is.” And I say, “Okay, cool. So is this like a landing page where in the funnel—?” He’s like, “Oh, it's a landing page.” I'm like, “Okay, cool.” So I just sort of coached him through how he could get that resolved and fixed with people that he already had on his team and could use.
But that's the thing, I think people are learning too fast and not being in the game. But the real education comes from being in the game and copying those losses. I actually don't know how to build a funnel and why do I even need a funnel? So newspapers and stuff
What I feel is that sometimes people forget when they're doing marketing that all the content marketing they're doing is costing them money; they're not banking that up as a cost towards their marketing when they're running paid campaigns. They feel that the paid campaigns—or they don't even know, they're not even conscious of it, that the paid campaigns are the ones that They should be measuring the ROI. But how many marketers do you speak to that actually measure the total ROI based on how much they spend on content marketing?
Because of this podcast, it's not free. It costs a fair bit of money to edit, schedule, put out there, and make it great. And the same with our YouTube videos and all that sort of stuff. So do you find there are many marketers who add that cost of content to their campaigns when they're running ads as well?
Lorraine Ball:
So I will tell you that the smart—ah, there we go. The smart ones do. So when we built the marketing budget, I always encouraged my business owners if they were like, “Well, I'm doing it myself, so it's free.” No, it's not free because there's an opportunity cost. If you're spending an hour writing a blog post and two hours posting on social media and in an email campaign, that's three hours you're not selling. That's three hours you're not face-to-face with a customer. And so you've got to consider those opportunity costs.
And so when we would do marketing for clients and then we would do our marketing, I applied an hourly rate to the work we were doing, and I would “bill” the company. In other words, the agency was paying, and I treated that as if it were billable hours and tracked it as an expense for the business. So I really captured what the cost of my marketing was. Because I needed to know, was I wasting my time or was it a good use of my time?
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, I think what people don't understand—I learned this the hard way—is that when I first started in my business, I didn't really put any content out there and I was just doing ads directly on Facebook. We're getting leads in and we're definitely selling and making great money. But it wasn't until I started content—a lot of YouTube videos and a lot of podcasting—that became the vehicle for sales.
So by the time people got on the phone—after going through a bunch of the content—they'd opt-in to something, give us a phone number and stuff like that. By the time they got on the phone, we didn't need to sell. They were already sold. They're just like, “Tell me the price and where do I start?” There's so much value in that branding, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And I used to tell my clients that content marketing is kind of like ground cover. Soldiers go into battle and your infantry's there and they're laying down the ground cover. And then you have that one sniper who only pops up after they're doing their job, and he delivers the kill shot.
Your content is your ground cover. That's the continuous stuff you're putting out there so that when someone sees your ad, it looks familiar. They already know who you are; they're more likely to notice the ad. When they meet you at a networking event, if you're doing live marketing, they’ve already seen all of that content. So you have that consistent level there. And then periodically you can do promotions.
We actually did it for a client using Google My Business and he was spending, I think, about $1,000 a month in Google Ads, which was a nice buy. He was getting some good traffic. We started aggressively putting content on his Google My Business page. And we could track more phone calls and more traffic to the website based on that content than he was getting from the ads.
We actually had him turn off his Google Ads for a couple months and he never missed a beat because there was so much good content there. And we were leveraging not just the content we were creating but also the reviews. So that whole user-generated content thing is really getting the benefit of that. And it made a huge, huge difference in his business.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. That's such a good story and such a good share. Because, yeah, away, I mean, there is the opportunity cost of creating that content, but that goes into you not needing to spend the money on ads, and you can also slow down the content as the business ages because then you don't need to produce as much.
So this leads me to a question that I was going to ask you later down the track in the show, and I think we may have the answer here. And this goes for all businesses. This is not just one particular type of business, but for all businesses. If you could choose social media marketing or just paid ads on one of the platforms or only content marketing, which would you prefer and why?
Lorraine Ball:
It would not be paid advertising because the minute you stop paying, it's done. My preference will always be the content on your website. And the reason is that that then becomes a source for where you go everywhere else. But the other reason is that you don't own your content on Facebook. Not really.
Jaryd Krause:
No, you don't. You don't own it on YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn. It's not yours. It's theirs.
Lorraine Ball:
And also, it's their rule. So there may be something you want to say in a way you want to say it and in a way you want to present it but you can't because it doesn't fit their guidelines. And I'm not really even talking about things that are offensive. It's simply a matter of whether, when you're playing on those platforms, you're living by their rules.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely.
Lorraine Ball:
And so I always tell people that you need to treat social media like you're going to a singles bar. You're going to meet a lot of nice people. Hear me out on this. You're going to meet a lot of nice people. You're going to have some fun conversations. But your objective is to bring your date home. And home is your website and your email list.
Because once you get them to leave the platform and come to you, and once you have that contact information, you control the conversation. And you are no longer dependent on the rules of any other platform. And you're no longer dependent on the conversations you're renting through your advertising. Now it's your relationship with that prospect.
Jaryd Krause:
I love that you said that. There are so many people listening to this who are buying blogs or owning content websites, and they don't have an email list. So what they're doing is what you're saying is they're creating content to rent space on Google.
And then when Google decides, “We're going to get paid a higher price by somebody that's got better content and we're going to rank them higher because they're prepared to pay a higher rent to get onto our platform,” they lose the traffic, and they don't have an email list. So they can't market to them unless they end up starting to pay a higher rent, which is them technically upgrading their content to rank higher, right? So what do you feel some of the best content marketers do really well?
Lorraine Ball:
I think some of the best content—well, the best content marketers out there, number one—answer the questions that customers have. People go to the internet because they have questions, and they have different questions at different stages in the buying journey. And this sounds so simple, but we used to do this exercise with clients, where we would sort of brainstorm with them. What are the questions people ask you all the time?
And then maybe we would go to Google, and you can type in the question, and it'll give you a whole bunch of other related questions. So you get this whole list. And then we would go to their website and type that question into the search button. And you'd be amazed at how many times they had told us, “This is the most important question. This is the question we get asked all the time.” And I can't find the answer to it on their website.
So great marketers answer questions. And they worry less about the individual keywords. They don't obsess about, “Oh, I've got to get this keyword in there," and they worry more about the answer. Because these days, I'm old enough to remember when you did what we call the Boolean search.
Jaryd Krause:
Have you got your hand over the microphone? That's better.
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, my god. No, I hope.
Jaryd Krause:
There you go.
Lorraine Ball:
Is that better?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah.
Lorraine Ball:
Sorry. I'm sorry. And my ring light is that I didn't stop to hook the phone into that. So I'm holding the phone.
Jaryd Krause:
Love it.
Lorraine Ball:
Love technology. But so with a Boolean search, you typed in furnace plus repair, okay? That's not how we search anymore. Now we go to Google Siri and we're like, “Hey, Siri, why does my furnace smell funny?” And that's what they're typing into the search. And so your content can't just be stuffed with the words furnace repair, furnace repair, furnace repair. It's got to answer that really obscure question.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it. Absolutely. And I think with a lot of people that do put out content specifically on their website for Google, they have the ideology that they know what questions are being asked because they're thinking about it. But the best way to really know what questions are being asked is to go to Google to find out the little FAQs in the FAQ section, but down at the bottom, related questions or related searches—they're the questions that people are actually asking, right? That you need to answer.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And there's a website; I think it's asksocrates.com. You can type in your question, and it pulls the data from Google and just generates this whole list in a really searchable form. So, yeah.
The other thing is to talk to your salespeople. Have them go through their inbox and look at the emails that they have written to customers in the last three to six months. What questions are they getting asked? What questions do the customer service people get asked? What questions do your installers and the people on the return desk have? Whatever it is, what questions do people have? And then start answering them.
One of my favorite questions we got—you don't get asked this much now—but in the beginning, as people were building their first websites, they were like, “Well, why do I have to have hosting and a domain name? And why do I have all these different fees?”
And I had to explain to them that your website's kind of like a mobile home. You can park it anywhere, but you have to have a mobile home park where you get running water and electricity and that's your hosting. And then your domain name; just make sure your mail follows you wherever you go. Well, I got tired of telling that same story over and over again. So I wrote a blog post. And every time somebody asks me, you know what? I would send them the post.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it.
Lorraine Ball:
Well, then I noticed, looking at my data, that that post was getting a lot of traffic because a lot of people were typing into Google. Why do I have to pay for hosting and domain registration?
Jaryd Krause:
Love it. Yeah. It's a win for everyone, right? You make it easier for you. You make it easy for your customer service team and you give people exactly what they want. And then they can choose the next step to work with you or to go down the route of, “Oh, let's look at more of the content because she answered my question in a fashion that’s all I need.”
You talk about something really cool that I am absolutely fascinated by. OPM, right? Other people's money. It can help you grow your business. And you also say that to grow your business, you also need a little bit of OPC. So I stand for other people's content as well.
Please, please, please share what you mean by other people's content. How do we need other people's content to grow our business? Because if I can get more of other people's content, sign me up.
Lorraine Ball:
Okay. So first off, I am not suggesting that you run around the internet scraping other people's information. But what you can do with OPC to cultivate that behavior is invite your community to share their stories. And something as simple as the most common OPC is reviews.
The beautiful thing about getting someone to write you a review is that they talk about your product or service—not the way you talk about it, but the way a customer talks about it. And they use words and language that other people will search for. So as you cultivate reviews, you're cultivating search benefits.
But you can go beyond that. Contests are a wonderful way to get people—whether it's a photo contest or something else. One of my favorites that we did was an optometrist, and he was opening up a children's practice. And we ran a contest that said, “Just share with us a picture of your kid wearing glasses.” So moms are interested.
And then the prize was that when you play ice hockey, there's something called a Zamboni machine that smooths out all the ice so you can play well. The guy was the optometrist for the local ice hockey team. He was giving away a prize. The kid would get to ride on the Zamboni machine.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool.
Lorraine Ball:
What mother is not going to want that for their kid? So we got 100, 150 photos. And he was like, “Well, that's okay.” I said, “No, we're not done.” Because in order to win, your photo has to get the most votes. And in order to vote, you had to give us two pieces of information, your email address and your zip code.
Why the zip code? Because grandma doesn't live in Indianapolis, she's not going to hire this optometrist. But mom and her PTA friends do. We got out of that contest. I want to say we got 1,200 or 1,300 email addresses in his market area that he could then target based on that campaign.
Jaryd Krause:
Amazing. It's such a clever way to do it. Absolutely.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And the other thing that you can do with other people's content is ask them—oh, god, potato chip, Lay's potato chip does this. They run a contest, and you suggest a flavor. And the winning flavor they make—well, people get really invested in the contest and they're going to buy more potato chips because that's my brand. And they're going to promote their flavor within the brand.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. And everybody votes for that flavor; they're going to buy it, right? Then what goes on with the compounding effect is that if that flavor stays in the stores, they're always going to say, “This flavor is because of me. We should buy these potato chips.” And they just keep buying them and buying them and buying them. ROI. And that is what we like to call infinite ROI.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And sometimes it's really interesting. People put together these really elaborate contests. But the truth is a very simple request with a thank you. Just say publicly thank you.
Jimmy Fallon will do this. And I don't know if he's still doing it because Twitter is a dumpster fire right now. But when Twitter still worked, he would throw a question out on Twitter and people would answer it. And then he would read it that night—some of the answers—on his show. So thousands of people would submit.
He'd pick a few that he liked. But everybody stayed up to watch to see if he would share theirs. And he had someone on his staff who was thanking everybody for their submissions. So even if you didn't get on the show, you got a thank you from Jimmy Fallon.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. Absolutely awesome. I'm pretty curious. You've spoken to so many marketers and you've got a book out as well as a bunch of essays from marketers. Maybe from the book, what are one or two essays that really stood out for you when it comes to growing a business and marketing? Are there some that are just so out of the box and are like, “Wow, that's really cool and genius”? Or are there some that are just inspirational—maybe one or two that you could share?
Lorraine Ball:
So I loved—and I'm at my table of contents now, so I get the title right. But Danielle Hughes wrote about managing your message. She really talks about—no, that's Lori. That's not her.
Danielle's thing was about writing a bio that really reflected you. That for a marketer, is one of the things that is so important because that's the introduction people have to you. And if the bio is too formal and then they meet you in person, they don't really know who you are; it does not work. It's just so important that the way you are in person and the way you are on your website are the same.
I just found it. It’s how to write an about page that attracts people to you and to your business. And she really stresses the personal—that you've got to make that human connection. And so if you're trying to sound very stiff and formal, it just doesn't work. I think that's one of my favorites, yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it.
Lorraine Ball:
I mean, like I said, I love all of them, but that one—oh, I'm going to do one more. I think Scott Flood's conversational copy is the key to connecting. He's probably the best writer. He wasn't necessarily the best guest in terms of being a talker but on paper—and this is what he does for a living. I think he's my best writer.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it. I was talking to Chris Silvestri and his podcast is the next one for people listening. I was talking to him yesterday and he mentioned that—and he's a copywriter, a really, really good copywriter and UX designer, and he's got an elaborate career. And he was saying that conversational copy is the best because when it feels like you're having a conversation with the person on the page, you're speaking their language.
Like us just now, today we're both marketers, right? It's easy for us to have a conversation. We're using the same language. We get the same thing. So it's been an easy and great conversation. We're very similar and that relationship just builds trust like no tomorrow.
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, absolutely.
Jaryd Krause:
And that's what we need in marketing, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, absolutely. And one of the things that I discovered early on—it's funny when I say to people that I'm not a writer because I have earned a living for 25 years writing.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, you're an author.
Lorraine Ball:
Yeah. And I mean, that's not my natural communication form. And so what I learned very early on is that I would record. I would go for a walk, and I would answer questions or dictate a blog post and then I'd hand it to someone else to transcribe and then I could edit it when it came back. But when I did it that way, the language was natural.
It sounded like me. And now, with transcription software, it's so much easier to do. Because if I just tried to type directly into the page, it just felt very stiff because I was trying too hard, and it just stopped being me.
Jaryd Krause:
I noticed that with my emails compared to some other people's emails and I've noticed a lot of people copy me now with my emails and how conversational they are. I start my emails in a very particular fashion. I started in media res, which means James Bond style. As soon as the movie starts, in the car, he just jumps off the cliff, about to die. How did I get here? That's how I start my email. So if you're not on my email list, it's a plug.
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, okay. I'm signing up because I love a good opening. I love a good opening to a blog post. I love a good opening to a story. And that's really what you're doing.
Jaryd Krause:
It's all about the story, right? Story sells. Because if you tell a story how you would tell it, you don't need to think about writing it the right way. You just tell it how you would tell it and that's conversational how you would tell it.
And that is so easy for people to read because it's reading like a conversation versus reading something that's a block of text. No offense to the Bible, but that's a tough one to read, right? It's not easy.
Lorraine Ball:
Well, it feels like a textbook. It feels like work as opposed to just a story where you kind of want to know how it all ends.
Jaryd Krause:
And you can drop so much value in that story. It doesn't need to be. All right, if I'm going to give value, I'm going to sit down and go through talking point after talking point after talking point. I just listened to a podcast yesterday. I went for a run. And it's on real estate investing—commercial real estate investing. And I had been listening to one previously and they're very conversational.
This one here, which I listened to, is very fast because they have their talking points down. And it's hard for me to actually process and digest the important, valuable things they're saying because it's just so fast. They're just blurting it out. They're producing an insane amount of value in a very short period of time. But for me to process and digest it and understand it, it was very, very tricky because it was just so formal. And that's just in a podcast.
Lorraine Ball:
Yeah. Yeah. But there's an audience for it. If somebody is sitting at a desk and they're taking notes, that’s that. You got to know with your podcast who your audience is.
That's one of the reasons why, with my podcast, I went to the 10-minute format. Because my folks are listening to an episode in their car between meetings. They're listening to it when they're doing something else. And I always tell my guests, Just give me one or two tips and then we'll link to your content. And if you grab them, they'll come back for more. And it's a different format. You really have to know what you want to talk about and be very on point, but you can still be conversational.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. Absolutely. My audience has said to me, “Jaryd, you get to the 35-minute mark range and the podcast episode ends,” and they're like, “No, please no, we need more from your guests and from you.” And I'm like, “Okay.” So I started extending them a little bit more and more and more.
This one we have gone almost past our time, Lorraine. So we may have to get you back on. So thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute delight to talk to you. Thank you for weathering the storm and the blackout that you've had to endure. Where can we send people to check out your books and your podcast?
Lorraine Ball:
So morethanafewwords.com. If you go there, you'll be able to get the podcast episodes. You'll have a link to my book. You'll also have access to my toolbox. It's got a lot of great resources for business owners. My favorite social platform is LinkedIn. So hop on and say hi.
Jaryd Krause:
Awesome. I'll put links to that in the show notes.
Guys, before you go, I'm going to get very meta. Lorraine mentioned answering questions in the podcast episode, and that's the best content you can create. Guys, if you have a question for me that you want me to answer on the podcast, please email me. I've already told you to get on the email list. I'm sure you're going to jump on there.
If you're not, get on the email list and then email me a question that you want me to answer specifically for the podcast. I do this inside my actual membership, where people ask me questions and I do a Facebook Live.
The reason I like to answer those questions on Facebook Live is because I get to give far more context verbally than just replying to an email. So I'm giving you guys an opportunity to ask me questions that I can answer on the podcast for you.
I've noticed that some of the solo episodes that I've done—well, most of the solo episodes that I've done—people have really dig and really liked. So I feel like just sitting there and answering questions could be valuable for you guys. So I'm sending some emails.
Lorraine, again, thank you. Thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure, absolutely.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
Jaryd Krause:
Thanks, guys. I will speak to you soon.
Hey, YouTube watchers, if you thought that video was good, you should check out this video here on 2 Types of Websites Beginners Should Buy. Or check out my playlist on How I Made My First $100k Buying Websites and how to do due diligence. Check it out. It's an awesome playlist. You'll enjoy it.
Why is it that some marketers just absolutely crush it and others really struggle? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast. And today, I'm speaking with Lorraine Ball, who, after spending too many years in corporate America, said goodbye to bureaucracy, glass ceilings and bad coffee to follow her passion to help small business owners succeed.
Today, she's a successful entrepreneur, author, and professional speaker who enjoys sharing what she knows about marketing and presentations with groups around the country and in college’s classrooms. And in her weekly podcast, More than a Few Words, she brings creative ideas, practical tips, and a real-world experience to every conversation. In her spare time, she loves to travel and take photos.
And in this podcast episode, Lorraine and I talk about what the best content creators do really, really well, and what the ones who need improving don't do so well. And we're not just talking about content creators; we're talking about marketers in that fashion as well.
We also talk about old school, traditional marketing like newspapers and phone books and what it looked like using that type of marketing versus digital marketing now. And also how some of the digital marketers are left with the best philosophies and how they can get stuck if they're just focusing too much on the numbers, which can be dangerous. So knowing your numbers is important, but only having your numbers as leverage can allow you to fail if the environment changes.
We also talk about what Google could do if they break it up into different companies based on the jurisdiction and the sort of things they're going through in the courts in America, which is quite interesting. We also talk about the two most important things the best marketers focus on and why focusing on those two things in their business and marketing is what gets them the maximum amount of profit.
We also talk about how using other people's content can make you more money in your business. Yes, other people's content, not just OPM, like other people's money, but other people's content, OPC. It's fascinating to hear. And Lorraine shares a bunch of different ways that you can use other people's content and why you should.
We also talk about paid marketing versus content marketing. I asked Lorraine a question, if you could only do paid marketing or only do content marketing, which one would you choose and why? She's got very good reasons behind both.
And then we move into some of the great stories of how businesses that she's worked with and businesses that she's had share stories in her books have collected a lot of business from different things like giveaways and competitions. Lorraine is coming up with almost 1,000 podcast episodes. She's been in marketing for so long; she's a world of information. There's so much value in this podcast. It's a great conversation. I enjoyed it and I have no doubt that you will too. So let's dive in.
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Lorraine, thanks for coming on to have a chat.
Lorraine Ball:
It is so nice to be here. Thank you so much for the invite.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. You're welcome. It's great to meet you. For everybody listening, we jumped on and had a great chat and connection. So we just had to hit the record buttons before Lorraine started to just spill value all over the place. So welcome.
Lorraine Ball:
There is nothing like setting the bar. Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, exactly.
Lorraine Ball:
Just setting the bar a little high. So you're creating those expectations. I'm up for the challenge.
Jaryd Krause:
No, you've got a world of wisdom. After everybody that you've interviewed, I mean, how could you not? So for guys listening, Lorraine's got an amazing podcast and we're going to share links to that at the end of the show and they'll be in the description. But you're coming up close to almost 1,000 episodes. Is that right? Wow.
Lorraine Ball:
It is. I just released, I think, maybe 905. I'm guessing I'm going to be—well, it depends on how productive I am this year, but I'm thinking 1,000 will probably be by the spring of next year. Yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
Wow. Wow. So I've got a guy that I know who's been on the podcast a couple of times. His name is James Schramko. I'm not sure if you've heard of James Schramko. No?
Lorraine Ball:
No.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. He's like a bit of a godfather of marketing in Australia. And he had his 1,000th episode and he had a really cool idea to pick parts apart from other podcasts that he's done and then put them all together. All the ones that he found were really juicy and really good. And people submitted questions to him and submitted feedback and he put the guests on the show, and I thought it was a really cool idea. Have you thought about what you might do when you get to the 1,000-mark range?
Lorraine Ball:
I think for 500, I did a little bit of a retrospective. I pulled some of my favorites and that was fun. But I like the idea of doing a live episode with a lot of different people. Because you're right, I have had a chance to talk to so many interesting people, and it's always fun and different. And even though I don't think marketing has really changed in all the years that I've been doing this, how people are approaching it and the tools that they're using are always changing and that's kind of fun.
Jaryd Krause:
It's so fun. It's so fun. I love podcasting just because the conversations that people get to have are great. And yeah, because you have spoken to so many people, after speaking to so many people and being in marketing yourself, what do you find the best marketers have, I guess, in common that they do really, really well? Or is it a way of life for them? Or, yeah, what do you think they have in common?
Lorraine Ball:
I think the very best marketers that I've met share one common belief and that is that it's all about the customer. You have to start with that customer and work backwards. And there are creative people that do fun advertising or there are people that do very well orchestrated campaigns but if they forget that number one, it's the customer.
And then you're going to laugh at me because most people don't expect a marketing person to say this, but the second thing is that really great marketers understand that it's about the numbers. Because if you don't pay attention to the numbers, you end up with award-winning advertising that doesn't sell products.
And I think that's the thing that I've loved about the transition to digital marketing is how measurable it is. You were kind of shooting in the dark a little bit before we had some of these internet tools. You'd be counting phone calls, or you'd have like five different phone numbers, and you'd be tracking, well, this phone number is only in this ad and this phone number is only in this ad. And so where did the calls come from? And the internet has just made that so easy that any marketer who doesn't pay attention to that is really missing out.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. I consider myself very, very grateful and I am very, very grateful that I came into marketing through digital marketing. And I'll shout out to James Schramko again and he talks about some newsletter marketing, not email marketing, just like letterbox marketing and how that has come back in great ways. But also, I've heard people talking about, yeah, putting ads in the newspaper. And I just think, like, how do you know what the ROI of that is? To the decimal point, right? To the cent. It's so tricky.
Lorraine Ball:
And you know what? The truth is, you didn't. I mean, you accepted that marketing was imprecise. We did a lot of creative things. In Australia, you guys may have a version of a book. We used to call it the Yellow Pages.
Jaryd Krause:
Yes, we've got the same. We’ve got yellow pages.
Lorraine Ball:
And it was just a giant phone book. And I had clients that, because of where their business was located, crossed over multiple territories. So they had to be in multiple books. And what we did was create a little code that went into each ad in each book. And when the phone rang and someone said, “Oh, I found you in the Yellow Pages,” the first thing the receptionist would say is, “Really? If you can tell me the code that's in the ad, you'll save 10% on your purchase.” Boom.
So we were doing things like that that helped. It was still imprecise. And along come Google Analytics and web trafficking. And suddenly you're like, wow, I know exactly how many people came. And I know exactly what they did. So it's easier, except now we have a generation of marketers who are addicted to those metrics.
And you're starting to see things like this from Apple, where the privacy factor is going up. And maybe you can't tell where somebody came from, or you're not seeing as much information. And I think it's going to challenge marketers in the next two to three years to get very creative, just like we did back in the day to figure out what's really working.
Jaryd Krause:
I love that. Oh, I love that you're saying that. Because it's kind of like, I was thinking about this when I was out surfing this morning. There was a mother on the beach with her kids, or a bunch of kids out there, and she was directing them where to go to the good places, where to catch the waves to the peak, right? The highest point of the wave has the most power.
And I was thinking, That's really good. It's a good cheat. But for that child, when their mother isn't around, they're losing an education on how to read the ocean really well themselves. And with digital marketing, we are blessed that we have these metrics, but as the landscape changes and we're only taught in one area, those marketers may not know how to survive in that environment, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Yeah. And it will change, and it'll change again. And this is really interesting here in the US; we're seeing the Justice Department go after Google. And the last time they did try something of this magnitude on the level of antitrust, they went after Microsoft, and they won. Because Microsoft used to have all their software bundled with computers, they had to stop doing that. And the time before, it was when they broke up AT&T, our phone company, into a series of smaller companies that led to a tremendous amount of competition.
So a lot of us are watching to see how this trial is going to come out. Because if the US tells Google they have to break up, it’s going to ripple through the world, but it's going to change search, advertising, information that's available, and metrics. So it's going to be something I really watch and figure out. If all this blows up, how am I going to run my business?
Jaryd Krause:
Wow, yeah. So if they do break up, what are some of the changes that you would predict, maybe? I mean, it's hard; it's really hard to know, but have you got ideologies or have people spoken to you about what they feel it could look like?
Lorraine Ball:
I think it's a little bit too early. I think they just started the trial. So it's hard to tell kind of where the Justice Department is—I mean, yes, they think Google is too big and they think Google is controlling search. But having not seen all the arguments yet, it's kind of hard to get a sense. Ask me in a couple of weeks and I may have a different opinion.
But I think that if businesses are smart, they are collecting data from multiple points to see if it's confirming what they know. So if you're losing your web traffic, then start watching your downloads. When you run promotions, don't run the same promotion on five different platforms. Run five different promotions. And then, when you find one that seems to be working, try it on a different platform.
But now you get a sense of, you know what? We promoted this online resource guide, and everyone loved it. Now, was that because we put it on LinkedIn or was that because it was a better guide? And so you've got to do that AB testing that moves beyond the simple metrics.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely, absolutely. And the metrics of conversions—I think a lot of people, marketers, are thinking about the numbers, like you say and the conversions are really high. But the conversions of those people in their journey to the audience—how close are they to buying? Are they very far away, but with high conversions versus lower conversions, but closer to buying and where they're at in their journey?
Which comes back to that philosophy that you were talking about before. Think about the user, think about your audience, and think about what they want and where they're at. Because I'm across numbers in my business, of course, I think every entrepreneur should be. But what's more important is that I’ll be prepared to give up a click-through rate—a really high click-through rate—if I know I'm going to run a different campaign with a lower click-through rate, but in the end, people are going to convert. And it's going to make the business more money because I understand where they're at in their journey and their buyer's journey, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, what you said there is so, so critical. Because it's not just that somebody took action; it's how close that action is to the actual decision. And click-throughs, they’re not on the same scale of vanity metrics as friends and followers. But if you are running campaigns and all you're looking at are the click-throughs, it really is almost the same kind of hollow vanity metric. Because what you want to see is, are they clicking through? Are they giving you their email address?
But then also, once you have their email address and now you're continuing to follow up with them, what's the open rate? And what's the engagement rate for that campaign? And then what percentage of those people become customers? And it's kind of a funnel and if there are holes in it along the way, you know people are going to drop out, but how many get all the way through? And is that enough to make it worthwhile to have that ridiculously high click-through rate that you're paying for?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Lorraine Ball:
Because clicks aren’t free. Not anymore.
Jaryd Krause:
No, no. And organic traffic is not typically free because you've got to create the content for it as well, right? So when you talk about the funnel, say somebody, they go through an opt-in, and they go through some emails, and then they get put into maybe an email marketing campaign, and then they go to landing pages, and they might go through a sequence of landing pages, a video series or whatever it is.
I think what people forget is that—well, I was speaking to actually my old sales guy, who was really good, made the business a lot of money and he went out on his own and he's like, “I need somebody to finish my funnel.” And I was like, “Okay. What does the funnel need?” And he's like, “I don't know.” I'm like, “Oh.”
So he hired somebody to do his funnel, right? And shout out to him; he's going to laugh at this and he won't mind me sharing because he's a student at heart. And he said, “I just hired him to build my funnel because I know I need a funnel to put leads through to get them closer to the sales journey.” I said, “Okay. So what part of the funnel is lacking?”
He said, “Well, on the landing page is a section that needs to be done, needs to be worked on. And when my old funnel, he stopped working on it, the funnel guy, I don't know what that section is.” And I say, “Okay, cool. So is this like a landing page where in the funnel—?” He’s like, “Oh, it's a landing page.” I'm like, “Okay, cool.” So I just sort of coached him through how he could get that resolved and fixed with people that he already had on his team and could use.
But that's the thing, I think people are learning too fast and not being in the game. But the real education comes from being in the game and copying those losses. I actually don't know how to build a funnel and why do I even need a funnel? So newspapers and stuff
What I feel is that sometimes people forget when they're doing marketing that all the content marketing they're doing is costing them money; they're not banking that up as a cost towards their marketing when they're running paid campaigns. They feel that the paid campaigns—or they don't even know, they're not even conscious of it, that the paid campaigns are the ones that They should be measuring the ROI. But how many marketers do you speak to that actually measure the total ROI based on how much they spend on content marketing?
Because of this podcast, it's not free. It costs a fair bit of money to edit, schedule, put out there, and make it great. And the same with our YouTube videos and all that sort of stuff. So do you find there are many marketers who add that cost of content to their campaigns when they're running ads as well?
Lorraine Ball:
So I will tell you that the smart—ah, there we go. The smart ones do. So when we built the marketing budget, I always encouraged my business owners if they were like, “Well, I'm doing it myself, so it's free.” No, it's not free because there's an opportunity cost. If you're spending an hour writing a blog post and two hours posting on social media and in an email campaign, that's three hours you're not selling. That's three hours you're not face-to-face with a customer. And so you've got to consider those opportunity costs.
And so when we would do marketing for clients and then we would do our marketing, I applied an hourly rate to the work we were doing, and I would “bill” the company. In other words, the agency was paying, and I treated that as if it were billable hours and tracked it as an expense for the business. So I really captured what the cost of my marketing was. Because I needed to know, was I wasting my time or was it a good use of my time?
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Also, I think what people don't understand—I learned this the hard way—is that when I first started in my business, I didn't really put any content out there and I was just doing ads directly on Facebook. We're getting leads in and we're definitely selling and making great money. But it wasn't until I started content—a lot of YouTube videos and a lot of podcasting—that became the vehicle for sales.
So by the time people got on the phone—after going through a bunch of the content—they'd opt-in to something, give us a phone number and stuff like that. By the time they got on the phone, we didn't need to sell. They were already sold. They're just like, “Tell me the price and where do I start?” There's so much value in that branding, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And I used to tell my clients that content marketing is kind of like ground cover. Soldiers go into battle and your infantry's there and they're laying down the ground cover. And then you have that one sniper who only pops up after they're doing their job, and he delivers the kill shot.
Your content is your ground cover. That's the continuous stuff you're putting out there so that when someone sees your ad, it looks familiar. They already know who you are; they're more likely to notice the ad. When they meet you at a networking event, if you're doing live marketing, they’ve already seen all of that content. So you have that consistent level there. And then periodically you can do promotions.
We actually did it for a client using Google My Business and he was spending, I think, about $1,000 a month in Google Ads, which was a nice buy. He was getting some good traffic. We started aggressively putting content on his Google My Business page. And we could track more phone calls and more traffic to the website based on that content than he was getting from the ads.
We actually had him turn off his Google Ads for a couple months and he never missed a beat because there was so much good content there. And we were leveraging not just the content we were creating but also the reviews. So that whole user-generated content thing is really getting the benefit of that. And it made a huge, huge difference in his business.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. That's such a good story and such a good share. Because, yeah, away, I mean, there is the opportunity cost of creating that content, but that goes into you not needing to spend the money on ads, and you can also slow down the content as the business ages because then you don't need to produce as much.
So this leads me to a question that I was going to ask you later down the track in the show, and I think we may have the answer here. And this goes for all businesses. This is not just one particular type of business, but for all businesses. If you could choose social media marketing or just paid ads on one of the platforms or only content marketing, which would you prefer and why?
Lorraine Ball:
It would not be paid advertising because the minute you stop paying, it's done. My preference will always be the content on your website. And the reason is that that then becomes a source for where you go everywhere else. But the other reason is that you don't own your content on Facebook. Not really.
Jaryd Krause:
No, you don't. You don't own it on YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn. It's not yours. It's theirs.
Lorraine Ball:
And also, it's their rule. So there may be something you want to say in a way you want to say it and in a way you want to present it but you can't because it doesn't fit their guidelines. And I'm not really even talking about things that are offensive. It's simply a matter of whether, when you're playing on those platforms, you're living by their rules.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely.
Lorraine Ball:
And so I always tell people that you need to treat social media like you're going to a singles bar. You're going to meet a lot of nice people. Hear me out on this. You're going to meet a lot of nice people. You're going to have some fun conversations. But your objective is to bring your date home. And home is your website and your email list.
Because once you get them to leave the platform and come to you, and once you have that contact information, you control the conversation. And you are no longer dependent on the rules of any other platform. And you're no longer dependent on the conversations you're renting through your advertising. Now it's your relationship with that prospect.
Jaryd Krause:
I love that you said that. There are so many people listening to this who are buying blogs or owning content websites, and they don't have an email list. So what they're doing is what you're saying is they're creating content to rent space on Google.
And then when Google decides, “We're going to get paid a higher price by somebody that's got better content and we're going to rank them higher because they're prepared to pay a higher rent to get onto our platform,” they lose the traffic, and they don't have an email list. So they can't market to them unless they end up starting to pay a higher rent, which is them technically upgrading their content to rank higher, right? So what do you feel some of the best content marketers do really well?
Lorraine Ball:
I think some of the best content—well, the best content marketers out there, number one—answer the questions that customers have. People go to the internet because they have questions, and they have different questions at different stages in the buying journey. And this sounds so simple, but we used to do this exercise with clients, where we would sort of brainstorm with them. What are the questions people ask you all the time?
And then maybe we would go to Google, and you can type in the question, and it'll give you a whole bunch of other related questions. So you get this whole list. And then we would go to their website and type that question into the search button. And you'd be amazed at how many times they had told us, “This is the most important question. This is the question we get asked all the time.” And I can't find the answer to it on their website.
So great marketers answer questions. And they worry less about the individual keywords. They don't obsess about, “Oh, I've got to get this keyword in there," and they worry more about the answer. Because these days, I'm old enough to remember when you did what we call the Boolean search.
Jaryd Krause:
Have you got your hand over the microphone? That's better.
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, my god. No, I hope.
Jaryd Krause:
There you go.
Lorraine Ball:
Is that better?
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah.
Lorraine Ball:
Sorry. I'm sorry. And my ring light is that I didn't stop to hook the phone into that. So I'm holding the phone.
Jaryd Krause:
Love it.
Lorraine Ball:
Love technology. But so with a Boolean search, you typed in furnace plus repair, okay? That's not how we search anymore. Now we go to Google Siri and we're like, “Hey, Siri, why does my furnace smell funny?” And that's what they're typing into the search. And so your content can't just be stuffed with the words furnace repair, furnace repair, furnace repair. It's got to answer that really obscure question.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it. Absolutely. And I think with a lot of people that do put out content specifically on their website for Google, they have the ideology that they know what questions are being asked because they're thinking about it. But the best way to really know what questions are being asked is to go to Google to find out the little FAQs in the FAQ section, but down at the bottom, related questions or related searches—they're the questions that people are actually asking, right? That you need to answer.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And there's a website; I think it's asksocrates.com. You can type in your question, and it pulls the data from Google and just generates this whole list in a really searchable form. So, yeah.
The other thing is to talk to your salespeople. Have them go through their inbox and look at the emails that they have written to customers in the last three to six months. What questions are they getting asked? What questions do the customer service people get asked? What questions do your installers and the people on the return desk have? Whatever it is, what questions do people have? And then start answering them.
One of my favorite questions we got—you don't get asked this much now—but in the beginning, as people were building their first websites, they were like, “Well, why do I have to have hosting and a domain name? And why do I have all these different fees?”
And I had to explain to them that your website's kind of like a mobile home. You can park it anywhere, but you have to have a mobile home park where you get running water and electricity and that's your hosting. And then your domain name; just make sure your mail follows you wherever you go. Well, I got tired of telling that same story over and over again. So I wrote a blog post. And every time somebody asks me, you know what? I would send them the post.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it.
Lorraine Ball:
Well, then I noticed, looking at my data, that that post was getting a lot of traffic because a lot of people were typing into Google. Why do I have to pay for hosting and domain registration?
Jaryd Krause:
Love it. Yeah. It's a win for everyone, right? You make it easier for you. You make it easy for your customer service team and you give people exactly what they want. And then they can choose the next step to work with you or to go down the route of, “Oh, let's look at more of the content because she answered my question in a fashion that’s all I need.”
You talk about something really cool that I am absolutely fascinated by. OPM, right? Other people's money. It can help you grow your business. And you also say that to grow your business, you also need a little bit of OPC. So I stand for other people's content as well.
Please, please, please share what you mean by other people's content. How do we need other people's content to grow our business? Because if I can get more of other people's content, sign me up.
Lorraine Ball:
Okay. So first off, I am not suggesting that you run around the internet scraping other people's information. But what you can do with OPC to cultivate that behavior is invite your community to share their stories. And something as simple as the most common OPC is reviews.
The beautiful thing about getting someone to write you a review is that they talk about your product or service—not the way you talk about it, but the way a customer talks about it. And they use words and language that other people will search for. So as you cultivate reviews, you're cultivating search benefits.
But you can go beyond that. Contests are a wonderful way to get people—whether it's a photo contest or something else. One of my favorites that we did was an optometrist, and he was opening up a children's practice. And we ran a contest that said, “Just share with us a picture of your kid wearing glasses.” So moms are interested.
And then the prize was that when you play ice hockey, there's something called a Zamboni machine that smooths out all the ice so you can play well. The guy was the optometrist for the local ice hockey team. He was giving away a prize. The kid would get to ride on the Zamboni machine.
Jaryd Krause:
Cool.
Lorraine Ball:
What mother is not going to want that for their kid? So we got 100, 150 photos. And he was like, “Well, that's okay.” I said, “No, we're not done.” Because in order to win, your photo has to get the most votes. And in order to vote, you had to give us two pieces of information, your email address and your zip code.
Why the zip code? Because grandma doesn't live in Indianapolis, she's not going to hire this optometrist. But mom and her PTA friends do. We got out of that contest. I want to say we got 1,200 or 1,300 email addresses in his market area that he could then target based on that campaign.
Jaryd Krause:
Amazing. It's such a clever way to do it. Absolutely.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And the other thing that you can do with other people's content is ask them—oh, god, potato chip, Lay's potato chip does this. They run a contest, and you suggest a flavor. And the winning flavor they make—well, people get really invested in the contest and they're going to buy more potato chips because that's my brand. And they're going to promote their flavor within the brand.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. And everybody votes for that flavor; they're going to buy it, right? Then what goes on with the compounding effect is that if that flavor stays in the stores, they're always going to say, “This flavor is because of me. We should buy these potato chips.” And they just keep buying them and buying them and buying them. ROI. And that is what we like to call infinite ROI.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. And sometimes it's really interesting. People put together these really elaborate contests. But the truth is a very simple request with a thank you. Just say publicly thank you.
Jimmy Fallon will do this. And I don't know if he's still doing it because Twitter is a dumpster fire right now. But when Twitter still worked, he would throw a question out on Twitter and people would answer it. And then he would read it that night—some of the answers—on his show. So thousands of people would submit.
He'd pick a few that he liked. But everybody stayed up to watch to see if he would share theirs. And he had someone on his staff who was thanking everybody for their submissions. So even if you didn't get on the show, you got a thank you from Jimmy Fallon.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. Absolutely awesome. I'm pretty curious. You've spoken to so many marketers and you've got a book out as well as a bunch of essays from marketers. Maybe from the book, what are one or two essays that really stood out for you when it comes to growing a business and marketing? Are there some that are just so out of the box and are like, “Wow, that's really cool and genius”? Or are there some that are just inspirational—maybe one or two that you could share?
Lorraine Ball:
So I loved—and I'm at my table of contents now, so I get the title right. But Danielle Hughes wrote about managing your message. She really talks about—no, that's Lori. That's not her.
Danielle's thing was about writing a bio that really reflected you. That for a marketer, is one of the things that is so important because that's the introduction people have to you. And if the bio is too formal and then they meet you in person, they don't really know who you are; it does not work. It's just so important that the way you are in person and the way you are on your website are the same.
I just found it. It’s how to write an about page that attracts people to you and to your business. And she really stresses the personal—that you've got to make that human connection. And so if you're trying to sound very stiff and formal, it just doesn't work. I think that's one of my favorites, yeah.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it.
Lorraine Ball:
I mean, like I said, I love all of them, but that one—oh, I'm going to do one more. I think Scott Flood's conversational copy is the key to connecting. He's probably the best writer. He wasn't necessarily the best guest in terms of being a talker but on paper—and this is what he does for a living. I think he's my best writer.
Jaryd Krause:
I love it. I was talking to Chris Silvestri and his podcast is the next one for people listening. I was talking to him yesterday and he mentioned that—and he's a copywriter, a really, really good copywriter and UX designer, and he's got an elaborate career. And he was saying that conversational copy is the best because when it feels like you're having a conversation with the person on the page, you're speaking their language.
Like us just now, today we're both marketers, right? It's easy for us to have a conversation. We're using the same language. We get the same thing. So it's been an easy and great conversation. We're very similar and that relationship just builds trust like no tomorrow.
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, absolutely.
Jaryd Krause:
And that's what we need in marketing, right?
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, absolutely. And one of the things that I discovered early on—it's funny when I say to people that I'm not a writer because I have earned a living for 25 years writing.
Jaryd Krause:
Yeah, you're an author.
Lorraine Ball:
Yeah. And I mean, that's not my natural communication form. And so what I learned very early on is that I would record. I would go for a walk, and I would answer questions or dictate a blog post and then I'd hand it to someone else to transcribe and then I could edit it when it came back. But when I did it that way, the language was natural.
It sounded like me. And now, with transcription software, it's so much easier to do. Because if I just tried to type directly into the page, it just felt very stiff because I was trying too hard, and it just stopped being me.
Jaryd Krause:
I noticed that with my emails compared to some other people's emails and I've noticed a lot of people copy me now with my emails and how conversational they are. I start my emails in a very particular fashion. I started in media res, which means James Bond style. As soon as the movie starts, in the car, he just jumps off the cliff, about to die. How did I get here? That's how I start my email. So if you're not on my email list, it's a plug.
Lorraine Ball:
Oh, okay. I'm signing up because I love a good opening. I love a good opening to a blog post. I love a good opening to a story. And that's really what you're doing.
Jaryd Krause:
It's all about the story, right? Story sells. Because if you tell a story how you would tell it, you don't need to think about writing it the right way. You just tell it how you would tell it and that's conversational how you would tell it.
And that is so easy for people to read because it's reading like a conversation versus reading something that's a block of text. No offense to the Bible, but that's a tough one to read, right? It's not easy.
Lorraine Ball:
Well, it feels like a textbook. It feels like work as opposed to just a story where you kind of want to know how it all ends.
Jaryd Krause:
And you can drop so much value in that story. It doesn't need to be. All right, if I'm going to give value, I'm going to sit down and go through talking point after talking point after talking point. I just listened to a podcast yesterday. I went for a run. And it's on real estate investing—commercial real estate investing. And I had been listening to one previously and they're very conversational.
This one here, which I listened to, is very fast because they have their talking points down. And it's hard for me to actually process and digest the important, valuable things they're saying because it's just so fast. They're just blurting it out. They're producing an insane amount of value in a very short period of time. But for me to process and digest it and understand it, it was very, very tricky because it was just so formal. And that's just in a podcast.
Lorraine Ball:
Yeah. Yeah. But there's an audience for it. If somebody is sitting at a desk and they're taking notes, that’s that. You got to know with your podcast who your audience is.
That's one of the reasons why, with my podcast, I went to the 10-minute format. Because my folks are listening to an episode in their car between meetings. They're listening to it when they're doing something else. And I always tell my guests, Just give me one or two tips and then we'll link to your content. And if you grab them, they'll come back for more. And it's a different format. You really have to know what you want to talk about and be very on point, but you can still be conversational.
Jaryd Krause:
Absolutely. Absolutely. My audience has said to me, “Jaryd, you get to the 35-minute mark range and the podcast episode ends,” and they're like, “No, please no, we need more from your guests and from you.” And I'm like, “Okay.” So I started extending them a little bit more and more and more.
This one we have gone almost past our time, Lorraine. So we may have to get you back on. So thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute delight to talk to you. Thank you for weathering the storm and the blackout that you've had to endure. Where can we send people to check out your books and your podcast?
Lorraine Ball:
So morethanafewwords.com. If you go there, you'll be able to get the podcast episodes. You'll have a link to my book. You'll also have access to my toolbox. It's got a lot of great resources for business owners. My favorite social platform is LinkedIn. So hop on and say hi.
Jaryd Krause:
Awesome. I'll put links to that in the show notes.
Guys, before you go, I'm going to get very meta. Lorraine mentioned answering questions in the podcast episode, and that's the best content you can create. Guys, if you have a question for me that you want me to answer on the podcast, please email me. I've already told you to get on the email list. I'm sure you're going to jump on there.
If you're not, get on the email list and then email me a question that you want me to answer specifically for the podcast. I do this inside my actual membership, where people ask me questions and I do a Facebook Live.
The reason I like to answer those questions on Facebook Live is because I get to give far more context verbally than just replying to an email. So I'm giving you guys an opportunity to ask me questions that I can answer on the podcast for you.
I've noticed that some of the solo episodes that I've done—well, most of the solo episodes that I've done—people have really dig and really liked. So I feel like just sitting there and answering questions could be valuable for you guys. So I'm sending some emails.
Lorraine, again, thank you. Thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure, absolutely.
Lorraine Ball:
Absolutely. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
Jaryd Krause:
Thanks, guys. I will speak to you soon.
Hey, YouTube watchers, if you thought that video was good, you should check out this video here on 2 Types of Websites Beginners Should Buy. Or check out my playlist on How I Made My First $100k Buying Websites and how to do due diligence. Check it out. It's an awesome playlist. You'll enjoy it.
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Host:
Jaryd Krause is a serial entrepreneur who helps people buy online businesses so they can spend more time doing what they love with who they love. He’s helped people buy and scale sites all the way up to 8 figures – from eCommerce to content websites. He spends his time surfing and traveling, and his biggest goals are around making a real tangible impact on people’s lives.
Resource Links:
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➥ Download the Due Diligence Framework – https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources/
➥ Market Muse (Content Marketing Software) – https://bit.ly/3Me39L0
➥ Surfer SEO (SEO tool for content writing) – https://bit.ly/3X0jZiD
➥ Page Optimizer Pro (SEO tool for optimizing web pages) – https://bit.ly/3wQCzin
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