Podcasts about target audiences

Today, we are joined by Kevin Evers.Kevin Evers is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review. Passionate about shaping groundbreaking research and amplifying pioneering ideas, he has edited bestselling and award-winning books on high performance, creativity, innovation, digital disruption, marketing, and strategy. He has also written popular articles on brain science, Hollywood blockbusters, the art of persuasion, and the unpredictability of success. His newest book, ‘There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift'. In this episode, we explore how Taylor Swift's career represents a masterclass in business strategy and leadership. Kevin reveals how Swift's approach to her career mirrors proven business concepts including blue ocean strategy, the job-to-be-done theory, and anti-fragility. Key topics include:How Swift identified and cultivated an overlooked market segment in country music, similar to Marvel's strategy with college students in the 1960sThe strategic approach Swift took to transitioning from country to pop music while maintaining her core audienceHow Swift transforms controversies into opportunities by controlling her narrative and turning challenges into artThe concept of "productive paranoia" that helps Swift anticipate industry changes and evolve ahead of trends-Website and live online programs: http://ims-online.comBlog: https://blog.ims-online.com/Podcast: https://ims-online.com/podcasts/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesgood/Twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesgood99Chapters: (01:30) Introduction (02:40) Tip: Why Swift Succeeded Where Other Young Artists Failed (05:10) Technique: Understanding and Connecting with Target Audiences (06:00) Tool: The Marvel Comics Comparison: Tapping Overlooked Markets (08:00) Technique: Strategic Transition from Country to Pop Music (11:30) Tool: Turning Controversy into Strategic Advantage (15:00) Technique: The Job-to-be-Done Theory in Swift's Career (19:20) Tool: Productive Paranoia: Staying Ahead of Industry Changes (22:10) Tip: Leadership Lessons from Swift's Reinvention Process (25:50) Conclusion

Think your audio program deserves more attention? In this episode of Launch Your Private Podcast, we coach Francesca Rea CFP, a senior wealth advisor and prosperity coach, through refining her private audio program, Rise Up, Live Up Money. Francesca has already launched her program but is seeking guidance to sharpen its messaging and positioning for greater clarity and success.Timestamps:[0:00] Introduction to the episode and Francesca Rea's Journey of launching her audio program and why she chose audio as the medium.[3:29] Early Launch Success and Masterclass Challenges[6:02] Conversion Metrics and Cold Traffic Insights[8:30] Addressing Messaging and Positioning[11:30] The Power of Perceived Value[15:00] Exploring Primary Currency for Target Audiences[20:18] Narrowing Focus for Specific Results[27:00] Overcoming Audience Misconceptions[34:30] Resolving issues with Spotify and linking supplementary resources like PDFs[39:00] Final Tips and Encouragement[47:00] Closing ThoughtsLinks mentioned:https://francescarea.com/IG: https://www.instagram.com/francesca.rea.alzati.wealth/Linked In: www.linkedin.com/in/francescarea

TAKEAWAYSBusiness of liquor and brandingImportance of taste and consumer experience in building successful brandsRole of personal branding and evolution of business strategiesBuilding businesses and constant tweaking for successInterplay between celebrity endorsements and product qualityImportance of packaging and design in creating brand experienceApproach to target audiences and mass appealPersonal branding and storytellingChallenges of measuring return on investment in advertising and marketingTIMESTAMPSBuilding Businesses and Improv (00:00:00) Discussion on building businesses and the iterative nature of business strategies, likened to improv comedy.Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:17) Introduction to the podcast "Right About Now" by host Ryan Alford, highlighting its popularity and duration.Introduction of Brett Berish (00:01:03) Ryan Alford introduces Brett Berish, President and CEO of Sovereign Brands, and discusses the radical approach in branding.Personal Branding and Business Strategies (00:02:09) Discussion on personal branding, embracing mistakes, and the importance of being different in business strategies.Entry into Spirits Industry (00:03:07) Brett Berish shares his entry into the spirits industry, influenced by his father's career and his passion for the business.Evolution of Liquor Business (00:05:00) Discussion on the historical and regulatory aspects of the liquor business, including the three-tier system and changes in alcohol serving laws.Challenges in Liquor Distribution (00:07:12) Explanation of the challenges in liquor distribution, emphasizing the role of distributors and the limitations on direct sales.Importance of Taste in Branding (00:11:28) Emphasis on the significance of taste in dictating the success of liquor brands and the common thread in Sovereign Brands' approach.Celebrity Endorsements and Product Quality (00:13:24) Discussion on the interplay between celebrity endorsements and product quality, highlighting the importance of taste over endorsements.Brand Experience and Details (00:16:14) Importance of brand experience, packaging, and design details in creating a unique consumer experience.Target Audience and Brand Appeal (00:18:24) Emphasis on selling to a broad audience and the significance of mass appeal in building a brand.Trying New Approaches (00:19:10) Encouragement to try new strategies and products, drawing parallels to the unpredictability of hit songs in the music industry.Personal Branding and Storytelling (00:20:40) Discussion on the realization of the importance of personal branding and storytelling in representing the company's brand.The motivational side of success (00:21:16) Brett Berish shares his personal struggles and the importance of sharing stories of failure and success.Discovering and supporting emerging talents (00:22:21) Brett discusses the excitement of engaging with up-and-coming artists and the potential to help them grow.Transparency and honesty in conversations with emerging talents (00:23:02) The importance of authenticity and transparency in conversations with young talents on the verge of success.The challenge of quantifying marketing success (00:24:56) Brett discusses the difficulty of measuring the return on investment in advertising and the value of building an audience.Scarcity and exclusivity in brand building (00:27:35) The discussion around creating rarity and exclusivity in brand building and the challenges it presents.Building long-term partnerships (00:29:36) Brett emphasizes the importance of developing long-term relationships and authenticity in partnerships.Cultural significance of spirits and brands (00:31:34) The discussion on the cultural and emotional significance of different spirit brands and the subcultures they represent.Proudest moments and personal milestones (00:33:08) Brett reflects on personal milestones and proud moments in his journey as a business owner.Expanding into new territories and cultural initiatives (00:37:02) The discussion about expanding into new markets, particularly Africa, and the cultural initiatives being pursued.Tying music projects with brand identity (00:38:54) The integration of music projects with specific brand identities and the intention to promote African artists.Embracing new opportunities and personal philosophy (00:40:23) Brett shares his personal philosophy and approach to embracing new opportunities.Wrapping up the conversation (00:41:22) Closing remarks and details on where to find more information about the brands and the conversation. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan's newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE. Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding. Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford.

This week, we delve into the highlights of the XP Summit 2024, or XPS, as it's affectionately known within the executive pastor community. Held at the vibrant Flatirons Church in Denver, this year's event was a powerhouse of insights, connections, and practical takeaways for church leaders. Here are some key points from my solo podcast […]

Dave joins Chris Walker for a Refine Labs Expert Series event. Chris is the Founder & Executive Chairman of Refine Labs and Founder & CEO of Passetto. They discussThe principles of building a communityLinkedIn personal vs. company page engagementThe role of executives in thought leadership contentHow companies are leveraging influencer partnershipsHow to approach LinkedIn organic and grow your audienceTimestamps(00:00) - - Intro (07:15) - - Importance of Community Engagement (11:32) - - Tailoring Marketing Strategies to Target Audiences (14:04) - - Depth Over Width in Influencer Strategy (16:26) - - Leveraging Influencer Networks for Product Promotion (19:36) - - Importance of Laser Focus in Content (25:03) - - Organic vs. Paid Content Amplification (27:27) - - Leveraging Content for Successful Advertising (33:05) - - The 1% Mindset in Achieving Success (36:06) - - Creation Strategies: Leveraging Existing Comfort Zones (40:06) - - Utilizing Content Variation for Effective Marketing (42:59) - - Investing in Employee Long-term Value (45:34) - - Validating and Refining Effective Communication Strategies (48:57) - Identifying Trending Topics on LinkedIn for Content Creation Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. If you share a pipeline goal with your sales team, then you care about the deliverability rate of your team's outbound emails. No email visibility means no meetings. This is the “silent nightmare” for marketers. You often don't even know this is happening. And the most common cause of it? It's actually an easy one to fix: you're not using the right tool. That's why 100s of marketers at companies like Mutiny are switching to Apollo.io. Apollo has every tool you need to power your entire outbound and inbound motions (yes that's right, I said inbound emails too, ask their team about it).Marketers using Apollo have seen outbound email deliverability jump from 62% to 98% after making the switch. 98%! That means more replies, more meetings, and of course, more pipeline.Want to see what type of results you can get? Head over to apollo.io/e5 right now and book a meeting with their team to get set up. And as a thank you for your time, you will receive a free annual exit five membership, that's valued at $275.  ***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Gordon & Corey offer a pulse check on how Generative AI has revved up the advertising and marketing industries and talk with entrepreneur Steve Han, founder and VP of Operations for Frequence.Stay in the loop with all things Borrell when you join our Research Alert Lists. As always, thank you for listening. If you like the episode, leave us a review!  Want to join the conversation? Share your comments at borrellassociates.com/podcast.

Welcome to the Marketing 101 Podcast for Small Business Owners, where you will find practical tips and guidance on developing marketing plans and content marketing strategies and tactics. Your host Philippa Channer, owner of Channer Consulting, is a content marketing strategist looking to help entrepreneurs like yourself to succeed.   In this podcast episode, the host, Philippa Channer of Channer Consulting, LLC, introduces Jessica Embree, a marketing expert from Tulip Media Group, who discusses the synergy of print and digital marketing. Embree debunks the myth that print is obsolete, highlighting its unique ability to cut through digital clutter and build lasting brand credibility. She shares insights on creating engaging print content like custom magazines and newsletters and the importance of tangible customer experiences. The episode covers strategic print marketing approaches, targeting, and the enduring relevance of print across various industries. Embree encourages businesses to embrace print to complement digital efforts for enhanced brand presence.   Learn more about and connect with Jessica Embree:   Jessica is the Creative Director with Tulip Media Group - TulipMediaGroup.com. You can Book A Call with Jessica calendly.com/jessicaembree or connect with her on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaembree/   Whenever you are ready, here are some ways that we can help you: Free 1-Hour Marketing Consultation: https://tidycal.com/philippa/free-marketing-consultation   Subscribe for regular content on developing a solid marketing plan, marketing strategy, and marketing tips.   Connect with us:   Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/channer-consulting-llc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/channerconsulting/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/channerconsulting/   Get in touch: info@channer-consulting.com

Welcome to Amazon Legends Podcast. Join us this week as we dive into Amazon selling and advertising Jonathan Wilner an expert with 7+ years of experience. Discover key strategies for converting target audiences into customer personas, holistic Amazon marketing, and managing $5 million in monthly ad spend across 1.5 million Amazon listings. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting, gain actionable insights on adapting strategies, leveraging data, and optimizing your Amazon presence. Tune in now for proven insights to enhance your Amazon strategy! Subscribe for more updates! Takeaways :Understanding Your Audience: Identify and understand your target audience on Amazon. Recognize the diverse needs and preferences within your audience.Customer Personas: Develop detailed customer personas that go beyond basic demographics. Consider factors like shopping behavior, preferences, and pain points.Data-Driven Approach: Utilize data and analytics to gather insights into customer behavior. Use Amazon's platform data to understand what resonates with your audience.Adapting Strategies: Be flexible in adapting your strategies based on customer feedback. Adjust your approach as you learn more about the preferences of your audience.Tailoring Content: Tailor product listings and content to align with customer personas. Optimize product descriptions, images, and keywords based on audience preferences.Feedback Loop: Establish a feedback loop to continually refine your customer personas. Act on customer feedback and adjust your approach accordingly.Brand Consistency: Maintain consistency in branding across your Amazon presence. Ensure that your brand identity aligns with the expectations of your customer personas.Quote of the Show:Success in the customer search group exercise lies in strategically defining personas based on Amazon search terms. Can we dominate the persona, be the primary brand, and ensure a holistic presence with sponsored ads at the top, organic spots, and brand videos? It's about winning the shopper immediately when they type those crucial search terms on Amazon. Links :Personal – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-wilner-63813a201/ Transact – Website: https://omctransact.com/ Transact – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/omc-transact/ Want To Level Up Your Business? Register With Our SponsorsViably is the complete financial solution to help e-commerce business owners extend their cash flow through funding. Viably's revenue-based funding programs are designed to provide online sellers with the funding they need to achieve their business goals. Whether you need to increase your inventory or ramp up your marketing efforts, Viably can help you access the capital you need to succeed.Claim your extra $1,500 when you qualify for $25,000 or more in funding. Go to www.runviably.com/legends  and start your application today.Amazon often loses inventory or overcharges fees. With Arthy, you can recover up to 30% of your lost revenue. At a monthly flat rate of only $99 with no commission fees for unlimited reimbursements, you can increase your bottom line. Their automated, Amazon-compliant process ensures hassle-free refunds.Visit https://www.getarthy.com/feature-lp/reimbursements and sign up today to get one month free and discover your recovery potential!

The cost of living crisis is expected to change the ads we see each day. That's because younger people, and families, are feeling the sharpest pinch. Many baby boomers are awash with cash, and that's altering the most lucrative age group for marketers. Massey University marketing professor Bodo Lang spoke to Corin Dann.

Aims started off as an in house cultivator for their sister company Healthy Herbal Care located in Van Nuys around 2006. When things went recreational they were fortunate enough to be granted a 2nd license for a separate cultivation facility & Aims Horticulture™ as we know it today was born. As a whole, they've been cultivating indoor cannabis for over 12 years constantly adapting new techniques, implementing innovations and updating equipment to maximize the quality of their product. Aims Horticulture™ now exists as a smaller “Mom and Pop” style entity whose only goal is to provide incredible, connoisseur level cannabis products at an affordable price! Be sure to visit the website at www.aims.la & don't forget to follow the IG @aims.la for information or exclusive drops in your area!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Julio Orozco, Marketing Manager at Belvo, discusses how open finance boosts user engagement and conversions. Belvo provides financial data to Latin American fintech, targeting B2B clients. Their website drives over 40% of sales from inbound leads. Growth Marketers face three major challenges: boosting qualified leads, enhancing campaign ROI, and lowering customer acquisition costs—precisely why they're in the growth game in the first place. Discover the solution with Pathmonk Accelerate: +50% Sales Increase Automatically Increase Website & Blog Lead Generation AI-Powered Personalized Experiences based on real-time intent Cookieless Technology All Integrations Supported No Website Changes Required Ready to elevate your website conversion? Experience it firsthand with our interactive demo ➡️ https://demo.pathmonk.com/ #growthmarketing #personalization #CRO #marketingpodcast

We are live, on-location at the TCL Chinese Theatre for the 19th annual Oscar Qualifying ⁠HollyShorts Film Festival⁠, as the official podcast partner. These shorter, special episodes are with selected filmmakers. In this episode Inde, Flo & Hae sit with Anthony Young of Hot Pot Productions, the Cash Reward Sponsor of the HollyShorts Film Festival Award Winner. They discuss the business of target audiences and importance of authentic networking. Hot Pot Productions is development company that focuses on unique and disruptive strategies in developing, distributing and monetizing content that is supported by next gen AI technology.   You can also watch all HollyShorts interviews on our YouTube Channel Cinematography for Actors: https://youtube.com/@cinematographyforactors Can't make it to the festival in person? Watch the films at https://bitpixtv.com/programs/hsff-23-pre-roll-final-87100d and use code HSFF2023CFA for 20% off!  For our listeners, CFA has teamed up with ⁠We Make Movies⁠ to get you a discount on production management services, including access to comprehensive production insurance and workers' comp for your next shoot. Visit ⁠wemakemovies.org/insurance⁠ and use code CFA23 on your intake form for 10% off your quote. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts to keep up to date on new episode releases.  A huge thank you to our sponsors: Apogee, FilmTools, Rosco, Lightstone Rentals, Deity, Canon, and First Mile Technologies. Website: https://⁠www.cinematographyforactors.com⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/cinematographyforactors⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@cinematographyforactors⁠ ⁠Cinematography for Actors⁠ is a community aimed at bridging the gap between talent & crew through our ⁠weekly podcast⁠ & community events. Our weekly show supports the filmmaking community through transparent, honest & technically focused interviews with the goal of elevating the art of effective storytelling. Join the CFA Community, sign up to our newsletter: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/e27e1a2bc895/newsletter⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cinematographyforactors/support

Welcome to part two of our personal and professional branding series on LinkedIn with Donna Serdula, world-renowned LinkedIn expert. In the previous episode, we started exploring the secrets of LinkedIn, and how it translates into success online. Today, we delve deeper to understand the balance between passive and active engagement on LinkedIn, especially when you're first starting out.We talk about how to advertise your product or service (or yourself) on LinkedIn, without turning it into a sales platform. Donna sheds light on how to find and engage with your target audience, all while maintaining an authentic presence. She shares insights on how to foster meaningful conversations, turn followers into potential customers, and leverage LinkedIn as a potent tool for growth.Donna Serdula is the founder and president of Vision Board Media, a professional branding company that helps individuals and companies tell their unique stories on LinkedIn and beyond.  Bringing dynamic brand storytelling to the masses and empowering people to dream big – that's the ink in her pen. It's her Website LinkedIn-Makeover.com where she and her team of over 20 writers and coaches help people collide with opportunity and transform their lives via future-forward career branding.She has authored two editions of LinkedIn Profile Optimization FOR DUMMIES. She's shared her LinkedIn expertise at global conferences, presented keynotes and workshops, and featured on a number of high-profile news outlets.Donna's website: http://www.linkedin-makeover.com/Donna's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todonnaAt UpSkill, we are building a community of UpSkillers, learning and growing together. Please listen, subscribe and share!We offer Corporate Training, Coaching and Consulting Services Soft Skills Leadership Skills Inclusive Leadership Skills Book your Free Consultation today!www.upskillcommunity.com

Hey everyone! Today's episode is a different, off-the-cuff format :). It's my personal story on ‘niching' as a business owner – and spoiler, for me niching is ongoing and messy. But I am slowly (after 2+ years in the game full-time) starting to see the heart threads of my niche come forward.  Tune in if you've ever struggled to niche, find your ‘why' story, or really understand and articulate your connection with your target audience.  Links from the show: Not Your Mama's Newsletters - Weekly email newsletter templates + prompts Follow me on Instagram: @jennyrothcopywriting Email me: hello@jennyrothcopywriting.com Visit my website: www.jennyrothcopywriting.com  Ready to outsource your copy? Get in touch!  Don't forget: Win a copy audit giveaway by leaving a 5-star positive review on this show and emailing me at hello@jennyrothcopywriting.com with a screenshot of that review. Winners are drawn monthly, and your name will stay entered until you win! Thanks for listening! :)

In today's episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast, we talk about how to work with target audiences in talent marketing or HR marketing, if you prefer using that term. Targeting your marketing, especially for employer branding, continues to be somewhat troublesome for many HR and employer branding professionals. ✨ Who should be included in your target audiences? ✨ Why being specific is the key to success? These are the two key questions I will answer in today's episode. Don't forget to go to the show notes page to get the access to the additional goodies connected to this episode!

Looking for ways to take control of your financial future? Look no further than the Entrepreneur Conundrum podcast! In this episode, financial planner and author Mark Willis shares his expertise on creating wealth and predictability through tax-efficient financial solutions. He emphasizes the importance of thinking differently about money, the economy, and the future to meet financial objectives, and offers real-world advice for building a more secure financial future. With a focus on alternative financial strategies and the importance of targeting the right audience through various mediums such as podcasts, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, blogs and books, Willis helps individuals achieve financial certainty and control through real estate investing and entrepreneurship. Whether you are a business owner looking to scale and leverage or an individual looking to create passive income, this episode is a must-listen. Take charge of your money and achieve your dreams with the guidance of financial expert Mark Willis. Listen now to gain clarity on personal goals and next steps to create wealth and achieve your dreams! - The guest is Mark Willis, a certified financial planner and owner of Lake Growth Financial Services.- Willis helps individuals create wealth and predictability through tax-efficient financial solutions.- He emphasizes the importance of thinking differently about money, the economy, and the future to meet financial objectives.- Willis shares his personal experience with student loan debt and his entrance into the financial universe after hearing a devastating conversation between a CPA and her clients during the 2008 financial crisis.- He focuses on helping people achieve financial certainty and control, particularly through real estate investing and entrepreneurship.- Willis believes in the power of teaching others to solidify their own learning, and his ideal clients are individuals who want to take control of their financial futures.- He discusses alternative financial strategies and emphasizes the importance of targeting the right audience through various mediums such as podcasts, LinkedIn, YouTube channels, blogs, and books.- Willis aims to expand his firm and have more professionals carry out reasonable financial planning conversations, with the ultimate goal of having more people in complete control of their financial future.- He recommends exploring other financial tools besides traditional retirement accounts such as 401Ks, IRAs, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, index funds, and ETFs.- Willis advises individuals to take charge of their money and have a plan for every dollar to create wealth and achieve their dreams. KEY QUESTIONSVirginia Purnell 00:01:22 How did you kind of get to where you are today? Are you still what you did in college?Virginia Purnell 00:03:23 So how long have you been a financial planner?Virginia Purnell 00:05:17 Do you help businesses too, or is it more just on the personal side?Virginia Purnell 00:06:00 Who would be your ideal client, would you say then?Virginia Purnell 00:07:07 So how do you get in front of those people?Virginia Purnell 00:09:19 So what are some goals that you're working on in the next year or two?Virginia Purnell 00:12:01 So do you do group sessions or more?Virginia Purnell 00:13:15 Do you feel like there's, like, a roadblock at all? Or what would you say is your number one roadblock that's maybe stopping you from reaching your big goal?Virginia Purnell 00:14:43 What's the best advice that you have ever received?Virginia Purnell 00:16:43 What do you think the best advice that you've ever given is?Virginia Purnell 00:22:51 So do you help people in Canada, too, or just more in the US?Virginia Purnell 00:23:34 Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you would like to share with us? Mark WillisLake Growth Financial Services:Lake Growth – Financial ServicesNot Your Average Financial Podcast:Not Your Average Financial Podcast™YouTube:Not Your Average Financial PodcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklakegrowth/Twitter:https://twitter.com/LakeGrowth Virginia PurnellFunnel & Visibility SpecialistDistinct Digital Marketing(833) 762-5336virginia@distinctdigitalmarketing.comwww.distinctdigitalmarketing.comBook a Free Call http://bit.ly/DDMBookACallEC

Q: Media Buying လုပ်ဖို့ ဘယ်လိုအချက်အလက်တွေလေ့လာရမလဲ? (Ko Alex အမြင် : Target Audiences) A: ကျွန်တော်မြင်တာ ကတော့ summarize လုပ်ပြရရင် (၃)ခုပေါ့နော် ကိုယ့်ရဲ့ target Audiences ကိုသိရမယ်၊ ဒါမှ digital မှာဆိုလို့ ရှိရင် onlineမှာဆိုလို့ရှိရင် ဘယ်ကို target ထားကြမလဲ အသက်အရွယ်တွေဘာတွေ ‌ရွေးပြီးတော့မှ ဘယ်လို့ interest တွေကိုမူတည်ပြီးတော့မှ ဘာတွေလုပ်ကြမယ် ညာတွေလုပ်ကြမယ်၊ ကိုယ့်ရဲ့ target Audiences ကမဖြစ်မနေသိကိုသိရမယ်။ #marketing #digitalmarketing #market #career #askalex #askalexmm

I think it's a great question because he's trying to target B2B. So he has a general contractor who wants to target commercial business owners only. Do you have any recommendations on the copy and target audiences that he should use? Okay. So they own the office building, I would assume? They own or lease and need a general contractor...

Examine the ‘why' and ‘how' of your company using some specific, insightful questions with Dave Mastovich, who also explains how they will help you achieve company growth and transformation. Get the full show notes and more resources at massolutions.biz/category/podcast/

How organising your content can keep customers coming back Have you heard about content clusters? They're all about strategic internal linking. Creating little groups of content around a key topic. You create a pillar page and link to and from it, offering multiple internal links to keep readers entertained, educated and on your site. Benefits include more organised content, less overlap and more authority on a given topic and increased content production speed. Sounds good right? But where do you start? And if your existing content is currently the blog equivalent of a hoarders boudoir, how do you organise your content into clusters? Today we'll answer these questions and many more. Tune in to learn:  What content clusters are What the benefits of using content clusters are How to choose your cluster topics Must-haves for your content clusters Common mistakes to avoid How to measure the effectiveness of content clusters, and where you can gather these metrics How Google's recent content update impacts content clusters What to do if you already have a blog packed with content Marion's top content cluster tip Useful resources:  Answer the Public Clever Copy Chats Head to episode notes Freebies: Free webinar: Increase your website traffic (and sales) The Ultimate SEO Checklist Free SEO Nibbles Course Sign up for the Recipe for SEO Success Course

 Bloody Impressive, Epic Crossover, Fucking Fantsatic, Cartoon Chaos these are the words we are using to describe this weeks pick. Welcome to episode seven of season 7 of Flicks XRayed, this week we have to save toon town and are reviewing Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Host, One Seriously Disturbed Toon Tony is joined by co-host Burbank Jokester Taylor and guests Dying of Laughter Joe, and Sourpuss Phil. This week we play a game of Release Year for Private Eye Movies, The Price is Right and The Flicks Awesome Lodge Word Game. So tune in as we discuss at length about Bob Hoskins, Animation, Target Audiences, and sooo much more. 

Exactly who are you trying to serve leveraging digital marketing?  I know you want to make more money.  But where is this money coming from? --> READ THE BLOG POST HERE https://myempirepro.com/digital-marketing-certified-chapter-2-the-persons-target-audiences/ --> WATCH VIDEO VERSION HERE https://youtu.be/RNQfkWtdyAA   Money comes from only one place.  It doesn't fall from the sky.  We do not pluck it from a tree.  It comes from other people.  The money you are going to make comes from other people right? In the previous chapter we talked about setting goals; smart goals to be precise.  We also talked about why the desire to help someone is not enough to run a successful digital marketing campaign.   It definitely is not enough to “want” to be an entrepreneur. I also want to be Elon Musk within the next 24 hours.  It's highly unlikely that's going to happen right? So the  act of “wanting something” is not enough, you will increase your chances of success when you set specific, meaningful, measurable and achievable goals. We also talked about the differences between setting goals at micro and macro levels of the experience for your prospects, customers, clients, partners and whatever your audience is.  And I gave you actionable steps and real life examples of goal statements. That exercise was necessary because it represents the foundation of your journey in your digital marketing endeavors.   You will encounter multiple layers of variables that can turn to very complex problems that can potentially include losing serious money and worse; time and energy. So it's important to always reference that chapter if you ever feel lost in your business with regards to marketing and promotion in a digital age. As a typical human being, you will get in over your head and lose focus at some point.  It's inevitable.  But you can always trace your step backwards as far as to your original smart goal when necessary.  I promise.  It will happen. In this chapter, we are going to talk about the person and not the people.  I know I just said money comes from people.  But if you don't understand these people at a person by person level, you will miss it completely.  Hence this lesson presented as a full blown chapter. In December 2004 during my first encounter with real estate, I was so excited that I dropped a private class I was taking in mobile application development.  Those were the days when you couldn't watch long videos in the palm of your hands on the go.   We were learning coding, programming and simulating everything you know today as your smart phone in virtual environments.  It was also my senior year studying Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). A friend of mine, (his real name starts with an ‘F' but I will call him Jason)... He had informed me about a real estate home buying seminar in East Orange, New Jersey  which he never showed up to.  But I was sucked into real estate for life.  It hit home for me.   Wow.  I could just leverage mortgages to become a landlord who collects money month in and month out. So I started going on appointments to look at every house listed on the market starting with one house in Belleville… even though my credit score would have put me in a terrible position of high interest rate at the time.  The mortgage officer at the seminar had told me that my “500 and change” credit score will get me a property and I would become a landlord in a few weeks.  A few weeks later, I stumbled into a late night infomercial and before I knew it, I ended up at another seminar which cost $3,000 that I didn't have.   My friend Jason had agreed to partner up with me leveraging his credit card in exchange for paying it back in a few weeks with interest.  Again, Jason did not show up but I was so excited that I could never forget that generosity as a foundation to what I am sharing with you today. If he had shown up, I would have ended up on the wrong path which involved just any house without proper assessment.  But what do I mean by assessment? You see… Jason had agreed to partner up to buy a bunch of houses with me but not having easy access to buying by myself led me down the route of learning marketing properly.  At first, it was about real estate right? What I learned eventually is that it wasn't about houses and real estate per se.  It was more-so about finding deals and creating a profitable path starting from the beginning. And that wasn't the end of it.  Profitable deals are sourced from real people's stories and real life problems. The common denominator in all of that and across multiple types of businesses is people, the endless questions they have in life and the inevitable problems they face in the pursuit of happiness.  And in order to understand your market at a basic and foundational level, it's wiser to understand “the person”. So in the rest of this book, we may call it your market, your audience, the people, the avatar or the person.  Who is the ideal person that your product, service or offer is designed for?   This person has a problem, a question or void and the value that your business brings is designed to fill that void. The biggest mistake that the losers of digital marketing are making today is the assumption that everyone is their ideal customer.  As soon as you post something on social media, you are asked to boost it with $10 in ad spend.  And after spending that $10, it's crickets. Of course anyone can become a connection to an ideal client for your business, but it's not wise to throw time, energy and money at everyone's attention without proper market research and analysis.  You will lose money. There are two parts to market research and analysis which are absolutely necessary if you are going to spend your hard earned resources on digital marketing.  The first part is about determining the market size.  The second part is to realistically figure out how much of that market share you can cover; competition analysis. It's very likely that you are not the first to offer the solution that your product and services offer right?  And if you are the first, that is not necessarily a smart move; you better know what you are doing. Many times, I hear aspiring entrepreneurs proudly boast about being the first to do something.  Listen.  It's most likely that you will not be Bill Gate or Elon Musk.  These are historical “firsts” of tools that we all enjoy today but this kind of entrepreneurs come but once in a lifetime. So let's be realistic.  Your product, service, offer and/or business have direct and indirect competition.  That means you are not going to be able to capture 100% of the market share.   The market is going to have segments that are highly competitive and other segments with low competition.  The low competition segments tend to also have a lower percentage of the market share. But the real question is this.  Is there a market?  Is there a “person” who has a direct or indirect need for the solution that your business offers? If there is, how many persons can we realistically identify?   Last but not least, is there any other business or anyone else already providing a similar or indirect solution to these people's problems? These are the questions that must be answered before you try to set up a digital marketing campaign in order to avoid losing money or worse; time and energy. Let's make it clear. Market Size Competition Analysis  When you determine the size of the market first, you are able to decide from the beginning if a market or business is worth going after or not.  If you don't, you may just be moving off your own passion-driven biases.  As a human being, you naturally gravitate toward certain types of businesses for different reasons. Maybe a friend of yours seems to be enjoying a business model and the reality is that you truly do not know the intricacies of what it takes to be in that business successfully or to look like success on the outside.  You don't know what you do not know.  Many businesses are laundromats and many people will take Peter's money to pay Paul just to look like success on the outside.   And many do that as a strategy of hope.  Hope is a terrible marketing and business strategy. So instead of operating your marketing from a place of hope down the line, you are able to assess the market size and see upfront if it's worth going into a particular business or not.   The same is applicable at the microlevel of a business.  You may be considering opening a different department.  It's going to cost you time, energy, money and other types of resources.  Before engaging those resources, determine the market size and do a competition analysis. You may identify some risk and you may just identify an opportunity bigger than what you envisaged.  The benefits of doing this assessment is much more than avoiding a negative risk.  It's just a profitable habit to get into overall as an existing or aspiring entrepreneur. To perform market research and competition analysis, there are simple, fun, free and paid tools available.  But they are useless if you don't even know what you are looking for.  The most popular of them is the almighty search engine; Google. At press time, Google is the biggest and most popular search engine that we all run to when we have a question.  Dare I say, almost all research starts from Google including medical research by a medical doctor who may be getting ready to put an incision in you or your children's body. I know that's scary right?  But that's the reality.  I don't know when you are reading this book and I don't know tomorrow.  Hopefully, I will continue to get the opportunity to update and offer new versions as we evolve into an ever evolving digital world. So maybe the hottest search engine when you are reading this won't be Google but it will always be some kind of search Engine.  As humans, we are always searching, asking and creating new problems to solve.  If you understand this, you will always be in business successfully. Whatever your biggest and most popular search engine is will be your number one market research and analysis tool.  Not the only one but always a great place to start from.  You can start by searching a seed keyword or keyword phrase on the search engine.  What you will discover is the beginning of a journey through a rabbit hole with lots of useful information that will fuel your present level of excitement about the business you are trying to initiate. This information will be grouped into a group of seven different categories listed as follows or similar. Category Number 1: Observe the top 10 results generated by the search engine result page also known as the SERPS.  Open each one of the results and see how your competitors are already offering solutions to your market.  Also, determine how many pages are offering results already. Category Number 2:  Observe the top 10 automatically suggested searches by the search box.  You may notice that as you are typing your seed keyword or keyword phrase, the search area is also auto-suggesting and attempting to populate the area ahead of you.   Take note of the different phrases from the artificial intelligence of the search engine.  Each one of these is likely an additional opportunity for you to serve and make more money. Category Number 3: Observe the “People also ask” section of the SERP. You will see the question that other people similar to people who search your seed keyword or keyword phrase are searching on the search engine.  These are additional opportunities that most people engaging in digital marketing are not taking advantage of. Category Number 4: If you are trying this on a smart mobile phone, I want you to observe the “People also search for” section for more ideas on angles to serve this market from.   Quick question.  How many people advertising online today would you guess are patient enough to do this much market research before wasting thousands of dollars on digital marketing? Category Number 5:  There is another section which may not show on every device called the “Refine This Search” section.  You should pay attention to it.  This is the machine attempting to help your audience narrow down their search faster and easier to the answer. The machines don't create these answers from thin air.  These are answers from your competitors being fed to a person who is potentially an ideal client of yours.  When they are ready to spend money, guess whose pocket that money is going into.  Your guess is as good as mine.  Category Number 6:  Sometimes, your seed keyword or keyword phrase is too narrow for the search engines to find meaningful results and it can tell because of the growing machine learning and artificial intelligence technology. So there is a section mostly on smart mobile phones called “Broaden This Search” on the SERP.  This section will give additional ideas of exactly what is in the mind of that person that potentially and possibly-desperately needs your service. Category Number 7: This section is probably the one you are familiar with if you also use Google to answer every question that comes to mind like me.  It's called the “Related Searches” section and it's usually at the bottom of the screen if you are on a desktop.   If this section is populated, it's an indicator that there is a market for the business you have in mind. This is what I want you to do.  I want you to come up with a seed keyword phrase for your business using this formula.  The phrase will start with one of seven different types of phrases. “I want to…” “How to…” “How do I” “How can I…” “What is…” “Where is the nearest…” “Where is the closest…” I want you to end each one of those phrases with a phrase that represents what your business offers. For example, my digital marketing consulting business market research would start with “I want to market my business on Google.”  Another example could be “where is the nearest digital marketing consultant?”  Come up with 100 different phrases like that for your business and attempt to search each one of them on your favorite search engine like Google, Yahoo or YouTube which is the 2nd biggest search engine at press time. The top of the search engine result page will actually tell you how many results are generated.  That's a starting indicator of how many pages are competing for the attention of your ideal person, audience, market, customer or client. After this exercise, you would have gotten to know that “person” a little more.  And that means you are better equipped to serve the person a little bit more than your average competitor.  It's a competitive advantage at worst.   Most people are going to shy away from this exercise and that increases your chances of dominating your market and leaving scraps for the rest. These persons that your business will serve are in two different categories.  They are probably searching for a solution already and secondly, they are already following your competitor. Market research and competition analysis gives you an opportunity to find out where they are spending their time with that smart device in their hands and legally stealing them from your competitors. The first category is called the intent based market audience and the second category is called the interrupt market audience.  Let's quickly break it down. The intent based market audience is actively in the middle of intentionally searching and looking for a solution that your business provides. On the flip-side, the interrupt-based market audience is not actively searching for a solution but we've been able to track their activities online and determine their interest based on their online behavior. In that case, they would be interrupted in the middle of other unrelated activities online in order to get into their discovery zone. The journey of your ideal “person(s)” travels through four main stages namely: Discovery Awareness Consideration and… Conversion In chapter 3, we will be diving through “value”, how to identify it and leverage it to create a smooth transition for your person(s), the market, from discovery all the way through conversion into a customer and long term client and even beyond. In fact, with this same concept, you will be able to turn a decent percentage of your best clients to loyal evangelists for your business therefore creating even more revenue; all thanks to value.

Learn about the six No BS marketing strategies from Dave Mastovich as he guides you through what he's learned from his own experience and clients, as well as looking through the websites of several other architectural firms.Get the full show notes and more resources at massolutions.biz/category/podcast/

Expanding your audience reach with the right voice Influencer marketing. Even the mention of it gives me the heebeejeebees.Visions of hot 20-somethings lying in a cossie on a rock in Ibiza spring to mind.  Your product lying next to them on said rock. And oh the horror stories. Small business owners giving away oodles of product, and splashing the cash only to be ghosted.So how do you choose a trustworthy influencer? And how do you see genuine return on your investment? Today we'll talk about the positives and the pitfalls of this relatively new form of advertising, and whether it really has legs for your business.r

This week on the Layover Live, Jason is joined by Sydney Walter, digital media analyst at Simpleview. Tune in as they discuss doubling down on search, how you can leverage the data from your search campaigns to expand reach in other channels, the concept of Zero Click searches, and how new legislation may be coming that could affect Google search results. Don't miss it!

One of the biggest challenges that businesses face today is how to engage their target audience. Many business owners put so much effort in marketing their product/service the wrong way… making all that effort go to waste! That's where we come in! In this podcast, Asher Aw (Founder of Significance Strategy/Host of “Starting Million") will discuss why most businesses fail at engaging their target audiences and how to do it the right way. We'll also be talking about: - What Attention Has To Do With Scaling Your Business - What It Takes To Get Barack Obama To Follow You On Twitter - How To Get People To Trust Your Brand - The Most Powerful Way To Get In Touch With Prospects Connect with Asher Aw: https://asheraw.com/connect

Audience definition is a core part of marketing. Unfortunately, in too many cases marketers end up with a poorly or outright wrong definition of their "target". A chance to address the problems with personas, over targeting, and the general lack of actionability behind most targeting exercises.

Marketing of Startups: Target Audiences with focused Marketing strategy

EPISODE 45: In this episode of the Creative Spark podcast, I take a look at customer personas and why I think you need more than one. If fact, if you're planning to launch a digital course, I think you probably need nine. Most online marketing gurus tell you to invent one ideal customer avatar for all of your content and products. Still, quite frankly, it's impossible to capture all the problems you solve in one marketing persona, and the ideal customer avatar you create ends up being vague and wishy-washy to accommodate everything in your course or program.

For the past few episodes I have been focusing on how to work with talent target audiences in talent marketing, and especially in modern employer branding. Making decisions about your talent target audiences continues to be one of the most common struggles in talent marketing when you start to working with it in a more strategic manner. Everything begins with your target audiences. In marketing, it is critical to be specific about who you target your messages to. Failure in being specific leads into failed marketing campaigns. Choosing your target audiences for recruitment marketing campaigns is much easier. After all, the position open gives you a pretty good idea who you might be targeting your messages to. But this is not the case at all with employer branding. Learning how to work with your target audiences in employer branding is one of the basic skills you must learn to master. In this final episode on the mini series about target audiences, I share with you a few tips on how to make the right decisions about your target audiences for employer branding. ⏱ 25:26 min Learn more about working with talent target audiences here:

Choosing target audiences for employer branding doesn't follow the same logic as targeting your audience for recruiting. In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast I share with you what are the two most common mistakes employer branding practitioners tend to do when making decisions about their employer branding target audiences. Knowing what these greatest pitfalls help you to steer clear from them. If you repeat the mistakes many have already done, you risk failing in your employer branding effort. These two mistakes are likely to turn your employer branding efforts into inefficient, costly and very labour-intensive. Which in turn leads to you stopping employer branding altogether. ⏱ 19:59 min I have plenty more material for you on the blog. If you are interested in this topic and want to learn more, go here:

One of the first questions we get from our clients when we start to plan their Magnetic Employer Branding strategy is who exactly should we choose as our target audiences. It has got to be also one of the most difficult areas to wrap our heads around. Why? Because when we think about our target audiences in this context, we think about the people we need to hire and reference to their roles or positions. In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast I share with you how you need to think about your target audiences when it comes to employer branding. Learn:

I think it's a great question because he's trying to target B2B. So he has a general contractor who wants to target commercial business owners only. Do you have any recommendations on the copy and target audiences that he should use? Okay. So they own the office building, I would assume? They own or lease and need a general contractor...

I think it's a great question because he's trying to target B2B. So he has a general contractor who wants to target commercial business owners only. Do you have any recommendations on the copy and target audiences that he should use? Okay. So they own the office building, I would assume? They own or lease and need a general contractor...

Marketing experts from Gorjana, Chubbies, Shinesty, and Public Rec discuss the various strategies each brand uses to find (and keep) customers.

In this episode, Anika talks about target audiences. Also, she would appreciate it if you would answer the following three question by either commenting on my episode, or by sending me a voice message via Anchor: What is your favorite book? Who is your favorite author ? How did you come across Anika's podcast ? Stay tuned for new episodes every Friday/Saturday/ Sunday --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/anika674/message

How do you define your target audience? No matter the industry, each business has a specific target audience. The more knowledge you have of your top customers, the better the marketing initiatives. Who they are, why you're going after them, and your purpose are all factors that come into play when defining your target audience. We want to know your thoughts! Email us at agency@theglintstandard.comSupport the show (https://glintadv.com/connect-with-us/)

01:07 - Marlena’s Superpower: Bringing the Arts to Tech * Coming Into Tech as a Creative 04:42 - Parallels Between Art and Computer Science/Software Engineering * System Architecture * Spatial Thinking & Representation * Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought by Barbara Tversky (https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Motion-Action-Shapes-Thought/dp/046509306X) * Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (https://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011) 09:33 - Sketchnoting and Zines * The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking by Mike Rohde (https://www.amazon.com/Sketchnote-Handbook-illustrated-visual-taking/dp/0321857895/ref=asc_df_0321857895/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312021252609&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6623941144735025539&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9006718&hvtargid=pla-454389960652&psc=1) 14:19 - DIY Publishing and Physicality – The Power of Print * The Pamphlet Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars) 20:33 - Zines at Work & Zines in Professional Settings * Slowing Down Our Thought Processes * Using Diagrams to Ask Questions & For Exploration * Graphic Facilitators 31:11 - Target Audiences, Codeswitching, & People Are Not Robots 37:58 - How We View, Study, and Treat Liberal Arts – (Not Well!) * Formulating Thoughts In A Way That’s Available For Consumption 43:01 - Using Diagrams and Images * UML (Unified Modeling Language) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language) * Collaborative Whiteboarding Software and Shared Visual Language (Drawing Together) 50:41 - Handwriting Advice: Decolonize Your Mind! * SLOW DOWN * Write Larger * Practice * How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (https://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Nothing-Resisting-Attention/dp/1612197493) 59:45 - The “Let’s Sketch Tech!” (https://appearworks.com/) Conference * Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/letssketchtech?fan_landing=true) * Podcast (https://anchor.fm/appearworks) * Newsletter (https://appearworks.activehosted.com/f/7) Reflections: Damien: Decolonize your mind. Jamey: Zine fairs at work and valuing yourself by taking up space. Rein: Creativity is good for individuals to explore, but when we share it with people it’s a way we can become closer. Marlena: Connecting arts and technology. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JAMEY: Hello, everyone and welcome to Episode 236 of Greater Than Code. I’m one of your hosts, Jamey Hampton, and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jamey. And I’m another one of your hosts and I’m here with my friend, Damien Burke DAMIEN: Thanks, Rein. And I'm here in addition to with the host, our guest today, Marlena Compton. Marlena Compton is a tech community organizer, designer, and collaboration artist who has worked in the tech industry for 18 years. She grows tech communities and organizes conferences such as “Pear Conf” and “Let’s Sketch Tech!” Marlena has worked for companies like IBM and Atlassian. This has left her with a life-long appreciation for quality code, empathy, and working together as a team. When she isn’t working, Marlena enjoys lettering, calligraphy, and walking her dog. Welcome to the show, Marlena. MARLENA: Hi, thank you so much. DAMIEN: So I know you're prepared for this. Same thing we do for all of our guests, we're going to start with the first question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? MARLENA: Yeah, so my superpower is bringing the arts to tech and that is teaching people the value of creative arts—such as writing, sketching, music, and more—and how this relates to the tech industry, helping creative types feel more at home in tech, and helping folks who are mostly in the science track in school learn why they need the creative arts for critical thinking and thinking through problems. So it's like, you have to give people a space to do this learning from a peer perspective versus top-down perspective. This includes building community for folks to explore these things. JAMEY: So you came to tech from art previously, is that right? MARLENA: I have a wild academic background of interdisciplinary studies, which will not get you a job for anything but like, renting a car. [laughter] Or whatever and also, later I did computer science, but while I was getting my liberal arts degree, I did a lot of art history, a lot of painting, and a lot of theater. JAMEY: I wonder if you could speak to coming into the tech industry as someone who is already an artist and considers themselves an artist, like, how that translated for you. Like, what skills from being an artist, do you think were helpful to you as you were starting in tech? MARLENA: Sure. So I think that if you know that you're an artistic type, like I knew how important arts were for me. But I think for children often they get a lot of pressure to find something that will get them a job and it's not like this isn't for good reason, it's like we’ve got to be able to pay our bills. On the other hand, when you're a creative type, it's such a core part of your personality. You can't really separate it from anything and if you try to just tamp it down, it's going to come out somehow. So I was this college graduate and I was having a really hard time getting a job and figuring out what I wanted to do that would make enough money to support me. Computer science was literally the last thing I tried and I seem to do okay at it so I kept doing it. [laughs] And that's how I got into it. I wish that we had bootcamps when I started learning computer science, but there weren't any and so, all I could do was go back to community college. So I went to community college. I had to take every single math class over again. Calculus, I had to take three times, but I stuck with it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I kept taking the classes and eventually, it worked. So [laughs] that's how I got into the tech industry and it's like, it's totally okay to do this just to make money. That's why I did it. DAMIEN: So then coming in with this art background, which seems really broad and you didn't talk about anything specific, what insights and connections were you able to make between art and computer science, and art and software engineering? MARLENA: Sure. So for me, building software is a creative process. In fact, this is something I've believed for a very long time, because as soon as I got out with my newly-minted CS degree and I knew that I needed to create, draw, write, and do all of those things. Eventually, I started looking around for okay, what in computer science is kind of more visual place and it used to be people would think of diagramming software, HoloVizio, Rational Rose, which is that is quite a throwback. Who here –? DAMIEN: UML. MARLENA: [laughs] That UML, yes! I would look at these things, like system architect, where it's like the idea was that you could literally draw out pieces and then it would make your code, which was [laughs] I think an epic fail if you look at it from, did it actually ever write successful code? I have never – REIN: There's another option, which was the expense of architects draw the boxes and then the chief engineer put the code in the boxes. MARLENA: Well, but see, you need a brain in there and this is all about the brain. [laughter] MARLENA: Yeah. I think one transformation that my thinking had to go through so, I had to go from this computer science perspective of find a way to chop up all your thoughts into little, discreet, logical pieces so that you can make classes, objects, and things like that and instead look at the brain as an organ in your body. We take more of a holistic perspective where it is your brain is connected to your thoughts is connected to like your internal axes, GPS system, and mapping system and how all of that comes together to problem solve. REIN: Yeah. I love it. Without bodies, we couldn't think about things MARLENA: Indeed. This past year, I've spent a lot of time specifically investigating this connection. One of the things I did was read Barbara Tversky's book, Mind in Motion, and the premise of her book is that spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought. That is how you orient yourself in the world and how you perceive a space around you and yourself in that space is what allows you to organize ideas, take perspectives that are based in imagination, and things like that. REIN: Yeah, and this ties into Wyckoff's work on basic metaphors because basic metaphors are how we structure our thought, but they're all about the world. So thinking about the metaphor of containment, you have a thing, it has an inside and an outside, there may be a portal that gets you from the inside to the outside. So this is how houses work, right? This is how we think about houses. This is also how we think about relationships. It's how we think about code. And then there's you combine that basic metaphor with the metaphor of traveling; starting at a place, traveling along a path, ending up at another place. You put those two metaphors together, you can have complex thoughts about achieving goals. But these are all metaphors based on, like you're saying, our perception of living in a world that has 3D space. Yes, and maps are such a big part of that. So when I was reading through this particular book, she goes into things like maps, how we map ideas, and things like that and there is quite a bit of science behind it. And even for metaphor, she writes that metaphor is what happens when our thoughts overflow our brains and we need to put them out into the world. DAMIEN: So putting these thoughts, these ideas back out into the world and into some sort of spatial representation, is that how you view the tech notetaking, or diagramming sort of thing? MARLENA: Absolutely. So I guess, for listeners, I want to back up a little bit because I think something that Damien knows about me and also Jamey and Rein from looking at the biography is that I'm very into sketch notes. Just to bring us out of the depth [laughs] a little bit, I can tell you about why I turned to sketchnoting and why I started doing it. It was because I was trying to learn JavaScript and yes, Damien, I know how you feel about JavaScript, some of us like it. [laughs] DAMIEN: I don't want to show my cards too much here, but I will say the fact that you had difficulty with it is telling. MARLENA: Well, but I also had difficulty learning C, Java, Erlang. DAMIEN: So how did [inaudible]? MARLENA: Well, so I went to CascadiaJS and this was my first – well, it wasn't my first, but it was the language conference and I was just learning JavaScript and I didn't understand half of it. It just went over my head. So to try and create some memory of that, or try to figure it out, I started drawing. I had seen sketch notes on the web. They were experiencing a bump in popularity at the time. I think my Mike Rohde’s book had just come out and it helped. That was what introduced me to this whole world and eventually, we're talking about when thoughts overflow and you turn to metaphor, this is exactly what was happening for me was Barbara Tyversky refers to these pictures we draw as glyphs. They can be more complicated than language and that is why when we're really trying to figure something out, we're not going to be writing an essay, maybe sometimes, but for the most part, we'll start diagramming. JAMEY: I also wanted to talk about zines while you were on. I was thinking about zines when you were talking about this because I feel like there's a few different mediums of art that I do and some of them are more intentional than others. To me, zines are about like, “I'm thinking this and it needs to exist in physical space and then it will be done and I can stop thinking about it,” because it exists. MARLENA: I love that so much and it's exactly what zines are there for. So zines are DIY publishing and zines are the publishing that happens for topics that, I think it happens a lot for people who are underrepresented in some way. Because you're not going to have access to a publisher and it's going to be harder for you to get any official book out. But then sometimes it's also just, maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want your zine to be a more informal publication. I love zines how kind of – they are all so super niche like, you can put anything. Define the word zine, ha! [laughs] JAMEY: It's so hard. People will argue about this in the zine community for like days and days. Hard to define the word. MARLENA: And that's actually part of the power of zines because it means it can be whatever you want, which means whatever you want to create is okay. I think that's really what we're trying to get down into here is having different ways of expressing and problem solving be okay and accepted. REIN: Just something to point out that containment is a metaphor we use for categories. So we're talking about what is inside the zine category? DAMIEN: I want to go back to the well, Marlena, you said zines were do-it-yourself publishing, DIY publishing, but blogs are also do-it-yourself publishing. So zines have a physicality to them and feels like that's an important aspect. Can you talk about that, or why that is? MARLENA: Well, there are also digital zines, so yeah. [laughs] But. DAMIEN: Maybe five containerization and categories. MARLENA: [laughs] Well, if we wanted to talk a little bit about physical zines, that even is interesting and Jamey, maybe you have a few thoughts about this that you can share, too because there are just so many different ways to format a zine. JAMEY: Well, I know that digital zines are a thing and I've read some digital zines that I've very much enjoyed. To me, the physicality of zines is a big part of them and a lot of what's appealing about them for me. I think that part of the reason for that is that, as you were getting at, people can write whatever they want, people who might not have a chance to write in other formats and most importantly about that, you can't censor a zine. It's impossible because someone makes it themselves and then they give it to whoever they want to have. It's a very personal experience and there's no middleman who can like tell you what you can, or can't say. So I think that having that physical piece of paper that you then hand directly to someone is what makes that possible and not putting it on the internet is also what makes that possible. Like, you have this thing, nobody can edit what's in it. It's all up to you. Nobody can search for it on a search engine. If you don't want someone to see it, then you don't give them one and it's just a holdover from what a lot of media was more like before the internet and I appreciate that about them. [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah. To me, it sounds so much like the Federalist Papers, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense. JAMEY: Oh, those were zines for sure. DAMIEN: I wrote this thing, [inaudible] about, I'm hazing him out of here, read this. [chuckles] Those are zines, okay. JAMEY: And political zines are a huge subsection of pamphlets and all sorts of political ideology. REIN: And that's where printing started was with the publishing of zines, that's my argument. MARLENA: This is the power of print. It's the power of print and that power, it's something that you don't necessarily get with the internet. Zines are an archive as well and I don't think we can just say – So when I did the first Let’s Sketch Tech! conference, I had an editor from Chronicle Books come and she talked about publishing. When I was talking to her about doing this talk, what I thought was most interesting about our conversation was she said, “Books aren't going away. Books are never going away because we are so connected to our hands and our eyes.” Books are always going to be there. Printed, words printed, pamphlets, zines, I think they're going to outlast computers. [chuckles] Think about how long a CD, or magnetic tape is going to last for versus the oldest book in the world. DAMIEN: Yeah. REIN: And by the way, if you don't think that printing was about zines, go Google the pamphlet wars. We think it's about publishing the Bible, but the vast majority of stuff that was printed was pamphlets. Zines! DAMIEN: And we can look at things that have survived through a history and it's really truly about paper from Shakespeare's works to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this is how things have survived. MARLENA: And on another aspect of this is the fact that we are human, we have human eyes and those eyes have limits as to how much they can look at a screen. Looking at paper and also, the physical manipulation of that paper, I think is a very important aspect of zines. So my favorite scene ever, which is sadly lost to me, was this very small print zine and it was the kind that is printed literally on one piece of paper and this folded up. But it had the most magnificent centerfolds where you open it up and this is awesome picture of Prince and the person even taped a purple feather in the centerfold part of it and it's like, that's an experience you're only going to get from this kind of printed physical medium. DAMIEN: So yeah, I'm seeing a pattern here, communicating ideas through physical mediums. JAMEY: And I think that because zines are so DIY and low tech that people do really interesting things with paper to express what they're going for. Like, I've been doing zines for a long time with friends. But my first one that I ever did by myself, I had this black and white photo of a house that had Christmas lights on it and I was trying to be like, “How am I going to express this feeling that I have about this picture that I want to express in this media?” I'm like, “I'm going to go to Kinko's and make copies of this for 5 cents and how is it going to look the way I want?” So I ended up manually using a green highlighter to highlight over all of the Christmas lights in every single copy of the zine so that everyone would see the green Christmas lights that I wanted them to feel what I was feeling about. I think that's a pretty simple example because it's not extremely a lot of work to put highlighter in your zine either. But I think that people have to think about that and how they want to convey something and then people have done a lot of really interesting things like taping feathers into their books. MARLENA: Yeah. This is a way of slowing down our thought process, which I don't think we talk about enough because right now, in our culture, it's all about being faster, being lull 10x and making a zine is a great way to reflect on things that you've learned. So I would really like to take a minute to just talk about zines at work and zines in a professional setting because I've noticed that one thing people think as soon as I start talking about zines is why do I need this in my job? Why do we need this in tech? I think that zines are a great way to help people on teams surface the unspoken knowledge that lives in the team, or it's also a way to play with something that you're trying to learn and share with other people. I’d like to hear Jamey, do you have thoughts about this? JAMEY: I have a thought, but I'm not sure how directly related it is to what you just said and I feel self-conscious about it. [chuckles] But I like to teach people to make zines who aren't familiar with zines, or haven't made them before and the thing that I try to teach people that I think zines can teach you is that you can just do this. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. It doesn't take a specific skill that you can't just learn. So they're accessible in that way, but I think it's also a bigger lesson about what you can do if you want to do something and that's how I feel about tech. If you want to learn to code, it's not magic, you can learn how to do it. If you want to do a zine, you can learn how to do it. To me, those thoughts go together. I feel like that wasn't exactly what you just asked, I’m sorry. DAMIEN: I liked it, though. [chuckles] MARLENA: It does tie into the fact that it's important to help people feel at home at work. Well, you're not at home at work, but to feel as though they are in the right place at work and this type of making zines and allowing people to surface what they know about your system, about what you're building, about ideas that your team is tinkering with. This kind of format gives people the space to surface what they're thinking even if they're not the most vocal person. DAMIEN: So one of this really ties into what I was thinking. When you said zines at work and there's a couple of great tech zines which I love and I think should be in a lot of offices. But the idea of actually creating one at work, something happened in my chest when I thought about that idea and it's because it's a very informal medium and tends to be informal and whimsical and you just kind of do it. I realize how much that is counter to so much of how tech teams and tech industry runs where it's very formal. You can't just ship code, you’ve got to get a pull request and reviewed by the senior engineer and it's got to fit our coding standards and run in ordering time, or less. [laughter] That can be very, I'll say challenging. JAMEY: I think that's also exactly why it’s easy and fun to learn about tech from zines because it feels so much more approachable than a formal tutorial and you're saying like, “Oh, will this be too hard, or what will I learn?” There's all of this baggage that comes along with it where it's like, “Oh, the zine is like cute and whimsical and I'm going to read it and it's going to be interesting,” and then like, “Whoa, I just learned about sorting from it.” DAMIEN: Yeah. Just because you’re writing software, or doing computer science doesn't mean we have to be serious. [laughter] Probably needs to be shouldn't be. REIN: It also makes me think about a shift that I would really like to see in the way diagrams and things like this are used, which is that when you're asked to produce an architecture diagram, you're generally asked to produce something authoritative. It has to be the best current understanding of what the organization has decided to do and that doesn't leave any space for exploration, or for using diagrams to ask questions. I think that's bad because naturally, on a team, or in an organization, everyone has their own models. Everyone has their own local perspective on what's happening. If there's no opportunity to surface, “Hey, here's how I think this works. Can I compare that with how you think this works?” You can't maintain common ground. I don't think producing a lot of words is a great way to do that. I think that's very inefficient. I also think that having an hour meeting with twenty people where you all talk about it is also inefficient. So I'm wondering if diagrams can be useful here. Relatively, it’s a little bit quicker to draw some boxes and connect them with arrows than it is to write a 1-page report. I'm wondering if we could promote more people putting out these low fidelity diagrams that are, “Here's what's in my head,” and sharing them, if that would help us maintain common ground. MARLENA: Absolutely, and I love the way that you brought up this situation where everyone is – because I think we've all been in these meetings where it's like, there are some technical hurdle, decisions have to be made, technology needs to be chosen, libraries needed – that type of thing. What I experienced was it was hard for me to get a word in edgewise. REIN: Yeah, like if you have twenty people in a meeting, at most three of them are paying attention and about half of them are going to be underrepresented in the meeting for a variety of reasons, if not more. MARLENA: Yeah, and well, I'm just going to say yes. For underrepresented people, this happens a lot. So one of the things that I like to promote is taking apart the traditional jam everyone into a room, let the conversation naturally happen. I'm just going to say it. I don't think that works too well and honestly, I think that a zine format, or even if it's just like take a piece of paper, let people diagram what they think is interesting, then trade, then your team is having a zine fair. [laughs] REIN: Or if you do that to prepare for the meeting and then the meeting is going over them. MARLENA: Sure. Yeah, and maybe the discussion is like a facilitated discussion. I did a lot of Agile team stuff, including I had to go down the route of learning how to facilitate just because I couldn't get a word in edgewise on my team. So I started looking at different ways to how do you have a discussion when it's like, there are two, or three people who always talk, nobody else says anything, but everyone has thoughts. It's really interesting what happens when you start trying to change how a group is having discussions. REIN: It also seems like it's super valuable for the person doing the facilitation because they have to synthesize what's happening in real-time and then they come away with the meeting, with the synthesis in their brains. Part of which they've been able to put into the diagrams, the drawings, and whatever, but only a part of it. So it seems like if you have some external consultant come in and draw diagrams for your team, that external consultant then leaves with a bunch of the knowledge you were trying to impart to everyone else. MARLENA: I don't know if that's necessarily true. In the world of graphic recording, those folks go to all kinds of meetings and I think it's true that they are going to come away with a different set of thoughts in their head, but they're also not going to have the context of your team. REIN: Yeah. MARLENA: And that's a pretty big part of it. But I know Ashton Rodenhiser, she's a graphic facilitator who does this and she'll go into meetings like the one we're describing, and while people are talking, she's drawing things out. It's really interesting what happens when people see their discussion being drawn by a third party. I've seen this happen at some conferences; it's really great way to change the way you have discussion. REIN: Yeah. So for example, we do incident analysis, we do interviews with the people who are there, and we review slot transcripts. What we find is that the people who are doing the interviews, conducting the analysis, facilitating the reviews, they become experts in the systems. MARLENA: Ah yes, because so much – it reminds me of how teaching somebody to do something, you teach it to yourself. So they are having to internalize all of this discussion and reflect it back to the team, which means of course, they're learning along with the rest of the team. REIN: Yeah. So I think my point was not don't hire consultants to do this, it was keeping them around after you do. MARLENA: [laughs] Wouldn't it be amazing if having a graphic recorder, or a graphic facilitator was just a thing that we all had in our meetings? REIN: Yeah, or even something that was democratized so that more people got the benefits of – I think doing that work has a lot of benefits to the person who's doing it. JAMEY: This is making me think a lot about the way that you engaged with something, or the way that you express it, depending on who your target audience is. Like, if I'm taking notes for myself in my own notebook, my target audience is just myself and I write things that won't make sense to anybody else. If I'm writing like a document for work, the target audience is my team, I'm writing in a way that reflects that it's going to be read and understood by my team instead of me. I think that a lot of what we're talking about here with zines, diagrams, and things like this is kind of an interesting hybrid. When I write a zine, I'm doing it for me, it's benefiting me, but not in the same way as notes in my notebook where I don't want anyone else to ever look at it. So it's like, how do I write something that's benefiting me, but also has an audience of other people that I'm hoping will get something out of it? I think that's a bit of a unique format in some ways. DAMIEN: That's interesting because everything I hear from novelists and screenwriters, it's always “Write the book, write the movie that you want.” You're the audience and if you love it, not everybody's going to love it, [chuckles] but there are other people who will, chances are other people will love it. If you write something for everybody to love, nobody is going to like it. MARLENA: Yeah, I think so, too and you never know who else is going to be thinking the same way you are and sometimes, it's that people don't have a way to speak up and share how they're feeling in a similar way. So I actually love that zines allow – I think it is important to be making something that is from your perspective and then share that. That's a way to see who else has that perspective. DAMIEN: But I also understand this need to, well, I'll say code switch. This need to code switch for different audiences. [chuckles] Rein brought up UML. I learned UML in college back in the long-ago times and I hated it. It was an interesting thing to learn, but an awful thing to do because all of my UML diagrams had to be complete, authoritative, and correct because I was doing them for my professor and I was a TA. I thought, “Well, if I had large amount of diagrams describing large systems, looking at them could be very informative and useful.” But no one in the world is going to write those things because this is way too much work unless I'm allowed to be informal, general, not authoritative, or complete and so, I'm realizing these tensions that I've been going on in my mind for decades. MARLENA: Well, and there's programs. Using those programs was so clunky, like adding a square, adding a label, adding a class, and pretty soon, if you were trying to diagram a large system, there was not a great way to change your perspective and go from macro down to micro and zoom out again. Whereas, this is, I think what is so great about the human brain. We can do that and we can do that when we're drawing with our hands. DAMIEN: Yeah. There were promises of automated UML diagrams that you get from type systems and static analysis and I think I saw some early versions of this and they created correct UML diagrams that were almost readable. But going from correct and almost readable to something that's informative and enlightening, that's an art and we don't have computers that can do that. MARLENA: Right. Like, humans are not computers. Computers are not human. [laughs] When is it not Turing complete? [laughter] I think that initially people really wanted to be robots when they were sitting down at the computer and I think we're going through a period right now where we're rethinking that. REIN: Well, in part it was management that wanted people to be robots. DAMIEN: Which reaches back to the industrial revolution. MARLENA: And still does. What I love is that having this conversation about how we work and how to build software, it brings up all of these things, including this type of management wanting people to be robots, but we're not. What's interesting to me and what I think is that if we could shift our perspective from let's make everyone a machine, we're all robots sitting, typing out the stuff for people. If we could shift to thinking about building software is a creative process, people are going to need sleep. If you want them to solve your problems, they're going to need different ways to express themselves and share ideas with each other. REIN: It's really important to uncover facts about work and human performance like, even if you have rules, policies, and procedures, humans still have to interpret them and resolve trade-offs to get them done. You can have two rules that are mutually exclusive and now a human has to resolve that conflict. Also, that we think that the old paradigm that Damien was talking about, this Taylor’s paradigm, is that manager decide how the work is to be done and then workers do what they're told. But workers, to do this, have to think about high level organizational goals that are much more abstract than what the people designing the work thought they would have to think about. I think if you can uncover – this is all creative problem solving and it's a part of the day-to-day work. DAMIEN: Yeah, that command-and-control structure was always a fantasy, less so in some places than other places, but always, always a fantasy. REIN: Even the military is reevaluating what C2 means in the face of overwhelming evidence that humans don't work that way. DAMIEN: It's nice to pretend, though. Makes things so much simpler. MARLENA: What's interesting about this changing paradigm in how we view this management and control piece is how this is manifesting in the world of academia, especially in the world of liberal arts, because liberal arts colleges are not doing well. [laughs] In fact, Mills College here in the Bay Area is not going to be taking freshmen next year and they're going to close. But I think there's a theme of education in here, too in how people learn these skills, because we've been talking about zines. You do not have to have a degree to know how to make a zine and that's awesome! [laughter] Along with these other skills and I know that there are a lot of people in tech, who they went through computer science program, or even a bootcamp and maybe they did some science before, maybe not, but they're still going to these creative skills and it may be, I think a lot of folks in the US and in tech, it's like you weren't in a position to be able to study art, or to get that much exposure, because it was about survival. Survival for your whole family and there's just not the time to try and explore this stuff. I would love to see more space in tech for people to explore all of the creative arts and see how does it help you express yourself at work. The most concrete example I have of this is writing up a software bug. So I used to be a tester and I could always tell who had writing skills and who didn't based on how they would write up a bug. [laughs] DAMIEN: No, and I can definitely feel that. I work on a team of one for several projects. So sometimes, I have to write a user story, or a bug and I have a very strict format for writing bugs. It's basically, it’s write on a Cucumber and yet I will take minutes and minutes and minutes to properly wordsmith that bug report for me [laughs] so that Tuesday – MARLENA: As you should! Doing a good job! DAMIEN: So that Tuesday, when I read that I know right away what it means and what it says. Whereas, I can write something quickly that might be accurate, but would be difficult for me to understand, or I can write something quickly that could be in complete assuming that I found the bug. I'm the one who put the bug in there; I know everything there is to know and still come back to this, no clue. I don't even know what the bug is. I actually have to throw away a feature this week because I had no clue what I meant when I wrote it. MARLENA: I used to actually give a talk about this, how to write up bugs, because it was such an issue and if you don't train developers and other folks who are looking at an app to write them, then it ends up, the testers are the only ones who can write it up and that's not okay. [laughs] DAMIEN: And when you talk about a talk, how to write a bugs, there's some obvious mechanical things. How do you reproduce this? What did you expect to happen? Who's doing it? That sort of things and these are very clear and obvious, but then there's the actual communicating via words issue. [chuckles] How can you write those things down in a way that's easy for the next person to understand? I spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. It's hard. It's an art, I guess. REIN: I want to turn this into an even more general point about the importance of the discipline of formulating your thoughts in a way that's available for consumption. So as an example, I used to write notes in a shorthand way where if I thought I knew something, I wouldn't include it because I already knew that I don't need to take a note about it and what I've found is that I couldn't explain stuff. I couldn't integrate the new knowledge with the old knowledge when it came time for me to answer a question. The approach I've been taking more recently is formulating my thoughts in a way that if I had to write a blogpost about that topic, I can copy and paste things from my notes, ready to go, and just drop them in. That's the thing I do for myself, but what I've found is that I actually understand stuff now. DAMIEN: Yeah. I've had the same experience writing things that I thought I understood. This is the rubber duck story. You think you understand something so you try to explain to somebody else and go, “Oh, that's what it was.” But since we have Marlena here right now, [chuckles] I want to talk about using diagrams and images in that process for a person who doesn't work that way usually. MARLENA: Indeed. Well, one of the things that I think we hint at in the world of tech—this is interesting because we've all been bashing the UML and all that stuff, but it did give us a set of symbols for visual representation of programming type things. Like, you make the rectangle for your class and then you put your properties in the top and the methods in the bottom, or something like that. Something that I've noticed in the sketchnoting world is that sketchnoting 101 is how to draw at all. How to feel confident enough to put your pen on the paper and draw a line, draw a box, draw a circle, make them into objects, whatever. But once you're past that introductory, when 101 level of sketchnoting and you've done a few, the next level up is to start creating your own language of visual representation, which I think people kind of do, whether they intentionally do it, or not. I kind of find myself doing it. The way that I contain categories of information in a sketch note, I've kind of come to a particular way that I do it. That type of thing is because we don't talk about creativity and representation; we don't take the time to do these things. They're not really a practice. Everyone kind of just does their own and I've been on teams that, or I've tried to be on teams that had a fairly mature way of having a wiki, you're going to talk to each other, Agile teams. Still, we might have a wiki, but it's not like we were always drawing together. I'm interested in have you all had experiences on your teams of drawing together, collaborating on one drawing at the same time? REIN: Yeah. We use a collaborative whiteboarding software to do various things and one of them is drawing boxes that represent systems and architectures. One of the exercises we sometimes do is we say, “You get this part of the board, you get this part of the board, you get this part of the board. I want you each to diagram how you think the system works now and then in 15 minutes, we're going to look at them together.” MARLENA: Yes. That type of thing, I think it's so important and I wish that more folks did it on their teams. Have y'all found that you have any visual representation that has started repeating itself, like say certain part of a system you usually draw in a certain way? REIN: Yeah. We've definitely developed a language, or a discourse over time and some shorthand, or mnemonics for certain things. We’ve not standardized, I think is the wrong word, but we've moved closer together in a more organic way. DAMIEN: Which is how language develops. MARLENA: Indeed, indeed. But this way of having this shared visual language together is going to give you a shorthand with each other. Like, when you have a map, you have a legend, and I think that it's important Rein, like you mentioned, not necessarily having standards, but having some common ways of drawing certain things together. That type of drawing together is very powerful for developing your collective way of visualizing a system and thinking about it. REIN: And another thing I want to highlight here is that if you ask four people to diagram and architecture and you get four different diagrams, that doesn't mean that one of them is right and three of them are wrong. What that usually means is that you have four different perspectives. MARLENA: Yes. We all have our internal way of mapping things and it is not a right, or wrong, a good, or bad. It's just, every person has a different map, a way of mapping objects in the world, that is brain science stuff. DAMIEN: I get the opportunity to reference my favorite, what I discovered just now, today, I’ll just go with today's zine, Principia Discordia. JAMEY: Oh my god, that’s my favorite! DAMIEN: Marvelous work of art. They say in Principia Discordia that the world is chaos. It's chaos out there and we look at it through a window and we draw lines in the window and call that order. [chuckles] So people draw different lines and those are the diagrams you’re going to get. JAMEY: That’s so beautiful. REIN: I have to interject that John Haugeland, who's a philosopher, said something very similar, which is that the act of dividing the universe into systems with components and interactions is how we understand the universe. It's not something that's out those boxes. Aren't something that are out there in the universe. They're in here in our heads and they're necessary for us to even perceive and understand the universe. DAMIEN: Which gives us a whole new meaning to the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But [laughs] we don't have to go that far down the road. MARLENA: Well, even if we think about color and perceiving color, everyone's going to have a different theme that they see. It's going to like – REIN: Yeah, and there's philosophically no way to know if red for me means the same thing as red for you. MARLENA: Mm hm. DAMIEN: So applying that same standard to our technical systems. Some senior architects somewhere might draw a diagram and goes, “This is the truth of what we have built, or what we should be building and that there is no external representation of truth.” “Oh, look, the map is not the territory! We can go through this all day.” [laughter] REIN: And the interesting thing for me is that this is something that there are Eastern philosophies that have figured out long before Western philosophy did. So while Descartes was doing his stuff, you had the Jainism principle of Anakandavada, which is the manifoldness of the universe. There's no one right truth; there are many interlocking and overlapping truths. JAMEY: How does this relate to a GitHub [inaudible]? [laughs] DAMIEN: [overtalk] It means your diagramming is direct. REIN: It certainly says something about distributed systems and in distributed systems, we call this the consensus problem. [laughter] DAMIEN: I love the fact that Git was built to be this completely distributed, no single authority source control system and now we have GitHub. MARLENA: Indeed. REIN: I want to know how I, as someone who has terrible handwriting, can feel comfortable doing sketching. MARLENA: Sure! I just did a whole meet up about that. It's not just you, I think that it's 75% of engineers and we emphasize typing. So what I tell people about handwriting, the very, very basics, is slow down. Not what you want to hear, I know, but it makes a huge difference. So this past winter, my pandemic new skill that I learned is calligraphy, and in calligraphy, they tell you over and over and over to slow down. So that's tip number one is to slow down and then number two is try writing larger. Whatever it is you're writing, play with the size of it. Larger and slower generally gives you a way to look at what you're writing and which pieces like, there are probably some letters that you dislike more than others when you are writing and you can take those letters that you really dislike. Maybe it's just a matter of reviewing like, how are you forming the letter? If it's all of them, it'll take you longer, but. [laughs] JAMEY: When I was a kid learning cursive for the first time, I really hated to do the capital H in cursive. I think it's like an ugly letter and I think it's hard to write and it was hard to learn. My last name starts with H so I had to do it a lot. I just designed a new capital H and that's what I've been using in cursive since I was like a little kid [laughs] and nobody notices because nobody goes like, “That's not how I learned cursive in class,” if they can read it. That's how I feel that language, too and we're talking about the way language evolves. People will be like, “That's not a real word,” and I'm like, “Well, if you understood what I meant, then it's a word.” DAMIEN: Perfectly fine with it. JAMEY: And that's kind of how I was just thinking about handwriting too like, what is there right, or wrong if you can read what I'm expressing to you? [chuckles] DAMIEN: Yeah. If you look at the lowercase g in various glyph sets, you have to actually pay attention and go, “This lowercase g is not the same symbol as this lowercase g.” [laughs] You have to totally call your attention to that. They are vastly, vastly, different things. MARLENA: The letters that look the same, though are capital T, I, and F. DAMIEN: You don't put crossbars on your eye? MARLENA: Well, I'm thinking in terms of like, for calligraphy, when I got into the intermediate class, I had to come up with my own alphabet, typography, design my own alphabet. Those letters were so similar, they just gave me fits trying to make them all different. But I think it's important for people to practice their handwriting. I know that we all just scribble on the pad for charging, or whatever. You just scribble with your fingernail and it doesn't look like anything. But keeping that connection to your handwriting is also an important way of valuing yourself and this space that you take up in the world. I think it's really good if you can get to a place where you can accept your own handwriting and feel comfortable with it. Since I am into stuff like calligraphy and lettering, it's definitely part of my identity, the way that I write things out by hand. It's physically connected to you, to your brain, and so, things like that, we want to say everything is typing in tech, but there is a value for your confidence, for your brain, and for how you process information to be able to write something by hand and feel confident enough to share that with somebody else. JAMEY: That was really beautiful, actually. But I was going to ask, how do you think your handwriting relates to your voice? Because when you were saying that about feeling comfortable with your handwriting and how it's like a self-confidence thing, it made me think of the way that people also feel and interact with their voice. Like, you always hear people, “Oh, I hate listening to a recording of myself. I hate listening to my voice.” MARLENA: Well, there's that whole field of handwriting analysis, just like there's that whole field of body language and that includes what someone's voice sounds like. It is attached to your personality and how you're thinking and how you're working with ideas. [laughs] So it's not like I'm judging someone when I look at their—sometimes I am, I'm lying. Sometimes I am judging people when I look at their handwriting. I mostly don't. Honestly, I think we've lost so much education about handwriting in schools, what I dislike about that is, we were talking about the power of print earlier. Well, if you feel uncomfortable writing your name, if you feel uncomfortable writing down what you believe and sharing it, that's the type of censorship, isn't it? So I think handwriting is important for that type of thing, but I think it is connected to your personality. JAMEY: It says something about you and when you put something out into the world that says something about you in that way, it's kind of a vulnerable experience. MARLENA: It is, and you're showing people how you value yourself. I think that's partly why a lot of times in tech, we've minimized the role of handwriting so much that nobody feels comfortable sharing their handwriting. Well, it's not nobody, that's a big generalization, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable sharing their handwriting and that is a loss. That is a loss for everyone. DAMIEN: I love what you said, in part because I didn't want to hear it, when Rein asked, “How do you improve your handwriting?” You said, “Write slower and write bigger,” and I knew right away that that was correct because that's the only thing that has worked when I was trying to improve my handwriting. But I gave up on that because I didn't want to; I don't want to write slower and bigger because of what you said—taking up space. If you look at my handwriting historically, it's been not taken up – very little space, very little time. I don't want anybody to have to wait for me to finish writing. I don't want to use this whole page. I don't want to think my writing is so, so important that it's all big on the page, but allowing myself to take up space and time is how I get to better handwriting. So that was just such a beautiful way of putting it. MARLENA: Well, I read this book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and it's a wonderful book where the book blows me away and it's hard to talk about it because she has packed so much into it. But it's thinking about how we make ourselves go so fast and it's about the attention economy. How we are trying to speed ourselves up so much and I think that handwriting is part of this. If we are going to take back our own lives, that includes being able to slow down enough to write your name in a way that feels good to you and share it. I like what you wrote in the chat, Damien, but I'd like to hear you say it. DAMIEN: I wrote it in the chat so I wouldn't say it. [laughs] “Decolonize your mind.” It was a message to myself, decolonize your mind. The idea that you don't get to do nothing, you don't get to take up space and time. Yeah, and so that's just, it's all these things are so tightly connected. MARLENA: So I think y'all are ready for me to tell you the story of how I came up with a first Let’s Sketch Tech conference and this conference happened maybe 2017, 2018. I always forget the exact year, but it was post Trump getting elected. Now the Women's March, right after Trump got elected and sworn into office, was a major point in time and wake up call for me. I've always tried to learn about politics, intersectionalism, and things like that, but this March showed me the power of making something with your own hands and showing that and sharing it to someone else. I wanted everyone to feel like, even in this era of Trump, we still have the power to make something meaningful and share that with our own hands. So that was when I decided to start emphasizing more and learning more about the connection between art and tech. I'd been doing sketch notes and it sort of struck me that there was not much of a community out there that handled this topic, which I thought was just kind of strange. When I looked at sketchnoting itself, it seemed like more was happening in the world of design. Well, what about engineers? I've had to draw out things so many times to learn them, to teach somebody else, to understand what's happening and so, that's when I put together this Let’s Sketch Tech conference. I wanted people to be able to retain the power to make something with their own hands, because that can never be taken away from you, whether you have internet connection, or not. But even if you do have the internet connection, combining these together is just so powerful. So that is why I started this conference and this community and it's pretty deep. I don't bring it up all the time because it's kind of a lot, but yeah, and we had a great time. DAMIEN: Thank you so much, and thank you for sharing that story and everything else you've shared with us. How do we feel about going into reflections? I think I'm going to be reflecting on in the broad sense, it's what I didn't want to say earlier until Marlena called me out, decolonize your mind. But in a smaller sense, it's how much of my view of the tech industry, my work in there, and the environment there should be formal, structured, strict, authoritarian. I had all these ideas that are still, unbeknownst to me, having a huge influence about how we can work. The idea of a zine fest at work seems so outrageous to me because it doesn't fit into those ideas and so, I'll be reflecting on well, where else am I seeing this stuff and how has it prevented me from doing something so very effective? [laughs] I said, zine fest. I used to think I was too young to mispronounce zine, but whatever. [laughs] Who’s next? JAMEY: I can go next. So my two favorite things, I think that got said, one of them was also about like the zine fair at work. I host zine fairs in my hometown and the idea of like, well, if you both draw something and then you trade, you're having a zine fair. I absolutely love that. And then my other favorite thing was about the talk closer to the end about valuing yourself and the way and taking up space and all of those things. I feel actually like I want to mush those two things together because talking about valuing yourself, like really resonated with me the way that I do zines in my regular life, not in tech. But I think that inside of tech is a place where there are people that I really want to see value themselves more. It's a system that has a tendency to shut people down and keep talented people and I want to imbue that kind of confidence into a lot of engineers, especially newer engineers. So I think that I really like this idea of a zine fest at work, and maybe that can, in addition to helping teach us about our systems and stuff, help us encourage each other to take that time to value ourselves. REIN: I think what struck me about this conversation the most is that creativity is good for people, personally, individuals to explore our creativity. But when we share it with other people, that's a way that we can become closer. I think that for the work to happen—because to some extent, I tried to apply these ideas at work—people have to build and maintain common ground with each other. I think that encouraging people to be creative and to share that creativity—you typically wouldn't ask a junior engineer to draw an architecture diagram, but I think you should. MARLENA: I hope that after listening to this, people definitely ask their newer folks on their team to draw a diagram, then we’ll share and trade with them. I think what I've learned from this conversation is, well, I think that it validated, more than anything, the ideas that I'm trying to spread about connecting arts and technology. It was wonderful to hear each of you talking about the struggles and challenges that you have at work in bringing this together because it is a different way of thinking. But I feel so positive whenever I talk about this and seeing people be able to recognize themselves and seeing some doors and windows open about how they can incorporate the arts a little bit more into their tech lives is the reason why I do this and it's been such a privilege to share this with all of you and your listeners. So thanks for having me. DAMIEN: It's been a privilege to have you. The idea that we can start out with like, “Let's draw pictures as engineers,” and ended up with, “Oh my God, how do I become fully human?” [laughs] It's really amazing. JAMEY: Yeah, this was really great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. MARLENA: It was a lot of fun. DAMIEN: Marlena, why don't you give your Patreon and your podcast? MARLENA: Sure. Well, I started the Patreon because it was an easier way for folks to sign up for the meetups that happened in Let's Sketch Tech. We do a monthly meetup and I'm starting to plan the conference for this year. There's a free newsletter, but if this podcast is giving you life, if you're getting oxygen from this conversation, I highly suggest checking out the Let’s Sketch Tech Patreon, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to my podcast, Make it a Pear! I talk a lot about creative process in tech. DAMIEN: Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us. Special Guest: Marlena Compton.

In this episode of Mini Mentoring, Susannah Storch & I talk about transitioning from a longstanding career in weddings to focus entirely on family photography (after a year-ish off for Covid). How do you shift your messaging and get the word out that you’re still in business but doing something new?

Visit Bonjoro onlineSupport the show--Fabian Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Matt.Matthew Barnett:Hi, Fabian, great to be here.Fabian Geyrhalter:Absolutely. I'm so thrilled to have a B2B tech brand on the show at last, but Bonjoro is not the typical tech company. I mean, it has brand and culture at its heart, it is about creating customer love, and it's a weird brand, it's a fun brand, it's a brand that is not afraid to stand out. It's probably more afraid to blend in. You started as a designer, if I saw that correctly on your LinkedIn. How did you end up running Bonjoro? Take us on that journey. Take us on the journey of how the brand came about, the brand formation, how did you get into video and all that stuff?Matthew Barnett:Yeah, so I trained as an industrial designer back in the UK many years ago. Industrial design is a terrible word, it's basically product design, but that obviously stretches from the engineering side all the way to the creative side. So I was always going to go into product. I think I had a personal affinity for ... I don't even know if I knew it was brand, just being a bit weird, I guess. I've always worn kilts my whole life, I always go on stage. I like going out and making a lasting impression personally. I used to work in agency a lot and pitching was part of my DNA, I thrived on that.I moved to Australia many years ago and fell into the tech scene. I actually originally went on a date with a co-founder and we didn't hit it off, but we did start a company. That was the first company, and then 10 years later Bonjoro is now the company that I'm in, and started, and I guess I found that space. I think that brand side, that brand attention has always been something I'm passionate about. Initially it was personal brand, I guess, if you look back and brand within other peoples products, and then I guess this was a great time to experiment and see how far I could take a brand myself. Initially it's got a lot of me in it, I'll be honest, and then it's evolved from there.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's how it usually works, right? A founder has a personality and they use that personality to launch a brand, and to quote-unquote, sell people, on what they have to offer.How did you get into ... was it always video for Bonjoro? Did you start like that? How did you decide that there's a painpoint out there, and you can solve it in a very unique way.Matthew Barnett:Yes, well I actually run an agency, so we had an agency here dealing with clients overseas. So Australia, great place to live, not a great place to be if you want to do global business because the time zones ... in my time now it's 6:00 AM, but you got to do these early calls.Fabian Geyrhalter:I know, thank you, I appreciate it. 6:00 AM for you, we have to call it out, that's a true trooper.Matthew Barnett:That's pretty normal, and so when we had an agency here we'd have a lot of leads coming overseas. That agency had headquarters but an office in London as well. We would essentially have these leads coming over at night and one of the things we did in terms ... so sales, but with a very big brand slant is that we tried to get our personalities across, and that creativity across, which is how we sold these agencies and we decided to use video to do that.So obviously agencies do rely on the team and the individuals, they are a massive part of how you sell, we were very good at that, we were very creative, we were very out there and so we would collect any leads that came in over night from other countries, and rather than send them an email which we originally did, but again it just didn't get us across and our brand across, we started doing individual videos for every single inquiry that we had.I used to take a ferry to work here in Sydney, so I would go across the harbor and pass the Sydney Opera House, so I would wait until that moment and then I would plant my smart phone, do these views, and we'd see the account manager from Budweiser in London and Ogilvy would sign up, and I'd do a video talking about Budweiser and the projects that we'd worked on, while the wind was in my hair and there were seagulls flying around. We packaged this up and we sent it to them, and most of the time people would reply and they'd go, "I can't really understand what you're saying because it's too windy, but this is hilarious, absolutely come in and see us." So we ended up getting all these extra meetings just because we were being a bit more creative in our approach.Obviously, this feeds the brand because as that agency, our very comms, our very first interaction we ever did with the company was a creative approach, and it was a very personalized approach as well, which is how our brand was in that company. Ultimately, long story short, one of those clients asked if they could use this video messaging system that we built. We let them use it, they started sending them, some of their clients came in, etc. etc. Then this just started to snowball and build its own company. So it was never an intention but we were trying to embody what we had as our original brand, in our way that we communicated, and then that ultimately became its own company, and its own product of the back of that.Fabian Geyrhalter:You called it a matching system, how does that algorithm work, tell us a little bit about how the whole, quote-unquote, system works, if I'm a client and I sign up. What's going to go down if I'm part of Bonjoro?Matthew Barnett:It's all about personalization and scale. So we are a video tool, the reality is it's not actually the video that is the key, the video is an amazing way to communicate, it's actually about turning up and taking time with the customers. So what we do is the system will sit on top of any customer data source you use, so a HubSpot, a Salesforce, even a Shopify. Any tool at all. What happens is we basically suggest triggers as to when it makes sense to send a customer or a lead a personalized one-minute video. The most common use case, of course, is with leads. So when a lead comes in, and like we were doing in that first case, one of your team gets notified and then you're going to record a 30 second, 1 minute video to welcome this lead on board and say, "Hey, this is Fabian here, awesome to have you sign up. If you have any questions let us know." Etc. etc.What we do specifically though, is we also pull in data about who that customer is. So we'll tell you what their job title is, where they work, where in the world they are. We'll even tell you what they've done in your software, or on your lead forms, or in your products, so we can show you ... for instance, in our instance, if you were a software company we could show you that this lead in the last hour has done steps one to four of onboarding, but they haven't done steps five to six. So when you do a video you not only use their name, their job and where they're from, you can also say, "Hey, also I noticed you didn't do these three steps, here's a link to go and do them. They're really important, and if you need help let me know."So you're personalizing the content in terms of saying their name and the company, and that kind of thing, and then you're also personalizing the direction that you're driving each and every lead to obviously try and get them to a better success.Fabian Geyrhalter:Very cool, and the reason why video is obvious right? It makes it personal, people actually know who you are and when we started our little interview here this morning you had your camera on, I had my camera because I always have my camera off because of bandwidth. I just want to make sure, especially with Australia, and you're like, "No, let's keep that on, let's get to know each other a little bit." That makes it more personable, right?Obviously, there must be people in a company who are like, "Well, I don't feel like I should be on camera." Or, "I'm a little shy." But you are specifically catering to people who should not be shy, or whose job title is to ... either they're an educator, or they're in the sales force, but those are people who should be more outgoing and that's why this is a great match for them.Matthew Barnett:It depends, I think everyone in your company should be happy to stand up and face customers. I mean if you go to any business that's not online this was the normal. It's the online and the not getting on video which is weird. Actually getting a person. You go back generations, you go into your grocer, he would know what it is you're buying, he would have your produce ready for you. Your baker was the same, your butcher was the same, you had all these relationships with our suppliers on a daily basis and then we all went online, and got in a [hoey 00:08:42], and we started to lose those relationships. So really it's just reigniting that.So going into the whole video thing, the reason why I believe video is seen this way where some people are nervous to go on video is because for generations, over a long time, video was actually put on a pedestal because it was essentially the realm of film and TV only. So we now have this deep, ingrained, subconscious feeling that the video is the realm of TV and movie stars, and make up, and looking perfect, and film, whereas actually it is ultimately just a window. That's all it is. Its no different to, again, meeting your coffee barista in the morning in person, versus remotely. It's just a window and it just shows you who you are.Humans are built to communicate visually more than they are to communicate in terms of audio, or words. 70% of communication is visual. So it's actually just very natural, we just need to get over this little hump of where video came from, and that's a psychological change to make. Which for the last 18 months, as terrible as it's been, this is one thing it has helped, is it's got people just to get over that and say, "Okay, well fine, video is just a window."Fabian Geyrhalter:I was wondering, I love the idea of video is a window, I think that's really poetic even, but it tells the truth, that's just how it is. Covid-19, it impacted everyone's brand. Some brands it impacted positively, it's hard to say that, it's difficult to say that because obviously it's been a horrifying situation for mankind. But there have been brands that just had the right product and the right time. How has this entire idea of video becoming the main means of communicating with clients even, how did that change the trajectory of what you're doing over the last, I guess at this point, it's 12 months.Matthew Barnett:It does, with hindsight looking back the challenge here is you could never tell what would have happened otherwise. I actually believe that the world was going in this way anyway. So, we were seeing a trajectory into video and more importantly, again I said at the beginning, it's not all about video. It's the main trajectory into personalizing the customer experience. I think this is the more important point for us as a company, brands were starting to find that customers were wanting connection again. Those that were taking the time, and front-loading customer service and support, were getting much better results. Video is a great enabler for this. Now the last year, what we've had is a lot of people train on Zoom. So we no longer have that challenge of getting over the fear. But again, obviously where we work and where we tend to be used, which tends to be a bit more front line. So customer success, sales, those individuals were already getting into video, it was already happening in quite a large way anyway.So as a business we have accelerated this year, it's a great place to be, I don't think it's been incredibly different because I think for us, and where we play, this was actually already happening. So we already saw that trajectory kicking off before the world changed. I think off the front lines, so where you have teams communicating and maybe the more introverted, and the back of house teams, that's where Zoom has kicked off because now teams have to communicate. But frontline was already starting to get over this hump I feel anyway. That tidal wave was coming, it has just got bigger, obviously. Maybe it wouldn't have got as big, as fast, I couldn't tell you, but it's not like the world changed on a dime for the video space, I don't think.Fabian Geyrhalter:Well, and now everyone has the perfect lighting, and everyone has the perfect mic, it's definitely a beneficial thing. For you, and on the other hand, there is a company like Clubhouse coming around, where it's like, "We're so sick of video, let's just listen to people, and let's be passive." It's really interesting and yet with the whole Clubhouse thing I see so many startups that are saying, "Oh shoot, Clubhouse would be so cool with video. Let's build Clubhouse with video." So who knows where all of this is going to go. I think it's just interesting because when people have too much of one thing they're just going to get sick of it, and right now it's the idea of everyone is over Zoom, and I just don't want to be on camera all day anymore.But in hindsight, we're all ready for it and to send a client a quick ... or a potential client a quick video message, it just feels natural now, and to your point, that's what it should be because it's just that's how you say hi to the baker, or the butcher, you actually know their face, you know their personality.Matthew Barnett:I think with communication it's an interesting one because you can't unpack it more and more and what it really means to communicate. There are different ways to communicate for different scenarios. So with a Clubhouse ultimately if you want to you can choose to be more passive because it is a more passive form of communication. What I mean is, you don't need to have 100% attention, whereas with video, you need to look in someones eyes, you need to be there, you need to be engaged and if you're not people can tell. Audio you don't have to have quite that level, which is great because it allows you to potentially multitask at the same time.Obviously written communication is great because it can consumed on the recipients own time, how they like, they can jump out and jump back in again. There are different pieces of communication that work at different points for different reasons, so no one communication style is better than another, it's about matching it to the situation. In situations where trust are important and connections are important, and I think getting your team and brand across, because for me team is brand as well, that's obviously where video, or in person, tends to have the biggest impact.On that note, you stated somewhere, I don't know where I found this, but you said, "My love of building great product is only surpassed by that of building great culture." I literally wrote the same thing to switch products with brands, where I believe that you simply cannot build a strong brand on a weak culture. What are some company culture tips ... We're going to talk a little bit more about company culture, but are some company culture tips from your experience running a company with what looks from the outside in as having a pretty admirable culture? What does it take?Matthew Barnett:I think a good start with this is to work out truly what the culture that you enjoy is. I say enjoy, because with all things in business if you're not enjoying it then you're doing something wrong. This is a large part of life. So I think with culture, when you first start, you don't think about this, it happens, and you hire people who will help influence that culture in a big way. I think about it as a drop of dye in a glass of water, and when you're a small team you put one small drop into a small glass and all the water goes blue instantly. As that team grows, and grows, and grows, that color has a danger of fading away because you're only putting one drop in.So at the beginning its easy, you all make the color, or the culture, as you get bigger you actually start to need some drivers. There comes a point, and you probably notice this, where you need to take a bit of a switch. The first step is to really be very honest with what it is that makes your culture. You hear people talk about writing down the key company values within this. There is no hard or fast rule, I wouldn't worry too much about this. I think the key to getting this right is just to be honest, don't use big words, just write it down, whatever makes sense to you and your team, run it past everyone and be like, "Is this us?"Don't think your values are something that you want to use to make sure that people come and get jobs, write them for what they are. If one of your values as a company is that you need to be quite ruthless to succeed, honestly, if that worked for your company and the environment you're in, that's okay, you need to be very honest and you need to understand that's what happens because that's how you're going to hire. This is going to influence how you build the team. Whatever the value is, be honest about it, understand what it is that you know needs to make your business a success and then ultimately you go hire.So have those values in mind, write them out, your early team will check them, yes or no. Then, as you start to grow that company this is going to be your blueprint for the first stop before you hire. This is why it's really important to have this, because again, back to the first point with the glass of water, as your team expands and grows, the biggest issue you're going to hit is that your culture has potential to dilute, and there's a stage when you're not too small, not too big, where making wrong hires culturally can actually disrupt the whole thing and throw off kilter.Fabian Geyrhalter:It can disrupt your product even, right? Because if suddenly not all of your staff is aligned and has that same emotion, and conveys the same kind of feeling, then suddenly people think of the brand as a whole as a different kind of company than you thought it was.To me, talking about culture, is a perfect segue to talk about bears. Bonjoro's logo mark is a bear, a very friendly, happy, pretty bear. Your title is Papa Bear, which is awkward when I say it like this, but it is, and in context it's really great. I think you have some explaining to talk, let's talk about the bear. How did the bear become the logo, and it's a really cool logo, it's really amicable. How did everything become about bears when it comes to video, and CRM?Matthew Barnett:I think with this company there was some through on my behalf about what kind of brand we want to go and build. So it wasn't so much that we kind of fell into it, I guess this was partly pre-meditated, we kind of knew where we wanted to go. I think playing around in video, and what we were doing. We would try and encourage people to get on video and to open up to customers. Ideally to have quite a lot of fun while doing it, because what we understood innately was that the more open you are, the more you're having fun, the more you drop the barriers, actually the more trust you build with the customer. It's more authentic, this tends to work.So you look at that, and you go, as a brand and a company, and bear to mind we are B2B, so we're in the business space-Fabian Geyrhalter:Bear in mind, I see your hint, I bear in mind.Matthew Barnett:I don't actually think it these days, it just happens.Fabian Geyrhalter:Very subliminal.Matthew Barnett:I think what you have to do, I think the job of a brand, is to not just reflect your customers but actually to try and bring them on the journey with you. This is how I see brands. So where we're having a company who have a product saying to them, "Look, you need to let go a little bit more, you need to relax a bit more, you need to open up a bit more." We want our brand to go a little bit further that you're going to go, so that you come on this journey with us.So when we looked at it, we looked around brands, we looked at what was happening in the space. We kind of knew it had to have almost like a bit of a B2C slant, even though we're in a B2B place. We didn't want to go out corporate and serious. I think a great company who did this in the B2B space is someone like MailChimp, and they've changed and matured their brand over time, but they've actually held really well back to that core ethos and the stuff their doing now, it's kind of perfect in my eyes.We, I guess, took a similar approach. I thought characterization was a way to do this, I can't remember how we came to the bear, I think it was maybe over a few beers. But the bear, I think at first it was a bee. I think animals as a characterization was an obviously direction for us, because it's fun, it's playful, you can take it a long way. The bear happened and then it just started to come more and more to life. This was partly driven by us. It was actually a lot driven by customers as well, I think especially in those early days you get your innovators coming on board, and there's a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, and everyone's like, "This is great, let's go further."I remember one of the first things we ever did was we started sending bear suits to customers children when customers hit certain points on the funnel. I'm not going to lie, it was a stroke of genius, because basically we then had customers sending us back pictures of them and their kids in bear suits. I was like, "Look, they're literally wearing our brand." That's when the penny dropped. People think this is actually pretty fun, and then it starts to go beyond just being a company.I look into the value of any company that you build, and we talk about non-tangible assets, and the biggest one of these that you could possible build is the brand really, which does include the team. But I think in those old days by getting everyone into a brand, and getting everyone to talk about that brand, we got a lot more excitement, we got a lot more fun back. We generated case studies a lot easier. People who are that way inclined jumped on us because we were refreshing and different from the norm. I think the brand equity ended up become more valuable than probably the product, especially in those early days where the product's catching up.So that just compounded it and we took it as far as it had to go, the title naturally fell out. My title is Papa Bear. I don't think I came up with that, again I think a customer came up with that and then it just stuck, so there we are. And now anyone who joins the company, we have a team of grannies in the North of England that build custom bear onesies for us. It's great if you live in the Northern Hemisphere and you have winters, in Australia they're a little bit too warm so we don't get to wear them that much.It's the idea of being fun and playful, it helps for hiring and it really helps for culture. We want everyone to enjoy their job and have fun, if they're not having that fun its kind of, for us, what's the point of business? We also want customers to have fun, and it helps with everything. Frontline comes in more positive. If you have problems people talk to you, they don't go and leave reviews, it just helps in every single way. But ultimately, it's all for us. The core thing is it's all about having a bunch of fun, while we're doing what we love.Fabian Geyrhalter:Look, it was such a fun story about there were so many pieces of brand nuggets in what you just said. It's so important for everyone listening to really dive into that. This is about personality, this is about culture, but this is also about translating what your product does, where you should open up, and you should feel a certain way, into the brand.So, one of the questions, when I'm in your shoes and I'm being interviewed in podcast, or interviews, or Q and A's or whatever it is, one question that I'm being asked all the time, literally pretty much every single time I speak, and I'm going to let you answer it for this time, because I kind of think you already did. They all ask me, "Does branding for B2B companies even matter? You're talking about all these B2C companies, and I get it, they're consumers and they want something. It's the Nike's and the Apples, but B2B, really? Does it Matt?" I think you've got an answer.Matthew Barnett:I don't know why anyone would ask this question, there's a million examples out there in the world. Absolutely, of course it does. You're selling something. People aspire to values and companies they want to work with in any market you're in. Anyone at all, you will have competition. You might have a unique product that's a world first, you're going to get people coming after you, and if not, people always have alternatives. If you're a coffee company people can drink tea. There's always different things people can do. So when you're in that space one of the most effective ways you can compete is brand, and this is your attitude and how you treat customers, and the decisions you make on products. It influences everything you do, it influences how you build the company, how you go to market, the kind of people you work with.Very, very importantly, if you want the easiest bit to understand where brand makes sense in a business actually is probably around hiring. So why does somebody want to work for Google? Why does somebody want to work for Atlassian? Why does somebody want to work for X bank, or Y fund? They have choices they go to and they're going to pick ones because they aspire to those values. The same will be for your customers. Having a brand strategy, and working certain ways, will get you opportunities, will get you different types of opportunities and give you different ways to compete.It's hard to say because for me it's so black and white. Of course the brand matters.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah, well it's hilarious because you were shocked that I say that pretty much every time I speak people come up to me and ask me that question. To me, it's like, why? You're selling to people, and people are people and they want to have something that's personable, right? It doesn't matter if it's a B2B sale that they're making or if it's an actual retail store that they're going to, in the end it's still the same thing. They want to have that connection.It's kind of great that you were so shocked that that is something people actually question. It comes across really, really nicely in what your brand does. I think not only from an empathetic point of view, which we talked a lot about, the strategic point of view, but the design, the language, the UX perspective that you take as a brand, it's so important.For you guys, you're doing a really, really great job. That alone is a huge differentiator in a sea of sameness, because just to defend the ones that come up to me and ask me that question, there's a boat load of tech companies, and apps, and services out there that are all pretty much doing the exact same thing. They use the same kind of web template. You know what I mean? It's like, here are all our features, it's like, feature, feature, feature, and then they go to Bonjoro and it's like, brand, brand, brand, and by the way we've got features.But it's different, it's a very different kind of mindset. Sadly a lot of B2B marketers don't have it because they come from the IBM days of doing B2B marketing.Matthew Barnett:I wonder if the challenge is, to be honest, that people don't understand what we mean when we talk about brand. Obviously if they'd just seen you speak, different group, but a lot of people think brand is a logo. They think that's literally the all encompassing world of brand is the logo that you put on your site, and maybe the type font. That is not brand, that it is one of the smallest elements of your brand, it's probably the least important element of your brand.Your brand, it's a culture, it's a style, it's a feeling, it's what makes you, you. I mean, individually we all have brands. If you walk into a room and somebody can't see your face do they still know it's you because of the way you walk, because of the way you talk, because of what you're wearing, that's what it is. How recognizable are you in a sea of mundaneness? That does not come down to logos, it doesn't necessarily come down to the whole visual piece, like copywriting is absolutely key to this. The way that you communicate with customers, it's your operations. Do you decide to put customers first, or team first, how does that work? It's about every element of your company, how you treat your employers, how you operationalize. Are you going to have centers in each country, or work remotely?So many things come into this, and it's not just a logo. If you ask me, it's probably the element that touches every part of the business. There's two things that do, your brand does, and then obviously money touches every part. Everything in the business is driven by money, I think everything is also driven by brand. It is absolutely all encompassing. It's the glue that makes your company what it is. So when you say do B2B companies not have a brand, I don't know if you're just thinking about logo, maybe that's the problem there, because it's so much more than that.Fabian Geyrhalter:Well the problem is I already educated them, so that's post my education. I appreciate your benefit of a doubt. I just really believe that there's a lot of start up founders, and I know that because they come to me, and they're like, "Well, all the other founders in my incubator are whatever. They're all doing consumer centric stuff, so of course brand is important, but I feel left out because I'm doing B2B." So it's kind of like this stamp of if you're a founder in the B2B space, invest in feature, feature, feature, that's all. That's where you invest. You actually shouldn't invest in branding and marketing, because that comes much later, and it's much easier, it's a different funnel.Obviously, we know the golden path, and I'm glad that you shared that with my audience as well. And talking about golden paths, I'm talking about how branding touches everything. I love on your website the way that you funnel very different customer segments through your beautiful and smart online journey on your site, by saying, "Bonjoro for" in the nav, and then you can select what you would use it for. So it's like, "Bonjoro for online education." Or, "Bonjoro for customer success."This sounds like a simple and logical solution but I see many companies screw that up by creating sub products. It's a different target audience, or creating this maze of an experience. You guys nailed it by saying, we do one thing, we're all about this one thing, and we just happen to do it for many people. So if you're this person this is right for you. Has this been an ongoing conversation, and big strategic brand decision, or was this just kind of like it fell into place? I assume it didn't just fall into place.Matthew Barnett:I think this is part of the maturity for the company as well, I'll to B2B and B2C. You basically have, and you'll know this as you grow, you have ideal customer profiles. So you will have ISP's. You will have certain customers that will utilize, and connect, and stay with your company. You see these in research projects, we do user profiles, Jenny is a greengrocer from wherever, that kind of thing. The more data you have, the deeper you start to understand who it is that's using your product. You start to understand that there's not just one bucket of people. There are different people with different motivations. If you can help tailor parts of product, or parts of your messaging, to different people because again, different people have different motivations.If you're a bank, it's very different talking to a 20 year old starting an account versus a 70 year old retiree who's saving for the grandkids. Very different market, very different messaging. How do you work out, because you can't target everyone, who you target and it's probably three or four types of people only. Maybe a little bit more, but small numbers. How do you then really bucket those up, and one thing here as well is to focus on the customers that are the best for your company. You might have a million Joe Bloggs but they don't ever spend any money, whereas you have a thousand Susie's who spend 10 grand a year, focus on those obviously. So how to you cater, and then how do you work out who these are? How do you change your messaging to really hit the core value that each of these different type of users are going for.Again, to the bank idea, a 20 year old opening a savings account versus a retiree with a fund, they're using the exact same bank and possibly the exact same products, but they're using them for different ultimate goals and reasons. The better you can understand this, the better you can tailor your message to those individuals with the ultimate goal that the better you're going to be at converting and convincing people to come and work with your company.Fabian Geyrhalter:Totally, absolutely, I love that bank metaphor because it is, and most banks actually don't do that, right? They're like, "Hey, here are our services, here are our features." Again, back to that conversation. Also aligning a company or a product around the big picture thought. So for Bonjoro, I assume it's not about video, but it's actually about connection, right? Creating this personal connection you and someone else, and video is the means to get there.With that said, if you could distill your brand all the way down to one word, or two words, what would it be. I call it brand DNA, but you can call it anything. For Coca-Cola it used to be happiness, everyone thinks about that, or at least that's what they made us believe. It's a sugary drink and we don't really think that anymore, but that was the idea, the messaging. With Zappos, which I'm sure must be close to you guys, because it's all about the customer service, for them I think it now distilled into just simply, wow. So with Zappos, you think Zappos, you usually think, "Wow, that's amazing customer service."What is a word that can describe your brand at its heart? Now we're talking about everything, from culture, to product, to what is the brand in a word?Matthew Barnett:Delight, I think would be the word.Fabian Geyrhalter:Delight?Matthew Barnett:Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter:I like that, just like the bears, it all goes back to it. Taking it lighthearted and giving value at the same time, I really like that.There's one more question that I wanted to ask about your brand, and I just never got around to it, because we started chatting about so many other things. Don't just say hello, say Bonjoro. Does that tagline pretty much encapsulate the story behind the name, was it from bonjoro, was that the idea?Matthew Barnett:Yeah, so when you're coming up with a name, and I do think this is important, to my point anyway it's not all about logo. I think my preferred way to start a company is to make up a word. I think that way you avoid other existing words out on the market so there's no confusion. Also you can get a domain name, and you can obviously get better SEO of the back of that. So there are tactical reasons too. But what you want to do with this word, you want to have connotations, and you want to inspire a subconscious thought towards what it is your ultimately looking to do as a company.So, Bonjoro obviously comes of influence from bonjour, or from buongiorno, which Italian and French for hello. Obviously the main reason we use with these videos is to turn up and say hello and welcome to customers. So, there's this subconscious feeling behind it of this welcoming open feeling to the company. And like I said, there was a domain name available so it was a win-win.Fabian Geyrhalter:In a past life you and I went to the same brand school. When we work on names for clients it's the exact same philosophy. It makes so much sense. It's a really smart move.All right, slowly we're coming to an end here. What it is a piece of brand advice, I know you already gave tons of advice, but what is a piece of brand advice that you might not have talked about that you think founders should just really keep at heart when they create their company, when their still young, they might have a couple of employees, maybe they're just two co-founders out on a pizza night figuring out what's our brand going to be. What is some advice from your end now that you've come through this multi times it sounds like?Matthew Barnett:I think a really good starting point is to find another company that aspires the value, that has the values, and the brand that you aspire to grow into. Very specifically do not just look in your industry. So with us, honestly, you mentioned Zappos and Zappos is one of the companies that we aspire to be. Zappos is not a tech company, they are a shoe and product company, but the way they approach customers, the way they put customers first, the whole delight and happiness, the whole leadership style, that to us is how a company should be built. We want to take some of that and it gives us a North star and a really good, I guess, baseline to check on and say are we getting there?Do this, it makes it a lot easier because there are going to be great leaders that are doing things that you want to do. Again, be that Zappos, be that [inaudible 00:39:04] bank, whatever it is you want to get to, have that North start and it just makes it easier as you grow to keep checking in and saying, "Are we on the right direction?"Fabian Geyrhalter:I love that and I also often advise founders to just stop looking at their industry, period. If you come in and you want change things, and you've got a mindset then everyone gets stuck with okay, let's put in a browser window with our six companies, and guess what? Your website's going to look the same like the other six people, because you are so focused at looking at your competitors. Oh, that's how they're structured, that's how their flow is, that's what they talk about themselves. And that's why everything is a sea of sameness. So yeah, look at the flower shop that disrupts the marketplace. Look at something totally different where you say they lead with empathy, or their trying to do something different in a space that is old and needs to be disrupted. Whatever it is, like you said, for you it was all about the customer first and so you gravitated to how it is at Zappos because they're really great in that space.It's unbelievable how many founders don't do that, and they're just so fixating on their industry, because it makes sense, right? Especially when they come from that industry, but I think that's super important.Matthew Barnett:As I say, it's definitely a wood for the trees situation. It's hard, if you're building something for the industry that you understand, you've been that for years, that's actually a good way to build a successful business because you understand what you're doing. The downsides are that you might have blinkers on when it comes to some strategy for sure.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah, totally. I made it my thing, and that was pre-Covid obviously, hopefully it's going to happen again soon. I only worked on our website copy, or strategic thoughts about it, I only used to work on it in airplanes, especially those gruesome trans-Atlantic, 12 hour, 9 hours flights where I did not pay for internet, and I was just basically there with a blank page. I worked on three sentences for like 8 hours. But that's it, it was so personal, and it was so deep, and it was just as clear as possible. Those are the lines that really stand out, and they always make it for a long time. In my eyes, that's how you create something when you already know what your brand DNA is, you know what your brand is all about. You just have to, I guess the idea of sitting on a rock, it's the same thing.Matthew Barnett:Exactly. 100%.Fabian Geyrhalter:What's next? What's next for the Bonjoro brand as we're slowly to coming to a close here? What are you excited about in the next six months? I mean, I think mankind is excited about things in the next six months after the last six months, but for your brand specifically are you brewing up something that you're excited about that you want to share?Matthew Barnett:I think this is the great thing about doing a start-up and taking that through growth is that your brand will change over time. It will hopefully refine and mature, is how I kind of think about it. So I think I see our brand doing this, I see us tailoring it down deeper and deeper to the kind of customers that we know are good for us, and that work with us, and the kind of people that we want to hire. We talked about the idea of personalization at scale.We have an ethos here which I think dictates a lot of our brand which is automate processes but never relationships. As it's interesting, when we look 12 months ahead about what we're going to go and build as a product company we start with that ethos first and then we start and going, well let's actually put together a mock up website and some mock up messaging and let's design the company the messaging that we want to be, and let's work back from that and build product afterwards. So we actually don't go product first, we tend to go almost brand messaging positioning first and then we go, what's it going to take to go and fulfill that dream?So we've just come out of that process, I'm not saying it's easy, but I think we've got a pretty cool North star for the end of the year, a lot to do in the next 12 months but it is going to be vision lead, and then products going to back fill in all the innovation that helps us get there.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's so awesome, I'm excited that you just went through this exercise, it's so liberating afterward just to say, "Okay, now let's open the floodgates, let's make it happen." I like the way that you guys work, it's just really cool. The great news is, and you know that, it's very easy for people to see it when they visit Bonjoro online that there is so much thought put into it, and it's very, very brand focused. Brand lead.With that being said, where can people find Bonjoro online? I guess everywhere because you own the word, right?Matthew Barnett:Yeah, if you type in B-O-N-J-O-R-O you will find something from us, so go have a play. If you want to test our video, try it out, it's free. You'll get a video from one of us somewhere in the world, so do say hello, reach out, we are human. If you want to chat to me in person, you can always go on LinkedIn, search of Papa Bear. That's the other benefit about having a title. I think there's three of us, and I'm the only guy in a bear suit. I don't know why the other guys aren't wearing bear suits, but there you go. So please do reach out.Fabian Geyrhalter:This is a call to action for the other Papa Bear's, this is competitive now.This is awesome. Hey, Matt, you did not come across as a 6:00 AM kind of, I just woke up and have my coffee interview. I really appreciate it, this was awesome. So much good stuff. Stay in touch, appreciate your time, and thanks for being on the show.Matthew Barnett:Thanks for having me.

We have a flood of updates this week, thanks to the Google Workspace for Education event, a total of 8 updates on the Workspace Update blog, and some tidbits we dug up around the internet. Welcome back to another episode of Workspace Recap! Last Weeks Google Updates Limit Google Drive sharing to specific groups with target audiences, now generally available Mute all Google Meet participants at once Introducing Google Workspace for Education Automatic group membership management with dynamic groups, now generally available More notifications added to the alert center in Google Workspace New Calendar admin privilege hierarchy in the Admin console Changes to information visibility in Meet quality tool, Meet audit log, and Reports API New option to download third-party apps and domain-wide delegation to CSV Other Topics Introducing Cloud Domains: Easily register and manage custom domains Upcoming: What you can learn in our Q1 2021 Google Cloud Security Talks - March 3rd, 9 AM Pacific Security Talks 2021 - Registration with Javier Soltero and Karthik Lakshminarayanan at 10:05 AM Pacific *** Announcements*** Workspace Recap will be on Clubhouse this Wed, 7 pm Pacific (Clubhouse is currently iOS only and if you need an invite email or DM us.) We will also be co-hosting an upcoming C2C Event on Feb 23rd with Christian Newman, and Paul Lees where we discuss Top Workspace Features of 2020 We are working on a Google Workspace Recap Newsletter! It will include the latest news articles, all our links mentioned, and more. You can signup to receive the newsletter at https://workspacerecap.com/newsletter Feel free to send us your Workspace Questions, remember, we are both experts in Google Workspace, and if we can't answer your question, we can probably find someone who can. Hit the subscribe button, engage with us and send us your feedback/questions on Twitter at @WorkspaceRecap, by emailing hi@workspacerecap.com and on our website at workspacerecap.com where you can also find expanded show notes, and more! Hosted by @MrJNowlin and @larsen161 Disclaimer: Podcast and Hosts are Not affiliated with Google

When writing your book — or anything else for that matter — you always have two target audiences. You have the people who need your book and you have the people who want your book. The difference between these people is a necessity. Those who need your book have a problem to solve whereas the people who want your book have an interest they would happily indulge in. That said, you want to write for the people who need what you have to say. If you can write for those who want it as well, that's great — but make sure you don't do so at the expense of those who need your writing. If you do, you reduce your impact. Join The Word Leader Facebook Community to learn more about writing, connect with like-minded fellows, and get support in your writing journey.

I think it's a great question because he's trying to target B2B. So he has a general contractor who wants to target commercial business owners only. Do you have any recommendations on the copy and target audiences that he should use? Okay. So they own the office building, I would assume? They own or lease and need a general contractor...

I think it's a great question because he's trying to target B2B. So he has a general contractor who wants to target commercial business owners only. Do you have any recommendations on the copy and target audiences that he should use? Okay. So they own the office building, I would assume? They own or lease and need a general contractor...

Many companies try to achieve their sales goals by being universally relevant. Does that work? Is it even possible? In today's episode, Mackenzie talks about how target audiences are like buried treasure. Every company has them, and the ones who do the work to uncover and understand them will reap the benefits - from improved return-on-investment to higher conversion rates.

This week on TBD with RMCC, Leah covers some international cannabis news before giving a quick update on the industry here in the States and the many legalization measures on the ballots that have a fair chance of passing in November. Then she sits down with Ashley Grace, the Chief Revenue Officer at Dalwhinnie Farms, a boutique cannabis brand here in Colorado that is looking to expand the market to different users who are seeking a more high-end dispensary experience. Learn more about Dalwhinnie here. Sign up for our Compliance Certification Program now to get a super deal! Only a few spots left! 

When it comes to strategies for higher ed marketing, most folks immediately assume we should be talking about texting, TikTok, and Snapchat strategies…and while these tactics might be worth considering for attracting future undergrads, higher ed marketing is a lot broader than just undergraduate student recruitment. In this episode, Zach is joined by Francesca Reed, Vice President of Enrollment Management and Marketing at Neumann University. They discuss how to effectively lead, develop, and implement unique enrollment marketing and student recruitment strategies across undergrad, transfer, degree completer (adult), and graduate populations.Francesca also shares her thoughts on the importance of ensuring that people with their “boots on the ground” are a part of the decision-making process when it comes to choosing where to allocate marketing spend and which channels to play in (and which NOT to). Plus, she gives her tips for building culture among enrollment management teams in a remote working world. Don't miss the episode for all of these insights and more.

Emma Donovan – Strategist and new business director, The Yellow Door

It's easy to launch a Facebook ad. But, optimizing your advertising and getting an amazing return is a different story. If you fail to constantly improve and maintain your Facebook campaigns, chances are that your results will start declining pretty fast. It may even happen in a couple of days after setting up a new ad campaign. If you want to achieve a higher campaign ROI, lower your advertising costs, and increase the number of conversions, you need to listen to this episode with Olivia Smith, the Growth Marketing Manager at HopSkipDrive. HopSkipDrive is an app that provides a safe, dependable way to get children to where they need to be. Get the free growth cheat sheet with all actionable tips and notes from this episode in a one-page PDF at https://growthtoday.fm/109

Join me for live, on-air coaching with Lynn Wilford Scarborough, a Retail Ready® student and the founder of Cheeza Pleeza. In today's episode, Lynn and I talk through: How to narrow her target audience when “so many” different people enjoy her gourmet cheese spreads How to move past “CPG Purgatory” - that challenging state of struggling to find the correct co-packer and increasing production sizes to meet the demands of larger retailers How to figure out her product assortment and narrow down her 14 SKUs, especially as retailers have varying opinions on which products to carry and which she should produce To find out more about Cheeza Pleeza, the copacker resources that I mention on today's show, and the full show notes, click here.

Join me for live, on-air coaching with Lynn Wilford Scarborough, a Retail Ready® student and the founder of Cheeza Pleeza. In today’s episode, Lynn and I talk through: How to narrow her target audience when “so many” different people enjoy her gourmet cheese spreads How to move past “CPG Purgatory” - that challenging state of struggling to find the correct co-packer and increasing production sizes to meet the demands of larger retailers How to figure out her product assortment and narrow down her 14 SKUs, especially as retailers have varying opinions on which products to carry and which she should produce To find out more about Cheeza Pleeza, the copacker resources that I mention on today’s show, and the full show notes, click here.

Description: Benedikt Brandmeier, Drone Champions League (DCL) Head of Sales and Business Development, joins Blinkfire Analytics to talk about how DCL attracts a very unique audience for its partners, the evolution of drone racing over the years, and the advantage of having an online and virtual strategy in place prior to COVID-19.

The next step is to choose a target market. As counter intuitive as it may seem, it's vital to ensure your marketing isn't too broad.

Content To Attract Your Target Audience I'm sure you want to ensure that you put out content to attract your target audience, but many often are unsure of what kind of content that can successfully capture their target audience's attention and keep them reeled in. Well, actually, you just need to understand and talk about these four points. Motivation Talk about your motivation. What motivated you to go on a journey. Tell them about how you were when you started, whether you were an absolute idiot or a loser. This is because normal people don't connect with successful and the ultra rich. They don't want to hear you brag. They want to hear stories that they can relate to because they actually understand! Fear Share with them your fear. It's all about connecting. Everyone has fears and if you make yourself out to be a fearless businessman who succeeds at anything they do, they can't relate and they might even brush your efforts off as luck. Proudly share your fear, whether you're afraid of speaking, failure, losing money or what other people think of you. More often than not, your audience will relate and they will want to find out more. When you share your weakness, people see you as an expert because they're amazed that you managed to overcome it and if they wish to do the same, they know to look to you for advice. Truth Sometimes, the truth can be ugly, and not enough people pick a stand. There's no polarity if you just sit on the fence, but the fence may not be the truth. Sit on the fence and nobody will know of you, because you fit in. Pick a side and preach your truth and you will gain both haters and loyal fans, but it's better than having no one at all that supports you. Be confident enough to pick a stand, and people will trust you. Objection The thing about objection is that you shouldn't make the assumption that you know what are people's objections. It's better to ask your target audience and then make content with regards to how you can dispel their objections. And this is how you make content to attract your target audience. Note how all these types of content are centred around your target audience. No one really wants to read content that doesn't relate to them and these four are all about relating to them. Try it today. Listen in to learn more! Instagram: @wilsonkomala hello@kingsmaker.co Also, get your FREE copy of ContentBox (100+Social Media Content Ideas) by joining our group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kingsmaker

It is important to know your target audiences to influence decision making for marketing strategy and budget of ads

Today for day 2 of Soul Biz Crash Course we talk all things clients! The Human of Wealth begins on the 4th December! There is a giveaway running until then – listen to episode 35 to learn how to win a free entry into this course!   Message me on IG to sign up or ask any questions – @highvibebabe You can join my free Facebook group "High Vibe Babes Community" Here:

Today for day 2 of Soul Biz Crash Course we talk all things clients! The Human of Wealth begins on the 4th December! There is a giveaway running until then – listen to episode 35 to learn how to win a free entry into this course! Message me on IG to sign up or ask any questions – @highvibebabe You can join my free Facebook group "High Vibe Babes Community" Here:

Visible Thread's Content Readability ToolInVision's User Persona Templates

In this mini-podcast Harold King and Johnnieanne Hansen discuss writing multiple job descriptions to attract a greater volume of candidates. With a full subscription to the Council of Industry's Collaborative Recruiting Initiative Hiring Managers can post an unlimited number of jobs. Johnnieanne advises using that feature to tailor job descriptions and titles in a way […]

In this mini-podcast Harold King and Johnnieanne Hansen discuss writing multiple job descriptions to attract a greater volume of candidates. With a full subscription to the Council of Industry’s Collaborative Recruiting Initiative Hiring Managers can post an unlimited number of jobs. Johnnieanne advises using that feature to tailor job descriptions and titles in a way that appeals to multiple audiences. Why not post that HR Internship has a Part-Time Human Resources Assistant as well? You can learn more about the Council of Industry’s Collaborative Recruiting Initiative here: careers.councilofindustry.org/manufacturing Visit our manufacturing-specific job board here: careers.councilofindustry.org/jobs For more information contact Johnnieanne Hansen at jhansen@councilofindustry.org or (845) 565-1355

The world’s most successful artists, brands, and companies have one thing in common: They understand their true fans. If you want to build a sustainable, thriving music career, you've got to understand how to work with target audiences. This session, recorded at the 2019 DIY Musician Conference, is a master class in marketing, funding, and developing your art so that it reaches your most enthusiastic fans. Mixing inspiration, information, and practical application, this session offers practical steps for you to dominate a niche market.  Distribute, monetize, and promote your music at cdbaby.com.

If you begin your career speaking to certain people do you know how to change target audiences? Or even if you should change target audiences? Never fear our guest for this episode has done it and she is sharing all the details! Vanessa Van Edwards began her speaking career talking to teens and parents, but today she runs the site Science of People. On episode 253 of The Speaker Lab she tells us why she changed audiences and how she did it as well as why she's moving to a new part of the country to help her speaking business, and why doing the same might help you, too! Join us to hear all of that and more on today's The Speaker Lab. THE FINER DETAILS OF THIS SHOW:    How did her online course help her narrow down her target market? What are the differences between introverts, extroverts and ambiverts? How can you appeal to all three types of people in your presentation? What was the moral turning point when she changed her business model? How did she make the shift from teens and their parents to corporate audiences? Why she opted to niche her speaking topics rather than her audience. How did she leverage her web site traffic to cultivate her own research? What are some reasons she didn't raise her rates sooner? And so much more!   EPISODE RESOURCES Science of People web site Vanessa Van Edwards on Twitter Captivate, by Vanessa Van Edwards Free Speaking Fee Calculator Got questions? Send them in here Email me! Subscribe on iTunes, and leave us a rating or review  

EJM 36: How I Planned My Product Launch Hello and welcome back to the Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Podcast where we: Celebrate the Raw Truth, Conquer Fear, Create Impact and Tell the Real Stories of Entrepreneurship. In this episode, we talk about how I planned my product launch in the podcasting space. I will discuss why the podcast is important for launching your products, ways you can make money through podcasting and how you will be able to give value to your audience through podcasting. If you enjoyed this episode jump in and subscribe to the Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Podcast on iTunes. Make sure to head to www.facebook.com/groups/podcasting101group to jump into our brand new FREE Podcasting Community where we help you guys uncover how to launch your own podcast & monetize it at the same time.   "The true value in podcasting is very much in the Long Game..." - Jamie Atkinson “Just taking the action is the biggest learning curve...” - Jamie Atkinson   Bulletpoint Summary In this episode, we will know: How I planned my Product Launch Why I used Podcast for my Product Launch How we will talk to our target audiences How we will give value to them Why you need to give value Timestamps 1:00 - Planning my Product Launch 2:00 - Using Podcast for Product Launch 4:00 - Long Game on Building audience 5:30 - Ways you can make money from Podcasting  7:00 - Inverted 9:00 - Talk to your Target Audiences 10:00 - Benefit from Podcasting 12:00 - Providing Value Through Podcast to Audiences 14:00 - You need to Give Value 16:00 - Free Content Launch 18:00 - Launching something Valuable for Free 19:00 - 28-Day Podcast Launch Lab and Product Launch 23:00 - Using Podcast to offer the Product   Contact Information Jamie Atkinson Email: jamie@entrepreneurjunkie.co Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamieatkinson/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Jamieatkinsonmedia Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/jamieatkinsonlive/     Free Podcasting Community The Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Facebook Page The Entrepreneur Junkie Movement Community Facebook Group Podcasting 101 Community - 4 Ways to Monetize Your Podcast

So you have your product and/or service ready to be launched and marketed to the public. But have you carved out your ideal customer? Is your target audience well defined? Who is your target audience? These are just some of the questions we'll help answer on today's episode as well as giving you pointers on how to reach your target audience inside Google and Facebook ad platforms. Our Site: https://digi.coffee/ Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/digicoffeeads/ https://www.facebook.com/digicoffeeads/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/digitalcoffee/ Thanks for tuning in. Please follow us @digicoffeeads for more content like this, leave a comment if you have questions about our video. As well, follow us on Instagram Tv and everywhere else you see our content.

I interview Ashley Ebert all about strategy, including all about her successful business of a decade, whether or not to scale, managing 50 employees, founding a business with her dad & more! Ashley www.theabundance.group www.instagram.com/theabundancegroup Jenna Redfield is a digital content expert, focused on organizing, planning and creating content for marketing purposes. She runs her YouTube channel Jenna Redfield and works with people to help organize their digital lives!  Home: https://jennaredfield.com YouTube Channel www.youtube.com/jennaredfield Join the Facebook Groups https://www.facebook.com/groups/adhdandnotion https://www.facebook.com/groups/marketingandnotion/ Follow me on Social https://www.youtube.com/c/jennaredfield https://www.instagram.com/jennaredfield https://www.tiktok.com/@jennaredfield

I interview Ashley Ebert all about strategy, including all about her successful business of a decade, whether or not to scale, managing 50 employees, founding a business with her dad & more!Follow Ashley!www.theabundance.groupwww.instagram.com/theabundancegroupJenna Redfield is the leader of the Twin Cities Collective, the largest resource in the Twin Cities for bloggers, small businesses, entrepreneurs & creatives. She is a well-known speaker, educator & social media strategist. You can work with her one on one with coaching and content creation (photo/video) servicesFree Hashtag guide https://www.twincitiescollective.com/free-hashtag-guideJoin the Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/twincitiescollectiveCoaching https://www.jennaredfield.com/coachingFind the podcast on all platforms http://www.twincitiescollective.com/podcast-linksGet Flodesk Email Marketing for 50% offhttps://flodesk.com/c/TWINCITIESCOLLECTIVEFollow us on Socialhttps://www.instagram.com/twincitiescollective

“There is so much value of being willing to take the time to focus on yourself to figure out what your brain is telling you."Welcome to our second episode where we dive deeper into what this podcast is about and confess our thoughts on the "avatars" we had in mind when creating our Dreamboard Social Club. For those of you who don't know what an avatar is, it's basically a fancy-smancy word for the personality, vibe, and characteristics of your target audience. We had quite a bit of fun creating our avatars and hope you'll identify with one of them (if not, that's ok, you can still listen and be entertained by these personas!).In this episode we:Introduce you to Karolina, Natasha, Margo and Paul, our avatar friends. Each are very different but they share a common thread of feeling a bit "stuck" and knowingly or unknowingly, they want to find their internal GPS to guide them to their best life and their best version of themselves. Listen to see if you identify with one of our avatars.Talk about how we (and our avatar friends) can use tools such as visualization and accountability to guide us through getting unstuck and moving in the right direction.Share our idea of creating a Dreamboard Social Club community to hold ourselves accountable to take action to live our best life (and redirect if we get off course or chose the wrong path, because we know life is real and that's likely to happen!).Discuss how wanting more out of life is not selfish...there, we said it out loud

A few shows back I did a Quick Tip episode, which talked about how specific you should be getting when it comes to your Facebook Ads targeting. It raised a lot of questions from listeners who messaged me and asked how to go about finding target audiences in Ads Manager, which is why I wanted to do this show today. A lot of people think they have to be as targeted as possible, but this is really no longer the case with Facebook. You want to be targeted, but you’re going to want to give more data to Facebook’s algorithm so it’ll find that target audience who are looking to convert, if that’s what your objective is. In this episode I share how I approach finding target audiences for my Facebook Ads, and I take you through my entire process for doing this. The key here is that you’ve got to do the work upfront, and that research will give you a clear and holistic understanding of your target audience. If you’re currently managing ads for other people, you’ll have to do the exercise I talk about today for your clients as well. Like a lot of things on Facebook, targeting best practices is constantly changing, which is another reason while you’ll want to listen to and subscribe to this podcast, as well as be a customer of my other programs and products related to paid advertising. Before we start the show, I’ve got something to ask. How do you listen to this podcast? Is it in the iTunes app, Stitcher, Spotify or maybe iHeart Radio? Do you listen to it at regular speed, or maybe like me you listen to your podcasts at 1.5X speed? I want to know! Take a screenshot of you tuning in to The Art of Paid Traffic, and include it on your Instagram Story, while tagging me, @RickMulready! Want to win a 30-minute strategy session with me? I’ll be drawing one winner at random each month, and all you have to do is give me your feedback on this podcast over at http://rickmulready.com/messenger, telling me what you’d like to hear more of - including topics you’d like to see covered, guests, style and frequency of the show! On the Show Today You’ll Learn: • Why defining who your target audience is should be your very first step • A killer website for getting ideas for your ad copy • An example of how I would do niche targeting in a specific industry • A free tool inside Facebook Ads Manager that I use to mine for data when researching my target audience • My process for building an overarching list of targeting opportunities that is the beginning iterations of potential ad sets • The number of people I want in my ad sets and why I want a bigger number when my objective is conversions • The reasons why I usually start with my warm audiences and the order I like to follow • What to do when you see a good Facebook ad that could be relevant to your business displayed in your newsfeed Coming up on the next episode I have a Quick Tip where we’re going to be talking about why more leads isn’t always the answer to increasing the amount of revenue in your business, and I’ll take you through an example of what we’re doing here in my business around this concept.

Everyone in business has probably heard the terms target market and target audience. Jake and Mirela will discuss what both of these really are and how they interrelate. Learn why target markets are critical, and why defining one is normally the first step in launching a successful business or product. Explore why target audiences are also important, and why going niche is the way to go. We'll also discuss key takeaways on how understanding target markets and target audiences can be used to improve any business.

Everyone in business has probably heard the terms target market and target audience. Jake and Mirela will discuss what both of these really are and how they interrelate. Learn why target markets are critical, and why defining one is normally the first step in launching a successful business or product. Explore why target audiences are also important, and why going niche is the way to go. We’ll also discuss key takeaways on how understanding target markets and target audiences can be used to improve any business.

We all have heard, read, felt and experienced that 'CONTENT IS THE KING' but, why many of campaigns or communication are not able to grab the eyeballs of their target groups? Let's learn from #AmanGoklani, Head of a content distribution company in India that how do we reach our audiences effectively and gain maximum out of our content.

I have dedicated my previous episode to importance of defining Target Audiences for a new digital product so early in the concepting process. We took MeetMe@ app as a use case, started with just one Target Audience, and finalized with four. By taking that step we had produced a greater leverage for success due to a fact that I recognized a greater, yet defined market, for our new product. What that means is that if we totally fail on one, two or even three, we still have the market. Does that sound as if we would have to build that product to suit as many audiences? It does, but that is an incorrect assumption. I’ll explain how come through three key actions of the Main Value Proposition milestone of my 12-milestone process. Subscribe, share this, pass it on, let me know what you think. New episodes every Monday 12:00 PM EST. -- Ivan Trajkovic is founder of Ivan Agency, a consulting firm for digital product concepting, innovation and execution. Ivan is also founder of a consulting firm for software engineering Engineers Ltd and an in-house digital production studio Engineers London Limited. Ivan partners with entrepreneurs, startups and established brands to envision and enhance their digital power through innovation of existing and creation of new digital products for Mobile, Wearables, OTT, Web, Emerging Tech, IoT and AR/VR. Realizing a realistic market need for advisory services in IT industry, Ivan’s companies focus on all phases of digital product lifecycle - from idea to execution and continuous innovation. -- Subscribe to my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVGgp0NMcELX4f0HRfCqImg -- Follow me online here: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ivan_agency/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ivan_agency Medium: https://medium.com/@ivan_agency Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ivan.agency/ Podcast: https://anchor.fm/ivanagency LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivantrajkovic/ Ivan Agency Website: https://ivan.agency/ Engineers Ltd Website: http://enginee.rs/ Engineers London Limited Website: https://engineers.london/

Summary: *Episode Sponsor: Freeeup.com* Join the conversation! In this weeks episode of the Brand Focus Podcast, we discuss why promoting your business to anyone & everyone is not an effective strategy, and how defining your target audiences will efficiently drive sales and increase brand awareness.   Resources Mentioned: (Sponsor)Freeeup.com: Sign-up today for the best freelancers on […]

Welcome to another Quick Tip episode! This is where I share a quick tip with you each week that’s related to Facebook ads or online marketing or just general growing your business tips. Today’s quick tip is about: A new hack for finding new target audiences that you may not have thought of. And you have Facebook’s increased focus on transparency to thank for this hack. I’ve been using this strategy myself and I’ve uncovered some target audiences that I hadn’t thought of. So I’m really happy to pass along this quick tip to you today.

If you ask any business owner, they'll tell you that their product or service is for everyone, wrong! It's important to know who's your target audience. Are they male or female, their race, household income, level of education, etc. This data makes it a whole lot easier for marketing agencies to create ads that will be the most effective. If you're interested in receiving a worksheet that helps you Define Your Business & Target Audience, please email me at fernandochavez@chavezenterprise.online.

One of the questions we ask on this show most frequently is, “Who is it you’re trying to reach? Who do you want to help?” Establishing who your target market is arguably required homework at the start of your brand. It defines your methodology, messaging, and focus. If you have no target, you have no direction. Target audience can cover any number of factors, from varying demographics, business levels, industries, and deeply specific niches. Knowing who you’re trying to reach brings great clarity to everything you do. But what if your business is not necessarily tied to a single target audience? What if you can actually reach multiple kinds of people with your products or services? What if you have several products and each of them work for a person in a completely different market? In today’s show we’ll dive deeper into establishing a clear target audience, if it’s okay to have multiple target audiences, and how to evaluate how far your reach can go.

How to combine an A-to-Z approach with Julia Cameron's morning pages. Plus a glimpse at 26 ways to get to know your target audience.