2463 - Blowing New Life into Small Business Growth and Video Content with Upwynn Marketing's Liz Mbwambo

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

1:20You are the founder and CEO of Upwin Marketing. You're found on the web at upwinmarketing.com. It's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Yes. Well, in addition, of course, all the fun things you could do in Central Florida. You know, I always love finding out what leaders are up to. And, you know, let it be known that, you know, our summers are sometimes often feel like the folks in the north, their winters where I probably spent a little bit more time indoors because you don't want to go outside. It's way too hot, way too humid. And I understand you and your husband have been binge watching a show.

2:02What are you watching again for the second time? For the second time? Yes. So funny. I just got off of like a whole week being off from work. I took a whole week off and we did go. I went to the beach and we did all the touristy stuff here in Orlando. So that was fun. but my husband and I, we took a couple of days to just binge watch and, you know, just have times of slowing down a little bit. And so we were like, watch. So we started watching the flash all over again. So it's our second time in the flash. We also kind of found some really good shows on like Apple TV. So we watched a couple on there.

2:33So we, yeah, we kind of had two, two days of just being couch potatoes, ordering in playing board games and watching TV. Listen, some folks might call that indulgent. Some folks might say, oh, you know, sitting in front of the, you know, whatever, you know, listen, I got to tell you, leaders, when I talk to high level leaders, they covet their downtime. And it's, you know, whether it's meditative or contemplative or just allowing the brain to relax and, you know, have a little bit of chewing gum from time to time. You know, my wife and I, we love going to movies and literally like go to the theater, you know, to kind of just get out of the house.

3:18You know, especially I don't know if you work from home much, but, you know, I really need a little bit of a change of scenery. But getting to the Flash, who are some of the big bads in the series? I know, is it General Grodd? Yes, we actually just passed that part. But, I mean, we're in season three now. I don't know how the heck we got to season three so fast. But we just got to the reverse Flash was probably the worst one, which is Flash, his enemy from the future. And then there is Zoom, which is from an alternate universe Flash. So, yeah, we just got to that part. So I think that was the biggest nemesis, the Zoom.

4:02Oh, wow. Yeah. There's not a, so I remember my context with the Flash, you know, there's the movies, but Super Friends, you know, and I'd watch in the 70s and 80s. And there was also, there was also a freeze guy with a gun. I'm not sure if he's in the Flash. um we oh yes um uh thawne yes thawne oh okay that i know these things all part of the arrow verse by the way so well very cool is thank you so much i'm inspired i'm gonna we're gonna check it out it's fun to like i said just have like a you know it's like a lot of the superhero stuff is just you know kind of like our modern day you know fantasy and you know it could just kind of just completely get sucked into that world.

4:48I spent too much time like reading books and self-development that I was like, I need to do this. You and me both, right. Learning brain cells. And that's what I did. Tell me about it. I love it. Okay. Well, Liz, tell me about your work with Upwind Marketing. Yeah. So I started Upwind Marketing a little bit over a year ago, probably about a year and six months now. I worked in corporate my whole career and I got to corporate burnout, had some health issues where my doctor was like, you're, you're, you're really stressed. You got to slow it down a little bit. So I took a little bit of time off and I had a conversation with my husband and we said, Hey, look, I'd probably be a little bit more fulfilled doing it for myself.

5:32And so came the realization that now I work more, but I'm so much more happier. I'm so much more fulfilled in working and having my own agency. So we are a full service marketing agency. We service mainly service type businesses. So anything from like in the home space, so plumbers, HVAC, attorneys, anything that, you know, requires BTC type marketing. So we, we're full beginning to end marketing agency. Yeah. And, and who, who do you typically serve? So typically it's like your, your attorneys, your home service, plumbers, HVAC, we do some e-com. So really a lot of service type businesses. All right.

6:17Well, you know, we're, we're kind of in the era of AI. I see Liz, a lot of bad marketing, sloppy, lazy, you know, newbie folks that are just kind of flooding the zone with just garbage. And, and consumers are really pushing back on that. I look at the content that you create And it's just, it's very real, you know, and it's, yeah. Tell me a bit more about where we are with, from your perspective, like, you know, the kind of marketing that maybe might be a little bit different from what you were doing a couple of years ago or a few years ago. But what do you see right now? Like if you were to like give us a state of the union for small business marketing, what should we be paying attention to?

7:03Yeah. So I've always said that marketing is one of those jobs that everybody has an opinion on and everybody feels like they can do better than everybody else. So I think AI has just kind of turned that dial up where everybody can just plug something into AI and then come up with an opinion and right. So it's dialed that up, but you still need the, the human aspect at the end of the day, marketing is still very psychological. Why people buy what triggers somebody to buy at the end of the day, people don't want to be sold to unless they're looking to buy, right? Like I don't care about until I'm in the market for a car, right?

7:35So there's certain things that still trigger people and you still need that human aspect of it. So we are seeing that there is an uptick in that human connection, right? Where we're seeing now where like my generation, we were very much technical and into everything automated and that kind of stuff. We're kind of seeing it go backwards where people are looking for more cohesiveness and engagement with one another. And so look really looking for that human aspect. So we're really focusing on UGC content, video content. Video is huge, especially now with the changes of Google and SEO, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it these days.

8:17Right. So video is just going to be huge when it comes to being found online. So we are really focusing on having that conversation with clients, the importance of not just video content, but founder led content, making sure that we're answering those questions ahead of time because the way that people are going to be searching in the next year, two years, five years, it's just going to be night and day. Yeah. So, so regarding, you know, I hope, you know, I'm a big fan of small video and I know video is kind of a pretty big part of the work that you do. What, I don't know if there's any, maybe general tips that you would recommend to people to kind of upgrade?

9:02Like if, you know, whether they have the ability to, you know, or they are working with a great agency like you, or, you know, maybe they're like, Hey, you know, I'm pretty good at video, but I just need some tips. Like, what do you, like, what are the elements that you try to convey? Or like, if you were to speak to a round or a room of founders, you know, like how you could, how you could, you know, inspire them to upgrade their video? What like what tips would you give? So there's a couple different things. So right now what I've been doing is I have a transcriber for all my calls, client facing internal calls, everything, and it transcribes everything.

9:37And it does go to an AI agent. And when we are going to get ready to build our videos, we go to the AI agent and say, hey, what has been the biggest question, the most common questions that we've been receiving from clients? What is the biggest, you know, the repeating factor on all of our calls for the last 30 days? What are those questions that clients are asking us? What are those pain points? And so we'll pull directly from our transcripts, that information to then build valuable content. One of the things that I've also been doing is look, just grab your phone, start talking in the car. Like it don't feel like you have to have this big production because because you're in the trenches.

10:14So sometimes you're just in the car. An idea comes up of, you just got off a phone call with a client. I've done it in a parking lot. I just got off a phone call with a client. And I was like, that is such a good point that we just had in that conversation. And I'll just pull up my phone and just record it. I may edit it later. I may, but I at least have the content right there. And then to then at least talk purposefully, cause it's fresh in my mind. So I would just say like, don't feel like you have to have this big production, just do it from your car, use AI for your benefit and really transcribe those calls because that's, that's really going to tell you what people are asking, right?

10:49So having that information, your first party data is going to really help you come up with those, that contact piece. Yeah. You know, it's tough. I think, you know, especially for those of us who are, you know, pretty back to back to back, you know, to, to remember that. So I think that's a really great tips. So it's, you know, you know, what, you know, what you can absolutely do is, you know, you can connect your AI, you know, if you use a tool like grain, or I think it'll even interface with zoom and grab your transcripts. And then, you know, once you get those transcripts into AI, you could do about anything you want with it in terms of like content creation, you know, certainly, you know, your own coaching, you know, as a, you know, if you're a service-based company And, you know, you want to, you know, again, kind of like what you did surface what folks are asking.

11:40I think that that's that's incredibly valuable. Thank you so much for that. And thank you as well for the reminder that it doesn't have to look awesome. And in fact, a lot of times, you know, just kind of like holding that phone out and, you know, talking directly to camera. That's what people are looking for. Like, oh, wow, this is personal. It's not glossy, super over the top marketing, which is appropriate. it? Absolutely. You know, in, in, in some cases, but certainly for social, I agree. I think that that's great. Yeah. I've done videos for my kitchen table. I've done it for my car. Yeah.

12:12Yeah. Liz, what about, you know, so that's great for content. What about just kind of like getting more exposure? I don't know if you get involved, you get much involved in like advertising or more outbound marketing? Yeah, so we do more of like, we don't necessarily do like, if you're talking about like cold email, is that what you're referring to when you're saying outbound? No, no, more like SEO or not SEO, but paid search or no. Yeah, paid search, you know, digital advertising, you know, that sort of thing. Yes, absolutely. So we do do paid media. Again, we're beginning to end advertising, marketing.

12:51My background comes from digital marketing in that space, SEO and PPC. And then I moved into traditional media. So I used to work for the local cable company doing all the local TV commercials for your local killers, hospitals, doctors, right? All that kind of fun stuff. So I'm well versed, I would say right now, chat GPT is launching their ads, we're still testing those to really come up with if that's going to be something that we're going to be recommending to clients, what that's going to look like, right? So I always want to test before I just put it because it's new. This is like when the internet came out, everybody was like, oh my gosh, I can use this for this, this, and this.

13:29So it's definitely something new with AI, but we're definitely still testing because there's still a lot of questions to be asked. Okay, so this may very well be completely different next week, just as quickly as things in AI move. What is the current landscape for advertising in ChatGPT and AI? Um, so right now we're really focused more on the SEO, the organic piece of it more so than just because, uh, you know, Google made the announcement that it's, it's going AI based. Um, so people are just going to be more ask questions more than anything where you can go to Google soon and then say, Hey, book me this flight whenever it gets under$400 from Orlando to New York city.

14:14And then it's going to go. So now it becomes to who are we really marketing to? Are we really marketing to the end user, me, right? Who's buying the ticket? Are we really marketing to the AI who's just going in there and waiting till the ticket drops under$400 to then book it, right? So we're having that conversation where we're really focusing more on that organic piece because things are coming more automated. I'm one of those. I don't even go to a lot of my tools. I connect things with MCPs and then I just have Claude kind of do the busy work for me, right? So I don't really need to watch instructional videos on how to do something.

14:48I just tell Claude, hey, do this for me. I don't need to know how to click around in the actual tool. So we're having that conversation with clients where we want to make sure that they're showing up when people are asking questions. It's no longer like, find me the nearest Italian restaurant. If you do that search, it's going to say, okay, are you looking for outside seating or inside seating? You know, are you looking for luxury? Are you looking for something casual, right? So it's going to become more conversational in people's searches versus just find me the nearest Italian restaurant near me.

15:18And then you kind of go and pick. Yeah. Well, Liz, your website is Upwind Marketing. Where do folks go from here? And, you know, who might be a good candidate to engage with you? Yeah, absolutely. So a good candidate for us is obviously a local small business who's looking to scale, right? Not necessarily in Central Florida. No, not necessarily in Central Florida. We service all U.S. And then if they go to our website, we have a resource tab where they can go and kind of get some freebies, some different tools and tricks that maybe we've used or we recommend to clients to help them with their marketing.

15:58So there's some discounts in there and free tools that they can use. And then, yeah, yeah, our website is there and available. We also have a lot of blogs that can help small businesses. And as they're kind of starting to ask these questions, we make sure to put out content that can help them in this next phase. Because it's the wild world west. The website UpWinMarketing, that's W-Y-N-N, UpWinMarketing.com. Liz, you are the CEO and founder. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

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17:50Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.