Podcast – Heather Steele – July 11
VIEW RECORDING – 42 mins (No highlights)
@0:00 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Thank you. Nice to meet you as well. I am the client projects manager at CHOP’s consulting and so I’ll tell you a little bit about us and then maybe run me through a little bit about yourself and your company.
I’ve gone through your form responses so thank you for sending those through and then I’ll kind of run you through the framework of what we usually go over in the podcast and let me know what you want to cover and we’ll come up with a little agenda and then we’ll just dive in to a mini recorded conversation and we’ll use that as podcast.
Now just noting we’re recording all of this our editor will take pieces of it and make it into a nice cohesive unit for us so if you stumble on your words or have a tickle and need to call for whatever feel free just say cut afterwards if you can yeah and then say three two one when you’re ready and dive back in and then our editor will know where to cut and what.
just pretty good at knowing where to cut it’s just knowing where to come back. Yeah. Alright so first off a bit about myself I’ve been with chops for about two and a half.
years. I was an operation specialist working with a lot of our clients on tech and operations systems figuring out what their gaps are, issues, challenges, and then figuring out solutions.
So sometimes they just need new systems, sometimes we have to really look at the process and figure out where it’s really inefficient or broken or just needs to be reworked and so we’ll start over.
And so we kind of handled our clients for the change management process, specifically tech knobs on my side, but we also have a marketing division.
And so our marketing division does everything from like website development, email marketing campaigns, branding, they do SEO, all the marketing things in the marketing side.
And so together we work on projects for our clients that basically deliver both sides. And so we’re sort of an all in in house services for you.
@1:48 – Heather Steele
Tell me even what maybe yourself and your company and how you got to your current state. Yeah, so I maybe you said this and I just didn’t hear it, but what is your idea?
@2:00 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
client look like, like what kind of business, what size it really just depends. Our ideal client is obviously one that has funding to be able to afford to pay consulting services.
That’s the number one thing. But really, profile wise, we’re really flexible in what type of clients we work with.
We have one off sole entrepreneurs that are literally just starting out and have a really skeleton budget, but they need something to get started.
We work with them within their budget to figure out what we can do versus what they dream of doing, and start the building blocks of phase one with them.
We also then look at building like future phases, right? We also have a couple of divisions of our company.
So like on the text and offside, I’m a certified consultant in Saluno and Clio. Those are both trust accounting softwares for legal, for law firms.
We’ve also got LEAP is another legal certification, but we have a couple other certifications for like CRM systems, project management systems.
So, you know, we try to make sure that we are able to provide a variety of tech solutions. to our client base.
Now, because we’re consultants for some of those other systems, we get clients referred to us from those specific systems that need a consultant to help guide them through the implementation.
We have clients that will refer us. So there’s a lot of like referral networking that happens for us with our client base.
And then, know, I’m working with a couple clients right now that are a small consulting company with a working on very large projects.
So really, the client base is more, they’re in need of tech systems or marketing. They have some funding and capacity to take on project work and they have vision.
Really, we just need clients kind of those three points and we will work with them to build out whatever they can dream of.
@3:40 – Heather Steele
Very cool. And so are you most working with Canadian companies or do you work with US companies too?
@3:46 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
We do work with some US companies and like I mentioned, the one consulting company worked on with a couple of projects.
They are local MBC, but they actually have an international audience. it could be on like a worldwide platform. We’re building out like a community online forum.
for one system, for one branch of their company, and then another is we’re building out all of the operations, processes, and systems to provide structure to a mini business that is actually launching a new software.
so it’s a vision of their company that’s been working on the corner of people’s desk for about 10 years, and they’re finally almost ready to go to market.
But then how do you do that? The branding, website, content, blog posts, all the things that we need to start tracking the work.
So if and when they want to sell something in future, we’ve got documentation to prove the process of development, volume of sales, etc.
So for the tech side and the marketing side, that’s one of our most interesting projects I think we’re working on right now.
Very cool. How about yourself?
@4:46 – Heather Steele
For your company’s profile? Yeah, so my company that I kind of is like a bull’s service marketing agency and over the years, have narrowed that down to be primarily digital marketing, really focused on around the website assets.
then we do a lot of like hosting a maintenance over there. And I’ve shifted all of the marketing strategy work over to a business I’m a partner in, which is kind of what I’m focusing the most on right now, which is value building marketing.
And that’s a business that my partner Randy and I run, where we help organizations typically it’s B2B service providers.
And anywhere from the small is like five employees up to about 50 employees is kind of our sweet spot.
Once you get better than that, they tend to start bringing all their marketing activities in house. And so they’re not the most ideal force at that point.
But we’ve developed a framework called the vision value model where we help business owners go through and really create a true vision for their business and for themselves.
help them get in line with what they value most about their business so that we can protect that grow and then we develop one year goals that are going to align with that vision and values and then ultimately craft a marketing strategy that keeps them on that long-term vision while meeting their short-term goals and so they’re deliverable is a very detailed like down to the tasks each month what they need to do in their marketing to accomplish their goals okay and then we have teams that can stay on and do the implementation work with them or they could bring it in house and do it with their own marketing team and we can just provide you know ongoing like fractional CMO kind of support to them and how many people work at that firm that you built there like being on your team we have about six people that are really dedicated to that team and then because we each run our own businesses with the people we can pull in for like overflow or specific projects that we need so we’re pretty tight little
@7:00 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
team. That’s great.
@7:02 – Heather Steele
Yeah.
@7:02 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Sorry.
@7:03 – Heather Steele
There’s a lot. It is decided by common. Sit on top of my camera.
@7:09 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah. That’s cute.
@7:13 – Heather Steele
No, I’m wearing Texas for you.
@7:15 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it’s about 38 and left for Joe Berta where I am today. It is scorching hot.
I won’t complain because it gets really cold in the winter. Yeah.
@7:24 – Heather Steele
Take the heat limits here, right?
@7:27 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah. Okay. So a little bit about your company. So I’m just kind of just taking a quick read through.
So just noting that you had like a special call action. But you’re really pushing the strategy accelerator. What would you like to kind of highlight during the call regarding that specific offering?
@7:48 – Heather Steele
So they did most like to highlight the need for businesses to really have a true vision in place and especially closely held like owner operated businesses.
If there’s not a vision that you’re working toward. And that vision isn’t communicated out to everyone on the team.
It’s very difficult to keep all the pieces moving forward. And so that accelerator is really focused on helping owners get super clear on their vision.
Where are they going? What do the next five to 10 years look like? Are they going to sell the business?
Are they going to transition it to someone else? they trying to reach some kind of milestone?
@8:23 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Is it bringing a new product or service to market?
@8:26 – Heather Steele
What is that big thing that’s on the horizon that’s going to keep everyone pushing forward in the same direction?
And so the accelerator is a really cool opportunity for business owners to get out of their silos, out of their echo chamber and talk to other business owners, really get insights into what other people are doing and learn from each other, come together in a collaborative format where they’re working on their vision, they’re working on their values and goals, but they’re doing it with other business owners that are similar to them.
@8:58 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
And so they get a lot more out of them. that because now it’s not.
@9:01 – Heather Steele
Oh, this is what I’ve kind of thought of, they can share and learn from other people’s experiences.
@9:06 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
And so it’s a really sounding board there for them.
@9:09 – Heather Steele
Yeah, yeah, to bring people together to go through our process, which has a lot of value on its own.
But when you’re able to do that with other owners, that just takes it up a notch.
@9:20 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
For sure. I think that our audience is going to be very interested to learn more about that and strategically how they should be thinking when they’re brainstorming and conceptualizing what they want to do.
One thing to have the dreams, another to figure out how to make them happen. And you know, does the work that they are passionate about, but not everybody’s necessarily passionate about the marketing or the ad manner, the operations or the tech side, right?
So for business owners, that could be a little bit overwhelming for them, at least for our audience. So our audience is our business owners, our client base, who they refer out to, who they may share like, etc.
within the algorithms of social media will find our content, right? Like I said, we get a lot of furls.
So we get a lot of business that kind of like bounces off of us from other folks, but they see value in applying those strategies at a high level long term.
But when you’re starting to build it, it’s like, oh my gosh, where do I start?
@10:14 – Heather Steele
If you think of like building a pyramid, right?
@10:16 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
All the base place first before you can really get to like the top viewpoint, if you will, right? so what I’d love to do in the podcast is to highlight that a little bit more and discuss how clients really need that and should find value in it, even if they necessarily can’t wrap their head around.
So think outside of the box and reach out for external support if it’s not your niche of what you do, right?
Because there’s always division or specialized labor. If it’s not your cup of tea, pay out someone else to do it, because it brings up their capacity to take on bigger projects that are better use of their time and skill set.
So during our podcast, not all being said, framework we kind of like to tackle with all our guests is basically
off, I introduce the podcast myself. Thank you for joining, ask you to introduce yourself and a bit about your company.
So depending on what you share at that point, I may ask you a little more probably like give me more about your background or what led you to your role or how you divide you came up with it.
You need to have another division of the business like you changed through that growth. We always ask like what are some of the biggest challenges you face in your industry?
How do you stay updated with the latest trends in your fields or like what trends do you see coming forward or that you have seen trends and how they’ve applied to your clients, right?
You’re talking about those long-term strategies. So that’s kind of information that our clients or our audience issues and our clients or our audience perks up for them.
always find in the comments where we get likes on those kind of parts. always ask, can you tell us about a project that was particularly well or perhaps didn’t?
@11:52 – Heather Steele
What was learned from that? I always love that question.
@11:56 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
What advice, right? It’s a loaded question. Can I always get some interesting comments? What advice would you give to someone starting in your industry and how do you see the future of the industry evolving?
Okay. So we kind of go into there and then depending on time, if we need to like extend and get a little more discussion going, I may ask another few questions would be like, what are some common misconceptions about your work within the industry or like marketing strategy in general?
And things like if you could record like one teaching video to share a tidbit and information with your client base or just business owners in general, what would it be?
And then my last question, if we, if I need to like get some more time going or I think I’m going to get an interesting answer, will be who is a significant influence, whether it be somebody like a specific role, maybe someone who is mentored you or you’ve mentored over the years.
Okay. And is like a great way to wrap up. then I just kind of wrap up, you know, thank you for coming, et cetera, cetera.
You can find our podcast at ABCs and then we wrap up and then I’ll press the end button on the recording.
And then basically what happens is I send this off to our marketing team and our management, Selena and Melody, let them look it over.
If they’re like, yeah, that’s a great content. When we’re going to go ahead and edit it, it gets an upper editor and they will go ahead and do their magic and make it look all professional and pretty blessed.
Awesome. I loved it. I said, it’s to another podcast. Like you edit them. like, yeah, yeah. Cause if you like some people are like, Oh, I’ve been on some of this.
Like you’re not allowed, like don’t mess up. Like, Oh, that’s a lot of pressure.
@13:23 – Heather Steele
Yeah, that is a lot of pressure.
@13:25 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah, we do.
@13:26 – Heather Steele
Right.
@13:30 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
That’s editing, but we’ll go in and like take out mistakes at least. Yeah. So I said, like if you can’t just have your like jumbling on your words you’re like, but your tongue or like my cat, I love the big cup.
But my cat knocked it over. one of the podcasts, like joke. And it was like 20 ounces still in their bowl.
So I was like, because as soon as he was like done, I didn’t want to stall his conversation, but like soon as he was done, I was like, one minute, please mute camera off and then just like quickly.
got a towel, something that smells like good. And then shampooing the carpet after the call because of iced tea.
Oh man, water that day. But anyways, I digress. So yes, things happen, you know, we’re live, but we’re recorded.
@14:12 – Heather Steele
always go back and edit them.
@14:13 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Perfect. Do you have any questions or anything else you would like to add or want me to come to about during the call?
@14:20 – Heather Steele
No, I think the only other thing that, and you kind of mentioned this too about, you know, that some of your businesses are on that trajectory to sell.
so yeah, I probably will talk a little bit about that just because lot of people aren’t looking at marketing strategy as part of the exit strategy.
And so I think that’s something else that makes us a little bit more unique. So I’ll probably talk in that direction too.
Sure.
@14:44 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
So yeah, I would maybe put that into like some of the biggest challenges you face in your industry, like the misconception of like, you don’t need to worry about marketing if you have sales now.
We have good sales, I don’t need to worry about marketing. well, when does your season get slow? Yeah, we go through both three, four months, you’re
slow and like, what do you do to prep for that? Well, we just save some money.
@15:05 – Heather Steele
You could be doing marketing during the six months prior. Right.
@15:08 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Right. That gets you some leads, some, you know, some, some funnels and, you know, filling the leads funneling into your company where you can follow up and make those like sales connections and potentially build up project longevity, right?
But yeah, that’s not necessarily like the one-off customer.
@15:23 – Heather Steele
You want to get the customers that are repeat and or referrals. Right. Right. Well, when I say sell, mean, gearing up to sell the business.
@15:31 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Exactly. that’s another side is that a lot of companies like, well, have sales.
@15:34 – Heather Steele
don’t need to worry about marketing, but I’m like, well, if you want to sell in two to three years, you need to show that you did stuff and that it can run without you being the one making all the sales.
@15:46 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Exactly. Without you, like literally on the phone all day. But yeah, so I agree.
@15:51 – Heather Steele
That’s a great point to bring up.
@15:53 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Awesome. Okay. So what I used to do is just give a little shake off. And then I will go three, two, one, and then I will kind of.
Okay, I’m going to just move my document. So I’m reading the document as I’m in front of the camera because you haven’t seen my eyes starting.
I’m trying not to get away.
@16:08 – Heather Steele
I don’t know why we don’t have monitors yet. They can have some sort of camera like right in the center.
You know what they probably do 24 have like recognizes where eyes are and it just has the camera behind the screen at that level.
@16:24 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah, it’d be amazing. I know. Well, used to do, I mean, COVID, we all kind of figured out desks at home, people who didn’t, I didn’t have an office.
So I remember having like my laptop and my monitor is like up on my old text book to me, I was like, hey, money put to get used.
That’s the most expensive laptop stand I’ve ever had. For books I read for a couple months. Yeah, I digress.
I mean, I love the fact that most of the stuff now is you can get an online book license.
But I remember slubbing on laptop with the big binder and like the four textbooks from the day. Yeah, no, I started photocopying two or three chapters ahead.
I just paid for lot of photocopying because I’m not carrying that book around.
@17:07 – Heather Steele
That’s insane.
@17:08 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
My back couldn’t take that. All right. So I’m just going to little sip of water here. Water. What are my lessons?
Nice. Okay. All right. So I’m just going to. Thank Three, two, one. Thank you joining us to the get done in business podcast by chops consulting.
My name is Jackie Mertow. I’m the client projects manager here with chops. Today’s guest. We have Heather Steele with us joining us from Blue Steel Solutions.
And welcome and thank you for joining us today, Heather.
@17:52 – Heather Steele
Thank you so much for having me.
@17:54 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
I’m excited for this conversation today. Well, we appreciate you joining us. Would you mind being starting off? during a bit about your background and what led you to your current role?
@18:03 – Heather Steele
Yeah, so I started my business about 14 years ago. There’s been a lot of change and shifts that have happened since then, but basically went from a full service marketing agency to an agency that really focuses on a strategy first approach, creating marketing strategies that really focus in on the owner or the board of the organizations long-term vision and then working backwards to what are those one-year goals that we need to accomplish to keep us on track for that vision, keep the business growing, but also in a way that protects what the owner values, because as a business grows, a lot of things are going to change.
so our process helps figure out what are those non-negotiables? What are the things about the business that you value most, that you don’t want it to lose or sacrifice as you grow?
And so we’re able to deliver a very detailed, very actionable marketing strategy. that’s going to meet those on your goals, protect what people value most, and then most importantly, keep them on track for that long-term vision.
@19:08 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
I think that’s so important. You can get so busy in doing the day-to-day work of whatever is you sell or produce, that you forget to strategize where you want to go and how you plan on getting there.
So like you said, breaking down those strategies into one, two, to five-year goals, and then from there into the objectives.
So it’s definitely great to have a support service that you can reach out to to get some of that knowledge, if you will, because not necessarily everybody will be an expert in that, if that’s not necessarily what their niche product offering is.
@19:37 – Heather Steele
yeah, and a lot of times we go for the low-hanging fruit, right, as agencies, it’s easy to say, well, here’s the thing I can help you accelerate in quickly, that that might actually derail that long-term vision.
might not be the right things to focus on. So that’s why we have a very different approach that we found gets great results for our clients.
@19:58 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Well, I can appreciate that. Would you mind telling me a little bit about some of the biggest challenges that you faced, either in the last few years, if the industry you’ve noticed any trends or changes, or some maybe projects that the version challenges with?
@20:12 – Heather Steele
Oh, yeah. definitely there’s always some challenges, especially with working with business owners, of different personality types there, for sure.
I would say one of the biggest shifts that we’ve seen, not necessarily just in the industry, but with business owners overall, is that they are thinking more about what’s going to come in the future.
We’re seeing that exit planning is something that’s really become very popular, and most business owners are being inundated by advisors who are wanting to talk to them about their future, what’s going to happen to the business, are they going to sell it, they going to transition it, what are they going to do with the ownership of that business.
But what people aren’t talking about is what can they do today to start making their business run better, making it more efficient, more profitable, in a
way that aligns with that long-term future and so that’s one of the challenges that we see is that people are being inundated with this concept of what are you going to do in the next five to 10 years to get out of your business but they’re not backtracking that into what do I do today to start laying that groundwork laying the foundation and how do I do it in a way that’s very profitable and good for the business now not just good for the business and the future and so that’s something that you know we see a lot of owners struggling with they want to have that that long-term vision they want to know what they’re going to do in the future but they don’t really know how to trace that back to the steps that they’re going to take today.
@21:40 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah I think having somebody who can work with that understands what the ins and outs of that game plan should be is always very helpful and I know here at CHOP we work with our clients on that change management piece in general for all projects and so specific to marketing strategy definitely a good approach to take to that especially if you want to look at like long-term and breaking it down right.
So, looking at just the trends in general in the marketing, online, digital world, have you seen any trends in recent past or that are going to be coming out in the future?
@22:15 – Heather Steele
We work primarily with B2B businesses, typically service providers, so we’re a little, I wouldn’t say behind on the trends, but the consumer trends that are really fun and exciting to jump on board with aren’t always the best fit for our clients, but what we are seeing is a big resurgence of LinkedIn.
Being really active and collaborative on LinkedIn is definitely something that we’re seeing, especially consultants, advisors, people who are more in a teaching kind of role in their organization, doing very well there, and then definitely kind of leaning back into that educational marketing approach.
You know, we went through a phase there, I think, around the pandemic where people were burned out on webinars and things like Zoom for Teens and yeah nobody wanted it but we’re seeing that come back around and start to be more effective again especially when it’s posed in shorter time walks things that aren’t going to take away too much of a prospect’s time but that are going to really deliver them some true value we’re seeing those start to really work well again as well and then of course video is like the best thing that we think anybody can be doing right now all when there’s content marketing because we’re all lazy right we don’t want to take time to read anything so just tell me the story yep if we can get some great video content from our clients we are super happy let’s say those are three things that we’re seeing work really well in the B2B world um and then you know just keep an ad it that’s the biggest thing is no matter what the trends are just get a strategy and stick with it be consistent something’s better than nothing just start it thank you
keep doing it.
@24:01 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah, to get that traction to get the ball rolling, that’s always probably one of the biggest Roblox. We see all of our clients deal with it.
It’s not only just getting like the momentum of like, okay, taking that first step, but it’s also getting your stakeholders involved.
It’s getting your team on board. so like if you can do it smaller doses to start, you’ll get bigger buy-in down the road, right?
It’s sort of like it starts like a snowball at top. By time it gets to the bottom, hopefully it’s picked up some speed, traction, it’s larger, some momentum moving with it.
@24:28 – Heather Steele
Yeah.
@24:29 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
So that being said, kind of looking at like how things have developed, I’m always curious to ask our guests, did you have any sort of recent successful projects that you’ve worked on that you’d like to share bit of insight on or perhaps some challenges that came up on a project that you think would be helpful for our audience, know, small to medium-sized business owners or people who are just looking for some guidance on how to tackle the change management prospect, perhaps specifically to marketing or just in general for operations?
@24:56 – Heather Steele
Yeah. So, you know, I think I can share two kind of… very contradictory experiences. We had a client that we started working with last summer.
We put together a strategy for him. Really great plan. Everyone had buy-in, especially his employees were really excited. You know, he supports several sales folks who were out in the field, you know, to generate sales for him.
And when it came time to start launching some of the marketing initiatives, he had so much imposter syndrome around putting himself out there, really getting the business out in front of people, sharing their success story, sharing what they do, that we couldn’t get anything approved.
You know, he put himself in the position of being this roadblock, of wanting to approve everything we were doing, but then he felt so uncomfortable.
Even down to the point of we did some interviews with some of these clients, and they loved the service they had received.
mean, they just couldn’t say enough good things. And when he saw the case studies put together, he felt like they had lied.
He felt like they had lied and said that he did a better job than he actually did, which was crazy.
But it all came down to this fear of putting himself out there, fear of saying that he can do something, and then what if I fail?
What if people think that I’m not as good as I’m saying I’m being? And so that was a really interesting situation of running into someone who was really successful doing a great job with his clients, but then just so afraid of putting that out there from a branding and marketing standpoint that we ultimately had to end our relationship because we just couldn’t make any progress because he was so afraid to put things out and show what great work he’s been doing for his clients.
Contrasting that with a new client that we’ve started working with, just within the past two or three months, we’ve been implementing our marketing strategy with him and he’s seeing huge success.
He’s getting referrals coming in. On a regular basis, he’s been able to close to new clients that are exactly in his sweet spot of what he came to us wanting.
He’s got some opportunities with some events and some speaking engagements that we’re kind of side projects that we realized that he wanted to do it through our vision value model and kind of pulled out what he values.
And so we were able to really help him hit the ground running and the biggest difference between these two people who are very similar when it comes to the service they’re providing, how they go about providing their service was that one was afraid to launch really held back, didn’t want to put anything out there for fear of what are other people going to think what are they going to say.
Well, the other one said, you know what, do it. just run with it. Let’s launch this thing. And man, he’s seeing so much more success.
You know, just enjoying the fruits of his labor so quickly. Yeah. He’s the process, he’s trusting the people that he’s hired to do this work for him, and he’s not afraid to put himself out there.
And so that’s something that I think is a really interesting dichotomy and something that we see a lot with owners, especially if they’ve grown their own business.
They’re so close to it, that they’re really afraid of, what are people going to think, right? are people going to put myself out there when I start doing all this marketing activity?
Is it going to be okay? Is it going to turn people off? And those that just say, you know what?
If it’s not someone’s cup of tea, they can look the other way.
@28:35 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
If there’s nine billion people, that’s okay.
@28:38 – Heather Steele
Yep, the people that this was meant for are going to resonate with it. They’re the ones that see the success.
@28:44 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Well, I think that’s great advice for anyone who’s like on the fence contemplating, should I take that next step?
Should I jump in, dip a toe or jump? I say jump, but make sure you’ve got a good support system around you.
If you are working with consultants that you trust them that they’re guiding you with proper timelines and milestones, etc.
And that you’re just putting out what content you can and content being your product or service, your marketing, operational support for your team if you have a team and getting your foot in the door, so to speak out in the market.
@29:15 – Heather Steele
Mm hmm.
@29:16 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yeah, I never get anywhere.
@29:17 – Heather Steele
Don’t take a step. And we always, we have this kind of Monterey that no one cares about your business.
Like, seriously, even your mama.
@29:26 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Like, nobody cares. You have to care.
@29:28 – Heather Steele
Only one cares. They’re the only one that’s so caught up in what you’re doing and worried about what people are going to think.
Yeah. What else is going to care about your LinkedIn post, about what you’re saying, right?
@29:41 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
The people that your message resonates with all they want is a solution for me to make their life better or easier or healthier.
@29:46 – Heather Steele
Absolutely. But they don’t care. No, truly.
@29:51 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
At the end of the day, they just have their solution from you and you just want your solution for somebody else.
that’s the nature of business. It’s very transactional. But I think if you were the one who. building out your business and you’re going to be passionate about it, put it out there because there are always niches for everything.
@30:07 – Heather Steele
you don’t think there’s a niche, there is. Yeah.
@30:12 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
So that being said, I just wanted to kind of ask you a couple of final questions here is how do you see the future of like marketing strategy involving and or like digital marketing in the digital realm of tools and resources available?
@30:27 – Heather Steele
Yeah, you know, I think that definitely we see a lot more AI coming in and being a great tool for folks, especially people who have that kind of writer’s block like how do I get started with creating marketing content?
We’re seeing AI just being a really great resource as that starting place somewhere to get ideas and rough drafts.
I think that’s going to continue to build. I don’t think AI is going to take over and do everything for us anytime soon, but it’s definitely a great tool for people to watch.
and see how they can incorporate it into their business. Just to get on that starting edge, right? things going, get the juices flowing.
know, some of the other things that we see coming on the horizon are definitely a lot more video content, really anything that’s short and quick, can get people’s attention, provide them a little bit of entertainment while you’re educating them.
Those are things that we’re seeing huge success with. And I think that’s just going to continue. You know, long form written content is really something that’s moving out of the digital marketing space and being replaced by video and by shorter content.
So finding ways to package up your message and deliver it in a more concise way is something that I think we’re going to continue to see as well.
@31:51 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
And I’m just a curious comment on like longer website content. How do you think of and moving more towards like video and image content instead?
@32:00 – Heather Steele
How do you think that’s point of effect SEO or website search ability? Yeah, so you know, one thing that we’ve seen is that now all the search engines are smart enough that they can start to understand the context of video.
Most video has some sort of transcript associated with it, right? Any time you upload something to YouTube or Vimeo, it’s automatically creating a transcript.
Even if it’s not perfect, it’s enough for the search engines to have some context about what you’re saying, what you’re talking about, and then same with images, right?
We’ve always used alt tags and meta descriptions and image descriptions to help people who can’t see our images know what they are, but now with the power of AI, search engines are able to read some text within images, understand the context with images.
There’s more of that at play, and so I think that that’s something that’s going to keep evolving, right? We’ve already seen SEO has changed so much in the last just five years.
It’s going to continue to rework. evolve. And the main goal of Google or any of the big search engines is to provide a great experience to their users.
They want people to continue using their search engine so they can serve up those ads and they can make more revenue.
And so they’re going to continue to do everything they can to make that a great experience for the user experience.
And if we’re seeing that users are leaning more into video, leaning more into short form content, you can bet that the search engines are going to follow suit.
@33:31 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
And they’ll adapt in ways using AI probably to help and still run in like the keywords, searchability, et cetera.
@33:37 – Heather Steele
But they’re going to extract in a different way rather than from like blog post content or website copy.
@33:41 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Yes.
@33:42 – Heather Steele
And that’s still important to have.
@33:43 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
You should have just a video on your website. Yes, I was going to say, still important to have a copy.
@34:00 – Heather Steele
But the days of writing 2000 word articles just to make Google happy, thank goodness, those are mostly over, right?
Unless you were writing for an audience of researchers, nobody wants to read all of that. Convince, make videos, add some.
@34:19 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Break a big piece in the smaller.
@34:21 – Heather Steele
Yes, make it legible or make it readable and consumable to the average person who’s going to be buying your products or services, that’s going to make them a whole whole whole lot happier.
And then I hope that we see more of a trend in marketing strategy to move into focusing on that long term, know, where are we going as a business, not just in the next year, but for the long term.
Because when we create marketing strategies that only focus on revenue goals over the next 12 months, we’re missing the bigger picture and we’re actually running the risk of hurting the businesses long term goals.
If we’re focusing, let’s say on just how can we help increase revenue through marketing activities? We may go for the low hanging fruit of a product or service that’s, yes, maybe we can generate revenue off of it, but when we look over at the operational side, it’s actually not the most profitable area to generate revenue, or it could be an unstable part of the market.
It could even be an opportunity where, yes, we can really drive this brand home and create a lot of opportunity for a business in the short term.
But if we’re not branding it the right way of building the right processes and systems, that could hurt the long term vision of maybe selling that company of maybe transitioning the company to focus on different things.
And so really having that long term vision, knowing not just what does an organization want to accomplish revenue wise in the next 12 months.
But where are they going in the long term what’s that bigger vision, what do they want to accomplish, and then working backwards into a one year strategy.
@35:59 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
That’s going to give you so much more insight and still be able to make big change make big impact over the next 12 months, but then keep them steered in the right direction.
@36:00 – Heather Steele
and further. Right.
@36:02 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Well, it’s great. I think that’s all concepts that all business owners should really take to heart when they’re looking at planning out, you know, and by planning out, I mean, looking at how are you going to implement this cyclically and look at it and review it from a strategy perspective and then use that to break down into the work that you actually need to do, right?
you hire an agency to break down and help guide you through that or if doing it in-house, how is that going to help guide your marketing communications team or yourself if you’re the one building your own content of what should be included, how it should be developed and like really tailoring it for the audience, know, for their attention span, the content they want to see, what they’re engaging with and what they will kind of like comment and share on, right?
So one of the last questions I’ll ask you for today, based on, you know, your experience in the marketing industry and field for our audience, could you identify maybe if there were some common misconceptions about your worker industry and what you would recommend
And for the audience to think about, maybe pivot or change their mind about it.
@37:04 – Heather Steele
Yeah, so I think, you know, a lot of people do sort of see marketing as this black box. They don’t really know exactly what’s happening.
They don’t know if anything’s working. It’s kind of a necessary evil to some organizations, right? like we’re gonna throw money over there.
We have no idea what’s happening. We have no idea if it’s working, but it’s just something we know what we have to do.
So we’ll keep putting that marketing line item in the budget. And I would say that that is a huge misconception.
If your marketing department or the agency you’re working with has not fully communicated with you how they’re going to track KPIs, how they’re going to link those things to the overall business objectives, and they’re not reporting those things back to you on a regular basis, then you definitely have a problem.
Yes, agreed. Huge misconception that, yes, while we cannot backtrack every single dollar that comes in the door to a specific marketing activity, we can look at what’s performing.
farming, where are the activities that are the the most revenue generating or the most positive? Keep those things going, put more budget into them and get rid of the things that don’t work.
@38:12 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Absolutely.
@38:14 – Heather Steele
That’s a huge misconception. And I think that comes back to just marketers not doing their job of relating their activities and their KPIs to business objectives.
The other thing that I think is a huge misconception is that with marketing being just kind of this thing that exists on the side of the business rather than something that’s actually driving that overall vision for the business.
When you bring your marketing plan in and it really incorporates your vision, what you value most, what you want to protect, and then you’re really anchoring it to your business goals, you’re going to see such a bigger impact from what you’re doing in marketing, but then you’re also going to understand what’s happening in marketing better.
And so one way to really do that, is to have a very clear vision that’s communicated throughout your organization and that your marketing team and your branding team is heavily focused on helping you achieve.
But a lot of business owners, they don’t even know what that vision is, right? Over the last 30 minutes or so.
And most people, if you ask them what do you want your business to do for you in the next five years, they have no idea.
They’ve never even thought about it in that context, right? They just want to make a take role and keep the lights on, but they have their time.
What could this business mean to me, personally, to my family, to my community, to the people I can impact because of the business, they haven’t really sat down and gone through that process.
so we have developed an accelerator program where we actually take business owners through and deep dive into developing that vision helping them identify their values and then crafting those one-year goals that are
going to get them on that trajectory. And so that’s something that we’ve launched just this year, and I would highly recommend that any business owner who can’t write off the top of their head tell you exactly what their vision is for their business.
They need to enroll in the accelerator so that they can get really clear on that, get their whole team on board, and then base their business goals and their marketing branding strategy on that.
@40:25 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Good to know. Yeah, we’ll include in the description for the session. Obviously, you know, contact information, your website. will also include a link to this strategy accelerator information page on our website.
We’ll include that in the description for you as well. Have any other final thoughts or comments you want to show their audience before we wrap up for the day?
@40:44 – Heather Steele
Yeah, you know, I would say if you’re operating from a place of no marketing strategy, that’s step one. If you’re operating from a place of no business vision, that’s actually step zero.
everything, back up, figure out that vision, and then get a really. clear marketing strategy in place. So you know exactly what you’re doing.
You’re not just making willy-nilly marketing decisions. You’re following a clear plan with a definite output of what you expect from that plan before you do anything else.
No more marketing dollars without a plan.
@41:17 – Jacqui chopsconsulting (chopsconsulting.com)
Absolutely. So it’s great to have all these initiatives and ideas things you want to do, but high level, definitely look at a strategy, break down those strategy into goals, goals into objectives and objectives will end up into your tasks of actually what work pieces you need to do.
I think that’s great advice and for all of our audience members to too little personal inventory to business where you add in those stages.
And like I said, we’ll post the accelerator, the strategy accelerator program link in the bio for this session as well so no one can reach out there for more information or off to the shops consulting website as well.
will share this podcast. The podcast will also be available on all the streaming services as well as on YouTube.
So we’ll be able to share that with everybody in the near future. We’ll get that out to you. Thank you so much for joining us.
