Link To Guest Website: Tiny Marketing

Title: “Finding Your Story To Create A Structured Marketing Calendar”
Guest: Sarah Noel Block – Tiny Marketing
Interviewers: Nathan Gobes – Radio Entrepreneurs & Peter Myerson – Author and Retired Attorney

Click here to read the transcript

Nathan (1s):
Welcome back Radio Entrepreneurs listeners and fans, I’m producer, Nathan Gobes excited to be back here in the studio, filling in for Jeffrey Davis, but I’m more excited because we have a returning veteran at my side, Peter Myerson, retired attorney and author. Welcome back Peter.

Peter (19s):
Thank you, Nathan. It’s really exciting to be back here interviewing guests. Thank you for having me,

Nathan (26s):
Yeah, it’s been quite some time since you’ve been in the studio. I think your first time in the virtual studio, but without further ado, why don’t we skip ahead to introducing the guests we have with us? Sarah Noel Block content marketer at Tiny Marketing. Welcome Sarah.

Sarah (44s):
Thank you for having me. It’s always a joy to talk to new people.

Nathan (49s):
Yeah. That’s as well. And you know, that’s a lot of why we do this. Why don’t you start by telling us about Tiny Marketing? What do you do and what do you focus on?

Sarah (58s):
Yeah, so I started it from being in a place where I was overwhelmed to being a one person marketing department for a seven company group. And I’m just overwhelmed, ready to break down in my cubicle until I’ve figured out a good formula to be able to get the most out of marketing. So now I take that formula that I created when I worked for that company. And I use it with all of my clients who have small marketing departments. We create content using a system that, that gets you more traffic, more eyes on your content and it takes less time to do

Peter (1m 44s):
So. Do you have any particular industry that you focus on?

Sarah (1m 51s):
I do. I focus a lot on pretty much anything that takes place like a building real estate, specifically around real estate investing and building materials, building like facility management. Those are my main focuses. And then I have anything in marketing because you know, that’s what I do. I work in marketing. So I work with a lot of marketing staffs companies as well.

Nathan (2m 19s):
Makes sense. All right. I was going to say, I’m sure a lot of those companies that are focused on, you know, on their real estate investing and construction marketing is not really one of the areas that they build out significant land. So if they, even if they have a team it’s probably small, like you said,

Sarah (2m 40s):
Yes. I mean, when I’m saying that I was a one person marketing department for seven companies, it was with a construction company. So that just tells you where they’re at with marketing, but I do, they do know that they need marketing and they need that awareness around them. So I do content. So I’ll do their blogs, videos, podcasts, email, social media, because they, they do, they need a presence. They need to be known for something or they’re going to be washed out.

Peter (3m 17s):
I, I mean, you’re, you’re the perfect guest for Radio Entrepreneurs, you know, you’re an entrepreneur. Did you ever think that you were going to be an entrepreneur growing up?

Sarah (3m 28s):
Hmm, that’s a good question. Growing up, actually, we were talking about this before we hit record growing up. I thought I’d be a writer and I would consider myself a writer still. I write content for my, I find the story in the data that we have and I make it interesting. And then I do a lot of writing. So in a way I thought I’d be a writer growing up. And then I always had this vision of being able to create my own thing, designed my own life. I’ve always had this idea that whatever, however I wanted my life to be, I could make it that way.

Sarah (4m 9s):
I could design it that way. And that’s what I did.

Peter (4m 15s):
That’s, that’s very engaging actually from my point of view, but being a writer is also entrepreneurial.

Nathan (4m 22s):
Yeah.

Sarah (4m 23s):
Yeah. So in a way I always thought I’d be an entrepreneur on my own.

Peter (4m 32s):
How do you get your clients

Sarah (4m 35s):
Content doing exactly what I do for my clients. All of my clients come in from inbound and the relationships that I build through through that experience. So a lot of my clients are people that have met me through the other work I’ve done, or they saw one of my articles. They watch my videos. I do live streams every week. If they listened to my podcasts, content marketing really does work. I started off with using, you know, borrowing other people’s audiences, doing all of my content marketing and other people’s publications that already had an established audience. And then eventually I got big enough that people started to go to me and find my own content.

Sarah (5m 20s):
Looking for me.

Peter (5m 23s):
You have any employees?

Sarah (5m 25s):
I don’t have any full-time employees, but I have a full team of contractors.

Peter (5m 32s):
I think that probably works best.

Sarah (5m 35s):
I think so too, you can scale up or down as you need. I don’t need all that.

Peter (5m 42s):
You know, the question is when do you want to be a big business?

Sarah (5m 45s):
Yeah. I don’t know if I ever want to be a big business. I liked my life exactly how it is.

Peter (5m 52s):
Where are you located?

Sarah (5m 53s):
I’m in Chicago

Peter (5m 57s):
Really is no boundary anymore.

Sarah (6m 1s):
Yeah. We have a cabin in the middle of the woods and I worked there half the time I can work anywhere. It’s lovely

Nathan (6m 10s):
To, to go back to something you were saying earlier about, you know, helping these companies find their story amongst their, their data and you know, what makes them them, you know, I’m sure for a lot of clients who are working on, they, you know, again, like what I was saying earlier, they’re looking at their day to day, they’re looking at the construction, they’re looking at their, their real estate and you know, it may be hard to see the story of what makes them unique. Do you want to talk about, you know, some of that process of, of how you help them find that?

Sarah (6m 42s):
Yeah. So I think of it like a Venn diagram on one side, it’s the solutions that the company has. This is, these are the problems that they solve on the other. It’s their ideal customer and the problems that they have, that what meets in the middle, that is where the content lies. You want to have, that that overlap the solutions that you, that you have and the problems that they solve. And that is where you want to focus. And that’s how I create the content themes. So I usually, I recommend that they have around four content themes. So they get known for very specific things within their industry. And that’s niching down on what you talk about is how you really get known for something, how people start to come to you for something.

Sarah (7m 31s):
So that’s where we start. These are four overarching themes that we’re going to be talking about across all channels. And then we’ll dig a little bit deeper into we’ll use like spark tomorrow. We’ll use their original research. We’ll use the data that they get through their analytics and see like what questions people are asking, what are people going to their website for? What are people talking about that are in the similar industry than them? And then we can build out a content calendar based off of that.

Nathan (8m 3s):
So you’re mostly focused on, on the content side of things particularly, is that correct? So I guess my next question is, you know, I think you mentioned that a lot of a company, client clients you work with may, may have a marketing person, but it’s, you know, just one person or small team. Do you want to talk about how you interface with, with existing marketing teams, especially, you know, I’m sure there’s listeners out there, there’s companies that say, oh, well, why would I need to hire Sarah? I’ve already got somebody. And you know, they may, they may think that that person they have is maybe not doing as much as they would hope, but they think, well, I’ve already got somebody. So, you know, how do you interface with the teams that, that already exists?

Sarah (8m 46s):
Yeah, well, they rely pretty heavily on me. I have one client who, after I handed over the work, they were like, okay, we can breathe again. We can hand over this piece of our marketing and know that it’s being handled L integrate with them and I’ll work with them on overarching, like marketing plans. And I’ll be, I’ll sit in on their meetings and figure out what content would make sense to support their campaigns or what services or products that they’re really trying to push that quarter. And then I’ll build out my content plan around that. And so it’s fully like a workshopping experience where we’re working together, but everything’s done for them and they get the benefit of not just me, but my team.

Sarah (9m 36s):
We have researchers, we have editors. So what they get is polished and ready to go.

Nathan (9m 43s):
No, Peter, do you have any questions before we wrap up?

Peter (9m 47s):
Yeah, it was sort of, so what are the biggest challenges you have?

Sarah (9m 53s):
Yeah, I would say scaling. I do w we were talking about this earlier, how I get a lot of inbound leads and I am the primary creator on my team. So figuring out the best way to grow without growing pains, without it affecting my clients in any way is probably the most difficult thing. It’s something I’m always working on, getting better at always working to figure out the best way to do project management between all of my clients and divvy up my time and delegate the right things and keep and keep the right things.

Sarah (10m 35s):
So I’m doing the creation and all of those exterior things that aren’t client facing are being taken care of by other people using that Eisenhower matrix to figure out the best way to outsource an in-source.

Nathan (10m 53s):
Yeah. I’m sure that’s something that a lot of entrepreneurs can kind of relate to, whether they’re in a similar, a similar industry as you with marketing or just really anything, you know, when to scale, how to scale properly is always a difficult task.

Sarah (11m 10s):
Yeah. The growing pains are always there, no matter what you’re doing, if you’re owning a business, it’s like, it’s always hard to figure out how you grow.

Nathan (11m 20s):
Well, even though you said you do have a lot of clients coming in, if our listeners or viewers out there are interested in hiring your services or finding more about finding out more about Tiny Marketing, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Sarah (11m 35s):
Yes, you can find me anywhere at Sarah Noel Block dot com, easy. My name, that’s my, all of my social channels or my name and my website is my name. And if you want to email me it’s hello at Sarah Noel Block dot com.

Nathan (11m 49s):
Great. And well, of course, we’ve been speaking with Sarah Noel Block content marketing strategists at Tiny Marketing. Sarah, thank you for joining us today.

Peter (11m 58s):
Thanks for having me

Nathan (11m 60s):
Really appreciate it. And Peter, thank you. Of course, for joining us. Is there any kind of links that people can use if they want to reach you or find your book perhaps?

Peter (12m 9s):
Well, I hadn’t even thought of, you know, they can Google my name and, and my book comes up, you know, in Amazon. So, you know, that’s a pretty easy solution or if they want to print it when they have to get in touch with me, but they can find me on LinkedIn, you know, I’ll think about,

Nathan (12m 38s):
Thank you for joining us today, Peter. And thank you again, Sarah, we’ll be back with more on Radio Entrepreneurs after this break.

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