12 - Minisode 2: Business Differentiation Strategies: Marketing, Branding and the Impact of AI
Aug 15, 2023Episode 12
Kickstart Collective
Have you ever wondered how to make your business stand out in a crowded market? This minisode by the Kickstart Team with Laura and Alyssa takes you on a journey through the maze of differentiation, exploring branding, web design, Google business listings, and the goldmine potential of email marketing.
We share insights on how to nurture and engage your subscribers, from building an email list with targeted Facebook ads, to managing campaigns effectively - all while ensuring your content is meaningful and engaging.
Diving into the cutting-edge realm of AI in writing, we delve into how AI may one day replace copywriters - but for now, it's crucial to review and edit AI-written copy. We also touch on the power of great copywriting in helping businesses to rise above the competition.
Of course, we had to pull a question from the "two can" as we play a round of 'What's Your Favorite Thing That Comes Out of a Can?'
This quick minisode is full of insights and tips for any businesses looking to differentiate and thrive. Tune in!
Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.
Have you ever wondered how to make your business stand out in a crowded market? This minisode by the Kickstart Team with Laura and Alyssa takes you on a journey through the maze of differentiation, exploring branding, web design, Google business listings, and the goldmine potential of email marketing.
We share insights on how to nurture and engage your subscribers, from building an email list with targeted Facebook ads, to managing campaigns effectively - all while ensuring your content is meaningful and engaging.
Diving into the cutting-edge realm of AI in writing, we delve into how AI may one day replace copywriters - but for now, it's crucial to review and edit AI-written copy. We also touch on the power of great copywriting in helping businesses to rise above the competition.
Of course, we had to pull a question from the "two can" as we play a round of 'What's Your Favorite Thing That Comes Out of a Can?'
This quick minisode is full of insights and tips for any businesses looking to differentiate and thrive. Tune in!
Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Two Can Talks podcast, where we bounce from topic to topic with our guest to give you an inside look at their life as a business owner. No question is off limits as we talk about what has led to the successes, the challenges and more.
Speaker 2:
And this podcast is brought to you by Kickstart Studios. Kickstart Studios is Wilmington's newest video podcast studio, equipped with multiple camera angles and an in-house producer. Creating a high quality video podcast has never been easier. Don't let the tech and gear learning curve hold you back from jumping into podcasting or created video content any longer. Our team takes care of it all for you, so you can focus on the message you want to share. You simply show up record and receive the final product. No more wasting time setting it up and breaking down the gear, setting up lights or doing sound checks on your own or in-house producer one everything set up and ready to go for you. Check us out at Kickstart Studios.
Speaker 1:
All right, welcome to our second mini-sode of Two Can Talks where we answer you guys' questions about marketing. So Luke and Joshua did the first one. That was more video production content related stuff. So we're going to take them more digital marketing questions. So if you guys have not met Alyssa, this is Alyssa. She is our account manager and graphic designer and social media person. She does a lot. So I think you've gotten at least two shout outs from other podcast guests, so I think it's only appropriate that you're on here in the world's seizure phase.
Speaker 1:
Here in the flesh, here you are. So we will dive into these lovely questions. Let's do it, let's see. All right, dive in. How can businesses differentiate themselves from competitors in a saturated market? So this is a good one, because if you are in a location or you have a business that there's a lot of competitors, you have to figure out how to stand out. So I don't know if anything comes to your mind. The first thing that came to my mind which this won't be super specific because we don't have the industry, but is figuring out your specific branding and your brand voice and what makes either you as a business owner and or your brand unique, and then just jump on that train.
Speaker 3:
And let it ride. Yeah, that is definitely true. And I also think I trust a brand more when they have strong branding, a good website and even their Google business listing when that's updated. Because if I'm looking for a new restaurant to go to and I'm looking on Google Maps or Apple Maps or whatever, and I find somewhere, if their website's not linked, not even giving them time to it's too many clicks, yeah. Or if I go to the website and it's like ugly, I click off.
Speaker 1:
I'm not doing it.
Speaker 3:
I don't want to eat your ugly food.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, no.
Speaker 3:
But like if I go somewhere and I'm like, oh okay, I like their logo, they have a nice website, it's easy to navigate. Yeah, I'll be more likely to choose them.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, no, I think that's a good point, like making sure, especially online, and if you're in a saturated market, I'm going to assume that people are Googling you or your industry or whatever, whatever you're me. So making sure that your SEO is good so that you show up in your. Google business listing is updated and accurate, Like you said. Like fully filled out.
Speaker 2:
You have your logo updated.
Speaker 1:
You have a link to your website. You have your hours, just like. Starting with the basics. I think is definitely a good point. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
Like the other day my sister she's getting married and she sent me this makeup artist website and she's like, does this girl look good? And I honestly looked through the website like not even a minute but I was like she has a cool logo, she's got a cool website. I was like, yeah, she's good, just book her.
Speaker 1:
Yeah she's got a cool vibe. She has to be good at making that. Yeah, no, but I mean that's a good point. I feel like if you're putting effort into those things that are making a first impression for your customers. That's going to go a long way.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so definitely.
Speaker 1:
All right, let's see. Oh, I love email marketing.
Speaker 3:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
How can a business effectively utilize email marketing to nurture and engage their subscribers? Um, I think email marketing is my favorite form of marketing.
Speaker 3:
Which is perfect.
Speaker 1:
So if you want to jump in, feel free. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a. There's so many options, um, with email marketing. I think from like. Step one is you have to obviously build your email list. Um, and I know, like on the Facebook ad side, when we set those up, there's options to do like a lead capture.
Speaker 1:
So you can start there with your targeting, um for those ads very specific to your oh, like your target audience. So you're like demographics, location, interests, all that good stuff, um. And then use that ad to build your email list. So you got your building a quality list of people that should at least essentially be leads, um. And then from there you just need a good email marketing like platform that you can do automations and segmentations and drip campaigns so that you can start really funneling those leads down a certain pathway, based on either what they're interested in, um how they've engaged with you. If they're not engaging, then let's get them off your list. We don't care, we don't care about them.
Speaker 1:
Honestly like if they're never going to buy from you, unless it's a situation, maybe like B2B, where they would be a referral source or something. That's a different story. But, um, you can start nurturing them through the email content, which I guess, yeah, so nurturing and engaging them that also, the like content of the email, I feel like is important at that point too, because if you're sending them trash, then it's not going to work.
Speaker 1:
You're not going to nurture them, but figuring, segmenting them, figuring out like what they're interested in, where they are in your sales funnel Is it like a top of funnel lead, like they might be ready in 90 days or they like ready to purchase tomorrow or do your service or whatever? Um, and then, yeah, building out resources and even like when we do blogs for people, like if you are blogging or putting out content, like all that stuff can easily be reused and like formatted for emails. So, yeah, that was a long winded answer. I don't know if you have anything.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, no, I think good bullet points, that's good. And then you do emails too, if you do it all, yeah.
Speaker 3:
And then I mean, even once you get to the content part of the email, I feel like there's so many routes you could do, like blogs or even reusing videos that you've done before. I think it's just important to like make whoever is in your audience that you're sending the emails to feel like kind of exclusive, you know, because, like, you had to get them to sign up, yes, make them feel like they're getting something out of it. Yeah, make sure, like it does have value.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you don't. That's a good point. You don't want to just be like by this, by this, I don't know. Do that like truly nurture them. Like provide them resources. Like if you feel like a certain audience or customer segment always has like the same questions over and over again, like address those questions in the email and then make it super easy, like for them to still get in touch with you or purchase. Like make sure there's always a called action, whether it's to go to your website and read more blogs or contact you or buy whatever it is. So, yeah, valuable content. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. Like reuse content and then always have a called action would be my bullet point at answer. I think it covers it all. Love it.
Speaker 3:
Love email marketing.
Speaker 1:
What social media scheduling and management tools should you use?
Speaker 3:
There are a lot out there. There's a lot.
Speaker 1:
We can talk about what we use and then can throw in some suggestions for other scenarios. We use co-schedule, which we about switched from.
Speaker 3:
Don't tell them. Don't tell them.
Speaker 1:
No, they know, I shouted that. Customer support. I mean a lot of things with Twitter's API, whatever. It affected a lot of people, a lot of schedulers, but I feel like it works well for us on an agency standpoint, because you can't have different profiles. Well, all of them. You can have different profiles, but the color labels.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, yeah, it's easy to organize all of them.
Speaker 1:
Yes, label them by client. It has some built-in reporting which is easy for us to kick off as a PDF.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, the reporting is one of my favorite features of it. Yes, very easy for reporting.
Speaker 1:
Yes, which is good, because you need to know what's working and what's not working and all that good stuff, and they make it. Yeah, it's easy to. If you wanted to do a specific campaign, you can set it up. When you're scheduling, you can select the days, but it's all under one. I'm not explaining this one. It's all under one campaign, but then you can still schedule by day it has a good crowd interview and then the other. I think big thing for us is it has that view only link.
Speaker 3:
That's what I'm going to say.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, so we can again. It's organized so nicely. So we can send a client just their posts that are scheduled for them to go in and review. Yeah, what else? What else do we love about co-schedule? Is that it?
Speaker 3:
I mean, those are the big ones. That's what's kept us around, yeah and for the price.
Speaker 1:
it's not cheap, but it is good In terms of other options if you're just trying to schedule your own post.
Speaker 2:
I mean Meta's got scheduling stuff.
Speaker 3:
I'm not as familiar with it just because we have co-schedule.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, if you're looking for a free option and it's just like you're posting on your again, it's through Meta, so it's going to be Facebook, instagram. Who knows, maybe you can schedule threads. I haven't looked TBD. It wouldn't really work for LinkedIn, but it's free, it's built right in, so it has some of the features that you would use for those posts. Hootsuite's great. They have a lot of options. I haven't looked on like an individual business basis but for, like, a agency plan. The cheapest plan they have is 100 bucks a month, which isn't bad. But if, again, if you're just like, if you're a small business and you're just scheduling your posts, that might not be worth it. But they will send you push notifications for like Instagram stories and reels, like if you're using original audio, so that's kind of nice. So you can kind of plan them all out and not have to. It'll send your notification to your phone when it's time to post. Yeah, there's a ton out there.
Speaker 3:
But we've been using co-schedule for a minute now. Yeah, it's been a while.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, they haven't done us wrong. Mine is the one glitch that affected a lot of the schedulers. They haven't done us wrong, Sorry. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I like it. Did you see in the advanced settings where you can schedule reels?
Speaker 3:
No, I'll show you. That would be very helpful.
Speaker 1:
I tested it out yesterday. It doesn't work for like all features, but like all the real. But yeah, we'll. Chat Can schedule reels under advanced settings, depending on your account, because they roll out features, you know, to different people at different times. Okay, this knew this was coming With the intro of AI written content. Will blogs by humans have a fair shot? You're going to take this one first.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I say yes. I think AI, chat, gpt is great for like coming up with ideas or helping with like layouts of blogs, but you can tell when it's like written by. Ai. You can tell sometimes. So like oh this sounds kind of like a robot, yeah, yeah. So I think it'll be useful for like getting things going, but as far as like making it sound real and actually connecting with the audience that you're writing to, yes, yeah, you still need the human touch.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yes, I would agree with that. I'm going to make one exception.
Speaker 3:
Okay, let's hear it.
Speaker 1:
Please do not be offended audience. I think there is a huge difference between like people like you and people who are professional copywriters writing, versus anyone writing Like if you don't, I don't think you even need like say it, I don't. Yeah, maybe you don't need like a obviously a formal education writing, maybe you haven't taken a writing course. But if you're like I'm not a super strong writer or you've written blogs in the past and you like they don't perform well, then yeah, ai might be a better, it might be better.
Speaker 1:
And then you go back and edit it and make I still make it sound like you make sure everything's factual, exactly, because it will say things that are just not true or legally, depending on your business, your industry, legally you might not be able to say certain things.
Speaker 3:
So I think you still need to edit and then you're not Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but you're not technically allowed to even just copy and paste what you get from that, are you?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that don't even there's rules.
Speaker 1:
I think the only thing is you can't like well, cause I was listening to a podcast actually on like the one. There's like the integrity side of it, like yeah, and then there's like the legal side of like not being able to like trademark and or like resell it, maybe under like the pretense that you, like, you originally wrote it. I need to go back and listen to it again cause it was interesting and then I'll send you the link when you put it in the show. But yeah, I think there's a lot to come. And then, like in the years to come, like yeah, how, yeah, cause they kind of just start for you.
Speaker 1:
It might not spit out the exact same thing for somebody else but it might do something super similar.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So I don't know It'll be interesting. But no, I agree it's great for prompts.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So if you are just suck at writing or you hate writing, sure fill it in there, get you some good bullet points and then go back and edit and make it sound like you and your brand and it is like it's learning. So the better your prompt, the better it's going to.
Speaker 3:
You can like teach it, yeah, which is kind of weird. It's a weird, but yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it's a whole new. It's a whole new frontier, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes in the next like few years, but I don't think it's going away. Yeah, no-transcript, unfortunately, fortunately, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, my job, luckily, doesn't rely purely on copywriting.
Speaker 3:
So it is interesting but it's a nice tool.
Speaker 1:
Yes, and like people who are like professional copywriters, like that is like a skill that I think is still important. I don't think you can just replace that with AI. I agree. Yeah, dun dun dun. Tvd will follow up on this in two years six months, who knows, next week figure out tomorrow. Yeah who knows where it'll go. I think that was all, yes.
Speaker 1:
Those are all of our sweet questions, let's pull one just for fun, all right. See what happens. Oh, it's a classic. This is one of my favorites. What's your favorite thing that comes out of a can?
Speaker 3:
Hmm, probably At the moment. Okay, I don't know if this is appropriate, probably I just started drinking the sping drifts. Yeah, like the alcoholic sping drifts.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I was like why is this not appropriate?
Speaker 3:
The regular ones are great too, but the ones that like the seltzers are so good.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I'm going to try this yeah. I don't even know if I think that was a thing. Yeah, okay, they're. They're really good, okay, good to know what's yours. I think I appreciate coconut milk coming out of a can.
Speaker 3:
I just got into coconut milk. So great, so great. That's something you can get into. Yes, it is for sure.
Speaker 1:
Well, croy, I feel like, is a classic and I'm very interested. I haven't tried it yet, but now I have to try Blake Lively's.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:
And boozy drinks. What's it called? Betty booze is one, and then there's another brand that says something else.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I'll try that.
Speaker 1:
We'll share. We'll have to share the ad when we share this episode. Yeah, but she has two cans with a two can, and I'm a big Blake Lively fan, so so we'll let it slide yeah it's fine, y'all, whatever ad agency she use, can steal our concept.
Speaker 1:
It's fine, she'll just have to be on our podcast. Yeah, sweet. Well, we're going to keep doing these on a semi regular basis. So if you guys have questions, you can send them to us at any point and then, prior to recording, we'll probably do a specific post. So it's super easy for you guys to submit us your questions Anything marketing or business related. We'll do our best to answer it. Try to tell the future with AI.
Speaker 3:
I don't know.
Speaker 1:
But thanks for tuning in and, alyssa, I'm glad we got to have you on camera. So people can finally know who all of our clients are shouting out on the podcast.
