2192 - Crafting a Smart Marketing Strategy in a Tech-Driven World with Butler Marketing Group's Sheila Butler

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1:05With us right now, it's Sheila Butler. Sheila, you are the founder and chief marketing officer with Butler Marketing Group. You're found on the web at butlermg.com. You work as a fractional CMO and marketing consultant. And Sheila, you're also a fellow Orlanduan. I think, is that what we call each other? I'll go with that, yes. Orlanduan, whatever it is. We live in Orlando. Also, we each happen to have some affinity for Disney. I think a lot of people who move here, like especially if you intentionally moved here, you probably like the mouse to some degree, like some of the experience. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have some background with Disney as well.

1:51I do. So I decided at the age of six on my second Disney trip that I was going to work at Disney one day. I don't know many people who decided when they were six what they wanted to do, but I did. And I followed that dream. And so I started my career at Disney and entertainment. And then I convinced someone in marketing to hire me for a project. And so I had left the Orlando area, moved up to Philly and then D.C. It was a slow crawl back down. But during the pandemic, I built a home down here. And my only stipulation was I want to be near the park so much so that I can see the Magic Kingdom fireworks from my house.

2:34And so on a stressful work week, especially as a fractional CMO, an entrepreneur, at least once a week I close my laptop and I go, just go to Disney. And I'll either go to Geyser Point and sit outside by Bay Lake and maybe write a blog post or LinkedIn. I know exactly what you're talking about. And you are absolutely right. That is such a great location because there's so many sitting areas. It's so picturesque. It's so tranquil. It's not like crazy chaotic Disney. It's peaceful. The rest of the world does not exist Disney. Clear your head. Talk with some nice guests. And then I'm door to door 15 minutes into Epcot.

3:15So sometimes I'm like, hey, it's Flower and Garden Festival. And there's the concert starting at 5.30, 6.45 or 8 p.m. So, all right, shut down the laptop. shopped, you know, check into the park, grab some food, grab a drink and sit and listen to a great concert and go home. I love it. I love it. Yeah. And guess what? To all of our friends who are listening from around the world. Yes. Everyone in Orlando, that's our lifestyle. Right. People are like, do you go to Disney every day? I'm like, I could, but you don't want to too much of a good thing. Isn't necessarily great. Um, but it is nice. So when you, you know, when you're local, you know you could just go for a couple of hours and just do some things so and yeah Disney's one like currently like we we let our passes lapse and so like we're doing Universal right now we're going to Epic Universe a couple of months you know when that opens and so but it's it's it's awesome it's not the same as Disney Disney's pretty special um tell me about uh Sheila before we kind of get into Smothers Day, what are you doing for fun right now?

4:19Or what are you into? What are you geeking out on lately? Oh, my goodness. So I started a show on YouTube called Marketing Over Bourbon. So I've been listening to a lot more podcasts and watching shows and just picking up like tips and tricks and best practices and really figuring out as an as a listener and an observer, what am I taking from it? And how can I apply, how I act as a consumer of, of content and apply that into my show. So that's, that's been my newest thing. How about you? What do I do for fun? I talk about that all the time. You don't want to the podcast listener goes, here we go again.

5:06To spare everybody else, we'll just keep it, refer to the past eight episodes where Josh talks too much about his little fun hobbies and stuff. Sheila, most importantly, folks are tuning in because they want to learn your superpowers, like what you do and what you, let's talk specifically about what you see working well right now in marketing. Yeah. So it's interesting. When I started my business almost two years ago, May 1st will be the anniversary of two years. I was getting a lot of work around brand transformation. So I see companies going through these inflection points there. They're going through, they're acquiring a business, they're divesting in a business, they're private equity, and they're trying to form a new entity.

5:52So I'm seeing a lot of branding work, also personal branding. I've gotten more and more clients now who are at a different point in their career. Maybe their job has been eliminated or they're ready for something new. And so they're trying to figure out how do they really articulate who they are so that they can be crisp and clear and attract the right opportunity for themselves and LinkedIn and so forth. So I see that. But I tell you what, from my perspective, I don't know how I would be able to run my business as an entrepreneur if I hadn't existed. And just the amount of it's an accelerant for me and getting the work done.

6:32It's someone that I can bounce ideas off of. And, you know, when you work at a big company, you can ask other people's opinions. You can walk down the hallway and be like, hey, I was just thinking about this and just want to get a couple of different opinions. And AI can be a great tool for me to use in the absence of the fact that I'm working from home, my client's remote. You just don't have those opportunities. Yeah. What would be some tactical applications of how you're using AI for marketing right now? And to the point where, you know, to our friend that's listening, you know, I want to indicate to them that if you're not doing this, you're probably getting left behind at this point.

7:12And anything come to mind? Well, so first of all, I think that for AI, it's start by starting. Don't be intimidated by it. Just fail fast. So I try all sorts of different things. I try ChatGPT versus Claude versus Gemini with the same assignment and see who comes up with a better approach that I think is the approach that works for me for whatever that scenario is. And you get different answers depending on what the tasks are. I use ChatGPT a lot for deep research. when I just don't have time to go through volumes and volumes of data, help me understand this topic and sift it through and help me prioritize and so forth.

7:52I use it as a tool from a marketing perspective for my own creative content. I created a bot that's in the voice of my brand. And so I took the Butler Marketing Group brand, all the brand personality attributes. And then I said, OK, my website is very Disney-esque and whimsical and magical. sort of speaking, my blog posts and LinkedIn posts are more like talking to a neighbor over the fence. And then it has a couple of examples of past work. And now because I'm using that Sheila bot and it writes in my style and tone consistently, I like, and you just build a custom GPT bot. Okay. So that's what I was going to ask the terminology, just for folks to understand what you're saying when you say bot.

8:38So in, in, in chat GPT, this would be cutting, you're creating a custom GPT. Is that what you did? Yeah. I created custom GPT bot. And then that way I've taught it how to write in my voice. And then I also have things like do nots and the do nots are don't make things up. Don't use jargon, et cetera, et cetera. And more and more, I'm finding that I can put together a topic and just say, you know, I'm thinking about you're an expert copywriter, chat gpt i always want to give it an assignment um so write a blog post roughly x number of words in the silent tone using the shilabod um and it you know i'm finding more and more than i'm editing it i'm spending less time editing it's never perfect it's never just like rip and read and put it out there but it's much more efficient for me um and so i've been enjoying that but i think you you have to learn it we just had a one hour long training um that we did with our team today And by the way, you know, for our team, it is a requirement of employment for you to be AI literate, and we will empower you with everything and anything you need to do that, including our own example, our own teaching, our own internal stuff.

9:46But, you know, one of the things that we talked about today, too, is, you know, that when you're working with AI, people don't realize that you're actually programming. So, you're using NLP, not the neuro-linguistic programming, that stuff. natural language programming. So your words are actually a programming language. It's deceptive because you're just talking like you would talk to anybody. But you can see this. This is really apparent when you try to use a tool like MidJourney. I really like Google's image creator. I forget what they call it. But you can see just the subtlest changes in your phrasing or words or even punctuation can make dramatically different results visually.

10:33Well, the same thing's already happening in your word responses, right? So you're using a programming language. So when they talk about prompt engineering, you know, you just went through, Sheila, some of the really important core components of that. But, you know, with natural language, you know, like with any kind of programming, it's garbage in, garbage out. So if you are constantly getting frustrated that AI is hallucinating on you, it's just a tool. And, you know, AI is not perfect. It's improving daily and new models are coming out. Like it used to be that there was breaking AI news once a month, right?

11:14And then it was once a week. And now it's like my newsfeed is just nothing but AI news. And it is like every single day, there is something just, we are in Moore's law right now. I mean, and if our friend that's listening right now is feeling a little overwhelmed and feeling like they're getting left behind, it's only going to probably get, you're only going to feel further and further behind unless you find some way to just find a little lane, you know, get, you know, enjoy. But I'm sorry, Sheila, I didn't mean to start monologuing on this. I'm just, I love this topic so much. Um, Sheila, talk about the work that you do with your clients a bit more, please.

11:54Yeah, absolutely. So I, when I started my company, I based it on my superpowers. So I spent years between Disney bank one slash JPMorgan Chase choice hotels, uh, uh, a tech startup, a regional bank in the Orlando area that was investing in fintech. So I've got a pretty diverse background. And I thought if I'm going to offer my services to people, I want to do the things that I'm really passionate about that get me excited about the work and be excited about transforming my clients' businesses. So I focus on branding and brand strategy and marketing messaging strategy. I focus on overall marketing strategy, which could be anything from thought leadership strategy to content strategy to strategic roadmaps to customer journey mapping.

12:39I focus on loyalty program design and optimizing loyalty programs, partnerships, developing strategic partnerships that grow your business and create new marketing channels, but based upon partnering with other similar businesses that can augment your audiences. And then as you mentioned at the top of the show, fractional chief marketing officer work. And that's for people who aren't familiar with it. They hear fractional and I go, remember fractions in school math. So it's a portion of the time. So if you're a business that maybe you're a bank with less than$2 billion in assets or you're a company that is making X amount of gross revenue new and you don't need a full-time CMO, but you probably do need the marketing North Star, your marketing activities may not be tied to strategies that drive the business forward, that hit on business objectives.

13:33So you sort of parachute in as a fractional CMO. You join the C-suite temporarily. You upskill the team. You teach them what they need from a strategy perspective. You set the roadmap. And then when, and the ideal scenario is they're so good and you did a great job that they don't need you anymore. And sometimes you can have multiple fractional gigs at a time because of the fact that, again, you're only working for a fraction of a work week for any of the given clients. Yeah, yeah. Sheila, could you ask, I want to get your take on this. And I think you explained this quite well. Any other thoughts on if someone's wondering if they should hire a fractional CMO versus just a marketing consultant?

14:15Like, how might they know? So I think it depends upon where your business is. What I've seen a lot in my clients is that they have marketing activities going. But when you start to ask the why, and you only have to ask like two or three whys before you really get to the answer, which is, I don't know, someone asked me to do this. So they said they needed an email, and I just did it. And so there's this lack of marketing activities that are really tying to delivering on business objectives. And there's a lack of understanding about how to build out strategies. And so I think that a marketing consultant could come in, and often it starts with an assessment of where the business is, and what's working and what isn't working and interviewing the team and so forth.

15:00And I think that there's a difference in being a consultant and you may, the work product may be, I produce a recommendation and a deck for someone. And then what happens to that information? It may just go in a drawer because they're not even sure how to implement it, which I think is part of the challenges. You recommended these things, but actually don't even know how to do that. And I think that when you have a fractional CMO, you actually have someone who's not only doing the consulting work, but then they're the practitioner. So they're actually implementing the work as well. Sheila, your website is butlermg.com.

15:37To our friend that's listening, first off, who is your ideal connection? Someone's listening and like, oh, listen, if you got this, this, this, and this, we need to talk ASAP. And what would those next steps be for them? So it's interesting from the brand transformation side, one of my recent clients was a private equity deal. And so they were trying to figure out how do we merge these two large organizations that then have sub brands underneath them? How do we merge them together and create a new parent brand? And then what is that brand and how do we explain ourselves and launch that? and I realized that there are probably many, many companies that are in that growth stage and they're not quite sure what to do.

16:25In fact, this company had tried to merge a year before and ended up pausing the work. And so part of my job was to really get everyone on board to build this new brand to get them forward in the process. And so they launched actually earlier this month. And so I think that there are many different ways that I can work with clients. I think there's a lack of marketing strategy out there, as I mentioned earlier. So I would say if you're a CEO or CMO, and you realize that you've got some fundamentals lacking in your business around marketing strategy, or you feel like you're at a place to where you need to redefine and re-explain what your brand is, then those are two really good conversations.

17:13to have with me. Yeah. Sheila, again, your website is butlermg.com. Also, how do folks find your YouTube channel that you're producing? Tell me resources and fun ways to connect to get more Sheila in their life. Absolutely. Well, they can find me in LinkedIn. So it's Sheila Butler on LinkedIn. And the channel in YouTube is Marketing Over Bourbon. It also has my name in it. So So if they put in Sheila Butler Marketing Over Bourbon, they're going to find it. It's also distributed. I've got the first two episodes live, but it's also distributed where people enjoy listening to their favorite podcasts.

17:50So it could be Spotify, Amazon, Apple, you name it. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Sheila Butler, again, Chief Marketing Officer for Butler Marketing Group, your website, butlermg.com. Thank you so much for joining us, Sheila. Thank you, Josh. It's great to see you.

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