Using Storytelling To Make Your Marketing Stand Out
SEO ROCKET WEBINAR SERIES
June 30, 2021 11:00 AM EDT
Anyone with a website is always looking for ways to drive more traffic. So how do you do it? One way is making sure that your website tells an intriguing story about your business.
Everyone loves to be entertained – especially your prospects! And, we all have a story to tell. But, how?
In this one-hour presentation, you’ll learn about how search is changing, what people need when they search, and ways to use a combination of storytelling, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing to increase sales.
BONUS! This month we host two master storytellers Elliot Strunk and Todd Coats who promise to charm you with oddball pop culture references and some really bad puns. #seriouslynotsoserious
Register now to join us on June 30 and begin entertaining your own prospects to turn them into HOT leads!
Presented By Special Guests, the Co-hosts of the Popular Podcast “Two Designers Walk Into a Bar”:
Elliot Strunk, Design Mentor and Podcast Co-host
Todd Coats, Brand Strategist and Podcast Co-host
READ THE VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION HERE
Using Storytelling to Make Your Marketing Stand Out
Transcript June 30, 2021
Hi everyone. I am Angela with SEO Rocket. Thank you for joining us. Today we're talking about using storytelling to make your marketing stand out. I have with me two special guests this month. We have Elliot Strunk and he's up there with Todd Coats, they are the co-hosts of the very popular podcast “Two Designers Walk Into a Bar”, which is sort of affectionately dubbed a love letter to both iconic design and pop culture. Two really cool things to put together, the peanut butter and jelly. Right? Today we're going to talk about storytelling and how that affects your marketing, right?
Every business marketer always wants... They want more, right? You want more traffic, more leads, more people to your site or people in your door. Which of course, we all hope will ultimately lead to more sales, right? And to have the more more more. You also need to be more memorable. You really need to differentiate yourself and stand out. This often means endearing yourself to your prospects and building that relationship with them and how can you do that with a great way to do that is with storytelling - making yourself stand out sand apart. So today Todd and Elliott are here to talk about that.
And of course, who better than these guys co hosts of a podcast where they tell stories every month. And I have to say, for those of you. If you haven't heard their podcast yet, I absolutely 100% recommend that you give it a listen. It's on their website. Their archives are on there. You can hear them all and sign up for the newsletter. So they'll let you know about the new ones that are coming. And you have a new one coming up soon, right? Yep. Yep. This week. Yeah. Okay, awesome.
The fun part about this podcast is tells you all these quirky backstories. These details about not only the artist that created these iconic images. And that, you know, things like roadsigns and movie logos and brands. And, you know, t-shirt designs, all kinds of fun stuff that you've probably seen your entire life, but you didn't really know the story behind. So even if you are, if you are a designer or if you're not a designer, it's really interesting. I find it to be very entertaining, and very informative. So that is my shameless plug for you guys. But, I mean it honestly, because I really enjoyed listening to those podcasts.
There's no shame in plugging us, we do it all the time. Yeah, we're very shameless. As you can't be Shameless enough for us, but that's okay.
You know what? It's okay. Because when you're in a bar talking design and marketing, it gets a little shameless at times guys, fine.
And I'll leave shame at the door whenever we go into a bar.
Cheers. Cheers. I've heard of an Applebee's incident.
Maybe so we don't know, but it was another franchise. Casual dining might go to in Australia, we'll just put it like that, okay?
Okay. All right, all right there were things are blooming goodness, right? Things are bloomin there are peanuts on the floor and then y'all were kicked out the door. Understood.
About that... Were you there secretly? Yeah. That'll keep your witness.
Well, it sounds like there's a story behind that, that I can't wait to hear later. But for now, I want to hear about your storytelling and marketing.
First of all, thank you to Angela and SEO Rocket for giving us this opportunity to share this information. And what we would like to present to you today is information about using storytelling to make your marketing stand out, or as we like to refer to it wit and wisdom from Todd Coats and Elliot Strunk hosts of the podcast “Two Designers Walk Into a Bar”
Okay, so what are we going to talk about today? We have a few things. So first of all, why we're here today. Second, the importance of stories and as Angela mentioned how stories really help with your marketing and then how good stories will stick with your audience.
Some helpful hints using stories to build traffic. And then using social media to complement your efforts.
And last but not least, we're going to have a Q&A. Now, speaking of our lack of shame, like we mentioned earlier, when people ask good questions, they are going to get some fun prizes. So please have your questions ready for us. Okay.
Without further ado, you're probably wondering Who are these guys? Who are Elliott and Todd, what's their deal? So basically a little bit of background on the two of us. We're both marketing Communications professionals and we've also taught. So we really like mentoring and teaching folks. And as Angela mentioned, we love pop culture and we have a podcast.
We're syndicated on all the major platforms. So this happens to be one we like called pod Bean, so you know, wherever you are, wherever your phone is, it's where you can find our podcast. So, two designers walk into a bar. It's about design and pop culture as we've mentioned. And then this is the website that we have put into the world and you might see some language that looks a little bit familiar. So what we try to do is make sure that is consistent that we have consistent messaging for our audience.
So we provide a number of different ways that people can find us. So, speaking of Storytelling, Todd, I think you have, you have some wisdom for us about this.
Well, the audience will be the judge of the wisdom quotient but have a point of view and both of us do earlier as you know. So what we're going to talk about is as both Angela and Elliot have mentioned this, how can you really place the concepts of Storytelling into your routine practice to drive better returns.
So this is probably familiar. Stories are as old as mankind. They are how we teach each other, how we communicate to each other and it's how we learn. Stories make information sticky to the audience if you think about it like that. So, think about it. I bet none of our ancestors passed along family traditions by cozying up to the Warm Glow of a PowerPoint. Dear, no, I doubt anyone ever ask to be tucked into bed and read a beautiful status report. No, not going to happen. Stories make information sticky, and stickiness is what makes you and your brand, stay in the minds of audiences.
So, let me, ask you a question. How many times have you heard stories start this way? “Once upon a time”? A lot. I bet. You know. You probably heard it a million times. Probably you've heard. Heard it more than a million times and we're going to we're going to show you. You probably heard it waaaay more than a billion times. It loses its stickiness, it turns into a cliche. So we face the same story challenges in the marketing world.
Often differentiation is difficult and our customers end up with too many options, no, clear affinity for our brand. And worst of all confused, a compelling and consistent story, gives you leverage and it can differentiate you against competitors. And by the way, our competitors are not just other companies that sell similar, goods and services. There's a lot out there in the world wide web and Elliott's. Got a few numbers to run past you.
Right. So let's start with a number - seventy thousand. So big number, what does it mean? And why should you care about it? So this is information coming from HubSpot, which is a service that we've all heard of, even probably some of you use. So Google performs at least 70,000 search queries every second. So, think about that, every second, there are 70,000 search queries. So what does that translate into terms of the bigger figures, right? So that's two trillion searches each year, I mean, that's crazy. That's a hundred sixty, seven billion a month, five and a half billion each day 228 million an hour. 3.8 million per minute in 63,000, you know, plus per second right around 70,000 that's a ton of information.
So you know, you read at a rate of about three words per second, just to give you an idea. So I think about how fast you consume information versus how quickly a Google consumes information and spits that information back out to you. And remember this. It's not like this traffic is shrinking. In fact it's growing so if you just think about what Todd was just mentioning in terms of direct versus indirect competition. Whenever a search query is performed, that is a lot of stories, right?
So if you think about a typical search that you do on your phone or on a web browser, when you're in front of a laptop or desktop, think about all the results that come back and then think about it, the bottom of the Google search results page. How many additional pages there are there you can't even see. So that is a lot of stories. And then Todd, tell us a little bit about keywords, because I think that's an important part of SEO and important part of Storytelling.
Oh, absolutely. It's the foundation of good storytelling and obviously, great, SEO, and SEM. If you think about keywords and the concept of that keywords are what we read, it's what we recall in our memory and it's what we search. On the next couple slides. I'm going to break that down a little bit for you and kind of show you how we use them. And I can probably pick up on some of the tactics and techniques that we use first of all, there's branded keywords and non-branded keywords. When we do publicity, we use a combination of both branded and non-branded keywords. Branded keywords are searched by Google, specifically related to the content that you create the Searcher knows and recalls your branded information, and they're very likely to see your content because of that.
If we search Apple computers or two designers podcast, you're likely to get that type of information. Your audience first of all, has a memorable touch point to start with, they see it. Some ways it strikes a nerve can be through outbound communication, word of mouth or past experience. They think two designers walk into a bar podcast, sounds interesting. Next, what they do is they search using those terms that they recall. If they use thoe are branded keywords, like I just mentioned. It'll show up on the search engine results page often called a SERP. This serves up our content much higher than our competitors content because the user has recalled our terms and used our branded search terms, the search queries, the options that they're given will be greatly narrowed in our favor. So branded keywords are very useful.
Also, non-branded keywords are very useful as well for a little bit of a different reason, non-branded keywords, relate to the content without using any part of your brand name, or any of the branded names that you may work under. Generally, the searcher is browsing, they’re less brand aware or they're doing a comparison. So the results may include our content as well as a competitor, competitor’s content. The more consistently that we use those non-branded keywords, along with branded keywords. And if we buy them for search engine marketing SEM too, the better our results will be.
So if you think about it, the steps are very similar. The audience interest is generally piqued by a touch point. If they're less familiar with our brand, they'll be searching using words that form the story that they know. And our case it would be pop culture podcast or something like that. So our content would show up along with some other podcast. And hopefully, if we've used the terms more consistently and more competitively, our content will show up sooner. The content appears using the unbranded keywords, of course, and Google ranks, of course, if we use them, like I said, Google will rank our content high. If this increases, the likelihood that the content that we want to show gets seen first.
So, we're going to play a little game and Elliot and Angela. I'm going to ask you to monitor the chat real quick. This will be very quick, but just to demonstrate a point of the value of what I just said, will do. Okay, you see three logos here. The one on the far left in the white circle, what phrase comes to mind when you see this or what few words, let's give you a second or two to think about that.
Elliot Angela. Any words popping up?
I'm thinking of running and just do it. Just do it.
Yep. See. It's, it's probably because now don't quote me on this, but I think Nike has invested a couple bucks in that, and the just do it, we can research it, but probably a few bucks. Clearly, they own that
That it is aligned directly with their name. Now, if you look at the middle logo, what few, what word comes to your mind? What are you seeing? What do you? What do you think?
Elliot: Well, you know, one of the things that I think of or that a lot of people think of, I think is curly fries, but I don't think that's the word that's intended. We know that's what Angela? Yes, yeah I mean I think of Ingram's, his authoritative voice. Meats!
Yes Arby's has invested a lot, make sure we all know. You have the meats, right? Well with the horsey sauce with Horsey Sauce and curly fries, obviously sauce and curly fries. Now at last one, you guys are doing great on this. Last one on the far, right, this brand. And everybody says…
Safety. That's, of course, safety Volvo is known for say, Safety. And as a matter of fact, I did some research and what's interesting is the national highway safety board did a decade-long research study on the most safe automobile brands. And by far the safest brand in the country is, Honda! Record scratch. What? Yes, Volvo ranked number 7. So that doesn't mean that Volvo's aren't safe.
Just not the superlative so they have chosen something that is important, critical to the audience, definitely something that they can claim that they can own, as their tent pole, everything they communicate around is safety and again, doesn't have to be the superlative. It just has to be consistent and it has to be audience centric. Elliot has another example, coming up.
Yeah, speaking of audience centered. So let's say you're in New York and you're in the mood for sushi. So you pick up your phone and you say huh? Wonder if there any sushi restaurants around where he happened to be in the city, right? So let's say some different choices come up for you and for all intents and purposes it's basically the same thing on the surface, right? So what's the difference? What is going to get?
Visitor going to one Restaurant over another where there might be a few variables here. So let's say, you know, Todd as you mentioned earlier with keywords, let's say that part of your story happens to be hey if you're looking for great sushi and you find yourself in SoHo or you're you know just getting off the subway at Prince Street. Boom, we're right there were very convenient for you.
So let's say you're thinking great but you know it's late. Late at night, some restaurants tend to close down later at night. How late are you guys open? You know, we’re open until midnight and so what this does is it starts to provide these terms that allow you to differentiate and make yourself more special to the particular customer that you're trying to appeal to, right?
So if you think about some other keywords, that could potentially be used. When you think about things like restaurants kid-friendly, good for large parties, a fun decor, whatever these words happen to be.
Don't assume that the audience knows enough about your restaurant. That they automatically think of those things. Or they're familiar with those things going back to Nike. Arby's and Volvo, it's a reason they own the words, they own. As Todd says, is they may have thrown a buck or two behind. So let's talk about Todd, some additional statistics related to this, right?
Right. So we look credible Elliot, I've included a chart with a bunch of numbers and stuff here. So so, so, so it's pretty crappy. You know what the charts about? Let me take a crack at, okay? All right, go for it. I'm not going to dig too deeply into this, but remember, a few slides ago, we talked about memorable touch points, that will spark the person searching for terms. This chart just shows that all of the sources, those touch points that will drive online searches.
Out the first one, if you look tv ads are driving the most searches their 57%. Close behind, that is out of home - Billboards Transit bus, things like that. And, and then it really gets pretty close on the other bar graphs going more to the right. If you're one of visitors a Facebook or Instagram page or being looking for something posted on Twitter, things are pretty close there. Between radio ads and tv ads. Now, why this is important is for two reasons. As I said before, offline sources will drive those search results. So you want to spend your money effectively with offline sources and secondly, I love television. I love producing television, it is not as inexpensive to produce as some other forms of media and you can see that the results if your focus is around SEO or the results are almost the same for a radio ad if you want them to go to your social media channels or things like that For an outdoor add, if you want them to search for you. So point being is remember that there are some great sources for offline tactics that have to marry up with your online tactics. Your offline tactics if you're doing television or out of home or digital banner ads must use the same words, that you want people to search for or else? How would they know, right? How would they find you?
So that's a lot of background on sort of the mechanics of Storytelling and how it works with getting across a message in that sort of complicated trail, that people will get to find you. Now, let's think a little bit about your narrative. Now on the next slide,
So how can you use storytelling branded and non-branded keywords to help tell your audience? What makes you different? And to be effective in your marketing? And we are going to start by telling you a little bit about how we approach it. And then possibly you can see yourself in that as well.
Let's jump in here. So we have a few different ways that we approach storytelling. Of course when we're thinking about new episodes for our podcast and new topics to cover. So when we were thinking about the podcast in general. Angela at the top of the presentation talked a little bit about it, and we've reinforced that with our messaging, this idea of design and pop culture. And from time to time people have asked us “How did you arrive at this idea? Like, you know, what? And why did you guys - visual, guys - why did you choose podcasting as your as your medium? It's not exactly a visual medium, right? It kind of seems a little bit counterintuitive but as we've been talking about, we use design as really, the gateway to this larger form of storytelling. And the artifacts that we use are really the springboards for getting into these shared stories and these shared experiences.
We don't drill down so specifically into a topic that it doesn't allow for the sort of accessibility that would come if somebody is not a designer but they really enjoy the topic that we're talking about or Have some particular affinity for it, due to a childhood memory or a part of the country, they grew up in or any number of these other things. When we started to hear from people giving a specific episode feedback.
So point being start with an idea that is big enough to provide flexibility. Something that it has shelf-life something that has longevity, something that is not going to paint you into a corner, right? So we have this pop culture umbrella, that allows us to talk about a number of different ideas through the lens of design and artifacts that have been created. What does that start to look like? Well, you know, Todd and I have… if a movie could be a spirit animal “Airplane” is our spirit animal. Both love the movie Airplane. Yes. As Angela mentioned, we have talked about things like road signs. Very interesting road signs. Some of these childhood memories. Mad Magazine is another one of our North Stars Todd and I originally started the idea of the podcast. In fact, because we're talking about one of the preeminent artists for Mad magazine, the gentleman Mort Drucker who had passed away recently about a year ago. And so that was really our kickoff point. Things like advertising mascots, of course, Shoney’s Big Boy. Everybody's familiar with Big Boy restaurants. The story of that or things like Wacky Packages and some of these other parodies and lampooning consumer culture to civic design things like a graffiti artist turned presidential portrait maker when you think about Shepard Fairey and his origin story. You know, we've talked about Reddy Kilowatt, how do you get something as abstract as a utility? How do you put a character behind that?
And then we also use things like audiograms to help convey little tastes of our story as well. So we'll listen to one of those really quickly in just a little while when we start to think about some of the different ways that we share these stories beyond just some of the artifacts. But the, the trick here is that with these physical artifacts. As we mentioned, you can start to see this as a very visual medium, as we've talked about and we start to make sure we have episode pages for each of these topics. People can go in, they can look at more videos, they can get more episode notes. All of this information is out there.
We have robust visuals they can look at on their phone. Actually, we had a great insight from one listener who said you know the best way to really enjoy your podcast is to have the episode page up while I'm listening to the podcast. Because then you get to sort of walk through and see everything that you guys are talking about. So we love the fact that it's really a multi-media sort of experience. You know? We take great pleasure in that. Todd you want to keep going?
Maybe we can start telling these guys. A few stories, right? Yeah, you mentioned something a few minutes ago Elliot with the great sign from Holiday Inn. You called it an interesting story and I think probably a lot of the listeners to the webinar today wouldn't think of it as being an interesting story and that's the secret to what we found with our podcast and with great storytelling is the “what”!
The “what's” that extra little oomph that goes beyond the, who, the what, the when, the why, the where to make the story more sticky. We always try to look for that when we're comparing these things that we talked about in our podcast, “the what” adds differentiation to the story. It also adds different genetic differentiation. Sorry, if I get going too fast at work, trips me up to your marketing story.
Think about the sushi bars, that Elliot showed earlier. What if one of them catered to special occasions anniversaries or one of them catered to teen parties, you know, think about it like that. That's a differentiating factor that will help you stand out even more. Think about ways to surprise and delight your audience that they may not know about. You deliver something interesting that's audience centric and unique to your brand. Think about how you can put that into your story that your crafting.
We will show you a couple of examples of how we've taken the “what” into some of our stories to give you an idea of how this might work and hopefully to give you a little bit of tease that there's so much more to the story than you might think. The first one both of these are iconic. But the first one Elliot’s going to talk a little bit about and I bet you recognize it right away.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So okay, yeah. So let's, let's go to the chat again. And let's see what people are going to figure out here. We should probably come from the perspective of is there anyone on the webinar today who does not know what this logo represents? A better way to go about exactly if you didn't know what this was. And what's awesome about it is, you can get it. We're still enjoying it today. Yeah, your generation. Absolutely. Yeah. So, of course, this is the Ghostbusters logo. Everyone is familiar with it. Ghostbusters came out, in 1984. I was 11 years old and if you listen to the episode of the podcast, for your talk about this, I somehow begged, borrowed and stole my way into the theater three times that summer, with three different groups of people that got to see this movie because I love this movie so much. And another thing I mentioned in the podcast, is that as an adult, I love this movie so much. When I saw the DVD for sale, two different times, I bought it twice now. Second time, not knowing I'd already purchased it. So Todd, I guess I still owe you that copy. I promise you. Well, I think that your command soon. Yeah, you're consistent. That's good. That that's true. That's true.
Speaking of consistency. Let's talk a logo. All right, so there is of course, a story behind this logo and it's a, it's a great story. It's definitely rooted in pop culture. So it's rooted in the pop culture of National Lampoon magazine. It is rooted in the pop culture of things like National Lampoon's Vacation. The designer of this logo is a fellow named Michael C. Gross and among other things, he was Art Director of National Lampoon's magazine and he also worked to create. He worked in the movie industry. Obviously, he also created props. And, one of the props he created was the deluxe family truckster from National Lampoon's Vacation. So, that god-awful station wagon that is in metallic pea. As we all love our favorite shade of automobile paint. That is from the same mind as the Ghostbusters look.
So why this logo? Well really the logo of course is very iconic. It has the international no symbol. It has the circle with a slash through it. It's great in that the ghost, of course, is bursting out, you know, kind of looks like Casper whatever but it's brilliant in a couple of ways. One way, is that it's very simple. It's really only two colors. It's black and it's red. So it's very striking, very iconic. Another reason it really works. Is there is no language barrier here, you know, it's pictoral. So as a result it's very easily identifiable by people even if they can't read the phrase Ghostbusters. Then a couple other things that I think make it memorable one. Is that it is actually in the movie itself. This guy who designed it…Some of his other jobs outside of magazine was he worked in the advertising ad world. And so he knew how logos would work, you know, how to how to package things. And so, of course, in the movie, the Logo appears on the side of their vehicle and appears in patches on their uniforms. If I remember correctly, a television ad for them among other things and so on. You know, then it's over the door in the fire station where their headquarters are. So it not only appears for the movie and appears in the movie, but it is not in any way, shape, or form. And then the reason that there is no verbiage associated with it is when Columbia Pictures was releasing or getting ready to release the movie and they wanted to tease the movie. There was one problem that they had and that is that another group owned the phrase Ghostbusters. And so they didn't know if they were going to actually be able to use the word or words Ghostbusters to promote this movie. So as a result, when they wanted to start generating buzz and getting the word out there, they simply released posters - teaser posters - for the lobbies of movie theaters with only this logo on it. And that really helped in conjunction with a trailer that you, of course, would see on TV or see before the movies, really helped it to become iconic even in advance of the of the movie itself coming out.
So a lot of pop culture here to unpack, but this is just a logo that I love so much, just because it just has fun memories of my childhood and my, my son's childhood as well. Now is Angela mentioned, it's multi-generational and all the parents who saw Ghostbusters have now, of course introduced their kids to it as well. And speaking of New York and pop culture, Todd, I think you have a great story for us as well.
I do on the next slide, I would say, I bet everybody recognizes this band, right? Of course, this is Kiss, this album is from 1976 and it's quite different from other album covers of the time, including previous album covers by Kiss.
The designer who conceived this kind of nod to midways and daredevil shows conceived it to complement that sort of traveling carnival-like atmosphere that was a Kiss performance. So it became a pretty unique looking thing. And at the time, when albums were sold in stores that you had to go to, it certainly stood out. So in digging into it, it was a little interesting to find out that the guy who created this, the band was from New York and the guy who created this was from the New York area. He grew up around there and around the Coney Island area. So this kind of flaming wheel of death vernacular that you see here was in his DNA. It looks like kind of a sideshow sign or a sign that you would see for a ride. That's a pretty interesting background story but that's only part of the story. Because if you notice, there are four ways to view the cover. No matter which way you turn it, it was always going to be right. That's because the band was originally conceived to be four, distinct personalities, like the Beatles with Mikado makeup. Think about it like that. Now, at the time, this was 1976 at the time of this release. They had just had the biggest hit of their career, the song Beth, which was written and sung by the drummer, who had been causing a little more trouble than his talent could cover. So the band was experiencing the pressures of immediate fame, all of a sudden, immediate recognition. And this was creating a lot of internal turmoil and riffs that were developing and what was really happening right now is there, they were wanting a way to unify the band so it looked more like everyone's contributions were important. No one was driving the popularity. So to ease tensions in the band, they allowed everyone to be on the top position. Now, if you have, if you know anything about the band, you know, that they would go on to have a couple members leave not long after this album came out. But at the time, fame was immediate. It was the first time they've experienced this and this was a design way to hopefully show that they are one cohesive unit and obviously pay homage to the carnival-like atmosphere.
This was kind of what we were discovering when we were talking about stories like this from 1976. this we have another compliment to this on that episode and the one logo Elliot was talking about Ghostbusters was in our Movie Logos episode.
Yeah, so that it and I think that's an important lesson here is that these were two things that we originally found out separately for different episodes. And yet depending upon how you weave the story together you can make those relatable as well. And I think that brings us to our next point here which is essentially always deliver your story with unique style and tone of voice. Always be authentic. Always be genuine.
And as we've mentioned before, you know, use this sort of terminology use, you know, some of this this flexibility some of this larger thinking to make sure that you're really telling your story in an interesting way to an audience that is going to get excited about it. So some of the ways that we choose to do that is whenever we have episodes with each episode, we always have unique collage art.
And before we reveal, the full art typically on the day before the episode drops and our social media channels will have things like teasers where, you know, part of the artwork is revealed through some sort of tear away before revealing, the artwork itself. This happens to be artwork that we have for an episode on Street culture. And so we talked about Ed “Big Daddy” Roth often. We talk about the Santa Cruz Screaming Hand.
We also celebrate our listeners. We are always asking for listener feedback. We love feedback and we really want to make sure that these folks are in the spotlight as well. And we really appreciate that what they're doing in the fact that they are subscribing and listening and then there's some general fun images, reminding people to listen. This was when our YouTube channel debuted, you know, we want to go ahead and showcase that a little bit. Then we'll also insert ourselves in a pop culture. I have a soft spot for this movie as well, you know. It was released in the early 80s similar to Ghostbusters few years earlier. But what I liked about this movie “A Christmas Story” is it was actually filmed in Cleveland, the town I grew up in and so my family loves this movie. And so this was a post that we did around the holiday where it's this idea of how can we sort of insert ourselves into these pop culture moments and we happen to have stickers. So this was a really good good way to kind of plug the fact that we have stickers and it was sort of a fun visual riff as we've mentioned before.
Obviously we have speaking engagements, we have other things that we do we have blog posts and so we're always trying to reinforce this bar idea of being in the bar and, you know, our blog posts and other things are sort of dispatches from the bar, notes from the bar, that sort of thing. And then as I mentioned earlier, we also do fun multimedia things, such as audiograms.
So, that's always fun to give people a little bit of a taste of what, some of our episodes are about in a, just a nice snackable format, so Todd. You want to jump in with some, some additional thoughts here.
Yeah, so in wrapping up, we want to just talk a little bit about how we insert ourselves into the story. We use it too.
If you recall the chart earlier that showed how media and search are interdependent, think about ways that you can use integrated media to add more color to your stories and always use consistent keywords for your marketing materials. So for us social channels, we use it to build our audience by connecting to dates and events that relate to pop culture. We celebrate weird observances like National Donut Day or things like that. Highlight people or events that are connected in some way to our podcast. We share interesting, finds and blog posts that we create and we promote listener quotes and speaking engagements. So we want to make our listeners, the star.
Let me give you a couple tips here. First of all, always use the contestants. Excuse me, consistent hashtags, that relate to your keywords. Tag others who would be interested in your content and encouraging reviews and comments whenever you can. And above all post and engage with others on a regular basis. This is a way that you can build your audience. Most of all is to really just participate in a consistent way, invite others to your conversation, participate in other people's conversations. So in short, hopefully if you can pull all of these things together, this will mean that storytelling can help make your marketing stand out even more.
So that wraps it up for us, we thank you for your time and participating with us today in this webinar. We thank SEO Rocket for giving us the opportunity to talk to you. And we have a couple minutes to have some questions if there are any.
Yeah, and as we shift in the question mode of sorry Angela, I was just going to mention as we shift in the question mode really quickly. For those of you who are interested, here are some of the different ways that folks can get in touch with us to visit our website, find our social media accounts and start to track our podcast down and hopefully, subscribe and continue to listen. So, thank you very much. Yeah.
Thanks guys has great info and I appreciate you sharing that so that the folks that are watching at home can find you. Because I do think really, seriously everyone, you should give them a listen. They’re a lot of fun. I have some questions for you and I was... I took notes, but I do have some questions. The first one may or may not be easy for y'all to answer will see. Probably is. This is a pop culture question. Alright, which actor that actually appeared in your presentation today, also appeared in another Christmas movie?
Mmm. I'm thinking of the actors that appeared in our presentation.
Elliot Strunk: Well, the first one that comes to mind is Peter Billingsley?
Yeah. That’s the actor.
Mmm. Wow. Can you give us the movie or the will I give it away?
Okay. Well here's a hint. The movie is set primarily in New York City. It wasn’t on 34th St.There’s singing. But, it’s not a musical.
Narrows it to okay, okay. And would you say it was in the 20th century? Yeah. Okay that but there's no way I can give you the answer. I'm stumped but I really love this. Yeah, absolutely.
There’s singing. No dancing. But, it’s not a musical. I'll give you the answer. You don't know? It was “Elf”! He was one of the elves in Santa's Workshop. In Elf.
Oh my goodness. That is great trivia! Yes, yeah. Yep.
This is wonderful awesome. All right. Awesome. Yeah. Hit us with another one will redeem ourselves
Anyway okay so I'll give you I'll give you actual live marketing question, how about that? Um so you know you mentioned the “what”, the differentiation and tying that together you guys had mentioned in your presentation that you you'd like to use, the user feedback, the visitor or viewer feedback rather
or listener feedback that you get from them. So I want to ask you about the matchmaking of it. You know, there are things that we do every day in our businesses that are just like everyday things for us. We never really think it is unique about us because it's part of our daily job or daily routine, you know, and we've just really become blasé and don't even recognize it anymore. You know, how can we as marketers, business owners and sales people, whatever our role is. How can we identify these different things in our business, that do make as stand out, that do answer that “What?!” question. That do differentiate us and put that unique spin that you talked about on our messaging across the board in the different marketing mediums? How do we, how do we even identify that? How do we find that? You know, we're so blind to it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's it. That's a great question. Yes, I'm sure he is and then you can jump in if you have one the ever.
Really simple answer. One of the greatest sources of inspiration is to dissect, what your competitors are doing. Look at their keywords, look at their website, look at their online presence. Look at as much traffic as you can. That they're getting dissect them and then do something different that that really is the easiest source of inspiration is know what others are doing. When I when I work with clients as my day job, as a brand strategist and when I work with clients you would be surprised how often they are. So internally focused on themselves and and getting their message out that they haven't seen. If it resonates with the market because others have similar messages. Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, I have to have to say, like when we in the SEO world, when we're doing, say a competitive analysis of someone for a client, that's one of the places that we start. We look at their competitors and what they are doing, how are they eating your lunch right now, you know, what's going on there and then what can you learn from that? You know, how can you improve on that. So that's awesome. It's interesting to hear that that applies to other aspects of marketing, too. Good to know.
And I want to thank you guys because y'all, you did a really good job of going through your curation process of, “Hey, this is what our audience is looking for”. How do you keep that in mind? Identifying, what your audience needs and wants, making sure you give that to them in a way that is interesting not just hey we're all good. You know, we're just kindred spirits here. There’s so much thinking there, you have to go through a thought process. Can you walk us just very briefly through your thought process there.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, you know, is that questions being asked to things pop into my mind? I think the first thing is like, would my mom understand it? If I were telling the story? You know what? Would my mom understand it and find interesting because my mom isn't a designer, doesn't have a design degree but my mom you know, like stories and then I think the other thing is, are we bringing something unique to the table? You know, Todd and I happen to have a very long list of topics that we've brainstormed for potential episodes. And one of the things that's wonderful about working with another person is, you know, one of us will say, “Hey, you know, I have a thought about this certain topic or the certain design object”, or whatever it may be. And, you know, for it to be part of Pop Culture, a lot of times it's been seen about and written about before, right? So, if we're going to talk about it, we have to bring something unique to that story, and that's really where the research component comes in. As we start doing research, if there's nothing additional there beyond kind of what we've already, we already sort of know, then there's really nothing there in terms of people peeling back the layers and adding any value with us telling the story. It's really simply conveying something that's already out there. So I think going back into us both being you know enjoying pop culture so much if we're digging into something. If we think it's a good idea like “Yeah okay you know you've convinced me this is an idea worth pursuing let's dig into it.” and we find something that truly surprises us. Like what we made a joke, I think in at least a couple episodes that one of our favorite topics apparently is that creative lawsuits. You know, there's always like a lawsuit that seems to be happening like it's part of the backstory about some of this stuff and our running joke is actually going to shift and just do a podcast about creative lawsuits because we seem to keep finding those. So I think that's that's one of the things.
Going back to touch on one of the things in the presentation. What is the value that's being added? What does the unique Voice or perspective that we have? And then also, I think the other thing just to kind of wrap u, my answer is connecting the dots and drawing these thematic associations between two, things. Like, there are times where we maybe have the object first and then it sort of like, oh, okay, well is there another object or thing out there that would match this? And, if so what is that theme over time? We have a theme in mind but then we need to go out and find a couple objects that not only will work but that we think the general public, IE my mom will actually know what it is and understand it, you know? So it's a balancing act, absolutely.
Alright. That's great information. And it's good too. I appreciate the feedback on that because it is interesting because I think we all need to really learn to think of ourselves as storytellers and not just you know pushing out, just vomiting information on people. We really need to sort of think to be more transparent, yet there is a kindler, gentler way of sharing this information for everyone. Thank you for bringing this today. I really appreciate your time guys. Cheers. Cheers. We have, you know, bar mix, we have our drinks. We need to stop. We need to toast all of the attendees on today's webinar and a little bit of an additional toast to, SEO Rocket, thank you.
Once again, you're so elegant with the martini Angela with olive and all. Yes, yes. Yes, I see we need to be more classy.
Right? You're gonna have to cut us off.
Let me just wrap you up. I won't cut you off. If you have not had enough webinar fun yet we have another one coming on August 18th! This is going to be really fun. This is how to discover fast SEO wins with an SEO audit. We're going rogue on this one y'all. This is going to be a live panel discussion. It'll be really fun. We've got Tom and Zane Tuck our SEO Specialists. They're doing, we're actually having… and pop it in the chat if you want submit your web address so that we can actually do a live audit during the webinar of your site.
Does your site have issues? Does it need to be on the therapy couch? Let's go ahead and find out what they are. Submit away, folks, we'd love to include you in this audit, it will be fun. It'll be free information. This is normally an advanced SEO audit and will cost you just under four hundred dollars to get that done. But if you submit it to us and we will do it for free for the first two who submit.
So please join us on August 18th for that. You can go to SEORocket.com and register to attend and see it live. Looking forward to it!
Alright, guys, I guess we do need to wrap up and all of us cut ourselves off. But thank you so much. I appreciate your time. I appreciate all the attendees. And I hope all this proves useful and actionable to you. I know I picked up some great hints and tips myself. I hope you did as well. So thanks everyone. We will see you in August!
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