Marketing Builder Podcast

Shelley Thomson’s career began working directly with patient’s experiences as a nuclear medicine technologist at Royal Melbourne Hospital, where she worked with patients daily.

In 2006, however, Shelley left her career in the medical industry and opened her own gourmet food business. Her goal was to create a store that treated customers like family.

However, tragedy struck and fire destroyed the shop and for years afterward, customers begged Shelley to reopen the store. It made Shelley realise that she had created a devoted fan-base who loved her business and so, instead of reviving the store, Shelley decided to help other companies improve customer service.

Shelley spent many years focusing on retail experience and customer experience before returning to her roots and combining her customer experience knowledge and expertise, and focusing back in on the health sector, by helping those organisations improve their customer experiences.

Like most business owners, Shelley has tried a variety of marketing strategies and tactics and today enjoys a blend of demonstrating her expertise through content to build trust, automation marketing, speaking gigs, workshops, and masterclasses to really drive her business. It results in clients seeking her out.

Writing a book to be part of her marketing has really transformed Shelley’s business and she shares her experiences in this episode.

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Content marketing is one of the areas that transcends marketing silos and links into so many other areas such as your website, digital, SEO, social, email etc.

Content marketing also contrasts with what a lot of marketing seems to be about in that brands just talk about and promote themselves all the time.

However, with content marketing, the basic premise is to provide some valuable information or entertainment (content) that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence the customer in some way.  

Content marketing can be seen as marketing through teaching. In other words, teach your audience things and solve their problems, by demonstrating your expertise, and they will come to trust you (and we all know we buy off people we trust).

If you want to build sustainable and strong marketing, that keeps generating business, and builds an engaged audience who trusts you, put your budget into content marketing.

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Reward Buddy launched in 2019 after Luke Santamaria implemented and brought to life a referral program for a physio group that he managed.

From there, Luke saw an opportunity to help other businesses, especially those that aren’t digital and trade online, to leverage their word-of-mouth and grow their referral programs.

RewardBuddy is great for service-based businesses such as cafes, gyms, trades, health providers, and those that don’t have a lot of time or money to put into marketing but who rely on word-of-mouth and referrals.

The platform also helps retain clients with a loyalty reward aspect with a points system for using business on the platform as well as reviewing businesses on the platform. The great thing is, those points can be used with any business on RewardBuddy.

Further, the platform provides the flexibility for businesses to create and implement bespoke reward programs so they aren’t forced into a one size fits all or pre-determined packages.

One of the advantages of the platform is that through a business’ reward system, they are collecting names and contact details of their customers; something that is sadly overlooked by a lot of small and medium businesses.

I found out about RewardBuddy on a Facebook group I am a member of where Luke had posted an article titled, 8 Ways To Get More Customer Referrals. I thought it had some great and practical advice especially for those on limited budgets because a lot of what Luke talks about can be implemented without spending a lot of money.

Being the passionate word-of-mouth and referral advocate Luke is, we went way over time on covering the 8 ways to get more customer referrals, so, I’ve split the chat with Luke up into two episodes. If this is the first episode of Marketing Builder you’ve listened to then I recommend heading back and listening to episode 18 and the first half of Luke’s chat.

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Reward Buddy launched in 2019 after Luke Santamaria implemented and brought to life a referral program for a physio group that he managed.

From there, Luke saw an opportunity to help other businesses, especially those that aren’t digital and trade online, to leverage their word-of-mouth and grow their referral programs.

RewardBuddy is great for service-based businesses such as cafes, gyms, trades, health providers, and those that don’t have a lot of time or money to put into marketing but who rely on word-of-mouth and referrals.

The platform also helps retain clients with a loyalty reward aspect with a points system for using business on the platform as well as reviewing businesses on the platform. The great thing is, those points can be used with any business on RewardBuddy.

Further, the platform provides the flexibility for businesses to create and implement bespoke reward programs so they aren’t forced into a one size fits all or pre-determined packages.

One of the advantages of the platform is that through a business’ reward system, they are collecting names and contact details of their customers; something that is sadly overlooked by a lot of small and medium businesses.

I found out about RewardBuddy on a Facebook group I am a member of where Luke had posted an article titled, 8 Ways To Get More Customer Referrals. I thought it had some great and practical advice especially for those on limited budgets because a lot of what Luke talks about can be implemented without spending a lot of money.

Being the passionate word-of-mouth and referral advocate he is, Luke went way overtime on covering the eight ways to get more customer referrals. As such, I’ve split the chat with Luke up into two episodes. You’ll hear the first half here, in episode 18, and the second half in episode 19.

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So often, we have the opportunity or the idea to pursue some marketing tactics. Something like some TV ads, or email campaigns, or social, etc.

Often, however, when I’m talking to businesses, they look at the tactic in isolation. They are only considering the what (the tactic) instead of the context (the why) in which they might execute that tactic.

When I say, "the context of the why", I mean, what are they trying to achieve. Why do it? Often, we’ll think that the goals they have set would inform us but, in marketing, before setting specific goals, we need to set some objectives (strategies) and then our goals sit under those.

As such, before we can properly consider any marketing tactic, we need to be guided by our objectives. In this episode, I'll outline the eight objectives you can pursue and how to decide which ones are best suited to your unique business.

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I was excited when I saw the title of a recent blog, that Matt Fenwick, Founder of True North Content had written, called The Northstar Framework: A Guide for Smarter Communications Decisions.

It’s a fairly common scenario for a lot of comms professionals and I know I’ve certainly been in this position loads of times. I’m either stuck with a bunch of ideas, and don’t know which ones to go with, or I’ve got a plan all set and then, one random morning, after the boss or a client has read a blog or listened to a podcast, they get all excited and say, “Hey, we should be doing this new ABC or XYZ thing!”.

Maybe it’s TikTok or Vine or whatever the kids are into. And that latter one is hard because they are the boss or the client and they are all excited but, deep down, you know it isn’t a good idea. But how do you say, “No” or, better still, how do you give the idea some air and work towards a smart decision of ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

The reason I was excited when I saw Matt’s blog, The Northstar Framework: A Guide for Smarter Communications Decisions, was because I’d sort of toyed with the same type of idea, a flow chart/decision process/matrix to help us work through deciding whether we should use a marketing tactic or not.

I, however, had never given it any serious bandwidth to try and figure out. So, I was happy when I saw that Matt had done all the work for us all and, to be fair, he’s done a better job than I probably would have!

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Everyone wants ‘more’ sales’ but simply focussing near the end of the buyer decision process is naïve.

That’s because your current pipeline state provides some excellent and hard data around how your target audience moves from awareness through to a customer. No doubt, you are already doing some marketing, and that is providing you with some customers, but you would like more. That’s fair and pretty normal.

Most people’s initial reaction, in wanting to increase their number of customers, is to simply add more people to the top of the funnel. The challenge with this position is that you may not have the ability to manage more potential customers through each stage of the pipeline. For example, could your receptionist cope well if the number of phone calls quadrupled? Or you had to respond to four times as many email enquiries?

Maybe, maybe not. But assuming is not the way to market effectively.

In this episode, I’ll show you how to examine your pipeline and make a decision on where you should be focusing your marketing.

Enjoy.

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I’ve known Tom for a number of years and I’ve had him and the team complete work at my place. To say that Water Tight Canberra is not like most plumbers, or tradesman for that matter, is an understatement.

It doesn’t matter what industry it is, I see many examples of business spruiking certain things that they think the consumer wants to hear and which they think differentiates them. Things like passion, dedication, experts, focus on customer service, reliable, etc.

It’s weird because, as consumers, these days, they are not really differentiators, they are just what we expect a business to provide us. It’s a minimum.

There’s a lot of businesses talking the talk but not walking the walk.

That’s not Tom Martin and Water Tight Canberra.

Tom really is focused on not just doing a great job but also the customer service. The proof is in the pudding with amazing Google reviews and winning a National Telstra Business Award.

There is a lot all small businesses can learn from Tom and that’s why I invited him on the show.

I started out by noting that, for lay people, plumbing would seem a fairly straight forward business and we might find it hard to differentiate between one professional, experienced, and licensed plumber and another and so, I wanted to know what unique elements of his business, or industry as a whole, really need to be taken into account when executing his marketing.

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What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customer or customers. They help you understand your target audience better and make it easier for you to align your marketing to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups that you might be trying to appeal to.

The key thing is that they should be based on research. Not gut feel.

In this episode, learn how to build real buyer personas that will help you focus your marketing.

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People often tell you to "Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life", and that’s the saying that comes to mind when I think of Phillip A. Jones, The Martini Whisperer.

One part of Phillip’s business ventures is Two Degrees Group, which he started in 2010. On paper, it’s a fairly typical consulting business but, scratch the surface a little and there is some really interesting stuff going on.

Phillip is the Chair of Judges for the Canberra and Capital Region Tourism Awards and a National Judge for the Australian Tourism Awards. Plus, he’s been invited to be a judge at the inaugural New Zealand Spirits Awards and the Royal Agricultural Society of Western Australia’s Distilling Awards in 2019, in addition to being engaged as a judge for a range of tourism, hospitality, and customer service awards programs.

Probably the most interesting element though is Phillip’s alter ego, The Martini Whisperer, which sees him being commissioned for bespoke creations, hosting events such as masterclasses, and a frequent guest speaker and presenter on craft spirits, and of course, the Martini.

In 2015, that all led to him having the honour of presenting the first-ever TED talk on the Martini.

Phillip’s journey is a great mix of being passionate and knowledgeable about something, putting yourself out there, taking opportunities as they come, and then, like most of us in small and medium businesses, taking stock after some early success and then getting way more strategic about the business.

Now, this episode is a lot longer than a normal Marketing Builder episode but I enjoyed talking to Phillip so much I just did not care about trying to keep him to a time limit nor did I look to edit it heavily to make it fit a certain time.

I trust you enjoy hearing from Phillip as much as I did.

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