More Than A Few Words

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast. Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. If you follow national brands on social media, ask yourself why. Odds are it’s because the content is fun, entertaining, and engaging. Now look at your business social media account. Can you say the same thing? A small business is probably not going to be as popular as a national brand. But you can emulate what they’re doing, and cultivate an engaged social community. So the question is, how do they do it? For starters, they post regularly, if you see a business account that hasn’t posted in several days, that’s a clear sign the company is not really all that interested. And if they’re not interested, their community is not going to be interested. And remember, you can’t be a silent participant.  That's like throwing a party and hanging out in the back of the room. You’ve got to jump

he weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  These days everybody's trying to present themselves as an expert. So how do you stand out in your niche in a crowded market? Part of the magic comes from creating a visual brand. Where does the process begin to build a visual brand for yourself? In today's crowded market, anyone can become a personal brand, but only special people can become have a personality brand. A personality brand is what's unique to you. It's how you position yourself in the market and how people perceive you. In the swipe right swipe left world, we make a decision about someone in less than one 10th of a second. We are in judging all the time so you want to make sure when you are creating your business, it's driven by your personality, because that's something that you're going to find your aligned audience with. And you're showing up in a way that is authentic and honoring who you are. Ab

The podcast More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with marketing professionals from around the world. A heart-centered business has purpose and intent, connected to your superhero talent. For so many 2020 was a time for pivoting and taking drastic measures, to keep our business running. We had to move fast and we didn't always have the ability to incorporate soul and heartful side of our brands and business. Making those tough choices left many of us stuck in the day to day, but now is a great time to get back to doing what brings your joy and adds value to others. One way to reset is to look at you tasks and  see which activities you are engaged in "fill your cup"  These are the things which make you smile  and feel energized. Then look at the activities which leave you feeling stressed, or unsatisfied. If there are more of these "energy sucks" in your day, it is time to shift how you spend your time. You may still have to do things that don't  fill up our cup, but find

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast. Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. Today I want to talk about patience. Because let's face it, this is something that small business owners typically don't have. We start our businesses with these grand plans, and we get out there and start marketing our product, and we expect results. But good marketing takes time. If you invest in inbound marketing and content marketing, you need to remember this type of marketing will not double your web traffic overnight. But those blog posts build value over time. And the content that you wrote a week or two ago, or even a month ago continues to be found in niches and continues to drive traffic for months and years to come. Search engines may not notice the first article you write on a topic. But once you have a series of articles, suddenly you begin to be seen as an authority. An

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world. Many business owners assume they know the answer. They believe they don't need research, but Lori Highby thinks that's a mistake. When you are making assumptions, it is like shooting darts in the dark. You may hit the target, but the majority of those darts are going to hit the wall or break a window. If you start with the facts, really get into the head of who your target customer you can craft a plan based on data and insight. Now you have a strategy to get the right message in front of the right people so they want to do business with you.  ABOUT LORI HIGHBY With a core personal value of lifelong-learning, Lori Highby has shared creative and strategic digital marketing, personal branding, and entrepreneurship lessons with people and organizations from allover. Her 20 years experience, education, and involvement range from currently owning a digital marketing a

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  This week we explore the importance of sales and marketing working together. Our guest Allan Langer explains companies that keep their marketing and sales teams separate have a lower success rate than companies which actually allow and encourage these companies to work together. The win rates are about 65% higher in those companies. It doesn't, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why that is the case. If your marketing is working it is driving leads to the company. But if there is no communication between the groups, the sales team won't know where they came from, what the demographic is or the lead came in. Without background information they are starting from disadvantage. If they understood the reasoning behind the marketing, they would be able to cater their sales presentation around that reasoning and everything becomes congruent within the comp

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast. Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. Who is your business plan for? I know that sounds like a simple question, but it’s not really. As a business owner, it’s important to have a business plan that guides your operations. But sometimes you also have to produce one for other people. And those different audiences are going to want different things from your plan. For example, if you’re trying to get a bank loan, the banker is going to want to make sure that all the numbers add up. They’re also going to want to see that you have clearly thought through what could go wrong and how you’re going to pay back that loan even if things don’t turn out quite the way you expected. Conversely, investors are not going to be as interested in the numbers. What they want to see is a really clear explanation of what your business idea is, w

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  Handling the mental health challenges (mostly stress, anxiety, and isolation) that come along with being a business owner. It's essential to separate your emotional state from the results, which brings you more peace of mind and ironically better results. About Craig Inzana Craig is a mental wellness advocate, media creator, and mindfulness practitioner. He is a recovering addict obsessed with self-development. wellbeing, and self-compassion. He owns a marketing agency that focuses on marketing and selling through relationships. He was previously a commission painter, a profitable filmmaker, and generally a multi-disciplinary artist.    

I happen to love things that are quirky and a little off balance. That should come as no surprise considering the fact that I named my company Roundpeg. It is this love of asymmetry and innovative shapes and sizes and styles that has really got me jazzed with some of the new web trends we’re seeing. Over the last few years websites had gotten very boxy with large rectangular images at the top, three boxes below is the preferred format. But new design tools are allowing us to create designs which break the grid pattern, creating the illusion that sections of the website seem to float and break traditional borders. We’re seeing asymmetry everywhere. This allows information that is more important to live in wider columns and layouts with unequal columns draw attention to the most important information on the page. We’re seeing lots of angles and dividers in weird shapes and sizes. If you’re ready to see a little asymmetry in your website, reach out to us at roundpeg.biz. 

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  Look Before You Leap Question to ask before you start your business. These days, lots of people are thinking about starting their own businesses, but they are not quite sure where to start.  Too often they focus all their energy on the product, service, or technology assuming the market will love it.  Krishna suggests they need to evaluate the market potential by asking questions about your idea client, the potential size of the market, who the competitors are and how you are going to deliver it to the marketplace. Next look at the numbers.  What are you projected costs?  Can you charge enough to generate a profit?  And finally, ask yourself, why you want to start a business?  Do you want to make a million dollars in the next 12 months, build this company to sell to a private equity company, use this as one step toward your retirement? Different objectives will l

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. What's important to you as a company? What do you value? It's natural in a small business for the values of a company to be driven by the owner, but if your employees don't embrace those values, your company won't reflect them. Start with a brainstorm session to clarify your values, everyone in the company shares what they think the company is about, and they share the characteristics that they would like to see. You may end up with a pretty long list and the trick is to revise it and revise it until you come up with just a few phrases that really capture the essence of your organization. To be effective, the values can't be just buzzwords and each value should have a short definition of what that value means to you. You'll know you have the right values for your organization if th

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.    So often small businesses make their web copy and marketing information so flat and so generic, prospective customers have a hard time finding a reason to hire them.  To make your company stand out and encourage prospects to choose you, your brand must have a little bit of personality. Every company has something in the culture, values, beliefs, or methodology, that makes them unique.  The more you can laser in on what makes you unique, the easier it is for people to connect with you.  Don’t be afraid of a strong personality.  Instead of trying to keep everyone happy, accept that you may alienate some people.  But Danielle thinks that’s ok. Because the people who connect with you are more likely to be excited and passionate about working with you. You can bring a little personality into your content by writing as if you're writing to a close friend. This remove

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner. The introduction of the first iPhone a decade ago started us down a path from which there is no return. Today, most websites see about half of their traffic coming from mobile devices and we expect that trend to continue.  As a result, websites are being built with a mobile first mentality. If you're thinking about building your first website or redesigning an existing one, here are a few things to keep in mind to create that mobile friendly design. The first is vertical hierarchy. On a mobile screen, one thing has to come to the top so we're seeing a lot of longer pages with one key idea on each page. Vertical hierarchy allows us to shift to minimalist design, which eliminates clutter which helps to focus the visitors' attention on that most important piece of information on your

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.  These days, we're not doing a lot of face to face interactions with customers or coworkers, but we still need to communicate.  I sat down with the Story Guy, Geoffrey Klein to talk about the best way for businesses to  engage an audience of prospective customers with storytelling. He believes if you want people to remember and understand what you're talking about, the best way to do that is to create a narrative or story to share that message. Forget about the facts and figures and make your product or service come to life with real stories of real people and how the benefited from working with you.   About Geoffrey Klein Geoffrey Klein, the Story Guy, is a TEDx Speaker, Adjunct Professor, and Content Producer who helps people and organizations communicate more effectively through the power of story and visual communication (graphics, video, animation). Geoffrey’

The marketing minute is a shorter version of the popular More than a Few Words podcast.  Instead of a conversation with a marketing professional, host Lorraine Ball shares a quick tip to start you on your day as a business owner.   One of the most interesting statistics to come out of our annual Small Business digital marketing survey was the fact that although most companies have blogs, they are actually blogging less often. This is really sad because blogging is one of the most powerful things you can do to compete with larger companies. But the question is, where do your ideas come from? And honestly, you can find great content ideas everywhere. Start by looking at what you already have. Read your literature, read your brochures, and see what information you can pull from that to create new blog posts. Listen to your constituents, your employees, and your competitors and see what they're talking about. Keep a running list of frequently asked questions and industry trends and regulations. Start building tha

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.    We are living in a relationship centric era.  Long gone are the days of mass marketing. Successful businesses must develop real relationships with their customers ,and deliver relevant, personalized and authentic communication if they want to stand out. How did we get here?  Two decades ago we were living in more of a product centric era, where businesses would would market and sell products based on the various features they could kind of cram into the product.  Sales people were trained to "sell the benefits of the bells and whistles.  Companies believed it was these features which set them apart. Eventually companies realized, people don't really care about how many bells and whistles are on your product or service.  They care about what your product or service can do for them.  The shift led to the customer centric era when marketing was focused on getting

Often when I talk to business owners about their Google Analytics, they focus a lot of attention on how many people came to their website, how many unique visitors, and what their bounce rate was. They miss  some of the most valuable information in Google Analytics, which is where your traffic is coming from. This data is the most actionable of all the information in your analytics. If your direct traffic is low, for example, that tells you that you need to be spending more time in offline activities, attending networking events, conferences, and trade shows handing out copies of your business card or handing out flyers with links to your website. If your organic traffic numbers are low, that means you need to be creating more content for your website. If your referrals are low, you need to spend time creating some inbound links to your website. If you want to improve the performance of your website tomorrow look at your traffic sources today. If you’d like help building a plan to do this, drop us a note at r

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world.   As more and more people are working from home, physical networking is less popular.  As a result, they are trying to do more on LinkedIn. Unfortunately,  many of them are doing it wrong. LinkedIn coach Tara Fitness says the first thing to do is get your profile right.  Get a professional looking head shot.  You wouldn't show up for an in person networking event in a t-shirt and sneakers, treat your LinkedIn picture  like your uniform.  Clean up headline.  No one is looking for a CEO, they want to know what you can do for them, so transform your headline into something compelling for the reader.  Write a compelling about section which really describes who you are and what you can do for others.    About our guest Tara Fitness is a digital marketer specializing in Email Marketing and LinkedIn Lead Generation for B2B brands. She is currently studying a Master of C

If you want to run a direct mail campaign, you can buy a mailing list. There are reputable sources for addresses and phone numbers of local homeowners and businesses. And the lists are relatively current, and you can target them down to a single postal route. And that’s a great strategy for direct mail. There are several reasons why this doesn’t work for email. The most important reason is that email lists need to be permission based and those are simply not available to purchase. Unwanted direct mail simply gets tossed in the trash, but the risk of an unsolicited email is that a spam complaint is filed. If you’d like to know more about building a permission based list, check out our blog at roundpeg.biz.

The weekly marketing podcast, More than a Few Words is hosted by Lorraine Ball and features conversations with professionals from around the world. In the old days we talked about advertising vs pr.  Now we refer to paid media vs earned media.  Regardless of what you call it, there is a tremendous opportunity to get your message in front of prospective custers is you know how to tell your story.  Let's start with the difference between Advertising and PR.With advertising you are able to communicate with your audience with a message that you control. You can pick the date and time of your advertisement, you pick the vehicle you want it delivered in, whether it's a newspaper, online television or radio, and you pick the calendar items to go with it. In contrast, there is a filter when it comes to public relations.  That filer is the editor of the newspaper or blog  or the producer of the TV news show or podcast. They decide when or if they will invite you for an interview or run your story. While you would like