THE THOUGHTFUL ENTREPRENEUR PODCAST
The Importance of Marketing in Podcasting
In a recent episode of “The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show,” host Josh Elledge interviewed Lorraine Ball, a seasoned podcast host, marketing strategist, and the founder of “More Than a Few Words.” Their discussion explored the nuances of podcast marketing, industry trends, and practical strategies for businesses aiming to boost their marketing efforts. This blog post will distill the key insights and tips shared by Lorraine Ball, offering a comprehensive guide for podcasters and marketers alike.
Lorraine emphasized the critical importance of understanding your audience as a foundation for any successful podcast marketing strategy. Conducting audience research through surveys, social media polls, and analytics tools can help gather data on your audience's demographics, interests, and listening habits. Building a strong, recognizable brand for your podcast is also essential. This involves developing a unique value proposition and ensuring consistent branding elements like podcast artwork, intro music, and episode format align with your brand identity.
Lorraine discussed leveraging social media and the rise of video content as powerful tools for promoting podcasts. Tailoring content for each social media platform and engaging with your audience through comments, discussions, and interactive content like polls and Q&A sessions can significantly boost your reach. Additionally, incorporating video by recording video versions of episodes and creating short clips for social media can increase engagement. Lorraine also highlighted the importance of SEO for podcasts and email marketing, suggesting keyword research, providing transcriptions, building an email list, and sending regular newsletters to keep your audience engaged.
About Lorraine Ball:
After spending too many years in Corporate America, Lorraine said goodbye to the bureaucracy, glass ceilings and bad coffee to follow her passion helping small business owners succeed.
As an entrepreneur, author, and professional speaker, she shares what she knows about marketing in presentations to groups around the county, in college classrooms and in her weekly podcast More than a Few Words. Every conversation is filled with creative ideas, practical tips, and decades of real-world experience.
About More Than A Few Words Podcast:
It started as a conversation with friends. When someone would drop by the office, I would pull out my iPhone and record a bit of banter. From those first, informal interactions with local marketing professionals, authors, and entrepreneurs, More than a Few Words, a marketing podcast was born.
Over the last fourteen years, there have been conversations with marketing celebrities, professionals and business owners like you. There were some laughs and lots of good information along the way. Today, the ten-minute conversations are heard by business owners around the world looking for practical tips and a little bit of marketing inspiration.
And now, there is a book. More than a Few Written Words is extension of those conversations with some of my favorites guests from around the globe, sharing their expertise in a new format. I hope you enjoy reading this essay collection as much as I enjoyed assembling it.
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Links Mentioned in this Episode:
Want to learn more? Check out Lorraine Ball at https://morethanafewwords.com/host-lorraine-ball/
Check out Lorraine Ball on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorraineball/
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Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - Hey there, a thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With 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.
Speaker 1 (00:01:18) - Com also happens to be the name of your podcast or friend is listening. I think you're gonna 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.
Speaker 2 (00:01:38) - Thank you so much for the invitation, Josh. The short answer is I love podcasting. You know, it has just been so much fun.
Speaker 1 (00:01:48) - Yeah, well, to give us the long answer on why that's the case.
Speaker 2 (00:01:52) - 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.
Speaker 2 (00:02:23) - And in the early days, it was also a great way to connect with my business community, with my clients, to feature their marketing stories. And 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. I set for ten 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.
Speaker 1 (00:03:11) - Yeah, well, Lorraine, I'm sure that, you know, again, doing what you do, and, for the longevity again, that you've had in this space, you've seen a lot of trends. What, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:03:35) - I think that they have to. They're going to have to find where I. Fits. But I think they have to avoid the temptation to let I do it all. Yeah. What we're seeing is this race to the bottom, because where I, where I 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 is really critical. I 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 pre-internet, where you ran a television ad, you knew people saw it, but you really couldn't say.
Speaker 2 (00:04:52) - 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. We 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.
Speaker 3 (00:05:34) - Good luck. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:05:36) - Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:05:38) - Lorraine, I'm curious about your perception of the minds of consumers and buyers and decision makers today.
Speaker 2 (00:05:48) - You know, I and I talk about this a lot in a way. Marketing hasn't changed in 50 years. Marketing tools have changed. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:06:21) - And 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 1015 20s. And so there is the need to adapt your messaging to smaller bites of relevant information. You still have to have the long stories. But you have to be able to break it up for these shorter and shorter attention spans of your audience. That's the biggest difference.
Speaker 4 (00:07:28) - Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (00:07:30) - Well, Lorraine, tell me a bit about the work you do today, who you serve and what that looks like.
Speaker 2 (00:07:36) - So I today would use the analogy of a general practitioner.
Speaker 2 (00:07:45) - You not feeling well but you don't really know why. And so you go to the doctor. He runs some tests. He 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. I 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 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 individual, internal teams, or I can recommend a network of people that I work with to do the real execution. So that's 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.
Speaker 2 (00:08:48) - But 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.
Speaker 3 (00:09:18) - Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:09:20) - and then so to to you know friend that's listening. Now when you kind of, when you let's say that someone ends up on your calendar and you're going to have an initial conversation together. where do you find yourself typically where does that conversation typically go?
Speaker 2 (00:09:39) - I have three questions that help me figure out right away. Are are you? Do you have a good foundation and kind of the 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 wow, this and this.
Speaker 2 (00:10:05) - We work with these and these and so that already creates the 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. Are 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 and 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. It might not be as good as what you're offering, but they had a solution.
Speaker 2 (00:11:16) - 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. But 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 more, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:12:23) - 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.
Speaker 1 (00:12:38) - Your website. Lorraine is 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?
Speaker 2 (00:12:50) - 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. There are two types of episodes. There are ten 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.
Speaker 2 (00:13:36) - 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, their day does not allow it. It's hard. So it it is. And so putting my 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 ten minute shows allow you to get a complete thought. And get on to 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.
Speaker 2 (00:14:50) - Oh, we've done that. It didn't work. How did they get it to work? And so that's, that's really what that show is about.
Speaker 1 (00:14:58) - 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 could find the podcast. Also, you can go to more than a few words.com, learning when they go there. What would you recommend that they do?
Speaker 2 (00:15:27) - I 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 ten 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.
Speaker 2 (00:15:45) - The cool thing is, if you if you sign up for the newsletter, we'll send you updates with 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 A12 punch from the newsletter. And, you know, it's been fun because we just launched, relaunched. Well, we just dropped our 1,000th episode. And 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.
Speaker 1 (00:16:34) - Yeah. Laraine Ball, podcast host and marketing strategist. Your website and podcasts, more than a few words.com. Lorraine, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:16:44) - Thank you. This has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (00:16:52) - Thanks 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 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 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.
Speaker 1 (00:17:57) - Just head to up my influencer.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. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur movement.