Your 2023 Marketing Plan: Where to Strategically Focus Your Efforts

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. Erin Ollila 00:00 Hey friends. Welcome to the Talk Copy to me podcast. Here we empower small business owners to step into the spotlight with their marketing and messaging. I’m your host, Erin Ollila. Let’s get started and talk coffee. Hello, friend, and welcome to this new episode where we talk all about what to do in your marketing in 2023. Without social media or besides social media, I am so grateful for the entire series and the incredible experts that came on to talk about all of the platforms. But if I’m going to be honest with you, I am so tired of talking about social media. So in today’s episode, let’s just jump down to what you need to focus on in 2023 in order to market your business. And there are four main things I’m not going to dilly dally here, I’m going to jump right in those four things are SEO, email marketing, messaging, and off platform content creation, such as podcasts and YouTube channels. Before I jump into all of the specifics for each of those four key areas of your marketing, I want to say a big thank you to you for listening to the show and ask you if you have a second while you’re listening, or right after this episode. Can you leave a rating and let everyone know what it is that you like about the show? I am grateful to Diane winger who is our most recent review, she says if you own a business, you either write, copy or hire someone who does websites, emails, social media posts, sales letters, all copy. This podcast has a nice variety of guests and covers the bases engaging and well prepared hosts. So thank you, Diane for saying that. And before I actually move on, I want you guys to grab a pen and jot down the name of Diane’s podcast, which is the driven a woman entrepreneur podcast. I was a recent guest on her show, and she released the episode last month. It is such a good episode now. Yeah, sure. Maybe that’s a little conceited that I’m complimenting an episode where I was the guest. But there were so many things that we dove into that I think would be really helpful for you. So I will put the link to the show notes for Diane’s show in the comments. And I hope you’ll take a second to go listen to that one. You’re done here today. All right, let’s just jump right in. We’re going to talk about my favorite number one SEO. One question that I get all the time from clients or even potential leads is how do I know when the right time is to start investing in SEO? And friends? The best answer to that as the right time to start investing in SEO passed you by a long time ago. No, I don’t want to sound all doom and gloom. And I don’t even mean that specifically, the best time to invest in SEO is right this very moment. But here’s the thing with SEO, especially when you’re creating evergreen content that’s not time sensitive or news sensitive. What you really want to do is let your content grow and work for you. And we are not in control of the search engines like Google, even though we can do the best efforts to make sure our site maps are updated. And we are providing a quality and clear experience for the end users of our website, Google and you know, likely what we’ll see now in the future with the introduction of AI and Microsoft, Bing. They’re the ones who get to decide how you rank for your business. And there’s a really important reason I brought up being here. It’s that we have the introduction of artificial intelligence. And yes, that is going to influence how SEO works is that the best way to say that how we approach SEO, how SEO presents us to the people who are looking for the solutions that we have, but we don’t actually know how it will change. So my best answer to the question of how will AI affect SEO is I don’t know. But what I do know is the efforts that you put in at this moment in time are absolutely 100% going to benefit you later on even if SEO changes significantly with AI tools Think of it this way. Right now, chat GPT is currently running on data that is all before 2020. Now, friends, think of the past three years, a lot has happened. We’ve had a global pandemic, we have had just a ton of awful and wonderful things that have happened in the past three years that this artificial intelligence does not have data points on, at least, you know, that’s being released to the public. So it can’t give us all of the correct information. And I bring this up for one reason, if we start creating content now in 2023, and SEO, as we know, it changes drastically, let’s say in three years, the content we have created in 2023. Or optimized, I should say that, we don’t necessarily want you all to run out and just start writing new things, you can absolutely use SEO to optimize the pages and the posts that you have already written for your website. But to get us back on track, if we start now, in a few years from now, if things were to drastically change, or even change slightly, we will have already started ranking. And hopefully, if it’s done well rank well, for the terms that are perfect for our business. So what is the AI going to tap into? It’s going to tap into the hard work we’ve done, it’s going to see your answers potentially as the answers to share with the audience, right? So if someone uses Siri or Alexa, or they use even the Google internet and type in a question, if AI suddenly becomes in charge of giving the answers, it’s going to look at all of the data and all of the content that was previously created, and use that information in order to share an answer. So should you wait three years, and I’m literally just pulling the note like the three years out right now, like, I have no clue what’s going to happen. I wish that I could give more clear answers, or at least guide guidance here. But I don’t know I have absolutely no clue. But let’s just pretend right, like in three years time, if you have created no content, if you have not optimized the content and the copy that you already have, you’re starting from scratch. And I do not want you to be in the position where you’re starting from scratch. Once SEO changes, if it does change, the beauty of SEO is that you can attract people to your business that are looking for the exact solution that your business can offer to them. Right? How would you like the idea that you leads were coming to you and not just so so leads, primed leads, leads that maybe already had the readiness to purchase leads that actually were solution aware or leads that really didn’t need too much nurturing, or sales effort in order to work with you. I think that from my best understanding of all of my clients and my own personal business beliefs, I would love it. If the leads came to me and I didn’t have to do anything to go out there and find clients. That’s what we all want to aim for. And that’s what SEO can do for you. We will be spending quite a few episodes this year talking about SEO and a few of the other key marketing points that I am going to talk about in this episode. So I’m not going to continue too much further here. But stay tuned, because we have so many great SEO episodes coming your way. And I really think that you’re going to learn a lot. And dare I say I think you’re actually going to be excited about using SEO in your business. Whether you are DIY it or hiring a service provider, I think you’re going to feel really good about your efforts in SEO in 2023. Now the next thing I said I was going to talk about was email marketing. I think we all understand that after we get the leads, we have to do something with them. In an ideal world, the clients will come to us we will have them sign a contract and we will work with them. But that’s not exactly how business works. Is it? Absolutely not. Erin Ollila 09:39 You know I have closed I guess you could say I’ve closed deals even though that sounds so salesy. I have closed deals with clients who found me in like 2018, but did not reach out to me in two or three years since either our first touch point maybe we had a discovery call or Are since they joined my email list way back in the day. But then later they reach out because at that point, maybe their finances are different and they’re ready to invest. Maybe their message or their business goals are clearer, and they’re ready to rebrand or brand for the first time, right? It takes a long time in the marketing world, I’d Erin Ollila 10:24 say, from when a client will, I should say when a lead is introduced to you to when they actually sign that contract. So what do you do? You can’t just attracts people. And this is why I am such a huge, huge advocate for SEO plus copy and content. Because if you just attract people to your website, and then you do absolutely nothing with them, you wasted their time and you’ve wasted your own time, right? You’ve wasted the opportunity to work with clients and give them transformations or help them at some of the like best or worst moments of their lives. There’s no need for that. So there’s a few options. The first option is conversion. Right. So as a conversion copywriter, you know, I would tell you, there are many things that we can do. When it comes to user experience and placement of things on your website messaging of your website, how we’re asking your leads to move along the site, and indirectly, how we’re asking them to actually purchase from you or work with you. Conversion copy is great. But not everyone is ready to purchase immediately. And for those leads that have a long lead lifecycle, we want to get them in our neural network to continue to nurture them. That’s email marketing. That’s what it’s for, to get people in your network. And to continue touching base with them in a way that’s not really threatening, while also not requiring them to do a lot of work on their own. I’m thinking way back in the day of personal blogging, when we would sign up for RSS feeds of our favorite bloggers. And we would read every single piece of content that they published on their site. Because content itself was not so oversaturated in in the market, right? If you found a blogger you liked you read everything that they had period. That was what 2006 Maybe fast forward to 2023 in the world of content and internet website pages is so oversaturated as well as our ability to focus and concentrate and just give the time it needed to read content has drastically decreased in all of those years. And I say this because as much as I absolutely want to promote blogging and things like that as a way to keep leads in, you know, in your funnel and nurture them as they work their way to becoming clients. When we ask them just to read our blog content, they have to make the time investment to sit down and read through 2000 words, let’s say of content that may or may not be exactly what they need. But email marketing is a lot easier to ask of our leads, we’re not requiring them to read a ton of words. And even if we are because there is definitely a need for long form emails at times, even if we are telling stories and requiring a lot of reading time, they have the option to click out of the the email whenever they want. And most importantly, that content is being delivered to them. They don’t have to seek you out, they don’t have to go to an RSS feed reader in order to find your blog content. You’re delivering it to them in their inbox. So email marketing is an excellent way to take the leads that you get to your website, and build and nurture a relationship until they are ready to work with you. And one more thing, they may never work with you. But if you’re nurturing that relationship, if you are sharing your best expertise and showing up as someone who is skilled and serious and can just be a great service provider or small business owner, they could be your very best cheerleaders. They could refer you to people in their network that you guys may have never even crossed paths before. So yeah, that’s it. Email marketing can do all of that and more. Don’t think that the people who are on your list will all We’ll convert. But don’t let that make you feel like you shouldn’t nurture them either, because they may help you get your very next best client. We’re going to jump into messaging. And we’re going to stay here quickly because I, in addition to SEO, I have a bunch of episodes lined up to talk more about how to adjust your marketing from the sense that you don’t have to start from scratch, you can audit and edit a lot of what you’ve already created. But messaging is really important to think about in 2023. Why? Because the needs of your clients may have very well shifted in the past few years. So much has changed in globally, let’s say so much has changed in three years. And what was highly motivating someone years ago, is not necessarily motivating them now, or where someone may have been more financially free. A year ago, two years ago, let’s say, Now, they may be a little bit more fiscally anxious and not wanting to spend for higher priced items. So how we speak to our clients has to change. One more thing, one point that I didn’t make a second ago that I really want to say is, the other thing that’s shifting a lot is the copywriting techniques that we use, in order to speak to our clients. You know, pain agitate solution, which is the pa s copywriting technique is one that worked for a very long time, especially when internet and marketing men write the way that we would write sales pages and product stuff or websites was highly influenced by that technique, introduce the pain point, agitate the pain point, and then provide yourself or your business as the solution. And not to say that that technique is bad per se. But it didn’t get used well, or it didn’t grow up, well, maybe I should say. Or maybe it was manipulated in the sense that it really started feeling yucky, to be on the like receiving side of that as a consumer. And because we are also consumers, as business owners. Eventually what happened is we all started to get really sick of being marketed to and that is something that is hugely happened and shifted in the past few years. Whether you are an average consumer who is not in the online business world, whether you are a small business owner who works locally, it doesn’t matter. What matters is people are really tired of having their pain points dangled in front of them and used as a way to manipulate them into buying. So how you speak to your clients may need to change from a sense that you may need to adjust your approach if your old copy was really following some of those techniques. And again, let me just reiterate here that there is nothing inherently wrong with that P A s copywriting technique, if it is done and used well, if we are being inclusive with our language, if we are not being psychologically manipulative when we talk to our clients, so I do not want to shame you at all. If you’re thinking to yourself, oh gosh, my sales pages are really problem heavy, or my website really does like and on right there on my homepage is the hero section where we talk about a problem, because it’s so super normal to address the problems of our end users. I mean, I say this as a joke, even though it’s not very jokey. But one way that I joke with Philly fellow copywriters when I talk about stuff like this is saying, if your best friend came to you, and they said that, you know, after a 10 year marriage, they found out that their partner had been cheating on them for the entire 10 years. Would you immediately offer them like offer to help them sign up for a dating app? No, you would not. You would acknowledge the pain point and acknowledge the feelings that your friend has. You would provide support you would let them know that you were there for them that you understood that they were going through something really heavy in maybe you don’t have the solution in that moment, but you would let them know that you are there as a resource. When you sit down to either write your own copy Are when you’re reading copy that your Erin Ollila 20:01 copywriter wrote for you, or shall I say, when you’re meeting with me for a website, copy review or a copy audit, one thing you want to do is think of that think of this situation. If you’re using pain points, it’s totally fine. So long as you’re doing it in a way, that is, this is the wrong word here, but ethical, you’re doing it in a way that is not manipulative, let’s just say, bringing it back to messaging, you know, a lot has changed in the past few years. And if you have not updated your messaging, that would be a key thing to focus on. And I’d say focus on that sooner than later. Because you know, when we’re thinking about attracting and converting people, you know, the past two things that I mentioned, were SEO and email marketing. If your messaging is off, it’s not so likely they will sign up for your email list, or it’s not so likely they’ll stay on it if they make their way there. So definitely think about how you speak to the people who are in your audience, quick and tiny little break before I jump into the final place that I want you to focus your marketing attention on in 2023. And I just want to point out that I have a cool new freebie called the four types of testimonials that you can grab on any page of my website right now, it talks about what the four types of testimonials are and how you can use those types of testimonials to really have that social proof and attraction and trust building with your audience in different ways in your marketing. So if you haven’t grabbed it yet, it is completely free. Like I mentioned, it is on every single page of my website. And I will happily link to it in the show notes below. But head on over there and dive in. Because I think that having testimonials in these different areas. But you know, the different types of testimonials is another way that it can really help all four of the marketing efforts that I’m suggesting today. You know, social proof works excellent. When it comes to email. People always don’t, you know, tie in the importance of SEO, and content like case studies. But there’s a huge reason that those two work so well together. And off site stuff also plays really, really well into the social proof we present when it comes to things like video and audio content. So short little interruption, but I do hope that you will go and download that and you know, it’s really easy to work your way through, I am not someone who is going to create long and hard freebies for my audience. So grab it, devour it, put it into action, and tell me how it went for you. I want nothing more than to celebrate your testimonial, big wins. So definitely let me know how you’re doing when it comes to getting the social proof for your proof for your business. And I will cheer you on the entire way. All right, so for the final place to focus your marketing efforts. It’s off site channels. But the two, I really specifically want to talk about our podcast, and YouTube channels. We have a series that is going to come out very shortly after this. That’s going to be about video and YouTube. And I highly recommend that you stay for that. Because not only will it cover, how to show up on video, how to use YouTube as a search platform, because it is one of the biggest search platforms and one of the most used and you have to remember people are consuming content differently on YouTube. Earlier I mentioned that no one really wants to sit down and read an entire blog and more than that read multiple entire blogs. But yet, the way that YouTube is set up, especially with things like playlist, if someone uses it as a search tool to find the answer to a specific question or to look for video content on whatever it is they’re curious about, and they find you they will easily binge all of your video content if they like what they see. So we have a great series coming up on video. And to follow that we’re going to be talking about podcasting as well. Specifically how podcasts and videos can work really well together from an SEO perspective, and from a way to meet your clients in the way that they like to consume content because again, our audience doesn’t necessarily want all of our content in podcast form or in written form or in video form. But if we are creating content for T logically, not saying that we have to create three different types of content. But if we’re being strategic about how we create the content, then we can get a definite like, wham. Bam. Thank you, ma’am, when it comes to both SEO, and messaging, as you know, copy and content, so you need to stay stay tuned for the next couple episodes to hear about the video and the podcasting opportunities. The reason I call them out specifically, though, is how they relate to messages, and how they relate to SEO. When we think of SEO, we think mostly of our own website, and that’s natural, because we you know, we all want to know what’s in it for me. But SEO is actually really important for what’s off of your website. Traditionally, we think of backlinks. When we think of off website, SEO, you know what other websites are linking to our website. And that’s what gets talked about most often. But if you remember, just a minute ago, I said, YouTube as being one of the main places people go to get answers to their questions. A tick tock, actually, we just did the three episodes on Tiktok. That is also one of the most searched places. LinkedIn, Tonya actually brought up the key point that if you Google someone name, you’ll likely find LinkedIn as being in the top three spots, if they obviously have a LinkedIn profile. So we have to look at all of those facets as how do they play together, when it comes to what people learn about you and your business. If they are in the video platform like YouTube, they can find your, let’s say, episodes that you are on someone else’s show, they can find it your own YouTube channel, and they find it because they’re using it as a searching tool. Same thing for podcasts. I mean, you guys are listening to this right now. And I can guarantee that you have used the search bar, in Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon, or whichever tool you use, you have used that search bar to find other shows. Maybe you had a vague idea of the name of the show that someone recommended. So you put those words in the in the search function. Maybe you literally were looking for a topic like you thought to yourself SEO podcast or copywriting podcast. And that’s how you find your way over here. What you did was you used the podcast player as a search tool. That’s literally exactly what happens with off site SEO, there are all of these channels out there that are presenting content to their end user, you want to be the content that is presented to them. So if you have your own podcast, you are in a prime position to be presented to a new audience. If you focus on SEO with your podcast, if you have a YouTube channel, you are in the prime position to be presented to the end user if you focus on SEO. So I’ll stop lecturing you because I really want you to come back and actually listen to those episodes. But really just a quick summation of everything I said, this year, the best way to attract the right clients and convert those clients whether there are still top of funnel and they’re really just converting with some air quotes here into your email newsletter, or they’re converting into being paid clients. The best way to do that is by focusing on SEO, email marketing, messaging and off site content channels like podcasting and YouTube. Now friends one more quick reminder, if you are still listening at this point in the podcast, I would love it if you could head on over to Apple podcast and leave me a review. Tell everyone what it is that you like about the show? Why do you show up week after week and listen in? What have you gotten from the show that has helped with your business? Erin Ollila 29:32 If you don’t use Apple podcast and you absolutely don’t want to sign in, head on over to Spotify, where you can leave a star rating on the show these small things they might seem silly in regard of like, well, how is this actually going to help really, but reviews are huge when it comes to podcasting. People will use that search bar like I just mentioned to find new shows They will see the cover art and they will make their you know, snap judgments on whether they think they’d be interested in the show based on the cover art. But when they first see a new podcast, they’re going to very quickly scan a couple of episode titles and immediately go to the reviews. So as podcasters it’s super helpful to us if we have recent reviews, and specific reviews, and we all know I am hyper obsessed with testimonials. So if you’ve enjoyed listening to the past, I think 65 Or maybe 66 episodes, I would just really love it if you took a second to share why it is that you’ve come back over and over again in those past episodes. That’s it. I’m not going to ask you for anything else today because I’ve already nudged you for view twice and I’ve lectured you over and over again about some of the things that I’m really like most passionate about in marketing, so I’m gonna leave it at that. That’s it friends. We have reached the end of this episode and I hope you will be back next week. Thank you for your time and I would love to know which one of these four marketing areas you are going to start with and focus your attention. Have a great day. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Top copy to me. If you enjoyed spending your time with me today. I would be so honored if you could subscribe to the show and leave a review. Want to continue the conversation. Head on over to Instagram and follow me at Erin Ollila. Until next time friends