How to Scale Your Business on a Tiny Marketing Budget with Sarah Noel Block

Hey guys and welcome back to Unscalable. Today's show is sponsored by my company StoryPrompt. StoryPrompt helps you boost customer loyalty and engagement using asynchronous video. Capturing stories, testimonials and attention is as simple as sharing a link.

Use the link in the show notes to get 20% off or go to storyprompt.com. so today i'm joined by a special guest sarah noel block sarah is the founder of tiny marketing and believes that you don't need a big team to have effective marketing she believes that if you have the right marketing strategy even tiny teams can have great results and she's proven this over the last seven years by stepping in to help small b2b companies grow with less and now she's built a system that you can use called the tiny marketing framework which we discussed on the show we had a great conversation about how to scale your business with a limited marketing budget.

Enjoy the episode and stay tuned for a special offer at the end of the show. So for those who don't know you, Sarah, can you tell listeners just a bit about your background and how you help businesses? Yeah, so I'm the founder of Tiny Marketing and I started that because I was a tiny marketer. I worked for a seven company group as a one person marketing department and I felt so overwhelmed and just crying in my cubicle until I came up with a way to make it work when I didn't have a big budget and I didn't have any team.

So now I've created a framework, the tiny marketing framework that I help small businesses implement so they can create really streamlined and effective marketing plans. Well, I'm keen to go into that a bit later in my episode. So for me, I've always bootstrapped my companies. So I started with myself.

Good. Kind of done marketing myself, been there. And it's really hard to juggle, like if you're trying to build a product, trying to do sales, trying to do marketing. So what made you decide to focus on marketing as a place to kind of focus on helping small businesses?

That was always my thing. I've been in marketing since 2008 so it was never a question what I was going to do even you know when you're in high school and they're like what do you want to be when you grow up it was always marketing I just I love the combination of being like the business mind with it but with the story elements that you're you're solving a problem and you're creating this community and story around around it with marketing. So you've obviously worked with numerous startups over the years.

What's a common challenge that you've seen kind of early stage founders face and how'd you help them overcome those challenges? Yeah, the biggest challenge that I've seen is they're not in their zone of genius when it comes to marketing. They're good at their thing. They're amazing at their thing.

That's why they started a business, but now they have to wear every single hat and it doesn't quite work for them. And you're just so stretched thin at that point. You need to have a really streamlined marketing system that's customer focused, like understanding your customer and then a system so you can actually implement it and make it work. And it doesn't just like catch on fire.

You never do anything with it again. So at what stage would you recommend someone sort of brings you in versus hires someone to do the marketing for them? The early days, a lot of my clients are under 30 million. So if you're going to bring in, I would say at the 3 million point, that's when you start hiring and outsourcing and bringing in those people.

And then like the 2.5 million and under is a good point to start to learn it and build out a system and bootstrap as much as you can until you have that revenue to be able to afford outsourcing it more. Yeah. Yeah.

I guess one mistake I made at Sendable in the early days was it was obviously just me and I was bootstrapping. And my first hire was a junior intern who joined the company in marketing. And I found myself just so stressed trying to hire, trying to kind of train that person up. I couldn't actually let go of things.

I couldn't delegate it's enough? Yes, that's a huge problem. You are not alone in that. So is it common that people just kind of hire the junior people first and then build bottom up rather than top down?

Is that what you'd say is a common issue? It is a mistake that a lot of people make is wanting to have that internal hire because I guess you feel like they might have more and they're more invested in your company. They'll stick around longer. When that's really not the case, which you need as a founder is somebody who knows who can own marketing and isn't looking to be doesn't need to be guided so i would definitely say outsource marketing until you can hire someone who's high level and can handle the strategy aspect of it and then that person can find the right people to outsource to for simpler things okay so let's say you've been hired to join or to help a team a marketing team in a company or a founder.

What is like a very common issue that you come across? Like what's the most common thing you see when you go into a business? Yeah, well, it's two different things depending on which situation you're in. If I'm supporting the marketing department, a lot of times it's too many people that are the person that says yes or know.

There's not one point of contact and then nothing gets done because you'll turn in the assets that they need. And there's too many cooks in the kitchen that are trying to determine if it's the right thing. So having one point of contact is really important when it comes to that. And then for founders, it's really letting go is a struggle that they have because it's their baby that's completely understandable.

Your business is your baby. And it's really hard to say, okay, I'm going to let the expert be the expert and I'm going to be the expert at my thing. Then, you know, it's your child. You don't want the babysitter.

That's actually something I used to do very badly. I used to get my hands dirty with every little marketing email that went out. You know, even though we had a big team of like 50 people, there was a point where I'd be like signing off in every marketing email. And it was just crazy, right?

I didn't let go enough. Oh, and then you get so burnt out because you feel like you need to be involved in every piece when you don't. You've got experts for that. So how do you, like, what advice would you give to a founder who's kind of holding on to every little thing because they've been building it for so many years and they can't let go?

Like, what's the one piece of advice? As a marketing person, like, how do you speak to them? Yeah, you have to let go. You have to trust.

You hired this person because they are the expert you need to be able to let them be the expert because when you have your hands in it, things get like the actual plan, the strategy gets diluted because you're not now, now the founder is coming in pouring water on the actual plan and you don't, you're not able to actually follow through completely with what you had planned and it's just, it's not going to work. You got to step out. Yeah. Yeah, I guess my advice to founders would be to try to set KPIs.

Like once I set company-wide KPIs and the marketing team were accountable for hitting those metrics, I was able to just take a step back and I didn care how they got to those metrics I didn care what emails they sent what social media campaigns they had to put out there As long as they hit the target metrics that I cared about So I think that that worked well for me as a founder just as a way to step back. Along the same vein is that I recommend that you have quarterly stakeholder meetings with the marketing person.

So all of the stakeholders can be involved in that process, but it's guided by the marketing person. and they are the person that says yes or no, but everybody's voice is heard and the sign-off happens at the end. Like you feel comfortable with it. And then that entire quarter, you're good.

You have that. And those KPIs are set in that quarterly meeting too. And then you can look at your past quarter's KPIs. Make sure you hit them.

Yeah. Okay. So this is a big question that I know a lot of people listening would be interested in hearing. So if you join a very early stage startup, they ask you to help grow their audience.

Where do you start? Like, how do you, like, can you take me to the tactics of how you go about growing an audience from zero? Borrowing other people's audiences is the first thing that I say do. That's what I did for my own business too.

And I recommend it for especially service-based businesses like coaches, course creators, because you're building out that no like trust factor with these mirror audiences. So make a list of product companies and service companies that aren't direct competitors that would make good partners and just start pitching them. And you could do lots of different ways. Like when I first started, it was a while ago and guest blogging was the thing, but I got my first 12 clients through a byline and a guest post.

So it makes a huge difference now i would say live streams podcast guest interviewing you could do newsletter swaps webinar partnerships all of those things get you in front of that perfect audience and a few of those also get you good lead lists in the end okay so audience so kind of using other people's audiences um and if you were to approach someone like what's the step how do you Do you email them? Do you go on social media? Do you send them a DM? What's going well for you?

For myself, it usually happened through LinkedIn, where we started commenting on each other's posts and it was more organic. But if you make a list and you start reaching out to them just with an email, it's the fastest way to start growing. is just send that cold email pitch. And if you're offering more of a partner situation where you're borrowing each other's audiences, it's mutually beneficial.

And if you have an audience too, then why are they going to say no? They aren't. It's a really easy win for both of you. Yeah.

No, I agree. I think lots of founders make the mistake of kind of cold calling their first few customers. But I think it's far better to sell to the people that those customers pay attention to. right?

Because then you have that trust factor and they can reach the audience you're trying to go after. And how do you feel about like affiliate marketing? Do you think there's still a place for that these days? You know what?

I am the wrong person to ask because I do not do that. I think there is. I think that the people who do it, do it really well. Because if you have an audience that trusts you and there's a product that you love, then you, why not make money off of telling them about that product?

But as far as how to do it, that's not me. I don't do it at all. Okay, so once you've got people to pay attention to you, how do you get them to trust you in the future? Do you have any tactics around that?

Having them pay attention to you for an ongoing period? Yeah. So yeah, you have the no, the no factor when they're starting to get to know you. But then when you get to that trust factor, I think it's all about like the value that you provided during that awareness stage.

So really understanding what problem it is that you solve and who it is you solve it for and staying on point with your messaging on that. a lot of people are throwing spaghetti at the wall and talking about whatever is on their mind at the moment when your audience only really cares about what it is that they need solved. So focus your messaging in on that. And for me, my best transition from just an audience, somebody who might like my content to someone who might be working with me, You know, going from dating to a proposal would be webinars really work for me because that's an opportunity where we get, it's almost like a one-to-one interaction where you have an opportunity to ask me questions and I'm teaching you something.

And that's a great place to build trust. Okay. So, and like just in terms of messaging, you know, I see businesses kind of promoting themselves. but as you say it's better to talk about the problem that you can solve for your customers yeah no one cares about you exactly yeah that's so true what are some other sort of things that b2b's get wrong in their messaging yes so relying too much on talking about themselves and selling there's nothing wrong with with selling it's the way you the way you say it though the way You need to position it as the problem that you're solving and not focusing on the right audience or understanding your customer to the extent that you should.

So something that I see a lot is a B2B customer will look at everybody who has bought from them in the past and they try to talk to all of them. But instead of doing that, look at your top 20% of customers. Who was it that was the most profitable and the ones that you actually liked working with? And think about them.

What was their customer journey and focus there? That's how you can create your marketing plan is, hey, how did they become aware of me? How did they end up converting? How did they end up working with me?

And it makes it a lot easier and more, even though most sales processes aren't linear, it gives you a linear way to think about it because they will likely go on that linear path even though there's other ups and downs in there yeah so you say kind of reverse engineer how they got to become a customer so kind of take the steps back how do you track that in a world where there's so many different touch points like how can you know exactly where they came from like which which touch points hit them along the journey to them so um i recommend that you send out annual surveys to your customers to really understand what their customer journey was.

And I interview a couple of my favorite customers that came in each year. So I can understand what problem was it that they need solved when they came and found me? And how did they find me in the first place? And then it's easy enough once they've converted to figure out those pieces.

Like, okay, so this is the lead magnet that brought them in in the first place. And these are the kinds of emails that they open. yeah it's crazy how most founders think of like how you can automate that but the best way is to speak to people right yes yeah honestly I just picked three that's like 20 minutes of time each and it gives me so much information so you created something called the tiny marketing framework Can you explain what it is and how it works Yeah. So this is the framework that I created when I was at that seven company group because I was overwhelmed and I needed something.

So now I've been teaching it to small businesses, but it's basically starting with an 80-20 marketing plan. Super simple. And it's basically what I just described. Look at your top 20% of your customers.

80% of your marketing plan should be focused on them. And then that other 20%, that's, think of it like a lab, a marketing lab. Allow yourself that amount of time every quarter to test out something new that you're interested in trying and seeing if it works. So 20% lab, 80% your ideal customer.

It starts there. And then, so that's the streamlined aspect of it. And then systematizing, creating a batching schedule, creating templates wherever you can, and a repurposing plan. So then it's really easy to create the marketing that you need to, even with a small team.

You have it completely scheduled out for you. So streamline, systemize, automate. So with automate, you want to look at everywhere where you can connect your softwares together so they can play nicely. and you want to see where you can bring ai into it to make it a little bit easier like why not go to chat gpt and say create an outline of a blog post based off of this and this and this it'll save you so much time and then um last would be outsource so all of those pieces that you can't automate or fit into your own system, outsource those pieces.

Look at the Eisenhower matrix, anything that's in that delegate square of the window, that should be going out and you don't have to deal with it. You can hire a virtual assistant or someone from Fiverr to be able to handle those things. So you don't have to take on everything. So I think, yeah, I get the idea of kind of trying to delegate as much as you can, but I think the thing always holds me back and lots of founders probably face the same thing is I have to spend the time explaining like what I need done like if I have to have a product video I have to have a product video done I have to play in the person on the product first how do you are there any like shortcuts to kind of delegate more more kind of more effectively in terms of yeah so that would fall into the systematize section of the framework where you're creating templates and those templates also would be living in your project management tool.

So anytime that you need something done for a specific task, like you talked about a video, that template's already built and you can assign it to that person. And all you have to do is drop those assets that they're going to need into that tool. Like I use teamwork. All I would do is drop it in the message and then they have everything that they need.

So that makes it a lot easier. And then having guidelines that they can use. So if you have documented guidelines, like this is what we this is our voice and tone this these are our the colors the fonts the the way we want to come across so just having that those documented guidelines will help a lot and save you so much time cool that makes sense just in terms of video adoption so i touched on video as an example but how are you seeing some small businesses approach video with tiktok and kind of short form video what do you recommend to them you know i know businesses are fearful of being on camera what's your strategy to help them kind of bring video into their marketing strategy?

Yes. So for these small businesses that don't have a lot of resources, I say repurpose as much as you can. So if you're already hosting a podcast, for example, like we're doing right now, take this video and turn it into shorts, reels, TikTok, do that as a baseline. Now, I'll admit like TikTok and Reels, the organic videos do better, but this is a place to start.

You can repurpose what you have. You can also use your videos, like your video testimonials from Story Prompt and use those as your content that are on shorts and whatnot. And then when it comes down to creating more organic video in vertical format, just batch some time. Say you spend one hour a week creating those videos and then schedule them out so you don't have to think about them anymore use tools like cap cut which makes it really easy or descript where you can make them pretty and on brand and then and it's super simple just schedule them out and i guess from the business that kind of the business owners that you work with um are you are you getting content from them or from their teams like what sort of video are you putting out is it from the marketing team predominantly?

Yeah. So I work with some small businesses where the owners feel comfortable enough being on video. Those are great. So they'll send that content to me.

I love that story prompt. You can automate this process and you can give them the prompts and say, okay, create a video on this topic and then they can send it right through there. That's amazing. and then for my customers that don't feel comfortable on video we'll do something with like descript where we can maybe use like fly decks or like you know an arrangement of graphics to be able to make the the real work yeah and how do you find that video performs compared to like images and text in your experience for verticals definitely the face videos do much better than everything else really yeah yeah um and that's as that's for reels and tiktoks for shorts there's a little bit more comfort in repurposing like using videos repurposing them from your youtube videos and your podcast those still do really really well okay youtube It is a little more forgiving.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. Okay.

I have a listener question for you. It's a fairly long one. So I'll read it and we can try to go through it together. Okay.

So this is a guy who's kind of working full-time and he's got a side business. And he's sending to schools. Sending to schools. So he says, how can I effectively promote my product to schools across different channels without investing too much time and money while also juggling a full-time consulting job?

I've been cold calling and sending emails, but the process is lengthy and often results in a delayed response or no response at all. I've had some success with demos and understanding schools' needs, but the final decision is often out of my control. Any advice how to increase the visibility of my product and maximize my efforts? So it's kind of how do you get visibility for a product without spending money and time?

So it's a really, really tough question, this. So how would you advise someone who's kind of running something part-time, trying to get attention and awareness for a product that they're selling on the side? Yeah. So at the awareness stage, I've been there, so I know exactly what you're talking about.

And what I did is I batched my time. I set aside Friday afternoons to create my marketing and scheduled it all out in that week. So it looked like I was always showing up. Nobody actually knew that I had a full job They thought that Shiny Marketing was full then but it wasn So I would do that So I was showing up consistently and he mentioned something about demos he could probably automate that process creating a funnel with like demio using um an automated dem um demo i spend demo and demio yeah they're too similar but he can automate that process having it automated will save him so much time and he'll be able to sell when he's working and not get caught so i would recommend that and then doing the borrowing other people's audiences as he has an afternoon off or something schedule back-to-back one so he can get that awareness with people who already have that audience that he wants he was asking how he can build his his audience on LinkedIn.

Any advice? I think from my experience, it's just been about storytelling, like sharing behind the scenes as I build a business. I haven't seen any, any, like anything work. It's more salesy than that on LinkedIn, but just curious to hear what your thoughts on building an audience with connections and that kind of thing.

Yeah. Salesy does not work well on LinkedIn. People do not like being sold to. I would say to gain the most awareness, LinkedIn newsletters are huge.

any tool really in a social media platform where they recently announced it put it out there they amplify it so if you're an early adapter you're going to get more more views that way so linkedin newsletters do really well you could also do lives or audio events events do really well on linkedin so I would recommend that. Yeah, and stay with the value. All of your content should be about that problem that you solve and not trying to sell. And just make sure that you're in front of the right audience.

So you could use LinkedIn Navigator to make sure that you're connecting to the kinds of people who would want to buy it so they see it when you're posting. Yeah, cool. Good advice. So this show is called Unscalable.

So I'm keen to hear from your experience with kind of building your business what's a tactic that you've used uh that isn't necessarily scalable that's helped you get your business off the ground and i know you mentioned selling to audiences that kind of thing anything else that you could suggest or talk about that has not been scalable not been scalable something you've had to like really work hard at oh my god everything i had to work hard at well i mean like having to work manually at you know yeah yeah yeah i would let's see here something manual Well, I think that doing live webinars, which is super manual, is so much more effective than automated ones.

So if possible, I would recommend that. And bringing in a partner is really helpful. You'll at least double the amount of people who show up. But that's something that I wouldn't want to scale because I like having the opportunity to have those conversations.

and we get to actually know each other on those calls. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen some tools where you can like have your recorded video play for an audience. And I always wonder if that's like maybe missing out on the opportunity of putting a face to a company and like building a trust, the no like trust factor.

Yes, I'm with you on that. I think that if your goal is to sell and you've created a webinar that the intention is to sell a certain program, do that. It'll sell for you when you're not available. But if your intention is to build an audience and build trust with them, do it live.

You can't replicate the energy of live or the back and forth. Yeah, that's so true. Getting their questions in the end and being able to have those deep conversations on their particular problem. You can't earn trust.

You can't automate that. Yeah. Okay. Before we go, just a quick question on AI and automation.

So you mentioned AI before and using it in your marketing process. Yes. Any tips you can give, like any kind of prompts that you've used to help you automate your marketing or improve your marketing processes that you recommend to listeners? Like what are your top three suggestions for prompts to use?

Okay. I love AI and it's flawed. It's completely flawed, but there are some really good ways to do So when I'm creating messaging around a certain topic, I will pick out my favorite messages that I've developed for myself or a client. And then I'll put it in chat GPT and say, give me some more like this.

And sometimes they come up with stuff that's better than what I put together. But it's still within that vein and has been like researched to the extent where like I know that this is what I want to talk about. So that's one is make this better or give me 10 more like this. I do that with subject lines too and social media posts, like make this better, but give them the original content that is already A plus to start with.

And then you get the gold out. Awesome. So that's one. Another thing that I really like doing is asking AI about what's missing from a certain book.

Like, let's say, like, my ideal customer probably read StoryBrand. So I'll ask ChatGPT, hey, what do StoryBrand readers say is missing from that? So that's something that I can include in my own content, because I know this is something they care about, and it's a missed opportunity. That's another one I really like.

and then when it comes to content creation i'll give chat gpt a bunch of ideas that did really really well for me and then i'll ask them tell me 20 more that are also like this and then sure enough it's spit out gold if you give them gold it'll spit out gold that's brilliant have you ever tried like the role play thing like i'm an ex whatever tell me about it's so good so for me i always write out like the persona first like even if it's about me i'll say i'm I'm creating a podcast about this.

Give me a few questions to ask the guest, whatever. And then I would link to the LinkedIn profile. So there's another thing, like you can link to the LinkedIn profile. So you can say, I'm doing a podcast about like business, startups, that kind of thing.

Here's the guest who's coming on the show. Give me 10 questions to ask them about their background and the subject matter as well. So it's amazing for that kind of thing. Yeah.

I like that. But that also just gave me an idea. Like if you're researching your customer, you can then ask chat gbt like put in those linkedin profiles of your favorite customers and put them in there and tell me like tell me some attributes that are that are for these type of customers what are their problems that's a brilliant idea i'm doing it right after this cool sarah um thanks for coming on the show uh so just before we go we have a mix of entrepreneurs founders marketers listening where can they find you online like where's the best place to reach you yeah they can find me everywhere at sarah noel block that's my full name and my podcast is the tiny marketing show do you want to talk about the giveaway real quick yeah sure yeah go for it so we're giving away um a full year subscription to story prompt so i think we'll have in the show notes page, the link to that to be able to sign up for that and get that for free.

Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much, Sarah.