Sarah Noel Block – Content Marketing

[00:00:00.000] – Speaker 1
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found on the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie. My name is James Kademan, entrepreneur, author, speaker, and helpful coach to small business owners across the country. And today we’re welcoming/preparing to learn from Sarah Noel Block, the owner of Tiny Marketing. So, Sarah, how are you doing today?

[00:00:31.030] – Speaker 1
I am good. How about you?

[00:00:33.290] – Speaker 2
I’m doing well. I’m better now that I got a cool person on the podcast here.

[00:00:37.880] – Speaker 1
Well, I’m happy to be here.

[00:00:40.090] – Speaker 2
All good. So how would you tell us what is Tiny Marketing?

[00:00:43.620] – Speaker 1
I too work with small teams. I work with small marketing departments, probably a little bit larger companies, but small marketing departments to help them with their content marketing and building out effective and efficient strategies and systems. It’s manageable even when you have a one person marketing department, for example.

[00:01:03.740] – Speaker 2
All right. And how long has your company been around?

[00:01:07.850] – Speaker 1
So I’ve been doing it full time for two years, but it was a side gig that I was building for 10 years.

[00:01:16.560] – Speaker 2
Oh, wow. Okay.

[00:01:17.710] – Speaker 1
That’s been a little while. Yeah, because I’m a chicken and it took me that long to be like, you know what? I can do this.

[00:01:25.120] – Speaker 2
Nice. What was the moment or the situation that happened that made you decide to actually flip and go full time with this?

[00:01:32.630] – Speaker 1
Well, it was 2020, so I’m sure you can guess what instigated it. Something happened. Yes, something happened in 2020. I had a great job and we were an essential company, so I was super busy. But it was all of that time to myself working from home and being with my family and that freedom that I didn’t have before working full time for a company that made me realize I want to take this full time. I have the resources and the client list building up to be able to do that. So I took the leap and it worked out.

[00:02:16.990] – Speaker 2
Nice. So are you married? Yes. All right. So you went to your husband, you’re like, Hey, funny story. I’m going to quit my job, start my own gig.

[00:02:27.020] – Speaker 1
Kind of opposite, actually.

[00:02:29.520] – Speaker 2
Oh, interesting. Okay.

[00:02:31.110] – Speaker 1
Yeah. No, my husband, he’s the one who’s like, you have a large list that’s happening with your side job. And I was working every single night, every single weekend, to be able to build it while I was working full time. He said, just do it. Just quit your job and do it. So I was like, Okay. It took me a couple of months for it to finally say okay. It took me a couple of months to finally say okay. It took me a couple of months after he said that to say, Okay, but I did.

[00:03:03.550] – Speaker 2
All right. And no regrets?

[00:03:06.190] – Speaker 1
No regrets. I feel like my business has been built in a sustainable way where I don’t have any of those roller coaster moments where it’s like, Oh, no. Where’s my money going to come from? There’s a lot of retainers and consistent clientele and referrals that have kept it completely consistent for two years.

[00:03:28.510] – Speaker 2
Nice. Was it challenging to reach out to some of the new clients or some of the people that you had in your list saying, hey, I’m full time now. Let’s hit this really hard thing?

[00:03:38.930] – Speaker 1
Well, actually, I built up my client list that were signed contracts before I left my job.

[00:03:47.460] – Speaker 2
Oh, nice.

[00:03:48.140] – Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah. So I had mentally prepared, and I actually talked to my boss, who’s a good friend of mine now, and told him I’m planning on taking my business full time. And they actually came on as a contract as well.

[00:04:02.300] – Speaker 2
Nice.

[00:04:03.390] – Speaker 1
With the clients that I was able to add up and then my former company coming on as a client, it was a no brainer. My salary was already made up from that before I left.

[00:04:15.190] – Speaker 2
Oh, very cool. Very cool. So it’s arguably on the verge of somewhat no risk or low risk.

[00:04:22.060] – Speaker 1
At least. Yeah, it was very low risk. I’m a low risk person. It was very low risk when I decided to do it.

[00:04:29.000] – Speaker 2
So over the past couple of years, how has your business gone compared to how you believe that it was going to go?

[00:04:36.180] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I was hoping for consistency when I started it, and that was my highest hope, is consistency. But when I started within the first quarter, we doubled, and within a year, we tripled. Good problem. Yeah. This year, we’re looking to grow even more. So it’s it worked out better than I thought it had, and it’s more sustainable than I thought it would be. I was really scared because it’s a lot of risk. I have two mortgages. I was telling you, I have a cabin and a house and I have two kids. Well, my husband had gotten a promotion right before I took this full time, but before that, I was also making more money than him, so there was a lot of risk. All right. That was the scariest part, but it ended up working out.

[00:05:36.550] – Speaker 2
Nice. So do you have employees or do you subcontract.

[00:05:40.290] – Speaker 1
To help? I subcontract.

[00:05:42.090] – Speaker 2
Okay.

[00:05:42.750] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I stay as lean as possible.

[00:05:45.040] – Speaker 2
Got you.

[00:05:45.870] – Speaker 1
I have a core team, though.

[00:05:47.680] – Speaker 2
How hard is it to find subcontractors, good subcontractors to help? I think.

[00:05:53.220] – Speaker 1
I’ve gotten super lucky. It takes a while for me to bring someone on as a core member of my team that I always go to. But we do a few test projects before I take it too seriously. And I rely heavily on referrals. My first team members were referrals. And from there, we started the test project and slowly bringing them in. And now we have five core members that work on all of our clients. And then we have additional writers that are in different niches that we work within. But a lot of them that I work with for the last year or so, some more.

[00:06:39.630] – Speaker 2
All right. Well, that’s super cool. So it’s interesting is when we search for employees or other people to talk to, business owners that I talked to are looking for subcontractors, they developed somewhat of a system to find these people based on the mistakes or the challenges that they’ve had looking for these people. So it sounds like you didn’t have to go through much of that.

[00:07:03.040] – Speaker 1
I started off with referrals. So I started off with a leg up because I was getting referrals from other people who were doing exactly what I was doing. So it made it easier. But I did make a lot of mistakes along the way. There were some contractors I brought on there. I was like, That was a mess. And I learned it. I knew exactly what I did wrong. Usually it was pretty much every single time I was like, That was a hot mess. It was because I didn’t do the test project. And I was like, In a desperate way. I was like, I need someone now. When you’re operating from a place of desperation, nothing good comes from it.

[00:07:46.330] – Speaker 2
I’ve been there.

[00:07:49.430] – Speaker 2
Sometimes you just want a body, assuming they can do the job.

[00:07:52.450] – Speaker 1
Yes. And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. You have to be way ahead of it.

[00:07:57.220] – Speaker 2
Fair. Totally fair. So when you’re getting referrals from essentially your competition, is that how it works thing?

[00:08:06.600] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I guess so. I don’t think any of us think of the other person as competition. Most of us are working in different niches. I work primarily in B2B and mostly with real estate companies that work with real estate investors. Got you. We all have different niches, but it’s a real community. The content marketing space is a community, and we’re all doing something slightly different. One person might be doing strategy, one person might be doing execution. But yeah, it’s my competitors that are the ones giving me referrals.

[00:08:44.790] – Speaker 2
All right. Well, that works out. That’s very cool. It’s interesting. I was in the printer repair, copy repair business. I started that in 2006 and I always joke to people that I think it would be safer to sell crack than to be in that industry because it was so cutthroat.

[00:09:03.480] – Speaker 1
It’s.

[00:09:05.160] – Speaker 2
Interesting to hear that.

[00:09:07.830] – Speaker 1
I believe that. I worked in… Some of my clients are in construction, and a lot of my former full time experience was with construction and building materials companies. And that’s how it was, too. It was really good. You weren’t friends with your competitors in those industries. Brutal. I feel like freelancers and consultants, we’re all friends. We’re all in the secret club together.

[00:09:32.510] – Speaker 2
Nice. Very cool. Let’s tell me, over the course of 10 years, content marketing has changed dramatically. Dramatically. I mean, just the players in the game, what gets found, the algorithms, the platforms, all.

[00:09:47.280] – Speaker 1
That jazz.

[00:09:47.790] – Speaker 2
It changes constantly. So how do you keep up with all that?

[00:09:51.190] – Speaker 1
Oh, constantly learning. There’s not a day that goes by where I’m not reading about it, writing about it, watching videos, staying on top of a podcast. I’m constantly learning because I am terrified of falling behind. That drives me into learning at all times.

[00:10:11.770] – Speaker 2
Nice. Now, you mentioned the real estate industry is your niche. That’s got to be a tough market just to, I guess, find the audience, so to speak. Well, I’m guessing it’s hard to find. Maybe it’s not.

[00:10:27.080] – Speaker 1
I specifically work with companies that work with real estate investors. So it’s a little bit easier because it’s a very specific person we’re talking to.

[00:10:35.900] – Speaker 2
All right. So in the case, one thing that I guess struck me as interesting about that is when I think of a typical real estate investor, that person that’s in my mind is not necessarily on social media very often, if at all.

[00:10:49.720] – Speaker 1
Yeah. When they are, they’re on LinkedIn.

[00:10:51.910] – Speaker 2
Okay.

[00:10:52.750] – Speaker 1
Sometimes Twitter.

[00:10:54.400] – Speaker 2
Got you. Okay. All right. Twitter is having a fun time now.

[00:10:59.050] – Speaker 1
Yeah. With Elon Musk, that came out of, well, I guess not nowhere, but it’s bizarre.

[00:11:04.580] – Speaker 2
Little weird.

[00:11:06.720] – Speaker 1
It’s.

[00:11:07.230] – Speaker 2
All good. It’s all good. It keeps it in the news so people keep going over there. It’s interesting. When you are writing content for a given company, how do you capture their voice so that their voice, the company’s, whatever culture, brand, whatever it is they’re trying to push, comes through rather than… I don’t want to say your voice because it’s your voice, but you know what I mean?

[00:11:31.760] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I do. It’s a process. First, I’m talking to the team members and the people within the company, and then I’m interviewing customers that they have and surveying them. So if they don’t have an already established brand voice, then that’s how I start to establish it. See how customers are talking about them, what phrases they use, what problems that the brand is solving for them, and that’s where I start. Now, if the company already has an established brand voice, it’s just a matter of reading through their content, getting a feel for it, and doing some practice drafts, making sure that I’m nailing it before we’re publishing anything.

[00:12:16.640] – Speaker 2
Got you. All right. Is that tough or is that something that you had to systematize over time?

[00:12:24.510] – Speaker 1
Trying to copy someone else’s brand voice can be tough. I feel like the easiest way to do that for me is talking to the face of the company, usually the CEO, and I’ll record that conversation and I’ll listen to it as I write. So I can hear what that person is passionate about, where they get really excited. And that’s how I capture the voice the easiest. But it’s challenging. But once you nail it, you nail it, and you can just replicate it over and over again.

[00:12:57.380] – Speaker 2
Interesting. All right. Just like, I suppose everyone has their own Swartzenegger impersonation.

[00:13:02.700] – Speaker 1
Yeah, probably everybody has their own process for capturing a voice. That’s mine, though.

[00:13:07.940] – Speaker 2
All right. No, it sounds good. That sounds very good. Is there a size of business that you… As your own business that you’re aiming for? That sounds like you’ve grown pretty fast.

[00:13:18.410] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I usually work with 15 to 30 million dollar companies. That’s right where my favorite ones lie.

[00:13:26.060] – Speaker 2
All right. And how do you find them if they’re not maybe necessarily marketing?

[00:13:32.210] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, a lot of them aren’t. 15 to 30 sounds big, but that size is usually a really small marketing department. So a lot of times I’ll… Well, most of my leads come inbound, so they find me.

[00:13:48.920] – Speaker 2
Oh, nice.

[00:13:50.110] – Speaker 1
Yeah. I whittle them down by saying, this is the size company that I usually work with, and this is the budget that you would need to be able to do this. But if I’m doing outbound, which I’ll do maybe once a year, I’ll go to LinkedIn Navigator and all of that information is right there.

[00:14:09.550] – Speaker 2
For me. All right, very cool. I’m thinking 15, 30 million when it comes to real estate investing, that’s not huge. If you’re selling hot dogs or something, it’d be a lot. But for real estate…

[00:14:21.600] – Speaker 1
No, the companies that I’m working with are doing the photography for their supporting real estate investors. They’re not real.

[00:14:30.650] – Speaker 2
Estate investors themselves. That is not the investment themselves.

[00:14:33.910] – Speaker 1
No, that’s who we’re selling to. I work with the companies that support them.

[00:14:38.420] – Speaker 2
Interesting. Okay. So there’s all kinds of branches there in that vertical.

[00:14:44.870] – Speaker 2
All right. Interesting. Well, that’s still a decent sized photographer or something like that. They’re doing 50 to 30 million.

[00:14:53.050] – Speaker 1
Right, exactly. But for some reason, that range always ends up having a really small marketing department. Three people max.

[00:15:02.140] – Speaker 2
Weird. All right.

[00:15:03.600] – Speaker 1
That’s what I’ve seen, at least.

[00:15:05.640] – Speaker 2
You threw me for a loop here because I’m thinking, a $15 million photography company, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one.

[00:15:13.810] – Speaker 1
Or met that. They exist. You just don’t know it, I guess.

[00:15:17.190] – Speaker 2
I guess I’m in my own little hole. So it’s all good. So how do you find companies like that? Because everyone wants to pose themselves as being some huge monstrosity, right? Most of the time. So how do you whittle through?

[00:15:32.500] – Speaker 1
Your money, if you’re an LLC, at the very least, your revenue is on there. It’s on LinkedIn, so you can find it. And if I’m being approached and I have an inbound lead, I’ll look it up. It’ll be online, your revenue. Got you.

[00:15:52.840] – Speaker 2
All right, you’ll find them.

[00:15:55.090] – Speaker 1
Yeah.

[00:15:55.690] – Speaker 2
That’s cool. What are some of your favorite channels to use for content, just pushing out, is it websites or is it other platforms, LinkedIn, whatever?

[00:16:05.580] – Speaker 1
Yeah. For distribution, I would say the best results I get are when you’re doing partnership content marketing, so other people’s publications. For example, I am a service company, so I partner a lot with product companies that serve the same audience as me and we’ll do content together. I’ll be on their webinar. They’ll be on my podcast. T hat’s where I see the most successes, having those partnerships.

[00:16:40.200] – Speaker 2
All right. You’re sharing an audience, so to speak.

[00:16:43.280] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s borrowing someone else’s audience. It already exists, and it’s mutually beneficial.

[00:16:49.530] – Speaker 2
Nice. That is very cool. What have been some of the challenges that you’ve had to deal with in working with different companies in the real estate sector?

[00:16:57.680] – Speaker 1
Yeah, some of the challenges of working with them, I would say if one person finds the value in content marketing, but the CEO doesn’t, if the CEO is just not on board, that’s usually pretty difficult to hurdle to get over. You get hired by the marketing director who’s like, Yeah, I know content marketing works. It’s what drives all of marketing. But the CEO is like, Prove yourself over and over and over and over again.

[00:17:28.110] – Speaker 2
Yeah.

[00:17:28.810] – Speaker 1
Always had to do that. That’s never going to be a good fit.

[00:17:31.700] – Speaker 2
The person signing the front of the check is sometimes challenging.

[00:17:35.060] – Speaker 1
Yeah.

[00:17:35.790] – Speaker 2
Nice. So when you are working with the marketing branches or the crew of a given company, how come they are just doing the content marketing?

[00:17:45.900] – Speaker 1
It takes so much time. Okay. If you really think about marketing, let’s say you have a three person marketing department, and those three people would then have to be experts at writing, video editing, being a managing editor, graphic design, advertising, PR. It’s a lot for three people, plus directing all of the strategy. It doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. So we become an extension of that marketing department. We work really closely with them, and it’s more of a partnership than us being this solo virtual group that doesn’t really exist in real life to them or their partners. Got you.

[00:18:35.130] – Speaker 2
I guess it’s one of the things that from talking to some of the clients that we have, I can understand the perspective, but I guess we’re like you with my call answering service, we answer phones for people that have their own office staff, but their office staff just have other stuff going on. So it’s interesting to hear like, I don’t need you guys. I got my own office staff. So I could totally see a CEO saying like, I got a marketing department. I don’t need you guys.

[00:19:00.590] – Speaker 1
Yeah. And then the marketing department is like, Well, I.

[00:19:04.270] – Speaker 2
Need her. Nice. How have you marketed your business, I guess, to show off what you guys can do?

[00:19:13.380] – Speaker 1
Content marketing. I pretty much exclusively market… It’s all content marketing. I start with core content that I commit to doing every single month, and that’s my live stream show.

[00:19:28.560] – Speaker 2
From.

[00:19:29.040] – Speaker 1
There, I repurpose. I have my live stream show and I interview some really smart people. It works out nicely because we build really good relationships and end up referring clients to each other, too. But that’s not the intention. The intention is to talk to really smart people in marketing. I have this show and then it’s repurposed into a podcast. And then we take that podcast and we split it into three different segments and we’ll have it out as micro episodes. We’ll audio grams, we’ll take that series and we’ll write blog posts based off of it. There’s so much you can do through repurposing. Wow.

[00:20:14.840] – Speaker 2
It’s like Oscar Meyer with the pig, right? Everything but the squeal.

[00:20:19.880] – Speaker 1
Pretty much. And it all starts with the live stream video.

[00:20:24.960] – Speaker 2
Nice. So you are recording the conversation live or posting it live?

[00:20:29.460] – Speaker 1
I’m posting it live posting it live, but the interview takes place Monday afternoons.

[00:20:35.590] – Speaker 2
Okay. And where are you posting it?

[00:20:38.830] – Speaker 1
I use StreamYard, so we distribute it everywhere. It goes to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. There’s other places you can post, but that’s where I’m posting it.

[00:20:48.400] – Speaker 2
Oh, nice. I didn’t even know Twitter had live.

[00:20:50.860] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, if you go back to 2015 Periscope, that’s when they started live. They were one of the first to do live.

[00:21:00.030] – Speaker 2
Periscope? I used Periscope forever ago, but it went away, right?

[00:21:03.500] – Speaker 1
Me too. Twitter bought it, and that’s how they were doing their live streams. And now just Twitter’s absorbed it, but they still use that same technology.

[00:21:14.040] – Speaker 2
Interesting. Oh, my God. Jog my memory away. A little.

[00:21:16.680] – Speaker 1
History of live stream. Holy cow. Yes. I remember periscoping back in the day.

[00:21:25.000] – Speaker 2
That’s so funny. That was forever ago.

[00:21:27.580] – Speaker 1
I know. So tell me.

[00:21:29.160] – Speaker 2
A story about the worst client that you’ve had. You don’t have to share names or anything like that, but it’s always fun to hear about the worst client.

[00:21:35.940] – Speaker 1
Oh, my gosh. Okay. I won’t say names for sure, but he was insane.

[00:21:47.620] – Speaker 2
Good start, right? Solid foundation.

[00:21:50.110] – Speaker 1
Yes. No, actually, we had an amazing relationship for a long time and just something happened. And I don’t know what, but on Thanksgiving, he calls me on repeat over and over and over again. I’m like, What is going on? He is saying that I’m cheating him and that I didn’t do what our contract said. I sent him the reports of everything we’ve done for him, and I sent him the contract so he can see we actually did twice the amount we had agreed on. His scope creeped a bit, but everything was done. But yeah, he sent me a whole bunch of nasty Gramm emails and calls on Thanksgiving. I don’t know what triggered this. It was bizarre. But that was the weirdest experience I ever had with a client. I was like, Okay, goodbye.

[00:22:42.970] – Speaker 2
I.

[00:22:44.500] – Speaker 1
Don’t understand what’s happening. I’m done, though.

[00:22:47.490] – Speaker 2
Out you go. I’m going to have to hold on just for one moment here. I’m going to pause. All right, so not the best client, I guess, as far as that goes.

[00:22:59.910] – Speaker 1
No, it was so weird.

[00:23:02.260] – Speaker 2
All gone now. Water under the bridge. Life goes on.

[00:23:05.260] – Speaker 1
Yeah, that was six months ago.

[00:23:07.460] – Speaker 2
All right, move on.

[00:23:09.590] – Speaker 1
I’ve moved on.

[00:23:11.060] – Speaker 2
Tell me about your best client.

[00:23:14.170] – Speaker 1
I have a lot of good clients. I’ll give you a framework of the best clients. Sure, fair. The best clients are the ones that are quick to give you feedback. You don’t have to sell them on the importance of content marketing. They already know it.

[00:23:33.540] – Speaker 2
The.

[00:23:34.200] – Speaker 1
Pay on time, of course. And they appreciate your work. I have a good amount of clients that fall in that range. But it’s nice being able to have those types of relationships and feel like, okay, I would consider you a friend. I would hang out with you outside of this. It’s nice being able to pick and choose the people that you work with.

[00:24:02.250] – Speaker 2
Nice. Very cool. Yeah, it’s a great place to be. Fantastic place to be in. Because you mentioned a few times having to essentially sell people on content marketing. Content marketing is an interesting thing because it doesn’t necessarily always have a call to action or driving people to an immediate sale thing.

[00:24:21.940] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a slow burn.

[00:24:23.630] – Speaker 2
Yeah. So can you tell me how you help people that don’t know? Maybe they’ve never even heard the phrase content marketing. But to the people that are used to just throwing advertisement, screaming at them, and having a button that says, Buy Now thing, how do you help explain and differentiate the different marketing to people?

[00:24:45.120] – Speaker 1
At this point in my career, I’m not trying to sell people who don’t know what content marketing is. So I avoid them because I don’t need to sell people on it. The people that value it, they value it and they understand it. But if I were to have a conversation with someone who was interested in learning about content marketing, I would say it takes a minute. It’s not overnight, but it works for years and years and years. So if you stay consistent, it’s going to drive traffic through search engines, through referral traffic, and through social media and email. Pretty much every acquisition channel will come through content marketing, but it takes time, and it could take up to six months. But if you want quick wins, yeah, it takes about, I would say, six months to start ranking for the keywords if you’re focusing on SEO with your content marketing. But if you want quick wins, start working with other publications, doing sponsored articles, and getting placements in other publications because that will drive a lot more referral traffic quicker.

[00:26:08.760] – Speaker 2
Nice. Very cool. A couple of years ago when you hit this full time, and you had… I guess I should back up a step. How long have you been doing your live stream?

[00:26:19.360] – Speaker 1
Two years. I started the day that I took it full time. Okay, so perfect.

[00:26:24.280] – Speaker 2
Right there. So how do you get your audience right away? Or did you have an audience right away, or did it take time for you to grow that?

[00:26:31.320] – Speaker 1
Is a good question. I started building my audience before I left my job.

[00:26:36.370] – Speaker 2
All right.

[00:26:37.580] – Speaker 1
Nice. I focused a lot on LinkedIn and building up my audience there, getting known in the industry for the content themes that I wanted to be known for before I ever took it full time. And then since I was live streaming on LinkedIn as well as other channels, I already had that built in audience with LinkedIn, and I already had an email list that was starting to build. So I had that audience established already. But then other channels.

[00:27:09.260] – Speaker 2
How long did you spend, or I guess prior to the going full time of your business?

[00:27:17.110] – Speaker 1
I think that I spent about six months really focusing hard on my personal brand.

[00:27:23.070] – Speaker 2
Before.

[00:27:24.700] – Speaker 1
Taking it full time. And really just being consistent with that was all it took. It’s all it took.

[00:27:31.460] – Speaker 2
And it’s interesting. Was there some magic number that came about that you’re just like, I got a big enough audience now I’m going to flip the switch to go full time with this? Or did you already have that date in mind? You said, okay, we’re talking.

[00:27:43.510] – Speaker 1
About today. I had a junk date in my calendar, I had a junk date. So I was pretty much reverse engineering my business from there. I knew when I wanted to leave and I knew that I wanted to have enough monthly retainer clients that I would make up my salary.

[00:28:03.700] – Speaker 2
I.

[00:28:04.100] – Speaker 1
Built that out. I made sure that I had enough clients and I had contracts that were long term that I was set for a while. I knew that I was going to be okay financially.

[00:28:16.860] – Speaker 2
Very cool.

[00:28:18.500] – Speaker 1
But it wasn’t a number of followers because that really doesn’t matter in the end. It was a number of signed contracts that that was my ultimate jump. Got it. I ended up leaving three months earlier than my jump date that I had in my calendar. Oh, you did? Yeah, I saw it come up on my calendar and I was like, Oh, my God. I had to screenshot it and send it to my husband. I was like, This was the day that I was planning on leaving.

[00:28:48.590] – Speaker 2
Oh, that’s funny. Congratulations on that. That’s huge.

[00:28:51.670] – Speaker 1
Thanks.

[00:28:52.570] – Speaker 2
That’s insanely huge. I’m knowing people that put a jump date and then a year goes by. And then.

[00:28:56.790] – Speaker 1
Watch it fast. Yeah.

[00:28:58.440] – Speaker 2
That’s the post jump date, jump date. Yeah.

[00:29:03.060] – Speaker 1
Awesome. Just move that.

[00:29:05.140] – Speaker 2
Yeah, right. Just kicking that, Snooze that. That’s funny.

[00:29:08.520] – Speaker 2
So how big would you like to get your company?

[00:29:14.000] – Speaker 1
That is a good question. I don’t know. Truly, I don’t care as long as I’m in a comfortable state.

[00:29:25.040] – Speaker 2
All right.

[00:29:26.490] – Speaker 1
I guess my bigger goal is around balance. I was telling you today, I got to call at 6 AM that my son tested positive for COVID. Because of the balance that I’m able to have with my company, it was not a big deal. He’s in the other room right now and we handled it. We actually, we went and got secondary tasks to make sure and those were negative, by the way. We don’t know exactly what’s going on. But either way, I’m able to live my life around my family and build my business around the things that are important to me, like traveling. And I love that.

[00:30:12.830] – Speaker 2
Nice. That’s very cool. So if you were going to talk to someone that was considering starting their own, let’s say, marketing business, what are some of the things that you would say, hey, these are the things you got to watch out for. These are the things you want to be concerned with. Stuff just essentially the advice that people want or people need but may not necessarily know to ask for.

[00:30:35.240] – Speaker 1
That would be… Let’s see here. Sorry, that was the school calling me again. Let’s go back to that. My phone was.

[00:30:44.640] – Speaker 2
Just ringing. Life happens, right? Yeah.

[00:30:48.240] – Speaker 1
Things to watch out for, not having a solid contract in place when you are bringing on new clients because, well, there are times that they will try and screw you and you need that contract in place. Don’t forget to invoice. So many people forget to invoice.

[00:31:07.980] – Speaker 2
And.

[00:31:09.500] – Speaker 1
That’s ridiculous. Don’t let people walk all over you because you’re a freelancer or a soloprene because they will try. They will try to avoid your invoices and not pay. And build your business in a structure that will allow for consistency. So you’re not scrambling and desperate for clients that you know that money will be there. That’s the way I built mine. And I did that from the start. That at least wasn’t a lesson learned. It was just a fear of not having money. So that was just how I built it. But I did have clients who were like, They were extremely happy with the work and then just didn’t pay the invoice.

[00:31:59.850] – Speaker 2
Don’t.

[00:32:00.580] – Speaker 1
Let people walk all over you because you matter, too. I took them to collections and I did get paid. It’s always fun. The business was going down, like their business was. Oh, no. But that’ll happen. Yeah, right?

[00:32:16.810] – Speaker 2
That is a rough thing. I can remember when we first started the call answering service, I used to have a business partner with this one. We had a contract, we wrote up a contract, whatever. I had an attorney check it out. And they’re like, Yeah, everything’s great. And I don’t know if it was client number 4 or 5, find some loophole. I was just like, How do we not catch this? T hen years go by and you keep having those people that it’s just like they’re playing a monopoly game or some board game where they’re just trying to figure out a way to cheat the system. Yes. You don’t need to try to cheat the system. You can just use.

[00:32:51.070] – Speaker 1
The.

[00:32:51.590] – Speaker 2
System as intended. Just use.

[00:32:53.510] – Speaker 1
The system. Just a weird…

[00:32:56.420] – Speaker 2
Some people, it was just interesting how they would just try to figure out a way. And I don’t know if it was just because it all seemed like a game to them or they felt like they wanted to win something.

[00:33:07.590] – Speaker 1
Most often I see that happening when they can’t afford the services and they are desperate to get out of a contract, so they will look for any loophole to be able to do that. Got you.

[00:33:22.260] – Speaker 2
But.

[00:33:23.120] – Speaker 1
If you had a conversation with me and told me that, then I would just work something out with you. Yeah, right.

[00:33:29.130] – Speaker 1
There’s a company that couldn’t afford me, and I was like, We’ll just cancel. We’ll just cancel. It’s okay.

[00:33:37.630] – Speaker 2
Life goes on. It’s not worth the energy.

[00:33:41.280] – Speaker 1
It’s not worth it. Here you go.

[00:33:43.520] – Speaker 2
You’re free. I get it. Go forth and prosper somewhere else. By the way, I get it. Awesome. I guess, what have been some of the challenges that you ran into that you didn’t necessarily anticipate?

[00:33:56.360] – Speaker 1
Well, the one example that I was just saying was one of them where they were just pleased as pie with the work that they got. It was honestly a small project. It was a welcome sequence, an email sequence. So I had to do the copy writing and then set up the system, the drip campaign in their HubSpot account.

[00:34:17.720] – Speaker 2
And then.

[00:34:19.200] – Speaker 1
They paid the deposit and then a year later, they still hadn’t paid the balance on it. So yeah. And then I had to go to collections and then it took another year or so to get them to pay that. But they did eventually. Sure.

[00:34:41.100] – Speaker 2
Fun.

[00:34:41.320] – Speaker 1
That was a lesson learned. It was more of a don’t walk all over me, I will not let you.

[00:34:49.230] – Speaker 2
Fair, fair. The entrepreneur’s journey here. Let’s talk about content marketing specifically in some of the smaller businesses that may be watching and listening to this, some of the things that they should just be aware of, or maybe they could even try to do, I guess, things that aren’t necessarily in the 15 to 30 million dollars range yet.

[00:35:09.320] – Speaker 1
Yeah. So I would say find that core piece of content first. The burnout is… You got to help me with that. I’ll explain the core content. Burnout happens a lot with these small businesses and entrepreneurs because you’re excited, you want to get started with your content marketing, but it is so much bigger than anybody realizes. I have five different people touching every single piece of content that leaves my agency. And it takes a lot to produce something good. So people get burned out when they’re trying to do it on their own.

[00:35:53.480] – Speaker 2
Start with core.

[00:35:54.610] – Speaker 1
Content first and do the repurposing process.

[00:35:58.940] – Speaker 2
So so when you say core content, I guess what do you mean by that?

[00:36:01.980] – Speaker 1
It’s committing to one piece of content that you could do consistently. Let’s say once a month you can commit to doing a live stream, for example. Okay. So once a month, I’m doing a live stream, and you can do that consistently. Just that alone is good enough. You’re showing up consistently for your audience, and you can use that content for your emails. Let’s say you send a weekly email to your list for your social media, it can feed that. So that one core piece of content can feed a lot and you don’t even have to go further. But you can. If you wanted to go further than that, you can repurpose that live stream into all of the things we talked about before, podcast, live streams, audio grams, micro content on YouTube. But even just committing to consistently, I’m going to create this one thing once a month, you can drive everything from that.

[00:37:03.570] – Speaker 2
Nice. All right. And then step two, going beyond that, where do they go from there?

[00:37:07.610] – Speaker 1
Yeah, going beyond that. I mean, it’s probably easiest to hire fractional help freelancers to write those blog posts because you don’t have time when you’re a one person company, you don’t have the time to do it. And it doesn’t have to be expensive if you’re hiring freelancers to write blog posts based off of the live stream that you created, creating social media graphics and audiograms. Make sure you send your emails consistently to your audience so they can expect… Actually, you get better open rates when you’re consistently sending on the same day, the same time every week because the email providers start to get used to your email coming in at that exact same time. So you’re less likely to go in the promo or the spam folder. Got you.

[00:38:00.700] – Speaker 2
Okay. So do it.

[00:38:02.420] – Speaker 1
Consistently and your audience will come to expect you and get to feel more comfortable with you.

[00:38:07.750] – Speaker 2
All right. Tell me, you raise an interesting point. I want to talk to you about timing. Timing up, you picked the day and time for your live stream. I don’t know if that was due to your live or due to when you thought your audience was going to be available, timing of emails, all that stuff. There’s all kinds of art and science there. I imagine you have some experience with that.

[00:38:30.060] – Speaker 1
Yeah. The original date and time that I picked for my live stream was just a test at first. I did it at lunchtime because I figured I’m talking to marketing directors, CMOs, VPs. They’re at lunch, they’re at their company. So I started then on Fridays. And I was like, I did it for a year on Fridays. And then I was like, A lot of people take Fridays off and holidays often fall on Fridays. So I moved it to Thursdays, and those are doing better. Thursdays at lunchtime. But it takes testing and looking at your analytics to figure out the best time. And you can always look at best practices, too. Like my email newsletter, the date and time that it goes out was chosen based off of best practices.

[00:39:18.300] – Speaker 2
Nice. That’s super cool. So I imagine that takes a little bit of practice just to figure out what works. And I imagine that’s not blanket for every industry, right?

[00:39:31.140] – Speaker 1
No, it’s not. You can find best practices and different benchmarks for pretty much every industry and every channel that you’re going after. So each one is different, but start there. If you’re not seeing what you expect to see, do a little testing, try some different times. But then when you land on one that you’re getting the results that you want, stay consistent with that because the internets, they like consistency. Just like Google, it will rank you higher if you’re consistently creating new content. Interesting.

[00:40:10.730] – Speaker 2
Okay.

[00:40:11.200] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it expects new content from you, so they rank you higher. Same thing goes with email providers. When you’re sending your emails at the same exact time and day, every week, they come to expect you, so they rank you higher, we’ll say in quotes, by moving you to the primary tab.

[00:40:28.030] – Speaker 2
All right. Now, are there software… The software is right. Because I look at the stuff that we’ve done and pay people to do, and some of it I’m like, You guys have to be using some software system besides just logging into every single individual platform, because it’ll take forever.

[00:40:50.180] – Speaker 1
Well, yeah. There’s marketing automation platforms, of course, that cover the vast majority. Like HubSpot, for example, you can do your social media, your advertising, your email, your blog, all of it in HubSpot. So you can choose a marketing automation platform to be able to do everything for you. Okay. Smaller companies might not be able to afford a HubSpot. Yeah. So anytime you can use Zapp to connect and integrate where you can, that’s a good way to go. I use a couple of different tools for my own company. I use Flow Desk for email. I use Smarter Q for automating social media for all of my clients. But everything is also connected through Zappier. There’s an integration there that makes it a little bit easier.

[00:41:50.160] – Speaker 2
That’s a cool platform to connect. I want to talk about the artificial intelligence content writing that seems to be coming about in the past. It really seems to have blossomed in the past six months, year, maybe.

[00:42:07.440] – Speaker 1
Yeah.

[00:42:08.190] – Speaker 2
I imagine that’s a little nerve racking or, I mean, pro con.

[00:42:13.540] – Speaker 1
No, it’s really not. I’ve tested a lot of these because in the hopes that it would take me less time to create new content.

[00:42:25.590] – Speaker 2
And.

[00:42:26.450] – Speaker 1
They all suck.

[00:42:29.400] – Speaker 2
That is so awesome. It’s so funny that you say that. I mean, it’s true. But we had somebody reach out and say, Hey, we got this AI phone answering stuff. I think Google even came out with one. And you try and you’re like, No.

[00:42:46.250] – Speaker 1
Sorry.

[00:42:47.440] – Speaker 2
No. Maybe self driving car, but communicating with people. I’m not there yet.

[00:42:57.910] – Speaker 1
I’m not against AI copywriting.

[00:43:00.890] – Speaker 2
Sure. I’m not.

[00:43:02.740] – Speaker 1
But a lot of them are awful. They’re not going to be able to tell a story. They’re not going to structure content in a way that is interesting and appealing. They don’t have that hook and loop. They don’t drive a narrative through their content. And then a lot of times they’re just pulling random things that make no sense at all. You need a great editor if you’re going to use it.

[00:43:31.200] – Speaker 2
Now, for.

[00:43:32.660] – Speaker 1
Small businesses that can’t afford a service, use it, but bring in a strategist to define the story and outline the story first and bring in an amazing editor to go through it afterwards. Got you. It cannot be used alone. It’s not fair.

[00:43:57.390] – Speaker 2
That is fair. It reminds me of I think of Mars Rover, something like that. And then I look at the little robot vacuum that you have. And every time you get home from work and you’re like, The game is where’s my vacuum? I think we have it. Yeah, we call.

[00:44:14.950] – Speaker 1
Ours Rosie. Yeah.

[00:44:16.860] – Speaker 2
It just hasn’t figured out how to get around that couch.

[00:44:20.630] – Speaker 1
No, it’s always stuck under there.

[00:44:22.730] – Speaker 2
Or whatever. I’m just like, I’m not quite there. Or trapped.

[00:44:24.270] – Speaker 1
On a carpet. I’m not.

[00:44:26.140] – Speaker 2
Quite there. So interesting. So Sarah, we’re running out of time here. Can you tell people how they can find you? Yes.

[00:44:33.860] – Speaker 1
So I have a live stream and a podcast called Tiny Marketing. It’s everywhere. So if you go to any place, you listen to podcasts or watch videos, it’s there, Tiny Marketing. And you can find me on social media or my website with my name, Sarah Noel Block.

[00:44:50.700] – Speaker 2
All right. Easy enough. And Sarah with an H?

[00:44:53.490] – Speaker 1
Yes, Sarah with an H.

[00:44:55.010] – Speaker 2
My sister’s name, so you got to make sure of that. Awesome. And how about your website?

[00:44:59.950] – Speaker 1
It’s SarahNoelBlock.com. Oh, easy enough.

[00:45:03.160] – Speaker 2
I love it. My name. Really quick, where did you come up with the name Tiny Marketing? You know what?

[00:45:08.700] – Speaker 1
It just came to me because I was working with a lot of one person marketing departments, and I had this notion, even the tiniest of marketing departments can have a big impact with the right systems in place. And that’s where it came from. Nice.

[00:45:25.620] – Speaker 2
I love it. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for.

[00:45:30.120] – Speaker 1
Having me. Sweet.

[00:45:31.540] – Speaker 2
This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggles stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. We are underwritten locally by the Bank of Sun Prairie. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, smash that big old thumbs up button, subscribe, and of course, comment below to let us know what you liked, what you loved, and what you want to learn more about marketing and about Sarah. My name is James Kademan and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls on Call. Offering call answering services for service businesses looking for growth on the web at callsoncall.com. As well as Draw In Customers Business Coaching, offering business coaching services for entrepreneurs all over the country found at drawincustomers.com. And of course, The Bold Business Book, a book for the entrepreneur in all of us available wherever fine books are sold. We’d like to thank you, our wonderful listeners, as well as our guest, Sarah Noel Block, owner of Tiny Marketing. Sarah, can you tell us your website one more time?

[00:46:29.250] – Speaker 1
Yes, it is sarahnoelblock.com, Sarah with an H.

[00:46:33.420] – Speaker 1
How could anyone possibly forget that? Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night. The podcast link is found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.