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Meet Sarah Noel Block, your Marketing Strategist friend. Sarah has rocked the content world with 16 years of experience, a BS in Public Communication, and an MS in Written Communication. She's supported big shots like apartments.com and Prudential, but her heart lies with small teams. As the creator of Marketing Mad Libs, the StrategicStory, and Tiny Marketing Framework, she's a master at helping tiny teams achieve big results. With an award-winning content platform under her belt and features in Entrepreneur and Thrive, Sarah knows her stuff. Catch her speaking at conferences and dazzling audiences with her wisdom. She's like that favorite teacher who makes learning fun and impactful. Let Sarah guide your marketing journey and unlock the secrets to success.

 

In this episode, Jason and Sarah discuss:

  • Importance of Marketing
  • Workshop Approach to Marketing
  • The role of AI and Technology
  • Starting Points for B2B Service Businesses
  • Excitement for Collaboration

Key Takeaways:

  • Experience the power of a comprehensive stakeholder-oriented marketing strategy
  • Appreciate the effectiveness of distinctive messaging in setting yourself apart from the rest
  • Grasp how strong messaging lays the groundwork for a marketing masterpiece
  • Master the art of providing a cogent marketing action roadmap for your business
  • Recognize the virtues of AI tools in enhancing your marketing process and team synergy

 

“Collaboration is key. None of us can do any of these things alone, we need other voices, other people, other ideas.”

 - Sarah Noel Block

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Listen to the podcast here:

Sarah Noel Block- Big Impact with Tiny Marketing

 

Hello and welcome, everybody, to this episode of The Insight Interviews- Powered by REWIRE. This is your host, Jason Abel, and I've got a special guest today, Sarah Noel Block. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me and for saying Noel right.

I know that's pretty cool. You and I had a little discussion about that a minute or two ago. Sarah Noel Block. Sarah, you have worked your life in such a way, as today, when we're recording this in 2023, you're a guest on a podcast. I know why you're a guest on a podcast but tell our listeners, you know, we're going to dive into some meaty stuff pretty quickly, but I always like our listeners to know, okay, who the heck is it that they're listening to and why are they an expert or should be on a podcast? So, Sarah, who are you and why are you on our podcast? 
       

Why the heck am I here? I'm Sarah, the founder of Tiny Marketing and also the podcast host for Tiny Marketing.

Yeah.

And for the past 15 years, I've worked in marketing specializing with small teams. So, I started off as a one-person marketing department for a seven company group, and I pretty much felt overwhelmed, and where a lot of people are, where they just can't get ahead. There are seven presidents breathing down your neck, and you're like, I don't know how to satisfy all of you and make sure that you're all reaching your goals. So, I came up with my framework, the Tiny Marketing framework, and that really helped me be able to systematize how I do marketing and streamline, by thinking about it in terms of who is our favorite customer, and I'm just going to try and replicate that journey. And it worked. It was cloning our favorite customers. 
       

Well, you must have done a pretty phenomenal job at it. Again, one, not everybody gets to be a guest on our podcast. We're finally to the point where I can legitimately say that. And two, you've got some pretty big names under your belt. You've worked with the likes of apartments.com, Prudential. I mean, the name of your company has in it the word tiny, but I suspect that you do some pretty big work.

We do some meaty work, yeah. I named it Tiny Marketing because I think that people overcomplicate marketing, and you can have a really streamlined, simple approach that targets the specific customers, that make sense for you, without overwhelming a small team. And, yeah, Prudential is huge, and they have lots of marketers, so they were not tiny. But most of the people I work with, they have small teams, and they need to be as efficient and effective as possible.

One of the things I heard recently was an organization that was trying to figure out, hey, are we B to B, business to business, or are we B to C, business to consumer? And I heard the best answer to that they go, no, forget all the B's and the C's. You're P to P. You're person to person. And it just makes me think about what you just said where, hey, even if it's a really big, huge organization, at the end of the day, there's people in the room that you're working with that you need to do some work with and workshop through and make some decisions around. So, yeah, it makes me think of the P to P concept. Well, do you have a story? Like, I'm thinking about our listeners who are executives, founders, they're likely in the C suite, and they do need to make marketing decisions. And I will tell you, just when we're doing our executive coaching with people, oftentimes sales and marketing, specifically the marketing piece comes up where, Jason, I don't know what to do. And we're not marketing experts. We don't have the answers. We go through some dialogue and ask them and help collaborate on some solutions with them, but typically what I found is the founders and executives at companies are very good at starting the company, figuring out the financial piece, maybe hiring people, but when it comes to telling the rest of the world what they do and how they do it and why people should do it with them, boy, it typically seems like they fall down. So that's why when we ran across you, I was like, hey, her, we need to have her on. So anyways, all of that is context for me to ask you, do you have a favorite story recently of specifically, like, I just described to my listeners, that type of person coming to you and you taking them from, hey, I don't know what to do to market our company, we're good, we're growing, but we're not really doing it the way that we want it. What would you say?

Yeah. That is exactly the point where I come in. I'm usually working with entrepreneurs that are growing their businesses, and they're getting pretty robust, but marketing always seems to be the last thing, and they don't know how to do it.

                                                                                                         
"It's the same way from solo entrepreneurs to big corporations is you're good at your thing, but that doesn't mean that you're good at everything."

Yeah, exactly.

So, marketing ends up falling apart. I'll talk about a recent project. I just wrapped it up like a week ago. It was a higher trained, deploy company, and who was involved was the founder, the VP of sales and customer support. So, these were the main leaders within the organization, and they did not know what direction to go with marketing, and they had some robust goals that they had to meet. So, what I like to do what I did with them, and what I like to do with all companies is I bring in all stakeholders from the very beginning, and I run a workshop with them because everyone needs to be involved and everybody has a different perspective. They are all dealing with customers in different ways, so they have really unique perspectives. And what I do is I listen. I ask the right questions and I listen. And then I find that golden thread that's throughout everything that they're saying, because when you're in it, you don't see it, but it's there. There is a golden thread that everyone can agree on and that's what I pull in. And I have a product called Strategic Story where I use that as a base and then I verify it with customer interviews and building out that customer avatar and the journey. But that's where we start because good marketing starts with change management and getting all of the leaders on board and behind that message, you're talking about brand messaging. That is one of the first things you should be doing before anything else, because you need to know how to talk about your business.        
            
So, I like this idea of getting everybody in a room and workshopping this. What are some of the questions that you ask? I'm envisioning our listeners going, okay, that sounds good, but what are some of the questions that not that you want to give the whole workshop during this podcast episode, but what are a couple of the questions that you asked that maybe some of our listeners can ponder for their own organizations?

Yeah, think about competitors, beyond direct competitors. What are competitive alternatives? So, if someone wasn't to come to you and your business for the solution, what would they be doing? Would they do nothing? Would they be using a spreadsheet to solve their problems? Would they hire an intern? Look at those other viable alternatives that they'd be looking at and what would make them choose you over that? What would make you better than that? Look at your competitors too. What makes you different from them? Because the key from not sounding like a corporate drone and everybody else is finding that differentiator that you can pull throughout all of your content. So, it makes sense, and no one has to ask you, well, what makes you different than Company B? Because it's so clear. That's why messaging needs to happen first because your differentiator is decided during that messaging, and then it's pulled through all of your marketing.

You mentioned golden thread and I wrote that one down, like that's one of my insights. The golden thread idea, that sounds very intriguing to me. You go through some of your Q and A and you gave us a couple of those questions that you ask, and maybe you're not at liberty to answer this question, but what type of golden threads have come out recently?        
            
So, I had a stakeholder workshop where I interviewed. I would say seven people were involved in it, seven leaders were involved in it and they were really butting heads where they did not agree on anything. But then I was going over all the transcripts on that, and it turned out that they all actually were agreeing, they were just saying it slightly different. So around who their ideal customer is, like, who very particularly it is, they thought on the outside that they were saying completely different things, but they were not. And then what made them different from their competitors, everybody was arguing again that they didn't agree on what that differentiator was, but when I went through the transcripts no, actually, there is a theme emerging throughout what you all are saying. And I'm not going to say what it is, it's X, but what I do is I make sure to record this workshop and I'm combing through those transcripts, and that's how I find those threads. Like, actually these trends are really emerging in what you're saying, and you're too deep in that you can't see it.

Untitled design (53) 

I like that last part about being too deep in. It sounds like you're in a similar situation that we find ourselves in as coaches, where people are in their own matrix, and you just can't see. But when you kind of rise above the matrix and this sounds like this is what you do with your Q and A and looking for those golden threads from up above, you can see the golden threads and then show them, reflect that back to them, start to pull that out, which is very interesting.

It's easy to have clarity when you're not in it. You're viewing it from above.

Yeah, we call that in coaching, we call that the white coat effect. Like, you can have in my case, my spouse tell you certain things about health and wellness and nutrition. She actually is a health coach. And maybe I listen to her, maybe I don't sometimes, but if the doctor tells me to do it, the person with the white coat, so to speak, well, then all of a sudden, I'm listening. Right?

Okay, that was smart. And your wife's like, hello, knucklehead. I've been telling you that for ten years.

Yeah, it's exactly right. So, you employ the white coat effect as well. Okay, so they've gone through your workshop, you've pulled out some golden threads. What then? What? Like, I often find I hear executives where they just don't know where to start. Hey, Jason, social media, LinkedIn, plain old advertising? Do I redo my website.? Where do I begin?

 

That's the beauty of it. All right, I'm just going to explain my process. This stakeholder workshop I have. I call it marketing mad libs, and then the big strategy is called Strategic Story. And that's when I build out the messaging strategy, the customer avatars, the content strategy, and the marketing. But the end of it, it's a marketing action plan. And these are the first things that you should be doing to get you closer to your goal. And these will affect your business right now. So, I set up a marketing roadmap and action plan for them, so they know exactly what they need to do next, and then I give them all the templates. This is as easy as it gets.

So, tell me more about that because that does sound exciting. I've heard about organizations where they call it kind of like done for you type of thing, but when you dig into the details, it's not really done for you, and then most organizations are just like, yeah, this is how you do it, but then the organization themselves are like, okay, that's a great message. I still don't know what to do, or we don't have the human resources to do it. So, I'm picturing myself going through your plan, and you've got the marketing action plan or the roadmap, but literally, then take me through the minutiae. Then what?

Yeah, then what? Is a good question. So I have a DIY done with you and then a done for you option at the end so they can choose their own adventure, let's say. Yeah, DIY, I'm giving you the templates, so I make it as easy as possible to be able to do it. If you have an in-house team who can handle that and then done with you, I can build out your systems and help you train up the people you have in house, so they know how to do these things that need to happen next. And then the done for you, you can hire me every quarter and I'll do an intensive and I will complete those action plans for you.

Literally, actually do it? Whether it's again, I'm thinking social right now, but any other type of thing, you've got the ability to- either you or your team- are literally just that doing it for them. Yeah, what's an example of that?

So, I'll go back to the most recent one that I did. The first thing that I said that they need to do is they need to update their home page with new copy, focusing on their ideal customer avatar because it was too generic. So, homepage copy, sales copy for their two main customer avatars. So, they needed standalone sales pages and then setting up a quiz funnel for one of those avatars that would be their lead gen on that. And then the other one was a master class for their other avatar. So, those were the first things that I said that you should do that will get you action fast. And then I wanted to set up the sales team to do a podcast series with interviewing CIOs within businesses to be able to build those relationships, but also create really intentional content for the people who would need their service. So that was like the first 90-day plan that I had for them. 
       

Okay, got it. Where does AI and technology enter into all this? I've just been asking that question lately, and I've gotten answers from people and guests and clients all the way from really detailed answers to a deer in headlights type of thing. But from your standpoint, where does AI enter into all this?

I love it and it's part of my framework.

Yeah.        

                                                                                                         

"So, for me, it's streamline systemize, automate and outsource. So, streamline is when we build that system and that marketing plan. But when we get down to automation, that includes AI too. If you can use AI for something, why not? Why not make it so you can work better?"

So, for example, the podcast that I'm helping them launch using a tool like Toasty AI, it will create articles, social media, copy, transcripts timestamps. Using AI for you, why not save hours of time? It listens to your podcast and writes it for you.

Okay, well, first of all, tell me more about Toasty AI.

Oh, I love it, and it's really accurate.

Tell us more about that.

Yeah, so it's the tool I use to repurpose my podcast and all I do is I drop the Wave file in and it does a damn good job of turning that into an article that actually sounds like me, like they use the voice of the podcast to generate it. But yeah, all within the same thing, it pulls the transcripts for it timestamps and there's a social media section where you could do prompts to put together your social media an article and show notes pages, and it just takes maybe like ten minutes.

Where six months ago we had to write all that out.

We were doing that manually.

Yeah. That's exciting. You've embraced AI and it sounds like you're I know even as soon as we got on before we hit record today, you're like, I'm a big fan of systems. This is something that you're on the cutting edge and so when it comes to that topic, you're embracing it and you're saying, yeah, let's go, let's do it, let's use everything.

Yeah. I also like using AI to grade the work that I'm doing.

What does that mean?        

So, I also write for my clients, I do copywriting. So, let's say I'm writing a home page. I'll write that home page and then I'll put it into AI and I'll ask it to grade, telling them what my objectives are. This is the customer avatar I'm going after. This is what I want them to do next, and then it will read it and tell me, okay, you should probably include some more examples here and it'll tell me exactly what it's missing and what it really likes about it.

When you say into AI, where are you putting that in?

So that particular I'm using Chat GPT for that.

Untitled design (54)

Yeah. Isn't that insane? The things that are available to us that weren't even available six months ago are. I know it blows my mind in a really good way, but dang.

It helps you work so much better. And if I don't have someone sitting next to me to look over what I've just created, it's another person that's looking over and saying, actually, here's where you could improve.

Golly, that's so good. That is so good. I know you have a copywriting background. Does that concern you at all? Or in other words, no, because you're using it to augment what you're doing, it's not replacing you, it's augmenting you. Those are my words, not yours.

Yeah, I wouldn't say augment. I would say it's making me work faster. So, if I want to outline something ahead of time, AI will do it faster for me. And if I've written something and I want it graded and optimized, I'll use that. Let's say I wrote a whole bunch of headlines for a sales page. I'll put them in Chat GPT and say, give me similar ones to see if they gave me something that's better. Just a little tweak from what I've done.

Yep. So good. Based on the questions that I've asked you so far, and you've been so gracious in your answers, in the stories so far, anything in particular that you would want our listeners to do? Like, is there anything where you would say, hey, I've got a real good picture of I'm sure you have a good picture of who you're - well, all right, let me back up. Who is your avatar? Like, who's the ideal client for you? I'm betting it's a lot of our listeners, but how would you describe that?

So, I'm typically working with B, two B service businesses that are like, ten to 200 people and like, three to 50 million in revenue. That's my sweet spot. And they're usually the ones that are just beginning their marketing journey.

And what type of actions would you have them prior to even calling somebody like you? Like, just on their own, which I know that they can't do all this on their own, that's why they need somebody like you. But what types of things would you implore them to start thinking about questions that you would start having them ask themselves. Where would you have them start?

Yeah, I would start with the ideal customer avatar and building that out, looking through their CRM and seeing who's the most profitable and who do you enjoy working with, what kind of projects are the most profitable and looking at that to start formulating what an ideal Customer Avatar would look like and then build that a little bit further and then get into messaging. What are their challenges? Why do they choose me over the alternatives and how do I make their lives better? Start thinking in those terms to get to that first stage of customer avatar messaging strategy.

Yeah, really good. Thank you. As we start to round third, to use a baseball analogy and run towards home on our time together today, Sarah, what is it right now, as you look over the landscape and you look even at your own work, what are you most excited about these days?        

I am most excited about collaboration and not just in terms of my own business that I'm seeing so much more collaboration within the marketing space, like service businesses partnering with product companies to amplify their voice. And collaboration even within organizations where more people are involved with decision making. And I feel like more investment comes in when you are collaborating, but especially with larger organizations like we're talking about today. I think that they are missing out a lot on collaborating with similar businesses to amplify their voice.     
 

Yeah, collaboration. Right. None of us can do any of these things alone, right? Like, we need other voices, other people, other ideas. So yeah, collaboration. Perfect. Sarah, how do people find you? I have a feeling that people are going to be intrigued by this conversation, so, if they wanted to reach out to you, what's the best way to make that happen?

Yeah, Sarahnoelblock.com is my website and I'll create a landing page just for you guys.        
            
That's cool.

Let's see, what should we name it?

Oh, I don't know. Are you going to take us through one of your workshops right now as we end? I like this. I don't know. This is what you do. What should we name it, Sarah?

Let's see. Hold on. I'm going to go to my calendar, and we'll just call it Sarah slash Rewire, and there you'll find I'll have all of my links so you can find me easily. And I'll also have a customer avatar bundle that you can download and it's normally $27, but I'll have a promo code on there, promo Rewire, so you can start to think through what a customer avatar could look like for you.

Super helpful. That is not something that we talked about ahead of time. That's not something that I expected, so, you over delivered, Sarah Noel Block. Thank you. You answered the question that I asked a few minutes ago, which is where does somebody start, but now you're actually showing us where to start. So, in other words, if they go to Sarahnoelblock.com/Rewire, there might be a promo code for one or two tools that you have on there. The promo code is Rewire. We'll put all that in the show notes. That's a really good place for somebody to get started. Yeah, they can start building out that customer I avatar and find you, which is super cool. Anything before we end today, Sarah? Anything that I haven't asked you that you'd like to chat about?  
      

I think we got it all.


We got it all in under 30 minutes or somewhere thereabouts. Well, Sarah, this did not disappoint. I'm going to go on there and use some of those tools ourselves. Rewire has gone through a lot of the work that you've described. But gosh, it can always be sharpened and always be tuned a little bit, and so I'm looking forward to going to the website that we just created and going through some of the tools myself. So, it really has been a pleasure. Really good information. Everybody out there, Sarahnoelblock.com/Rewirenow, but go check her out. I think you and your organization, and the marketing of your organization will certainly appreciate it. So, Sarah, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.        
            

Oh, listeners, I got some really good insights from that interview with Sarah Noel Block. This idea of golden know, even when you've got a bunch of executives in a room or a sales group or a project team and you're disagreeing on some things, if you can look for that golden thread to pull out and sometimes it takes a little bit of Q and A. But that idea of golden thread that hit me and her final idea of collaboration, I really appreciated that. Just getting different ideas, different perspectives and collaborating on things. She doesn't have necessarily all the answers, but what she can do is she can collaborate with a stakeholder team to come up with a solution, and I think that that's the case with really any problem that you're looking to solve. So that idea of collaboration, I know that as soon as I end up Toasty AI. That sounded pretty cool. And then she put a website together for free online value-added material for you and your marketing efforts. Remember the promo code rewired to get your free tools? So those were my things that was thinking about, those were my insights after talking to Sarah. But what's really important, listeners, is what insights did you have?       

 

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