[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hi. Welcome to Confessions from the Home Office podcast. My name is Wendy Hill and I've been running a marketing consulting company, Market Momentum, from my home office in Greenville, South Carolina. Since 2005, I've been raising my two kids and rescuing lots of dogs and fostering and doing all that type of thing. This podcast will give you insight into what it's been like working out of my house for two decades. I'll also be passing along some tips and tricks to help you with your business, especially with marketing.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Are you struggling with marketing? Visit my site, wendyhill.com, and let's figure out how to take marketing off your list of stressors. Whether you're a startup or an established business looking to outsource, I have solutions tailored for you. From kickstarting your marketing efforts to completely outsource services. We'll help you tackle your to do.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: List and reduce your stress.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Visit wendyhill.com today. That's Wendy with an I and let's transform your marketing strategy.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Today's episode is about how marketing has changed over the past 20 years. So by the end of this episode, we'll talk about things that were going on back in the early two thousands and how that has changed today and kind of where things were, where things are and where they're going. So this should give you a lot to think about and maybe help you realize that maybe you need to get more with the times or you are already with the times, or maybe you're a little bit ahead. So buckle up. A lot has changed in the last 20 years. So back in 2005, Facebook was just a baby. MySpace was around, LinkedIn had just come out and Twitter was coming out in 2006. And the iPhone did not come out until 2007. I was a BlackBerry girl and I thought that's all I ever needed. All my friends had blackberries. We BlackBerry messaged each other and I knew the little keyboard and I could type even under my under a table during a meeting. And I felt like that's all I needed. And when I heard about iPhones, I thought, there's no way. This is just extra stuff we don't need. And imagine now if I didn't have a smartphone, I would be out of style.
Marketing back in 2005 was a lot of planning, strategy, and a lot of things that involved print, like brochures and direct mail flyers. And then we also had all the advertising that we would buy, like tv, radio, outdoor, that type of thing. So digital marketing was around a little bit, but it was expensive. People didn't really understand it. It took a lot of customized programming and it was just kind of a baby, kind of like Facebook. And so, you know, looking forward to today, looking forward and now looking at today. Digital marketing is really where everybody starts with instead of looking at all the print and looking at all the traditional advertising. So back then having a website was if you had a website, you are on the web and you were considered almost ahead of the game. Most people had a site, but it was more of brochure where I felt like we would put a client's, all the brochures on there, a lot of PDF downloads.
There wasn't a ton of interactive things on there. It was just more of kind of click and read, click and read. And it was just really content heavy. But that was a trend back then. And now business owners have a website, but they don't want to put a ton on there because they know we have the attention span of a nat. And business owners also have to think about juggling website and their social media content, email marketing, everything.
So let's talk a little bit about decision making. I feel like back when I got started decision making, we looked at data some, but it was more of this is what my gut tells me, or I really know my audience or I have a lot of experience and this is what's always worked for clients and now we have to really look at data because it's expensive to do things, it's expensive to run ads online and just to, to create anything. There's always a cost associated with it. So it's really important that you know where you can get analytics from, like Google Analytics, or even just the statistics from your email marketing program. I mean, something even as simple as flow desk. An email marketing program can tell you how many people opened, how many people unsubscribed, how many times did they read it, did they look at it on a mobile device or did they look at it on a desktop? And you know, a lot of times you can say, hey, this person opened my email seven times, maybe I need to get in touch with them or give them a call.
So I feel like now we definitely have plenty of tools to look at the data so we can make decisions when we plan and how we optimize and change how we execute things. So let's talk about social media for just a minute. I mean, that's all the rage now. I mean, personally, I would love to turn off all my social and throw it in the garbage just because everything's so crazy right now.
But social media is part of most businesses strategies. There's some that don't do a lot just because of the nature of their business. But think about social media. It's not just putting up content anymore. I mean, content creation is a full time job in some companies. It's a full department in some companies.
You know, back when I got started, LinkedIn was around, some people used it. It took a couple of couple years for it to really take off. And it used to be more of like, this is my online resume. And now people are putting a lot of content up there. They're putting polls up there. They're trying to find a way to build audiences. They're reaching out through people's dm's, trying to sell and close business. And with social media, you've got that whole with LinkedIn, but then you've got Facebook, you have Instagram, you have Twitter or X.
And TikTok. I'm not a huge TikTok fan. I like to watch TikTok. I don't like to create TikToks.
But it's not just about being present. It's about building communities and making sure you're solving a problem and you're providing value when you put content out there for your audience to see and try to attract new people.
So let's talk a minute for about how advertising and how we absorb content, how it's changed. Think about, you used to watch tv a lot with your family, or even just by yourself, and you would watch, and then ads would pop up on tv. Now you can skip, now you can subscribe and pay a premium to not get ads for things. And you listen to the radio, you're going down the road, and ads would pop up. Well, I don't know. The last time I listened to the radio in the car, I have playlists and I have other things that I listen to podcasts, and I don't listen to local radio, or I don't even listen to Sirius anymore. And so I feel like we've gone from this interruption based advertising to now it's content, it's images and videos that we put on social, or we pay through social to try to attract people. So marketers are now becoming more like mini publishing houses, creating reels, writing blog posts. I'll create a piece of content and then I'll try to figure out ten different ways I can use it so I don't have to keep coming up with new stuff every single second, you know, producing podcasts. People are coming up with podcasts on just about every subject now. And that's an attraction strategy for businesses, if they don't want to pay a lot of money for advertising, maybe doing a podcast will get you in front of the right audience over time.
And also, just think about inbound versus outbound marketing. Back in 2005, businesses, they relied heavily on outbound. I mean, thinking of all the outdoor boards, we still do some outdoor with clients, but a lot of cold calls, radio ads, tv ads, that type of thing in direct mail, tons of direct mail. We used to do that. And now inbound reigns more. So. Business owners and marketers are trying to figure out how to create valuable content to attract customers instead of interrupting them and bothering them. I'm going to put this in front of you. And there's lead magnets and getting people through sales funnels and trying to attract people to their business. Doing more inbound than outbound.
So another topic I want to talk to you about is making things mobile friendly, mobile responsive. I have to laugh because probably six, seven years ago, I took my kids to the beach and we were gonna look, go to this italian restaurant at the beach, and we were looking up the menu on my phone, and it didn't, it wasn't mobile responsive. It wasn't sized to be on the phone, and we had to keep scrolling to the left and scrolling to the right, and it would flip and do all this. And so we finally just left and we're like, we're not, we're not even gonna, we're sitting in the parking lot and we're like, this isn't worth it. We're gonna go somewhere else. So I feel like people understand that more now that you can't just put up a website and hope that it works on the, a mobile device. And a lot of times it takes tweaking. So when you put something up on, created on a desktop or laptop, you need to go look at a mobile device. I would look at it on Android and iPhone and make sure that it works okay. And a lot of times it needs to be scaled down. It doesn't need as many images. It just needs to be able to, for the visitor to be able to find the information that they need.
So another thing that I thought about when I was planning for this podcast episode is how marketing has changed. And I know that there's still some big agencies out there and even some medium sized agencies where it's a whole team to create something for a client. And I get that there's still a lot of people that are doing big radio campaigns and doing big tv campaigns and huge, you know, trade shows and things like that. But for everyday, maybe small medium businesses, the traditional team of trying to get things done with marketing. Like when I was back with an agency and when I first got started on my own, I'd have a lot of people working with me. It had to be, you know, I had to have an artist and I had to have a copywriter, and I had to have a programmer, I had to have a production person, and everybody was in their silo doing things. And now as we have automations and more tools, one person can handle a lot of the steps and a lot of that technology is built into software. And I guess that's more of us moving to more digital marketing instead of more traditional channels. So I feel like today things can be done faster and more efficiently. And companies, marketers like me, we don't have to worry about huge capital investments. We're doing more technology and subscription based programs to get our work done.
So another thing I wanted to talk about was e commerce. So I remember back in the day, there were these, all the.com bust and there were all these huge companies. They poured all this money into everything, and just about all of those companies are gone. And how you had to be a big company with a lot of investors to do a.com. and now just about anybody can have an e commerce. Think about all the Wix platforms and Shopify platforms, and you can even just sell on Facebook or Instagram. Or Instagram. And so, you know, it's pretty neat. When a local boutique, you know, back a couple months ago, I was looking for a dress and the boutique I was in locally was missing one size, and I had to have that dress. So I went online, found it in a small place in Texas, had it shipped in three days later it was done. So just how e commerce has made things easy, and it's helped open doors for businesses of all sizes to sell to people anywhere.
Now, another thing when I was preparing for this, I want to talk about was influencer marketing. So back in the day when it first got started, you'd have a big budget if you were going to hire even a local celebrity or a model or an athlete, somebody to be a spokesperson for your brand or to be a model. And now just about anyone, especially in the b two C business and consumer environment, they can hire an influencer. So you can go out and find someone who's got a size following that you're looking for.
That's in the industry that you're looking for to promote a product. You can negotiate. If they're just going to, you're going to give them product in exchange for them producing the content and putting it out, or if there's also going to be payments. So there's platforms now to help you find influencers. So if you have a product that you're looking to promote and you're struggling with it, that might be something you want to consider. Now because you're dealing with ordinary people. Sometimes it can get a little crazy trying to track them down and get everything done, but it might be something to consider.
Let's see, the next thing that we're going to talk about is video. So video has been important as long as it's been around. I think back to when I first went out on my own. If I had somebody come and say they wanted a video, it was usually like a corporate video or a video for a special event or a new product. Everything was high quality. We were hiring people to work half day full days. We were paying for editing time, half day full day blocks. We had to get, sometimes we had to audition and get talent in to do that. And, and it just took a lot of budget and took a long time to get something done. Now fast forward to today. Video creation can be done anywhere. I mean, my kids do video creation. They've been doing that for years. And there's just so many platforms where you can put things like YouTube, Vimeo. People are using rumble now to put things out, twitch to stream things. So now any companies of any size can be in the video world. Now I'm not saying that high end video production companies aren't needed, they definitely are. But think about when someone goes live and talks about something or they do a quick q and a video. We don't expect that to be super high end video production quality. It's just more of real time.
So if someone has a camera and some editing apps, they can be in the video business.
So another thing that I was thinking about is personalization. So back almost 20 years ago, personalization might mean your name is at the beginning of a letter or your name was on the label when something got a direct piece, direct mail piece got sent to you. But now with databases and all the data analytics and AI, you can get a personalized experience. So somebody may send you a video and it may be based on preferences where they've, where you've looked at things on their website or different courses that your products that you've purchased, when they go to promote something new, they can customize what type of marketing you receive. So that's, that's pretty cool and something to think about when you're looking ahead at how to maybe make an experience more personalized for your customers and your prospects.
So one of the last topics that I want to talk about today is marketing technology. And that's something that I could talk about all day long because I'm not a tech guru, but I am kind of a tech geek.
Over the past 20 years, there's so many tools when used to if you needed something or you needed an app, you had to hire a programmer, you had to first bid it out. You had to find somebody who wasn't going to charge you six figures to do it. And that's still going on with huge companies. But thinking about with marketing, things that you need to do, there are apps that I use every day and programs that I subscribe to every day to help get things done for myself and for my clients, like Trello, Flowdesk, Mailchimp, equipped 360, Castos, Riverside, Zoom, Google, Meet, Canva, stripe, wave, apps, wave IO.
I can't even think of anything else right now, but I'm sure there's about ten more. So if there's something you're looking for, it's probably already out there. And if there's something you're looking for and you can't find it, let me know and I can help you.
But before, it would take a lot of app development money to get something done, or to speed something up or to automate something, not anymore.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Are you getting started or restarted with marketing. For your business, visit my site, wendyhill.com and download the Market Momentum Kickstart guide. Inside, you'll discover a step by step roadmap to launch your marketing that delivers results. Don't leave your marketing to chance. Firing off bottle rockets is not great for your budget or for your results. Grab your free market momentum kickstart now and launch your next campaign with confidence. Visit wendyhill.com to learn more. That's Wendy with an eye.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: So businesses can now reach global audiences and compete with larger companies, get things done faster, and measure results much easier than how it was in 2005. So I'm grateful for that. Digital marketing has made things stressful for people at times, trying to keep up with the technology and figuring out do I have the latest tool? Is there something better out there? I'm always looking. I'm always watching webinars. I'm always doing research.
But whomever is working with you on your marketing can help you take care of all that so you don't have to think about it. So I would expect AI and augmented reality and voice search to keep changing things. With marketing, you need to stay adaptable. Don't jump too quickly. I think being a knee jerk, if something doesn't work the first time or it's not working fast enough, you have to be patient for a little while. Sometimes just people are busy, sometimes it's the time of year. Sometimes it just takes time for things to work. But the overall goal is to connect with customers and provide value. I always try to think about marketing as being in four buckets, like doing the assessment, doing the planning, doing the execution, and then optimizing. And you might say, well, you should optimize earlier. Well, yeah, of course, but you can always go back and look at the data and change things and make things better. So I feel like it's always that four step process, and it never really stops. It just kind of keeps rotating through. So that's my short walk down memory lane for marketing.
If you think about it, a lot really has changed, and I think that's good. I think that it's not as complicated to get things done, and we have a lot more tools now and a lot more things that we can do, so, oh, quickly. A couple people have asked me about my dog, Lola, the golden retriever, that I mentioned in the trailer about how she likes to eat socks, and they want to know how she was doing. I don't know if Lola will ever be on the podcast. I don't think she could sit still very well. She could sit right here with me, a chair, but I think she would scratch, or I think she would start whining. So we'll try it one day. Lola's doing well, I think I figured out that Lola has Pica, and that is a condition where dogs and maybe humans eat things that they're not supposed to eat. So, like, this week, she's eaten a shoe, she's eaten a couple paper plates, she ate a bill, which, hey, that'd be great if it went away.
She ate a tennis ball, and she ate a marker. And I know she ate the marker because I saw pink lines all down her legs and never found the marker. So I think she was dragging the marker while she was eating it and colored herself. So she's almost five, and she should have quit doing this a long time ago, but she hasn't. So I think we're just gonna have to keep dealing with the pika and try to keep things picked up. But it's. It's not funny, but it's funny. I suspect one day that when she passes away, if I ever had her body donated to science, they would find, like, a quilt of all the missing things that I've lost over the years in her stomach. So anyway, that's my short story about Lola. So as we wrap this up, what marketing tools and strategies are you using that work? What are ones that you feel like have made your life easier as technology has changed and things have changed over the years? And are you struggling with anything, or is there a tool that you're not quite sure about and you have a question about? So send me a note. If that happens, you can always comment on YouTube, or you can send me an email at
[email protected] so that's the end of this episode of Confessions from the Home Office. And I appreciate you listening. I'll be back soon with another episode. Thanks.
