S. 3 Ep. 14 – You’re Making Marketing Harder Than It Needs To Be. Here’s How.

Intro: You know, those moments when you’re doing what you love in your business, maybe it’s standing on stage or creating content, whatever it is, you’re totally immersed, and time just seems to slip by? This is called the Flow State. At Speaker Flow, we’re obsessed with how to get you there more often. Each week we’re joined by a new expert where we share stories, strategies, and systems to help craft a business you love. Welcome to Technically Speaking.

Taylorr: That was weird; you’re going to start the show with us. For context, for everyone joining the show, Austin was just making a wonderful Jaws theme. You want to just replay that for us here, Austin?

Austin: [Makes Jaws Theme Like Sounds – 00:46].

Taylorr: It almost has a Pink Panther vibe to it, though. Not even like, it’s a little Jaws, a little Pink. Yeah. Exactly.

David: I’m not really up the doom of Jaws. It’s a little more jaunty, I kind of want to dance to it.

Taylorr: Yeah, right. It has a little swing in it.

Austin: I’m a jaunty guy. I don’t know what to say. Just not a lot intensity over here.

Taylorr: Well, as you can tell everyone, we’re on a very focused track today. Oh, man. David, welcome to the show. I hope you expect nothing less than what you just experienced. it’s great to have you.

David: I hope there are plenty of breaks for singing. This is going to be a musical episode.

Taylorr: Yes, it is. Yeah. Speaker Flow the Musical, coming to a dive bar near you or something.

David: Be ready for it.

Austin: The bar is so low. It’s so low.

David: Oh, no. Okay.

Taylorr: Oh, man, this is going to be so fun, David; thank you for joining us. We’re really excited to unpack your knowledge; you’re a true expert in your field. Definitely excited to get into those weeds now. But I have to ask you first, so your brand, Interrobang. Am I saying that right?

David: You are, yes.

Taylorr: Okay. Okay, great.

David: That’s half the battle.

Taylorr: So, what is that? How did it?

David: Yeah, my company’s name, Interrobang, is a blessing and a curse. It is a curse in that nobody knows what it means. A lot of people can’t pronounce it. It’s certainly not something that’s easy to spell. It is a blessing in that people get curious about it and they ask me, and that’s a wonderful lead-in to explain what it means and how it relates to my brand. And I like curious people. So, first of all, do either of you have any notion of what an Interrobang might be?

Austin: That’s a thing?

David: Yeah, it’s a thing.

Taylorr: It’s a thing like a noun.

Austin: I thought you were just combining a couple of things together.

David: It is a noun. It is a real-life, tangible-ish thing that exists in the world.

Taylorr: Well, if it’s a noun, I have. The only thing I could possibly think of is a blend of interrogation and then a bang, like the Big Bang.

David: Yeah.

Taylorr: That leads to some paradigm shifting stuff. But I feel like an idiot just saying all of that.

David: Austin is laughing at you.

Austin: Watch out Stephen Hawking.

David: Mockingly. You’re on the right track. So, an Interrobang, it’s a punctuation mark that combines a question mark and an exclamation point. So, maybe you’ve seen it. It actually exists, there’s a short code that you can type, I don’t know what it is, maybe I should, but you can actually type it on a keyboard. And so, it is at the core of what Interrobang Digital does; everything that we do, every project that we work on, it starts with questions. We do a deep-dive session into our client’s businesses; we ask a million questions, and that gets us the clarity that we need to actually do effective, meaningful work, that; if you stick with the analogy, results in an outcome worthy of an exclamation point. 

So, that’s the idea. It’s a question mark and an exclamation point. Are there better ways to convey that, that people can spell and understand? Probably. But what am I, a branding expert?

Taylorr: No, I love that, man. I love the curiosity that provokes and it has a beautiful explanation for it. Yeah. It’s awesome.

Austin: That’s what you want out of a brand. Yeah.

David: Yeah.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: And I learned something new about the, I suppose, English language and punctuation. That’s great. Fun facts with the Technically Speaking crew.

David: You never know what you’re going to learn on an Episode of Technically Speaking.

Austin: You’re welcome, World. Well, cool. You’ve had a whole adventure in the digital marketing world going back since the late aughts or something like that, if I remember correctly. So, can you just give us the story, what led you to where you are today, being a thought leadership speaker, coach, consultant, marketing expert?

David: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a lot of hyphens. So, I made my first website in 1997, because I got assigned against my will to be the computer ladies helper in my middle school. I hated it at first, but it actually afforded me this really cool opportunity to go to the school district and learn HTML with a bunch of adults. And this was in the day of like blink tags, if you remember, blink tags at all. Ooh. Bad, bad, dark days of the internet.

Taylorr: Dark days.

David: So, I learned all of these skills and I did it as a hobby for years, was never interested in it professionally, I went off and was an actor for 15 years instead; creativity was what I really loved. And then, yeah, in the early teens, I kind of realized, oh, I can combine creativity and knowledge of HTML and coding and create these really cool websites. Fast-forward to 2016, I’m creative director at a web agency and we’re creating these really cool websites, they look beautiful, and they are not moving the needle for our clients at all. I know you had Danielle Tucker on an earlier episode and she talked about her realization that just a pretty website is not enough; I had that realization in 2016. 

And so, I was just dedicated to creating websites that moved the needle and that was at the heart of why I created my own company and my own business. And that led me down what I already talked about, asking all of the right questions, but then also using a website as a hub of a marketing engine, which is much, much larger and more expansive and complicated. And that kind of led me to the very far opposite end of the spectrum, where I was taking clients through so much work, so much content creation, so much management, that it really took them away from the core of what they wanted to be doing. It took them out of their area of expertise and it’s so time consuming to do as much marketing as you can do. 

So, that kind of led me to where I am now, which is finding this happy medium between just a pretty website and trying to do everything and see what sticks, where we’re really, really deliberate about identifying, okay, for your audience, for your product or service, for your market, where do you need to be? What do you need to be saying? Where do you need to be saying it? So, that we can kind of more surgically create results without having to dedicate our lives to suddenly becoming full-time marketers.

Taylorr: Yeah, man. Wow. We see this struggle day in and day out, slightly different context just being on the systems-end of things, the back-end of it, rather than the front end of it. But it’s real easy to focus on all of the shoulds that we could be doing with marketing. How many different acronyms are there in marketing people can go down the rabbit hole on like, SEO and BBC and CRO, and then you have all of the social media stuff and then all of the channels and then all of the content. It’s incredible that we even attempt with all of those possible things, when in reality, probably, as we’re going to talk about here in a little bit, I would imagine that can be pretty distracting for people. 

And, honestly, probably a little discouraging too, having to split your entire focus, not staying doing the stuff you love and not seeing the results you want, and not being able just to focus on all of the things that are working. It’s a conversation that, I don’t think a lot of people are having, many folks are like, oh, you should be doing all of the marketing things. And we can do those, but do we need to?

David: Yeah. Well, and one of the real sad things that I see a lot, a lot of people come to me having trying marketing, trying to do everything, realizing that they can’t keep up, and so their marketing efforts don’t actually get them anywhere. They don’t get them the results that they were hoping or expecting to get, and so then they just kind of give up. They go, oh, well, marketing doesn’t work for me. I’m not going to do it. And that’s a real shame because marketing can work. It can work, you can’t just try to do everything and hope that it magically falls into place.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: It’s the quality over quantity conversation to some degree.

Taylorr: It is. Yeah.

David: Absolutely.

Austin: It’d be better to do one thing amazingly than it would be to do 10 things okay.

David: Absolutely.

Austin: From a results perspective, at least.

David: And one of the tricks is just understanding, like, okay, of all of these options that are out there, which one or two or three are going to be most impactful for my situation as a speaker, coach, consultant, thought leader?

Taylorr: Yeah, totally.

David: If you can figure that out and you can attack it, you’re going to be in good shape.

Austin: True that. Taylorr, have we said the laser versus sunlight analogy on here recently?

Taylorr: I don’t think so.

David: I love that analogy.

Taylorr: If we have, they need to hear it again.

Austin: Okay, we’re going to throw it out there. Okay. The difference between a laser and sunlight, right? Sunlight produces tens of millions of kilowatts of energy. You can go stand outside underneath it and you might get a sunburn or worse if you’re out there for a really long time, but the point is not that intense. A laser on the other hand, uses orders of magnitude less energy, maybe a couple dozen kilowatts of energy, and it can burn a hole through steel. The difference between those two things is focus. And I think that’s really kind of at the core of what you’re talking about here, man. If you focus in the areas that, not even that could work, because anything can work, if you just focus on something and not try to spread yourself so thin, you’ll probably get results from that thing that you’re focused on.

David: Yeah.

Austin: [Granted – 11:06] you’re actually, putting your best foot forward and trying. So, anyway. Okay. Let’s get back on, sort of, the rails here. When Taylorr and I were planning this episode, we wanted to give ourselves a context to come at this topic from, and we had the idea, a big part of what you talk about on your website and just in the conversations that we’ve had is this sense of making things simple. And I know before the show we were even talking a little bit about how you’ve had a paradigm shift, of sorts, around that and I want to hear about that. But we figured we could, sort of, look at this as a foundational stepping stone situation because people have to start somewhere, right? 

And so, for somebody that’s maybe aspiring, they’re just trying to break into this industry, or even for a veteran that maybe had missed some of the essentials, let’s just go back to the basics and then build up from there.

David: Yeah.

Austin: So, the first question that we want to ask you is, before we even get into a website and the fun, flashy, shiny things related to marketing, what’s the work that needs to have been done before you could even help somebody in those categories?

David: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’m so happy that you’re thinking about strategy before tactics, because it’s so common, especially somebody just breaking in to say, well, I know I need a website, I’m going to make a website, here I go. I’m going to put everything on it. And it doesn’t do a thing. So, when we think about tactics, we need to understand; one, who is your audience? Two, what are the outcomes that they want? Three, what is going to differentiate you from everybody else offering what you are to that audience? What’s going to make you stand out? What are your values? What makes you, you, right? And how do you deliver those outcomes in a way that is easy for your target audience to understand? 

So, if you understand that, then you can begin weaving that into not just your website, but any of the channels that you exist on. I’m a huge, huge fan proponent of Donald Miller’s story brand system. You guys familiar with that?

Taylorr: Oh, yeah.

David: Yeah. I was an actor for years. I love the hero’s journey; it’s baked into every aspect of storytelling. And so, story brand, if you’re listening to this and you’re not familiar, basically it just takes that hero’s journey and puts your customer in the position of the hero and puts you in the position of the guide and gives you all of those cues that you need to be able to guide your target audience through the experience of working with you to get the outcome that they ultimately want. And it simplifies things in such a way that, they have something called a brand script. It’s a one pager, it walks through the whole thing and it is effectively your single source of truth for your messaging. 

So, whether you’re creating a website, whether you’re optimizing your LinkedIn profile, whether you’re creating a profile for an essay or e-speakers or any of those other platforms where you want to be, you can just look to that brand script and say, I know exactly what I need to say here. It removes so much extra thinking and it makes it easier for your audience to understand what you do. It simplifies things for your audience as well, because they’re getting a consistent message that’s focused on their results everywhere they find you.

Taylorr: Yeah. Well, the consistency is a huge component of this, right?

David: Yeah.

Taylorr: If you have different messaging laced throughout all of the possible channels, once we get to tactics and things, your website and e-speakers or your LinkedIn or directories or wherever else, that can be confusing to people. It can also be confusing for you, especially when you’re asked, Hey, can you create a bio for this thing or write a description of what you do? It’s like you have to sit down and think for a half hour about, okay, how do I phrase this? Whereas, you have the brand script right in front of you and like, all right, copy paste, here we go. It makes it brainless to focus.

David: How many of us, as speakers, have been asked for a bio and we go, okay, Well, which of which of the five files we have saved here called My Name Bio is the new one?

Taylorr: Pretty much. That’s exactly right.

David: And it’s only natural to have inconsistent messaging because we create our website one time, we optimize our LinkedIn profile a few months earlier or later. So, we’re always in a slightly different space, maybe we’re refining our business or our messaging as that goes on. So, it’s easy for our messaging to be inconsistent. But that’s just making it harder for people to hire us.

Taylorr: Yeah. Which is, obviously, not what we want.

David: Yeah. Not technically hat we’re known for

Taylorr: So, you have the strategy in place, you get the brand script, that’s going to guide the creation of a website and branding and so on. So, let’s assume now, you could start the process of getting that website built out, you have something that’s consistent with that brand script. What other assets does somebody need then to start putting effort into then the marketing tactics? Or are we good to go? Can we start figuring out what channels to go through? Or are there other things in addition to the website that we may need to consider prior to putting fuel on that fire?

David: I will always say don’t wait to start; don’t wait to get things online. You don’t have to have a million assets built out before you put your website online. Get what you have out there, don’t worry if it’s perfect, don’t worry if it’s done. Here’s the truth, it’s never going to be done.

Austin: Praise be.

David: It’s not print.

Taylorr: Praise be.

David: Praise be. Wow. I didn’t think I would earn a praise be today. I feel good.

Taylorr: Yeah.

David: Get what you have online and then continue building off of that. And here’s what I’ll also say. Your website doesn’t need to have a million words on it. In fact, if it does, you’re doing it wrong. Start with a one-pager, keep it simple. Make sure that you’re clearly defining what you do, who you do it for, what they get. Make sure that you are showing how your brand is different. Make sure people know your vibe. If you’re trying to book a speaking event, chances are whoever’s looking at you, the event professional is looking at 20, 30, 40 other speakers and you need to stand out immediately. They’re not going to read all of the words on your page. So, what’s your vibe? What’s your deal? How are you going to come across when you’re onstage? 

You need to convey that, if possible, in the first five seconds somebody’s on your website. Which is both scary because it’s like, oh, how do I do that? But it’s also a relief. Because you don’t have to write an epic poem to your audience. You can just, if you do it right, you convey it and suddenly you have the hook in. Question.

Austin: I just want people to.

Taylorr: Internalize this?

Austin: To tangent off of this a little bit. Yeah. I think part of what plays into this is that the reason for why you have a website in the first place goes missed sometimes. And I think the association that people have of the website is, it’s a sales tool. Meaning, by the time somebody gets to the bottom of your homepage, they’re ready to click the buy button and be your next new client. And unless you’re a celebrity that has massive reputation and perception and they don’t actually give a shit about what you’re going to say when you get up onstage, just the fact that you’re the person that’s there is what they’re after. 

Your website isn’t selling anything. Your website is meant to give somebody enough of a taste that they want to try out in a sales call, talk to you and see what your deal is about. And so, when you say like, yeah, your website in the first few seconds needs to give somebody a sense of your vibe, to use your word, which I frickin love that word. That makes sense, right? Because all you’re trying to do is just get some attention, get that attraction going on, get them feeling flirty with you, and now you can have a conversation and now we can piece together where it’s actually a good fit and you can give more of the backstory if necessary and overcome objections. But all of that stuff happens after the sales conversation has been booked, typically; for most speakers.

David: Absolutely.

Austin: Are we on the same page there?

David: I think we’re on the same paragraph.

Austin: Great.

Taylorr: Great line.

Austin: I love that.

Taylorr: Love that. Yeah.

Austin: David, yeah, man.

Taylorr: Didn’t see that coming.

Austin: Dropping the hits.

David: Yeah. So, then, Taylorr, to answer your question about what other things do we need? It really depends on who we are and who our audience is. So, if you’re making most of your money through speaking and that is your goal, that’s what you want to sell. I’m here with a hot take. Stop doing SEO. Don’t do it at all. You don’t have to worry about it because your audience is not going to find you through a search, unless they’re doing what’s called a branded search, which means that they’re searching for you by your name or your company’s name. But they’re not just searching speaker on this topic and going to find you because you wrote the world’s best blog post. It’s not going to happen. 

So, don’t worry about it. You have the freedom to not worry about SEO. If you are a speaker, instead, make sure that you’re developing a message that stands out, that they can know what outcomes you’re going to produce and make sure that they can see it; if you have a sizzle reel, great, get it up there so people can see, so you’re showing, not telling, what you’re about. And also make your sizzle real half as long, because they’re not going to watch the whole thing. Front-load it and make it intriguing and make it short. If you have video of you onstage, great. Get that video on your site, make it crazy easy for people to find and engage with. 

If you’re doing a lot of virtual events, by all means, get examples of you doing virtual events there for people to see and, again, engage with. But what you really want to do is; SEO is like sending out flyers to say, Hey, party at my house. Whereas, your website or any of your hubs are the party itself, worry-less about trying to get everybody to come to your house and instead make sure that the people who do come to your house are going to have a great time when they’re there. Their favorite music’s going to be playing. I started this metaphor before I really knew where I was going, so I don’t really know what a party looks like. I haven’t thrown a party in 15 years.

Taylorr: I think it’s a great example.

David: At my age I’m like, there are some delicious hors d’oeuvres laid out. I don’t know. But you want people when they find you to go, yeah, this is the place. Don’t worry about trying to get them to come to you through organic search. To flip that a little bit, if your main product is corporate consulting, workshops, trainings, things like that, then I would say prioritize some, sort of, lead magnet and a lead magnet’s just a downloadable resource, usually gated behind an opt-in, collect an email address so that you can continue to nurture over time. But create a lead magnet that, number one, addresses the problems that your audience, typically, has that you solve in your paid workshops, training, consulting, et cetera. And then actually, if you can, kind of take them through the process of what it’s like to work with you. 

So, typically, a workshop is going to have a lot of questions, a lot of working through activities. If you can put those into a pdf with, literally, just like fill in the blank, go through these exercises. That’s going to do a few things when your target audience goes through it with their team. It’s going to probably get them a win, if it’s done decently. It’s going to make them go, oh, okay, this is cool. I’m getting quality out of something that this person provided. It’s going to educate them on your core concepts, on your process, so that they are bought-in to your deal and they’re more ready to not only buy from you, but also be an awesome client once they’re working with you, because they already know your methodology and all of that. 

And three, it’s just going to convey to them that, hey, if I’m doing this thing and it’s a generalized template and I’m getting a win from this, imagine what I’m going to get from actually hiring this person. So, if that’s your audience, build something like that, that’s going to be more relevant. It really comes down to who is your audience, what outcome do they want and what do you need to get them from where they are to where they want to be.

Taylorr: Yeah. Oh, I love this too because it’s the concept of giving it all away for free. So many people are worried about just that example, I can hear the alarms going off in our clients’ heads like, well it’s my IP, what if they use it and create a workshop with their own? I’m very controversial, people, get off your high-horse, your ideas aren’t original. Give it away for free. Give it away for free, let them experience the value, even if they DIY it, you should be pleased about that, right? You should be thrilled that there are some people out there that can just take your thing that you’ve developed and go get results from it, even if they don’t hire you. 

If your true motive in life is to create an impact, well, you locking that behind your IP and them needing to pay 15 grand for it, you’re lying to yourself if impact is the top priority for you. And then they get a taste of it and then we all know, right? They go and DIY it and what naturally happens, everything you just outlined. They do it half good and they’re like, wow, this was good, but what if we actually hired this person now? And the trust factor is so much larger and guess where they end up? Now on your contact form or your book a meeting link or something to that effect. 

So, just really want to emphasize that for people, just give away your stuff. and make it as easy as possible for them to get results without you involved, and when that’s possible, they’re just going to come back around anyway because they want you to expedite that for them.

David: And you guys do such a good job of living that. You guys don’t even gate most of your stuff behind an email opt-in. You just put it out there for everybody, which is incredible. Speakerflow.com/resources, am I right?

Taylorr: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Austin: Wow.

Taylorr: Wow. What a plug, man. Damn.

Austin: David, damn.

Taylorr: I’m going to put you on payroll too.

David: Have you guys heard of this thing called Speaker Flow?

Taylorr: What is that? That’s awesome, dude.

Austin: So, I have a question along this line, though, right? So, somebody spends three months of their life slaving over their laptop creating the coolest lead magnet that has ever existed. Follow this formula and you will have your mind blown, your organization will clear 70 billion in profit this year, all of it is a hundred percent true, coolest lead magnet ever. The problem that a lot of people run into is that nobody finds it. And so, they’ve created this amazing, valuable, awesome thing and it is sitting on a shelf just waiting for somebody to come across. So, if SEO isn’t the maneuver that you might recommend here, and maybe that does have a place at the table, everything does to some degree, I imagine. What does somebody do with it, they’ve created the thing, now what?

David: Yeah. Well, so SEO can have a seat at the table, I don’t want to totally knock on SEO. If you’re going to do SEO, I would say be thoughtful about the content that you’re creating. Don’t try to create blog posts and videos and podcasts and all of these things to try to capture people everywhere where they might be. Focus on what you’re best at. So, yeah, if you’re doing a lot of speaking, if you’re doing, especially a lot of video or a lot of virtual speaking, sure. Maybe create video, instead of writing articles and that way you’re going to hook people through the medium that they’re usually going to engage with you in, in a paid product. If you’re more comfortable writing, great, write. I am a big believer in, not only repurposing content, but proactively thinking about how you can repurpose content before you even create it. 

So, here’s an example. We all, I think every speaker thought leader that I’ve talked to in the last four years has a book that they’ve been working on that this is the year they get it launched, they swear; before life and everything else gets in the way. So, if you have a book you want to write and you also want to create content to try to bring people to your site, think about, well, what are the chapters of that book? You have 12 chapters. Great. Let’s write a blog post, one every month, on that chapter. It doesn’t have to be as complex as a full chapter; it could be a thousand words, whatever. But start thinking about what those things are. Post it online. If it’s relevant to your audience, eventually, sure, it might start bringing in some traffic. 

If it doesn’t, then at the end of a year, if you’ve written one blog post a month, you have most of your book written, at this point, it’s just throwing in, building out what you’ve already got. So, yeah, create marketing materials but do it smart. So, if you want to bring in people without worrying about SEO and without paying tons of money for paid ads or anything like that, it’s really a matter of, as much as I hate to say it, talking to people. And I’m an introvert, I don’t love talking to people, I have to psych myself up for it. But people who want to hire you are out there. You can ask for informational interviews. It doesn’t have to be a sales pitch. 

One thing that I love to do is look at what are the events that my/or companies that have booked my top five competitors in the last three or four years. And then just reach out to them, Hey, guys, I know you do this event every year. I know that you don’t want to bring in the same speaker every year. I speak on very similar topics. Here’s my deal. Here’s my vibe. Here’s my website where you can see more about my stuff. And just get in front of them, it doesn’t have to be a sales pitch so much as it’s just like, Hey, let me get on your radar. I do this stuff too. Do you want to have a conversation?

Taylorr: Heck, yeah. It doesn’t.

Austin: I love it.

Taylorr: It’s just, yeah. Yeah. Well, what I love about this conversation; one, Austin and I are very much in the same belief system here, especially because like, well, we haven’t said about this, you kind of alluded to this because you said, I hate to say this, but you’re connecting cold with people. You’re not passively waiting for your website to blow up, your social media to blow up; you’re not putting energy into a bunch of hope. You’re taking control of the process and reaching out in a way that will get results a lot quicker, even though it might be slightly more uncomfortable. But that’s the payoff for doing something like that. And you remove hope from the equation. 

We talked about this as an earlier episode and then now things become predictable and you’re in control of it. And God, how much are you going to learn in the process of doing that? You’re going to learn the phrasing that people like to hear, you’re going to be able to figure out what matters to them to create other resources that add value to their life. You’re going to go from this scarcity mindset, initially; to this abundance of I know exactly the problems you have and I just want to provide this thing for you, and if I can ever be a resource, you just let me know. 

And that approach is going to transform a business and naturally the more conversations you have, then the more followers you’re going to get on social and maybe the more traffic you might get to your website, because people are talking about you, that stuff’s going to spread like wildfire. And you don’t need to focus on a bunch of tactics that are really driven by hope and chance, you know?

David: Yeah. I love that. Ultimately, if it’s a numbers game, how do you increase that first number? If you’re increasing the number of conversations you have, then by default, you’re increasing the number of people who respond to you, which means you’re increasing the number of actual conversations that you have, which means you’re increasing the number of other people that you meet. It all, ultimately, leads to more sales, but you have to do the work. But going back to kind of the original point, if you are super, super clear on what you do, who you do it for, what they get; you can be a lot more, let’s say, laser focused, on who you’re reaching out to, who you’re having those conversations with, so you’re not just trying to talk to everybody in the world, which can be time consuming.