1980 – Why Your Marketing Strategy Needs a Makeover with The Change Starter’s Stevie Brown

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1:06With us right now, it's Stevie V. Brown. Stevie, you are the CEO of The Change Starter. You are an outsourced marketing specialist for growing businesses. Your book is called The Care Factor Fix, How to Finally Get Results from Marketing. Your website is thechangestarter.com. Stevie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Looking forward to it. Yeah, so give us an overview of what The Change Starter is and what you do. Yeah, sure. No worries. So, well, the ChangeStarter has been around for about nearly 10 years now. So next year will be our 10-year anniversary.

1:43And, you know, we've had some evolutions, but essentially what we do right now is we are an outsourced marketing team for SMBs. And, you know, my background was before my business was working with corporates. I've worked with all the big major, you know, global brands and, you know, work with the big ad agencies and the big marketing companies. And so, you know, I've got all that experience and knowledge and now I love to bring that to SMBs who don't necessarily have the funds or, you know, the budgets or the resourcing to really, you know, tap into all of that kind of big corporate thinking. So we've been doing that for 10 years.

2:18And essentially what we do now is we create a strategy for those businesses. You know, typically SMBs don't have a very formal marketing strategy in place. So we put that together for them, really zone in on their targeting, make sure that we're clear, what are we actually trying to do here? And who are we trying to do it with? And how do we clarify, you know, what the marketing is going to do versus what the business is doing in general, as it's developing and growing. And then once we've kind of got that strategy in place, we put a team together to implement that. And so we, you know, we pull from internal team and also external resources that we can build the most effective and efficient team that's going to be right for that client.

2:58So it's all done bespokely to what that client is going to need. And then we implement it for you. So we have a marketing manager that is the kind of one contact for the client and they work for us, but they're sort of like, you know, the main contact. And then the client gets that one point of contact and they can talk with them about everything they need. So it keeps it really streamlined. And then the marketing manager makes it all happen behind the scenes. So, you know, if you're the business owner, you can get on with running your business, you know, that your marketing is happening. And, you know, we really seek to build long-term relationships with clients because you know marketing is not something that happens overnight despite what some people out there would you know probably have you think um that's oh it's just a two-month job and then it'll all be done um you know we always of course um you know business really is innovation uh of your products and services and then marketing them so if you're not doing marketing long term if you don't have a long-term partner then that's something that you know really needs to be fixed in any business um and it's really really critical so that's definitely what we what we provide yeah well stevie i it's interesting i i feel like there's a lot of us like if you're an entrepreneur you automatically feel like um you're responsible solely for marketing and certainly at the very very beginning that may be likely the case um but but i i believe it's my opinion that that is one of the areas that i mean unless you're actually like that's totally within your skillset or your zone of genius.

4:30That's something I think that most of us would benefit from, from bringing in somebody with that expertise, not just an operator, but someone who could provide some leadership with that as well. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, like, I think, you know, as business owners, we all, you're right. We try to be all things. We try to kind of show that we know how to do everything, But of course we don't. And, you know, we might come into a business with an area of expertise from our background. We don't necessarily then know all of the other areas that we need as a business owner.

5:03And we learn those as we go. And like you say in the beginning, of course, you know, you kind of have to do everything yourself. When you're first starting a business, you don't you can't bring in people. You don't have money. You don't have, you know, the ability to lead a team. And so you are doing it yourself. And I think it's great that we, you know, learn all those skills and capabilities as business owners. but we can't all be an expert in everything. So at the end of the day, it just makes more sense. If you really want to grow your business, you have to bring in other people. And, you know, if you've been in business for three to five years plus, then you really should be at the point where you are outsourcing pretty much everything so that you can actually focus on being that leadership role for the business, the vision, and everything that you want to do in the future and really look at those growth plans.

5:44And I think I try to challenge business owners to say, you know, what are you really doing day to day when you really break down what you're spending your time on? And nine times out of 10, you know, they're not actually focused on the vision. They're not focused on the next 10 years. They're just thinking about what's going to happen next month. And so really, I think, you know, part of our role and the thing that we can do really well is partner with a business so that they can take a step up the ladder and start thinking about what the future of that business should be. So I think it's really important that we don't, you know, we kind of put our egos out the way and not try to be great at everything, but actually accept that there are other people with expertise that we can outsource to.

6:21And that's how we grow. That's how we can really expand and scale on things. So yeah, I think it's absolutely critical that business owners recognize that and understand how important marketing is to their growth. Yeah. And listen, I think that any CEO or any leader, any entrepreneur should not feel badly that, You know, that like they are just supposed to innately know how to be an incredible marketer. Listen, you know, to my friend that's a leader, you're maybe the founder or CEO of your company. Identifying what your zone of genius is, I think, is so critical. And staying within your zone of genius is so critical.

7:03And I think a lot of us, Stevie, I'll speak for myself that, you know, when I do work that is outside of that zone, that's where I start to maybe not enjoy my work as much. And, or I put way too much pressure on myself to be something that I'm not. Now I happen to enjoy marketing a bit. So that one's not necessarily a big gap for me. But, you know, I, we work with a lot of brilliant consultants and to expect that they are going to be obsessing over marketing trends and what's working and some of those big decisions. Again, I think it's pretty critical that you bring in a really great team. So Stevie, I want to know what it looks like.

7:52Maybe you could share a story of a client that you work with. What does it look like when you bring in that marketing team through the change starter? how does the CEO adapt who may have been carrying too much of that burden on their shoulders? Yeah. So it's super interesting what happens actually, because what we find is that when we start working with clients, they suddenly feel a bit lost. They're kind of like, oh, now I don't have this burden on my shoulders anymore. Somebody's kind of taken this hat off my head and they sort of don't always know what they're supposed to do next. And it kind of depends like what stage they're at in their business journey, you know, how commercial they are as a thinker, like, you know, where you're at, you know, we're all on a journey with our business as a business owner.

8:38But, you know, when they are more experienced in business, they tend to kind of go, okay, great. Well, that's that ticked off. I've got that project underway. That's happening. We've got a partner, no problem. Now we can focus on, you know, the things that we couldn't get to before because we were really busy trying to keep the marketing running. But for other business owners, they find that they don't really know where to take themselves next. So what we try to do actually is educate around that as well. So when we start working with a client, you know, the first stage is really discovery. We want to learn as much about their business as we can as quickly as possible.

9:07So we go through that stage. And I think that gives the businesses real confidence that, oh, okay, these people actually are interested in our business. They want to understand the products and services. They want to understand our audience, how our operations work, everything like that. And so once we've started to learn that, we can start to take that burden off their shoulders. And then we try to educate them to say, so here's all the stuff you can be doing now. So if you're not quite sure what you should be doing, if you're not doing marketing, well, Hey, look, you know, where's your sales at?

9:35Where are your, you know, where's your sales team or your business development team? What are they doing? Is that still you? Have you got people in place? How are you going to develop that aspect of it? Because if we're going to be bringing you leads and engagement to your business with the marketing activities we're going to be doing, well then are you, how well equipped and set up are you to actually take those on? So I think we can start to shift the business owner into kind of a higher level thinking and enable them to really get on with things that they've really felt they haven't been able to do before.

10:03Because I think marketing is a great distraction, right? It's like, oh, I have to do an email. I have to do some social posts. I have to do, you know, some blog content. And that takes a lot of time. So all of a sudden you filled your day and you're not really getting on with important jobs for you as a business owner. And I think it's a good distraction. So once we remove that distraction from them, it's a great journey for them. And we can partner with them to say, okay, cool, we've released you now. Off you go. You can do all these other things that you didn't have time to do. And we can kind of guide you a little bit on that journey as they build trust with us.

10:34So it is a journey and it does take a while. So in the first year of working with a client, you know, it is about getting us on board and us getting a strategy in place and a team in place and getting, you know, the systems going for that particular client. But it's also a journey for the business owner. It is a leap off a cliff when they start to work with a business like ours, because they really do have that opportunity to take themselves to their next level of growth as well. And so I think it's really exciting when we start to see that happen. And then when we start to see, you know, we've got the marketing in place and things are starting to happen for them.

11:12They're getting more engagement, more inquiries, more leads, whatever it may be for them. They start going, oh, wow. Okay, cool. We really can, you know, take this to another level. And we didn't know that before. So it really builds a lot of confidence in business owners as well to have a professional marketing function in place. And it's pretty exciting stuff, but it's definitely a growth journey. And, you know, it's but it's an exciting one for us and for the business. Yeah. Stevie, share with us, you know, we're now into the second half of 2024. for, what do you see as really critical in today's marketing?

11:51And what do you also see having fallen out of favor that you would probably urge leaders to look at with a little bit more of a critical lens? Yeah, great question. So look, I think we're in a tough economy pretty much everywhere in the Western world for sure. and you know when you have that you really just need to make sure that your basics are in place and this can be you know particularly with digital marketing things can fall out of out of whack and not be set up properly and I think it's important to just have those critical infrastructure pieces happening I mean we have you know people we talk to who are like we don't know how much traffic we have to our website and and that's such an easy fix it's like just install Google Analytics you should be looking at that.

12:38You should know this. This should all be in place. So really, it's sometimes really good to just take that step back and go back to basics. Have we got basic systems in place for lead generation? Like what's going to happen once someone fills out an inquiry form? Do we actually know where that inquiry form is going? So it might sound really simple, but I think that as businesses evolve over time, things can kind of fall out. And if they haven't got a function, they haven't got someone specifically looking at those things as a, you know, a full-time kind of marketing team that's focused on that, then actually they, those things can kind of, you know, they change the website and then they forgot to update the email address.

13:14And it's really simple stuff, but imagine how many leads you could miss if you, you know, if your form was going to somebody else. So again, it's just checking the basics, auditing your website. Is it the best it can be? Is your SEO in place? You know, is, is the, is your email, you know, have you got an email marketing software that's picking up those, you know, form fills. So we've got that, you know, we've got that data. Have you got your opt-ins and everything, you know, legally checked out for people opting in for marketing? So I would say, you know, really go back to basics and make sure that the basics are in place because sometimes you can pick up some really big wins there.

13:49And I've literally had that happen with us before. We've had a client come on and we've checked everything out, which we always do in the beginning. You know, we ordered everything. We look at where everything's set up and you find these little things. You go, wow, this is just not even fixed up properly. And imagine how much traffic they lost or how many leads they lost because they didn't have this in place. So I think back to basics is a really good thing to do. And I think the other thing that people don't always put enough focus on, which kind of baffles me because, you know, I kind of say these days that marketing is content, content is marketing.

14:21Like content is absolutely what we do to market in the digital age. And a lot of businesses, they don't actually have that content in place. So, you know, if you are, even if you're sitting back right now, because maybe, you know, times are a bit challenging, and you're thinking, maybe we're not going to spend so much on, you know, ads, or that kind of thing, you know, maybe you've done that before, you've been doing that, and you go, let's just pull it back a bit, because it's expensive. And we want to kind of, you know, look at other smart ways to do this. Well, then what are you doing to build your organic, you know, search engine rankings and get your website optimized?

14:55And, you know, have you got an organized blog and have you set up your content in the right way? And are you actually tracking specific keywords that you want to rank for? Because these can be really easy wins for businesses. When we look at content plans, we look at keywords and we go, wow, they're not even ranking for that keyword. They haven't even tried. And it's like such an obvious keyword for their business, for their industry. And it's an easy one as well, like no difficulty to actually rank for it. So, you know, I find that businesses are often losing, leaving a lot of money and opportunity on the table just because they haven't got really basic things of digital marketing in place.

15:32And I think that when you, as particular, if you want to kind of reset a little bit this year, and you want to sort of step back on high ad spends, you might want to just have a bit of an audit, bit of a check, and just see if you're missing something really critical that could make a huge difference. And even your website, like your homepage, what's going on at the top of that homepage? Is that as bad, as good as it can be? Because I've had, again, clients before where we look at their website and go, wow, if we just put a button up here, you're going to get a whole different ballgame going with your website.

16:06And then you do it and they get all this traffic and they get all these leads and they go, wow, that's been sitting there like that for five years. So I think it's back to basics. I think that's the way to go, right? Yeah. Yeah. I tell you, it is absolutely pretty important to do those audits of what we're communicating, because I think we've all had that experience that you just described where we look at something and go, how great. We haven't said that in over three, four years, and it's just been sitting out there. That's embarrassing. But listen, you're not alone to our friend that's also had that experience.

16:40Stevie, I know you've got a book as well. Do you mind sharing a bit about the Care Factor Fix. If our friend goes to the changestarter.com, you can get this. Share more about the book and who needs to read it, what you would expect in terms of the transformation that would take place. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So yeah, so the book is The Care Factor Fix, and the Care Factor Fix model was something I developed as part of my master's degree in digital marketing. So it's all done from proprietary research. And what I was really fascinated to understand is where I could see that there was this huge disconnect between business owners and then marketing providers.

17:20So that could be internal marketing people that you hire, it could be consultants, it could be marketing agencies, anybody that you have involved in your business that's going to do something in the marketing realm for you. And we'll just call them a marketing provider. And what was happening was I would talk to marketing providers and they would say, oh, you know, clients, they're just so annoying. like you know they don't you know they don't understand timelines and their expectations are ridiculous and they want to get all this done for this budget but it's not enough budget and you know they don't communicate properly and we don't get a brief and so I would get all these kind of complaints on that end and then on the client end it would be oh these marketing providers are useless you know we don't get any results we're not getting anywhere like you know we don't hear from them they don't communicate they're not doing anything and so I was like what is going on here Why is there this like huge kind of disconnect?

18:09And so when I researched that with both sides of the coin, I kind of found out that there were four areas, these four pillars, which, you know, make up the word care, which is commitment, accountability, realism, and engagement. And if these four pillars are not aligned in your business, in your relationship with your marketing provider, then you're not going to have a good experience with that marketing provider. And if you fix those pillars, then you're going to have a really good long-term relationship with your provider. And I think it really starts with that commitment piece, which is about saying, we understand that marketing is not an overnight thing.

18:45It's not something we're going to do for a month and then quit. We're going to always need to market our business. We always need to do some form of marketing. And it's going to be a long-term partnership that we need to build with someone who can really help us grow and we'll all grow together. So I think that's the first piece. And then you need to commit to the strategy and you need to commit to a budget and not kind of knee-jerk react to stuff as things change. You know, it's very easy to knee-jerk react because maybe something happened in the business and you're, oh, God, you know, we need to suddenly save some money or whatever.

19:15But that's not necessarily the right approach to take. You know, you should be consistent with your budget and commit and also with your strategy. You've got to let strategy needs time to seed. It needs time to take hold. So you've got to trust in the process. So that's kind of the commitment side. The accountability side is about, you know, where people's roles are. And I think getting clarity of those roles is super, super important. So, you know, your role as a business owner, it's you can't just sort of shove marketing off to your marketing provider and they are great, that part solved. And now we don't ever need to think about that again.

19:49Right. You've got to still be part of the process because the marketing has to slot into your overall operations of your business. So marketing is part of your business. So you're doing your business or service development, creating whatever it is that you sell. And then you've got to work with the marketing provider to say, right, well, this is what it is and this is how we want to sell it and what it's all about, why we developed it so they can market it. And then it's got to go through your sales team and the sales team has to understand where the marketing came from, right? So really, we want to be integrating with your entire system.

20:21So accountability, understanding who's responsible for what is key, and knowing that as a business owner, you know, the sales of the business and the growth of the business is ultimately up to you. Marketing is going to help. They're going to bring the horse to water, but your sales team's probably got to make it drink, particularly in B2B sales, much more important to have that sales or business development side of things nailed down. So that's really accountability pieces, you know, who's responsible for what and are they going to put their hand up and say, yeah, I, I did, you know, I didn't do a good enough job here and I need to work harder if, if that's the case.

20:52And then the other two are really more about, you know, realism and engagement are really more about timelines and budgets and, and how engaged and communicative everybody is in the process. So, you know, if, if we're realistic, we have to have conversations to be realistic about timelines, because often a client will come with an expectation about the budget, about the time it takes either to do something or the time it takes to get results from that. And then also they'll have expectations about what a result is. And usually what I found in my research is that small businesses think that results mean sales.

21:27They don't think about the leads. They don't think about the relationship they might need to build and how long that relationship might take to build, particularly in B2B. It's, you know, yes, if you're an e-com business and you're selling a product, then it's a much faster, transaction, right? So the marketing goes straight through to the sale. But if you are a B2B consultant, coach, services provider, agency, you have to build relationships and relationships take time, right? So you're not going to just, you know, just because the marketing got you an inquiry doesn't mean you're going to get a sale from that straight away.

22:03It might be six months, it might be 12 months, who knows, you know? So really, really important that you set those expectations and clarity and even semantics. What does results mean to each party? Really important to set those in advance. So that's sort of a very brief overview of the model. And if you go to the book and read the book and use the book, it's got some tools in it that actually help you to really assess where you're at with your care factor in your business, and then how can you fix it and really go towards a long-term partnership with your marketing provider. Stevie V. Brown, you are the CEO of The Change Starter, outsourced marketing specialist for growing businesses.

22:43Your book, The Care Factor Fix, How to Finally Get Results from Marketing, your website, thechangestarter.com. Stevie, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much.

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