1930 – Exploring Innovative Marketing Strategies with Marketing Magic’s Menekse Stewart

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1:06With us right now, Manekshia Stewart. Manekshia, you are the founder of Marketing Magic. You're found on the web at marketingmagic.app. We're going to share some links in the show notes for this episode. Also your website, hey, Manekshia. And if you are wondering how to spell that like I was, it's K-M-E-N-E-K-S-E dot com. It's great to have you, Manexia. Thank you so much. Thankfully, now that Google's algorithm is no longer exact match, even if you search for me and do a misspelling, I tend to come up. So nobody needs to worry about being able to spell my name properly. Yeah, well, you do a lot of work in and around kind of that intersection of AI and marketing.

1:55And then natural, I'd say you're a big fan of things like quiz funnels. We'll talk a little bit about that. Our audience tends to be, I didn't share this with you ahead of time, but we've been around for a little while. Like we're usually a lot of leaders, a lot of founders and have been at the helm for five or more years. So obviously, AI is incredibly disruptive. and in a good way, hopefully for most of us. But Manekha, would you mind maybe just kind of describing your impact in your work today and who you serve and what you do? Yeah. So currently, I work with small business owners with Marketing Magic and have built up the system for that.

2:33But I actually started out in SEO in 2005 and worked in a variety of different agencies and on different projects up until about 2016, 2017, when I became a freelance head of marketing. and have worked with sort of a handful of, you know, substantial thought leaders and people who've got a really big body of work. They might have bestselling books, podcasts, a sort of framework for teaching and coaching, but really in that knowledge commerce space. And a lot of the work involved in that was optimising for, you know, brand presence, making sure that people's, you know, intellectual property is at the top of Google and that there's traffic coming from multiple sources like really designing out some sort of evergreen customer journeys and that in between launches, in between promotions, in between new books coming out, there's still that consistent audience growth happening.

3:30I also in 2018 started teaching marketing strategy and search engine optimization for university of the arts london and l education which is working with a lot of heads of marketing and heads of pr and marketing teams from global companies around the world so i've had a varied um sort of background and i tend to summarize it by saying i'm a professional nerd but it's been heavily focused on the content and side of things because of the sort of seo leaning, which is why, you know, AI and machine learning has been a professional interest for me since about 2017. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, let's give a little instructional segment here and kind of maybe talking about things that for business leaders, I would really, you know, that you would really recommend they pay attention to.

4:23And, you know, again, just things in their leadership or how they're presenting their marketing that they pay attention to and things that they should really be doing? Yeah, so I think we've seen a real trend in the last few years since the pandemic of empathy and leadership and what it looks like to be a human leader. It's really taken a shift away from a lot of the productivity content that we were seeing throughout the 2010s. And I think that the rise in AI has really contributed to people's awareness that you can automate the cognitive intelligence behind a task. You can automate decision-making processes, but you can't automate the things that connect you to your audience the things that um really connect you to your team that are relational that are culturally relevant that contextual that are nuanced and so as we are going into this sort of new era of the internet um a lot of disruption is happening for people where they've you know had courses and course launches there's a really huge area that's being impacted at the moment um where people might have been doing you know big launches and seeing like a lot of revenue coming into their business for a model that they've had in place for five, ten or more years.

5:33And now they're doing it and they're getting 20 % of the sales that they were getting previously. And the real takeaway that we can sort of add into our marketing and considerations is how overwhelmed our consumers are, how overwhelmed the people are in our spaces with the amount of content that is available to them. And so as business leaders, our responsibility is to lead with the context that we add to our audience's lives. The customers are coming to us with problems, with things that are relevant to them. And they don't necessarily care like how many podcasts we've been on or how many stages we've spoken on or how big our business is.

6:17They care like how well we can solve their problems. And so as we are setting up marketing systems and investing in assets for our marketing moving forwards, the question that we have for ourselves is, is this going to help my ideal customer solve a problem in the long term? Is this something that is going to be useful, relevant and valuable to them? And it's going to shortcut the learning process that they have to go to to reach a solution and an outcome. and you know that the adoption of AI, the adoption of chat GPT and how quickly that grew can feel maybe a little bit threatening for how rapidly things are going to be changing but the summary takeaway is that people want contextual responses, they don't want to be putting things into a search engine and getting 16 million results, they want to be able to ask a question that is relevant to them and get a relevant answer and so that's really the big transition that many business leaders need to kind of understand about how marketing and communication is changing in the next few years.

7:21Yeah. So what would be an example of someone that you're working with and you're observing maybe some new marketing practices or they've made some recent changes and it really worked for the better? And if you could be kind of explicit on like what they did yeah so one example is going from having a very generic marketing audience to having first party data um about your audience and doing segmentation and really understanding more about your audience's interests and um we're not just thinking about demographics we're thinking about you know what are their values what goals are they working towards what are they worried about what concerns do they have how do we um understand more about who our customers are um in a first party data way so how can we collect that information in our businesses so you mentioned quiz funnels earlier and I think I'm just gonna you know build out on that and one of the projects that I worked on with a thought leader who had around you know 160 ,000 subscribers on their mailing list was how do we build out something that helps us to understand more about who is subscribing to these emails and while also enabling us to segment and understand which of those people is most qualified for the services, the products, the offers that we have.

8:44So the quiz funnel had, you know, maybe four results. And you've got a couple of those results where they have a direct qualification for a service or a product or an offer. And then a whole load of other people where maybe they're not qualified quite yet, but it's given you insight into the trends of your audience. What are the key topics? What are the key challenges? What are the ways that people are sort of perceiving their problems? And again, it just really helps with being able to personalize your marketing messaging when you have those systems in place. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more for someone that's not actively using, again, what you called a quiz funnel?

9:24Tell me about the strength of that. Who is it appropriate for? And when I say who, think about both, you know, kind of who would host that quiz and what kind of population or what kind of audience would be appropriate for that? Yeah, so they are really industry generic in a lot of ways, because it's ultimately taking the segments that you're working with within your business and thinking, okay, like if I'm an enterprise client, who am I? Am I targeting CMOs of$500 million plus revenue per year? Like what are the key challenges that they have? And how do I filter out those people from all of the other CMOs?

10:05Like what are the kinds of things that they're going to be experiencing? What problems are they going to be having? You know, if you look at e-commerce, being able to qualify and you see this a lot in the beauty industry, actually, where people do things like shade finder quizzes for makeup brands for foundation. And in athletics, you'll see quizzes where people are being asked, you know, what kind of workouts they enjoy the most. So it's really any if you think about your industry, it's like what information is helpful to you as a business owner, but also what information is driving the decision making?

10:39behind your customers' decisions and how can you build out a piece of content that filters out both the things that you need to know, but also the things that you might not yet realize are a big trend among the people that you're trying to target with your business services or offers. Yeah. Manekha, how do you work with, you've got the platform here, Marketing Magic. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, so I built this at the end of 2022, start of 2023. And it really turned my brain into an AI tool is the shortest way of describing it. Really looking towards small business owners and people with smaller teams, people who are starting up, who don't yet have the resources to build out, you know, a team of humans, but they need that extra support, they're feeling overwhelmed.

11:30So the average business owner is saving about 40 hours a month at the moment with that and it's effectively a marketing assistant in their pocket um and uh it's been a really enjoyable uh project to work on because a lot of the sort of ai tools are starting to focus on enterprise and some of the sort of bigger businesses that want to build out big ai systems to automate things in-house um but there's a whole cohort of people who are juggling life and parenting and chronic illness and small business and all of the different things that happen within the sort of small to medium enterprise space for freelancers and solopreneurs that are kind of can't afford the budget but because their business isn't scalable beyond what they're making with their own hands or beyond the sort of goals that they have for their businesses so the goal behind the tool is to really make that ai technology accessible for people who don't necessarily want to scale an enterprise but they still are having incredible impact in the space that they're working in with their own businesses.

12:36Yeah. So your website, do you mind sharing? So you can go to the website. It's get.marketingmagic.app. So again, to our friend that's listening, it's probably just best that you go to the website so you can see exactly what this is. But it's basically a suite of AI enabled. Can you, I'm just trying to make sure folks understand. Yeah, so basically like all of the, it takes a product marketing approach to building out your marketing and sales assets. So if you think about launching something into the market, you go through the process of ideating, understanding who your ideal audience is, and then you have to like map out your product specification, create your sales suite, so sales page, any assets for, you know, checkout, or if it's a service discovery call and that kind of process and the nurture that happens with that.

13:28And then the marketing that actually drives traffic to those sales assets so if you've got a service page a sales page um it's fine to be actively promoting that but if you don't have a suite and body of content that is bringing people over you're always going to be um getting stuck in terms of the number of leads that are coming through and so the idea is that you can build out strategic blog posts content that is informed by the ideal audience and the sales um um assets for that product so it really is like an all-in-one marketing strategist for creating um a sort of digital platform that brings your ideal audience to you um and just helps to unlock more time and energy for other things um because marketing is and especially online marketing is predominantly functional a lot of the things that we're having to do are formatted in a way that is very functionally driven and historically advertising and marketing we're actually a lot more about the sort of fun elements in our businesses where we're thinking about okay how do we creatively communicate this you know what are some of the visual ways that we can represent the outcome or the impact or the benefit of this and instead of having the time and space to do that because of the nature of digital marketing we're often just um you know briefing our teams on the creation of copy-based assets and we don't necessarily have that time energy and creativity to do things in a more interesting format and so um you know automating the functional and then having more time and energy to be able to do really fun marketing visual marketing uh marketing that engages in different formats across different channels um is really the like joy of being able to um get some of those things um you know more automated yeah uh manekshia um your website as well heymanaksha.com do you mind sharing the resources that are available there you've got on this website you've got workshops you've got I guess funnel systems that that you sell and then certainly opportunities to work with you as well do you mind describing what you'd find there yeah so I do a lot of education and because of the nature of my work with University of the Arts London and L Education and so there are different workshops and things that I run throughout the year live but also on demand and they explore different marketing strategies and how you can build them out and people will you know do them themselves to kind of give themselves a bit of creative inspiration or often I'll have people you know putting their team members onto things to upskill their team as well and then in terms of one-to-one stuff I don't do a whole lot anymore but I do enjoy a meeting marketing strategy project and I do VIP days just to work through the sort of nitty gritty of people's marketing systems and look at ways that more automation can be added in or how AI can be utilized, but also how you can optimize your presence for more organic visibility as you are growing your business online and in the real world.

16:28Yeah. So to our friend that's listening, where do they go next? What would you recommend? I mean, you've got a few options here. We've talked about a few options. We have talked about a lot. Yeah. So obviously, if you are a more established entrepreneur, you might want to have a conversation about how we can look at optimizing your team and building out some systems in house. And that would be a super fun conversation. So do feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to. And if you're looking for ways of really helping your team make the most out of their work hours and their available hours, do check out marketingmagic.app and see if that can be a helpful resource for your team.

17:07Yeah, excellent. All right. Manaksha Stewart, your websites. Once again, heymanaksha.com. And then of course, get.marketingmagic.app. Manaksha Stewart, you're the founder of EACH. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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