1947 – Exploring the Importance of Marketing and Trends with Lorraine Ball

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1:05With us right now, it's Lorraine Ball. Lorraine, you are a podcast host and a marketing strategist, and you are found on the web at more than a few words.com also happens to be the name of your podcast to our friend that's listening. I think you're going to like this episode. You're going to want to just do a quick search for in your podcast app for more than a few words. And you'll find Lorraine's podcast. Lorraine, you've had over a thousand episodes. Congratulations on your longevity. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for the invitation, Josh. The short answer is I love podcasting.

1:46You know, it has just been so much fun. Yeah, well, give us the long answer on why that's the case. so the the podcast started as an experiment when I was running my digital agency and I had an intern who came in and he said you like to talk and I went yeah big surprise there and he said you should start a podcast and this is 2000 at that time 2009 and I was like what's a podcast and we set it up as an experiment and discovered it was a great way to connect with other marketing professionals. In the early days, it was also a great way to connect with my business community, with my clients to feature their marketing stories.

2:32And so the content built and it was an integral part of marketing and promoting my core business, as well as marketing and promoting my speaking business. Fast forward 19 years, or 10 years from that point, I sell the agency, but I still like the conversations. And so today, more than a few words is a standalone entity. It no longer is designed just to promote the marketing services, although there are so many lessons in those podcasts that I often share them with my consulting clients and my marketing students. Yeah. Well, Lorraine, I'm sure that, you know, again, doing what you do and for the longevity, again, that you've had in the space, you've seen a lot of trends.

3:22What, from your perspective, is just really important for business leaders to be paying attention to today if they want to be doing their marketing right? I think that they have to, they're going to have to find where AI fits, but I think they have to avoid the temptation to let AI do it all. What we're seeing is this race to the bottom, because where AI draws its inspiration is from the average of the internet. And as more AI generated content gets out there, the average goes down. And so I think number one, the paying attention to, yes, AI is a good tool. I use it all the time. Keeping your content and your information unique is really critical.

4:17I think the other thing that business owners really are going to struggle with, they're struggling with now and will continue to, is as the social media and marketing platforms push to a zero-click environment, It is harder and harder to attribute a sale to a particular piece of content. And so in a way, we are back where we were 20 years ago, kind of the Wild West or even pre-internet where you ran a television ad, you knew people saw it, but you really couldn't say, Joe who bought from me yesterday came as a result of that ad. And so setting up different metrics to really measure and hold accountable their marketing and being more prepared when they're operating in the digital space to focus on real engagement, on real interaction.

5:15We were talking about that offline before we started this conversation that putting content out there is great. But if you're not interacting, if you're not engaging, if people aren't paying attention to you, it doesn't matter. And posting that link and say, click here, is worthless. Good luck. Absolutely. Yeah. Lorraine, I'm curious about your perception of the minds of consumers and buyers and decision makers today. You know, and I talk about this a lot. In a way, marketing hasn't changed in 50 years. Marketing tools have changed. But the real psychology behind making those marketing decisions, the process people go through to eliminate alternatives, to identify with a particular product or service, that's the same classic marketing that my professors were learning when they were in marketing school.

6:21And so the fundamental of understanding who your customer is, what their pain points on, who do they associate with, who do they identify with, all of that is still relevant. I think the biggest differences is more brought about by the tools. There is a level of impatience where you can see this. Watch an old movie. Watch a close-up of Ingrid Bergman and the camera lingers on her face. Today's audience has pulled out their phones and they're already researching something else before the camera leaves her face. We have been conditioned. Movie cuts are faster. Reels, 10, 15, 20 seconds. And so there is the need to adapt your messaging to smaller bites of relevant information.

7:15You still have to have the long stories. But you have to be able to break it up for the shorter and shorter attention spans of your audience. That's the biggest difference. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Lorraine, tell me a bit about the work you do today, who you serve and what that looks like. So I today would use the analogy of a general practitioner. You're not feeling well, but you don't really know why. And so you go to the doctor, he runs some tests, he figures or he or she figures out some stuff about you, and then we'll recommend specialists. And that's really what I love doing with marketing today.

8:00I love working with companies that have some marketing, and they're just, they're not sure it's firing on all cylinders. And so I can go in, I can do a web audit, I can do a social media audit, I'll do a content audit, I'll talk to them about the overall marketing budget. How much are you spending? Where are you spending? And help them develop a plan, at which point they can either go back to their service providers, they can go to their internal teams, or I can recommend a network of people that I work with to do the real execution. So that's kind of my superpower is the ability to diagnose. I also love doing strategy work, just in general, building a soup to nuts marketing plan for a product or service.

8:48But the reality is, other than startups, most businesses have stuff out there, and it's a little disjointed. And so the people that come to me and the people that get the most value out of the interactions are people that are doing a ton of stuff, but it's either disconnected or just not delivering the results. And we'll go in and try to figure out, here's why this is or isn't working. Here's what you need to change. Yeah. And then, so to our friend that's listening now, when you, let's say that someone ends up on your calendar. You're going to have an initial conversation together. Where do you find yourself typically?

9:34Where does that conversation typically go? I have three questions that help me figure out right away. Do you have a good foundation? And then kind of identify the starting point. And the three questions are, who is your customer? what's your environment like and what is your objective and those sound really easy but whenever I ask the who is the customer I always get the well this and this we work with these and these and so that already creates the all right we need to get clear on the center of your circle or you know who's on the periphery but you cannot you cannot create a relevant marketing campaign for women because women are not a homogeneous group.

10:24Are you talking to young women? Are you talking to women of color? Are you talking to women with children? Are you talking to women who have never made a decision to have children? And on a wide range of products, those criteria are important. So who is your customer? The second thing is the environment. And I want to know who are your competitors. And very often I get the, well, I don't really have competition. Nobody does what I do. Wrong answer. And so you're kidding yourself because even if you have a completely revolutionary product, your product solves a problem. And yesterday, before you launched your revolutionary product, people who had that problem did something.

11:12It might not be as good as what you're offering, but they had a solution. That solution, even if it doesn't look like your product, is your competitor. So getting really clear, and I have a whole class on this, but getting really clear on who is your competition, because that's going to help you decide what do you really talk about in your short marketing tips. If you're competing with another company that does what you do, you better talk features and benefits. But if you're talking, if you're competing with a company that has a completely different solution, you need to talk about why your solution is more cost effective, is smarter, is faster, is whatever.

11:55But if you don't know who you're competing against, you don't know what to talk about. And then the third piece is, what's your objective? Well, I want to sell more. Great. Do you want to sell more to the same customers? Do you want more and different customers? Do you want to sell higher margin product? Do you want to focus your sales on this particular product? Until you decide what you really want. Yeah. Again, you can't create. So 30 minutes, I'm going to ask you those three questions. And we're going to start to uncover where the holes are and then decide what makes sense after that. your website Lorraine is uh more than a few words your podcast more than a few words what does that mean and who should subscribe to the podcast and who should be following you so more than a few words my mother said I was born talking that I always had more than a few words so when we named the podcast it seemed like the appropriate thing today more than a few words is a marketing conversation for business owners.

13:09There are two types of episodes. There are 10-minute interviews where we drop a very quick little bit of marketing knowledge on you. And it is designed to spark a thought, give you a nice starting point, introduce you to people who are experts in whatever it is we're talking about. And then there's a, my Sunday morning shows are usually a one or a two-minute just marketing idea. And those are just me. And the show by design is those short episodes, because I understand that my audience are business owners. They are busy. They are doing other things as much as they would love to sit down and watch a 25 minute video.

13:56Their day does not allow it. It's hard. So it is. And so putting myself in the shoes of my audience, when do I listen to podcasts? I listen to podcasts when I'm on the treadmill. I listen to podcasts when I'm out walking. I listen to podcasts when I'm driving between meetings. And so the one minute and the 10 minute shows allow you to get a complete thought and get onto whatever else your next meeting is. And so it's very much designed for business owners. Some of the conversations are geared towards more early stage companies. A lot of the more technical stuff, when we really geek out on some of the marketing trends, that's really over the heads of maybe my early stage companies, but a more established business is going to go, oh yeah, that makes sense.

14:50Oh, we've done that? It didn't work. How did they get it to work? And so that's really what that show is about. Yeah, I love it. Success leaves clues. I really, you know, again, in terms of like escalating our path forward, as much time as we can spend at the feet of other people who have been there, done that, already gotten their nose bloodied a few times so that we don't have to. So very, very simply to our friend that's listening, just search for more than a few words. You can find the podcast. Also, you can go to more than a few words.com. Uh, Lauren, when they go there, what would you recommend that they do?

15:26I recommend they do several things. Number one, listen to, listen to the newest episodes, get a sense of what we're talking about. I promise you, it's a 10 minute commitment. It, you know, it's, it's not going to be a 30 minute commitment. Sign up for our newsletter and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. The cool thing is if you, if you sign up for the newsletter, we'll send you updates with, I usually, because I have so many episodes, I usually send a new episode and then one from the archive that's on a related topic. So you kind of get a one-two punch from the newsletter. And, you know, it's been fun because we just relaunched, well, we just dropped our 1000th episode.

16:10And so I've been going back and I've been listening to some of the early ones. And, you know, the audio quality is not what I'm used to back, you know, 2010, 2011, but the content, the information that we were sharing back then is as relevant today as it was then. And that's, that's really fun to dive way back into the archive. Yeah. Lorraine Ball, podcast host and marketing strategist, your website and podcast, more than a few words.com. Lorraine, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This has been a lot of fun.

16:52Thanks for listening to the thoughtful entrepreneur show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

17:33I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm gonna share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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