Maximize SEO and marketing with Lorraine Ball

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with marketing expert Lorraine Ball. She talks about effective strategies for boosting SEO, for creating content, and how to gauge the effectiveness of marketing.

Ball is the founder of Roundpeg, a digital agency in Carmel, Indiana, building smart strategies for businesses who want to use internet marketing to grow. Founder of the Digital Toolbox, an online community for business owners needing to know more about digital marketing. She is also the host of More than a Few Words, a weekly podcast, marketing conversation for business owners.

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Transcript

Erin Manning  0:02  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau  0:11  
The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Photo Finale and Advertek Printing. Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by marketing expert Lorraine ball, who's based in Carmel, Indiana. Hello, Lorraine, how are you today? 

Lorraine Ball 
I'm great. How are you today? 

Gary Pageau
I'm doing great. So Lorraine, before I get started with people, I usually like to them to share their background a little bit, can you tell me a little bit about your journey into becoming a marketing consultant.

Lorraine Ball  0:48  
So it I wish I could tell you that there was a grand plan that I knew exactly that I was going to do this when I started out. For confession. I have an undergrad degree in elementary education. I've worked in oil field supply and heating and air conditioning. I went back to school and got a master's in marketing and set off on a corporate career until one day I woke up and I went You know what, you people move to slow bureaucracy and indecision, it's not my style. And so left the corporate world behind me the bad coffee and glass ceilings and started my own at the time traditional agency, which over the last 20 years morphed into a digital agency. And along the way, I discovered that there were a lot of people that didn't know what we were learning. And so we started teaching and training. And so today, the digital toolbox. Digital toolbox club is where you can find me most often offering online marketing tools, tips and resources for business owners, you work a lot directly with small business owners who make up the majority of my audience, what is the one thing that they always seem to get wrong? I think one of the things that a lot of them are getting wrong is they are obsessing about the wrong thing when it comes to search engine optimization. Okay, there's a lot of emphasis on keyword stuffing and meta tags and all the geeky techie stuff. And they keep forgetting that search engines don't spend any money with them. People do, what we've really started focusing on? Well, we've been focusing on it for about 10 years now is more humanized and content based SEO, talking to people and what we've discovered is if you do a good job of talking to your audience, the search engines will find you.

Gary Pageau  2:41  
So it would be an example of talking to you to your audience, let's say for example, you're running a local photo store, how would you talk to your customers on your website in such a way that would benefit your SEO?

Lorraine Ball  2:56  
So the first thing that you need to do is you need to start with the questions that prospective customers have. And those questions tend to fall into one of four categories. There's that first informational search when people don't, they don't really know what they don't know. And they start typing in, I just found a box on my grandmother's photos, what do I do with them? Right? And so that's that first informational questions, then there are the, what I call the navigations questions they're looking for, oh, a photography store can help me Is there a photography store near me? Right? Oh, is there a photography store that carries this brand of camera or film that's that second, the navigation? The third level of questions are commercial investigation where they start refining their search comparing options. And then the last one is transactional. So if you're a business, you need to think about those four steps information, commercialization, navigation, and transaction and what are the questions people ask at each step along the way, make a list. And then I love doing this, go to Google and start to type in the question and look at all the other questions that are related to that, that come up. Now you've got a list of 3040 good questions, go to your website and type into the search bar. Any one of those questions? Does anything come up? Right? And invariably, the answer is no. And so the very first thing you need to do is come up with a plan to start answering what you know, are the questions customers have.

Gary Pageau  4:42  
I mean, are you saying like have an FAQ on this site? Or how would this be inside the site?

Lorraine Ball  4:49  
So I, I think FAQ pages are great at a high level, but I really would recommend that you create a blog and answer each question individually. And when I say answer each question, remember that there are literally millions, hundreds of millions of pieces of data on Google. And so if you want human beings and Google to value what you have to say, you can't give me one paragraph, right isn't enough. So if there's a question, how do I restore my grandmother's wedding photo? Right? I don't want to see a paragraph, I want to say six to 800 words. Okay, so

Gary Pageau  5:34  
That's like the sweet spot for that minimum.

Lorraine Ball  5:36  
Yeah. But on your FAQ page, you can have, how do I restore grandma's photos? You know, it's a complicated process, read more. So your FAQ page becomes like a directional sign that drives people deeper into the website, to learn more about your expertise about what they need to know, that really establishes you as an authority.

Gary Pageau  6:03  
Doesn't that take a lot of time to get results from that sort of SEO work? Get me because Google has to find it has to index it has to look at everything else. It

Lorraine Ball  6:13  
This is not a quick hit content basis. But here's the other side of it. And I'll give you examples from a range of industries. In each of these cases, the blog post I am referring to you is 10 or more years old. The first is carpet store. And they have a comparison blog post that they wrote 10 years ago, on different types of high pile carpet. that blog post gets traffic every week, every week for the last 10 years, people have come to their website, because of that blog post. Now, when you start to see that you don't just hit the bottom of the page, you go, Oh, that was nice. I'll go to something else. If you have a page like that on your website, you better have a contact form, you better have an offer, you better have something that tells me I got to the bottom of the page. What's my next step? Right? What somebody wants told me was, you know, when you're starting out, you can advertise and you'll jump from zero to 50. And as long as you're spending money on advertising, you're going to stay at 50. With content marketing, you're going to start at zero, you're going to get to 10, you're going to get to 20, you're going to get to 30 4050. But then as that blog post continues to live on and continues to drive traffic, it will go to 6070 ad, and it won't come back down. The minute you stop advertising, it's gone. Advertising you're renting, content marketing, you are buying.

Gary Pageau  7:55  
You're owning, right, you're owning it there. Yeah. Is there a place for buying Google AdWords because I know I have said in a couple sessions recently where people are saying it has been effective for them.

Lorraine Ball  8:07  
It is not an either or, however, before you spend money on Google AdWords, you need to think about your whole sales funnel. It breaks my heart when I talk to people. And they're like, well, I ran Google AdWords, and I spent 500 1000 $2,000. And I didn't get anything. Really? Where did you send them? Well, they send them to my homepage, and I figured they could figure out what to do? No, right. If you're going to do Google AdWords, you need to create first, a custom landing page that specifically talks about whatever it is you're advertising, right, with a very obvious contact form that you can then track somebody came from Google because they were looking for photo restoration or Nikon cameras or converting glass slides to digital, whatever it is. They click on that ad they get to your page, there's no bait and switch yet promised me special pricing on cameras, you prompt whatever you promised me about it, find it, find it right away, and then have some kind of conversion form to capture that lead. And if you don't have that sales funnel, don't spend the money on the advertising.

Gary Pageau  9:29  
So what about reviews reviews is one area that has gotten a lot of attention lately, where people are really pushing, you know, either Google reviews or site reviews or product reviews or things like that as an aid for finding people. Is there a benefit to that? Hell yes. Oh, can I say hell? Yes, you can. This is a grown up podcast. Okay.

Lorraine Ball  9:51  
So this is actually nothing new. Interestingly, way back in my corporate days, this is going to date me but way back in the Late 80s and early 90s, the federal government actually did a lot of studies under the tarp study on customer satisfaction and the impact of good interactions. And everything I learned when I was reading that study still apply today, even more. So, back then my mom would come home from work, and she said on the porch, and she might talk to one of our neighbors and, and they'd be talking about a new hair salon or a new restaurant, and then the other person would go off and go, Oh, I might try that. Right. The only thing that has changed is those conversations aren't happening across the backyard fence anymore. They're happening online. Right, the vast majority of people are more likely to believe, a review from a complete stranger than they are to believe you when you're talking about your business. Reviews are absolute business gold. Now, here's the challenge. If you run a fabulous business, 95% of your reviews are going to be great. But there are going to be some that aren't great, right. And it is more important, how you handle the negative reviews, right? Then all the positive reviews that you have. So I have a little advice for most people. Number one, treat the negative review, like somebody has walked into your building, and they are yelling at you. If somebody came into your store and started yelling, you would walk up to them and say, I'm sorry that you're unhappy. I'm sorry that you're disturbed. Let's go have a conversation. We'll go sit in my office, right? I mean, that's a natural thing. You get them out of the hallway, you get them away from the other customers. And you acknowledge I'm sorry, you were disappointed? Not necessarily. I'm sorry, we screwed up. But I'm sorry, you are disappointed. Right? Same thing works on social. Same thing works. If somebody posts a negative review, I'm sorry, you're disappointed. Let's see how we can resolve this. And then you take the conversation offline.

Gary Pageau  12:09  
That is one of the things I always hear from retailers, they say, I don't really want to deal with the bad reviews. And maybe that's a lack of confidence on their part, my husband

Lorraine Ball  12:19  
and I do a lot of traveling and we do a lot of the hotels, calm and TripAdvisor reviews to figure out where we're going to stay. I won't dismiss a hotel that has a bad review, what I'm going to look at is, what is the percentage? Okay, 95% of the reviews are positive, which means I've got a pretty good shot of having a good experience, right? Then what I want to look at is how do they handle their mistakes? Right? Because if something happens, will I be treated with respect? Will I be acknowledged? Will they work with me to resolve it? Right? That's what people are looking for. So embrace the negative reviews, it's your shot. One of the things that tarp study discovered is, let's say your satisfaction is add a 90% or 75%. Let's go 75%. If you have a negative interaction with a customer, and you resolve it quickly, 24 to 48 hours on most businesses, you resolve it quickly, you won't go back to 75%, you'll go to 85 or 90% in the eyes of that customer. Right now, I'm not advocating that you deliberately screw up so you can clean up your messes. Keeping that in mind recognizing that when you recover, you will recover higher than you were. And so because social media is so public, you actually recover not only in the eyes of that customer, but in the eyes of anyone else who's reading that review.

Gary Pageau  13:53  
You think marketing has lost a lot of the personal touch. I mean, there's a lot of talk about personalization. Right. But to me, it almost seems cold and analytical.

Lorraine Ball  14:04  
I think marketing was always cold and analytical. Okay, watching national television commercials reading ads in magazines that spoke to the masses. They were sitting back in their offices studying the numbers, profiling their audiences, they didn't have the level of data that we have today. But they were making assumptions about their target customer and they were creating messages. And so I think good companies actually have a huge advantage today because they can choose to be more human and choose to be more personal. The neighborhood restaurant 50 years ago could welcome you when you walked in the door. But their ads were pretty cheesy and they were pretty, pretty static where they tried to make themselves look more professional. But their Instagram page with the photograph of grandma still in the kitchen making her tomato sauce, or the newest member of the family that, you know, the the, the the grandson who got his first camera and he's now taking pictures and working in the developer lab, that human side and being able to share that human side has actually made marketing more personal, not less personal, if you choose to.

Gary Pageau  15:30  
And is there a rule of thumb on that? Because again, there's a lot of, you know, some of the folks that, you know, I've spoken with, you know, you make a big deal out of, you know, Betty, the new digital printer, and then Betty leaves in two months. You know, I mean, there is there are issues today with turnover, staff turnover and retention and things like that, whether or not and it's not always even a reflection of the business or what people are being paid. It's just people's lives change. And it seems like, you know, people don't stay very long. So what is the pros and cons of that?

Lorraine Ball  16:05  
I think that is a decision company by company. I'll give you an example. My digital agency RoundPeg was acquired by another agency Dexia, their choice had always been to publish blog posts from the Dexia team. We publish blog posts from every member of the team you knew who wrote what people come and go in. That's the reality when you hire young professionals at the beginning of their career, they're going to come and go. And I will tell you that the welcome post never got anywhere near as much traffic as their sweet goodbye post. So, and everybody was like, Where are you going? We wish you the best of luck. What a great, how wonderful that you started your career at RoundPeg. And we I have the parents, the grandparents, the aunts, and the uncles of people who worked for me 12-15 years ago, who still follow the page. So they, that community remains loyal to me as long as as long as people are not, you know, running out because you're a horrible employee, right? Yeah, but let's assume that it's a matter of better opportunity came along, treat the people as people recognize, acknowledge, celebrate them, your customers will connect to the whole company. And they will stay. We're a client that a food manufacturing company that they had, you know, people knew the names and faces behind the brand, they knew the plant manager, they, they because they'd seen articles about him on social for years. And when there was an issue where they had a recall, their community got behind them, they were so supportive, and it had everything to do with they felt connected to the individual people, right, it is a choice, you have to be confident enough in your company and in your relationship with your employees. Right, you want to put it out there. But one of the things that I find you we work with a lot of heating and air conditioning clients, the technician that comes to work for you, well, his mother knows he works for you. But his aunt's his uncles, his cousins don't? Well, when you share that on Facebook, suddenly you start getting referrals from the family members because they want to support him or her

Gary Pageau  18:24  
well. And I think in the photo industry, the segment that we work in, you know, you're also dealing with people's personal memories, right? So there's sort of a, an implied pipe connection there, the person who's in the lab is seeing the prints, you know, they're seeing the family, they're seeing the kids grow up. And so I think there is the potential to have that connection there.

Lorraine Ball  18:44  
Well, and also in that industry, one of my favorite things is to develop what's called user generated content, where you invite your community. So that person in the lab was like, Oh, my God, I loved this picture of your daughter, can we share it? Or would you share it right on our Facebook page? Right?

Gary Pageau  19:08  
Again, the photo answer has has the advantage of actually being able to make heroes of their clients or their customers.

Lorraine Ball  19:14  
Yeah, in a way that a lot of other industries can't

Gary Pageau  19:18  
Yeah, I don't think Dunkin Donuts could make a hero of somebody eating a doughnut, but maybe they could because they good? Well, maybe they maybe if they hired you, they could because there's a lot of technology in the photo industry for good or for bad, right? We've got you know, we've kind of moved upstream from the sort of comfy analog process of you know, film and paper and chemistry and was a very linear process. You dropped off the film, you picked up the prints, you were overjoyed. And then you know, you may or may not make an enlargement or whatnot. And as digital technology has become more prevailing in the industry, it's sort of created a Wednesday a disruption but a distraction I guess is a better word. For the amount of opportunity, the amount of potential that is out there, what do you say to your clients or to business owners who are inundated with multiple opportunities, not only for product development, but also you know, marketing and outreach possibilities, because you can't do everything,

Lorraine Ball  20:20  
my favorite term is to do what's called a tech stack audit. So you sit down and you make a list of all the technology that you're using. And in my industry, there is a price tag with almost all of it. There's my subscription for Adobe, this is what I'm paying, present cast this is. And so you have all of these. And then you also identify, well, what do I use each of these products or services for and you do this, I would say, probably once a year, because it will make you crazy if you do it more often. Because there's always creep, somebody comes along, and you're like, Oh, that sounds like a great idea. I'm going to subscribe to that I'm going to subscribe to this. And then all of a sudden, at the end of the year, you look at it, you're like, I don't really use this, or this product does this and this. And so twofold. Number one, go back through everything that you're paying for and identify what you're not using. And then also any time someone comes to you with a software a product, a tool before you go after it with shiny, shiny, shiny object syndrome, whoo, got to have that step back and go, I can put that in the pile. What do I take out? Right? The funny thing is, I've been doing this kind of consulting with my clients for 20 years long before social media, you know, okay, so you're in the yellow pages where you talk about the wisdom of that or not, you know, you're doing the newspaper, you're doing television, you want to do postcards, now somebody has come along, and they've got this other, you know, billboard, you only have X amount of dollars for your marketing, if you're going to put the billboard up. What do we take out? That same, there's only so there's only so much room for so much. And it's not saying that something isn't a good idea. And it's perfectly okay to have an I'll get back to list. And I do this a lot with products. And I'm like, Okay, I think that software product, or that tool has a lot of promise, I don't have the bandwidth to learn how to use it right now, I don't have anybody on my team who can manage that program. I'm going to put it aside for three months and revisit it.

Gary Pageau  22:32  
It's okay to just say no, you don't have to jump on with the tic toc. And then we're the clubhouse. As soon as it's, it's launched,

Lorraine Ball  22:37  
I have always been a I'm going to jump into everything, I'm going to give it a fair shake. But I'm also going to admit, when this doesn't work, and the example is Tick tock, All my friends are like, you got to be on Tick tock, this is awesome. I jumped on. I did a weekly chat with a friend of mine every Friday morning for five months, five months, I felt like that was a really good test. And what I discovered in those five months was that there are a million people on there Who all are making a million dollars. They're all talking about it. Now, if they're making so much money, why are they're talking about it? You know, why aren't they on a beach somewhere? What I also figured out is my clients were not there, right? We were having great conversations with no ability to reuse it. And so we both stepped back and went, you know, this, this doesn't make any sense. And so we switched, every Friday morning, we do a Facebook Live, and now we're pushing it to both Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn live. We can record it, we can reuse the content elsewhere. And so try something understand what you're trying to get out of it and why you think you want to be there and then have an evaluation after a reasonable period of time. You know, tick tock may change and I may decide to go back to it. But I'm actually I think TikTok what that TikTok, Clubhouse was a phenomena of the pandemic. We were all in our houses, we were all alone. And we wanted to talk to people

Gary Pageau  24:12  
who are the thing that I think has always been going back to the days of the Yellow Pages and postcards and billboards and now with digital tools is how on earth do you track ROI and meaning in a meaningful way, like, you know, we say all i got five clicks, I got 1000, clicks or whatever, what is a great way to actually attach dollars to that ROI.

Lorraine Ball  24:34  
Depending on how much you want to geek. You can put tracking codes these days with the internet on just about everything. If you're running Facebook ads, you need to install the facebook pixel on your website, so you know where people go. If you're running Google AdWords, you need to have a tracking code that goes all the way to your thank you page so that you can backtrack If you're going to do direct mail, you should have a custom landing page that that URL only appears on that direct mail piece. So you can look at and go, you know what we had 500, people went to get my company slash offer 20 five.com. And nobody filled out the contact form on that page, or we didn't have anybody go to that page. So that campaign didn't drive traffic. So in every instance you can, you can look at marketing's ability to drive someone to you to initiate the beginning of a conversation, there is a difference between marketing and sales. I track for several of my clients, how many phone calls they get from their Google My Business Page, and how much traffic they get to their website. Then I also look at how many contacts submission forms for some of my clients, if they don't have if they have a dedicated phone numbers easy if they don't, but the issue is, I can drive someone to the phone. But once you pick up the phone and have the conversation, that's where marketing ends. And so whenever anybody talks to me about ROI, I'm like, you know, part of the problem is that you're judging marketing, but it is dependent on your scout sales skills. Right? It reminds me of when I was in corporate, I was responsible for the p&l of my brand. Except I didn't control the pricing, my prep, there was a pricing manager who was outside of my control setting pricing. And I was like, how do I control p&l? If I can't control pricing? Same thing here I can, I can drive those people to you. But you're not going to get any ROI till you close the sale. And that is a totally different conversation.

Gary Pageau  26:53  
What happens with your clients when you say that when you say like, I'm sure you do things where you maybe call your clients store, you know, you you do test drives, and what they do. And it seems to me like that is one of the things that almost every business these days and work on because they're short staffed, or people have a bad day or whatnot, and you get into, you know, not great phone manners. 

Lorraine Ball  27:16  
For example, because we are a small agency, we can be selective about who we work with. And the people that hire us get a lot of this upfront. In other words, they're going to hear this from me before they sign on the dotted line. Because the one thing I don't want to do is get into a situation where somebody has hired us and doesn't really understand what they're signing up for, and what kind of magic I can work and what kind of magic I can't. I don't want to disparage my competitors, but there are agencies that smoke and mirror. And that's not what we do. So I don't have a lot of these conversations six months in that goes, Well, we did well, here's what we said. And every month we've had a conversation, like like, we'll do it every month. Here's where we are, here's what we were working towards. Here's where we performed above, here's below, getting into a relationship with an agency that is honestly giving you feedback and telling you where you are along the way is really important.

Gary Pageau  28:19  
So spener conversations, tell me more about the digital toolbox would you have called an online community for business owners,

Lorraine Ball  28:27  
the digital toolbox started, because we had a lot of people coming to us who for one reason or another were not ready to work with us. Either they didn't have the budget or they had the budget, but they didn't know what they didn't know. So the conversations were very confusing, because we had to spend a lot of time educating. Here's what digital marketing is, here's what SEO is, here's, here's what a good website looks like versus a bad one. And as I said, in the beginning, I started my life as a teacher. And so that was a really natural thing for me to go back and start doing presentations, and then webinars and then recording the webinars. And so we started with a conference and then put a lot of the content online and we've been adding to it for the last two years. We have a Facebook group. So if you've got a question about digital marketing, you can hop over to the group and ask it. And so that's why we think of it as a community. We do some networking. RIAs, sometimes we use zoom, and sometimes we use the Google, the Facebook rooms, and those are kind of nice. And then there's just a lot of online training both some free training every month as well as paid training, and our paid members have access to the whole library, which I think right now has got resource count. We're up to about 100 and I think that's pretty evenly split between white papers, workbooks and videos

Gary Pageau  29:49  
and how would someone find that DigitalToolbox.club? Okay, so you got the little unique extension there. Yes, you want us to do a weekly podcast Tom about more than a few word

Lorraine Ball  30:02  
More Than a Few Words is a marketing conversation for business owners every week, we have several episodes that we do the Sunday morning show is a little one minute marketing tip. I say one minute, it runs between 50 seconds and a minute and a half because some things you just can't cover in a minute, right. And then the the longer episodes, sometimes we do one sometimes we do to our interviews with marketing professionals from around the world. And it's fun because I've gotten quite a few friends now in Australia and in England. And so when I can travel again, I've got some people I'd love to meet face to face. All the topics are about marketing and business tips. And it's a nice little grab and go podcast.

Gary Pageau  30:43  
And that's listed in all the podcast directories and whatnot.

Lorraine Ball  30:47  
You can find me wherever you listen to podcasts, or at more than a few words calm. 

Gary Pageau  30:52  
Well, thank you, Lorraine for your time, where is the best place for people to connect with you directly?

Lorraine Ball  30:57  
You can find me on either those properties LinkedIn, I would say that's probably the platform where I am realistically the most active you can find the rain ball on LinkedIn.

Gary Pageau  31:08  
Well, thank you, Lorraine and best wishes for a great summer and hopefully we'll catch up with you soon. 

Lorraine Ball  31:14  
That would be lovely. Thanks for having me.

Erin Manning  31:18  
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. For more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.thedeadpixelssociety.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai