It’s a monumental episode!
We have such a special guest on the show this week.
The GODFATHER of helpful marketing. Someone who has provided a significant amount of inspiration to us in our own journeys.
This week we chat with Timbo Reid, as he shared with us what being helpful in marketing really means and how to go about it and stick at it.
There’s a few great stories in there and is a timely reminder to all of us the power of being helpful, even as we’re deep in the trenches figuring out how to further optimise our B2B marketing workflow!
Watch The Episode
Links:
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Transcript
[00:00:00]George Coudounaris: welcome back to the B2B Playbook listeners. This week’s interview [00:01:00] is with Timbo Reid. He’s the godfather of helpful marketing. He’s the host of the 13 year old award-winning small business big marketing podcast. He’s a sensational keynote speaker and a conference mc, and he’s also an author of one of my favorite books, Kevin The Boomer Rang Effect.
He’s also a huge inspiration for our five bees. F.
Kevin Chen: He sure is. And I dunno, you love that book, George. We talk about it a lot, uh, here on the podcast and in person. It was pretty surreal for us to have him on the podcast, particularly you, George. I’m very happy you had that chance to talk to him. Listeners, you can hear the excitement in George’s voice.
But yeah, we’re very grateful to have this opportunity to meet one of our heroes in marketing. And aside from George Fangirling during most of the conversation. we also got a few pieces of marketing gold from timber as he would. The first is B2B marketing is more like P2P people to [00:02:00] people,
George Coudounaris: and related to that, Kev, he said, make sure you understand that person and what problems they have, and then go about solving them.
Kevin Chen: another point that he made that we love to hop on about as well, is that helpful marketing actually positions you as the opinion leader in your industry as that expert in your industry.
George Coudounaris: And Kev, something that he said, which I think has been very true for us, is that having that helpful mindset actually makes business more enjoyable. As I said, Kevin, dad wanted a doctor. I’m not a doctor, but at least what we do still helps people.
Kevin Chen: that’s it. We’re both here. Helping people hopefully. And once you start, Timbo says it’s hard to stop. And I think it’s very true from our experience as well. It’s very hard to stop. Once you’re on that train of helping people. It’s definitely a cycle that feeds itself.
George Coudounaris: and finally, Kev, one other point that I really love that he made was focus on quality over quantity when you start. Because otherwise, if you’re just going at quantity, it’s gonna become very overwhelming. This is a long game. You need to make it [00:03:00] sustainable and you need to commit to it.
Alright, Kev, listeners, we hope you enjoy this conversation with none other than Timbo Reid.
George Coudounaris: welcome back to the B2B Playbook. Listeners, as you know, we rarely have guests on our show. Instead, we select a few true experts who align with our view that B2B marketing is more about people. Not platforms. Today, our special guest is my favorite marketer of all time, Tim Reid.
Now Tim is a huge inspiration behind what we do here at the B2B Playbook and is the godfather of helpful marketing. He’s the host of the 13 year old award-winning small business big marketing podcast, which is my favorite marketing podcast, by the way, and is a sensational keynote speaker and conference mc.
He’s the author. Of the book, the Boomerang Effect. Why being helpful in your marketing returns more customers and makes you more money, which is an awesome read. I’ve got a signed copy here from Tim from years ago on my desk. [00:04:00] Timbo, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Tim Reid: George, it is absolutely my pleasure. And thank you for calling me the godfather and not the grandfather of small business marketing because , that would make me feel significantly
old
George Coudounaris: That’s it. You can be a young godfather and timbo. I mean it, on my bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Joe Politi, I’ve got Seth Godden. I’ve got so many marketing greats and the Boomerang Effect sits there for me. And you’re a huge inspiration for so
Tim Reid: Well, well done to you, man. You 70 podcasts, 70 episodes later, most people fall off at six, so I think it’s awesome. Good on you for doing what you’re doing. And the whole B2B world needs a bit of marketing love. I like to refer to it as P2P people to people, cuz it doesn’t matter what you’re dealing with, who you’re dealing with, at the end of
the day, they’re humans.
George Coudounaris: That’s been our experience too, Timbo, and I think that’s why in our own framework we’ve actually adopted so much of your helpful marketing mindset. So for a little bit more context, my business partner and I, [00:05:00] Kevin, we were really struggling when we got into the B2B world to apply some of the B2C concepts and.
Once we stripped it back, I think we realized that it was fundamentally so much about humans and relationships and the things that you always tried to do with big businesses at scale at B2C didn’t necessarily really work in b2b. So once we tested and tried all the different things out there, we ended up coming up with a bit of a playbook.
And we realize that there’s really five major stages to our playbook. And the second stage is what we call be helpful. And so much of that is founded on a helpful marketing mindset.
Mm-hmm.
And timbo, maybe a great place for us to start is actually a quote from your book, the Boomerang Effect. I’ve got it here.
So you said, when you are helpful, good things happen. It’s my WOOWOO theory in action. It’s the way the world goes. Timbo, what does it mean to be helpful in your marketing, and why does it work?
What does it mean to be helpful in your marketing?
Tim Reid: I suppose the first point to start with George [00:06:00] is just instead of, listen to this as a human, what I’m about to say as a human, not as a business owner or marketer or employee of a business, and reflect on the last time you were helpful. And reflect on the last time you were helped. And it feels good. It just does.
It’s like that’s what part of, it’s part of the human experience. So I, call it woowoo. It’s not really woowoo, it’s just human. And I think we forget about that sometimes in marketing. So the idea of being helpful in your marketing, Recognizes that there are two forms of marketing. Neither are right, neither are wrong.
There’s push marketing and there is pull marketing. And push marketing is like advertising, direct mail, letterbox drops, sponsorship where you pu because of the limited amount of time or space that you have, you push a message onto an unsuspecting target audience as US marketers like to call them, and that’s.
But you gotta find a lot of money cuz it’s an expensive option. And the [00:07:00] other, the opposite of that is pool marketing, where you are so helpful because you’ve identified the major problems your customers have. or your prospects have, and in your marketing, you go about solving those problems, helping them make a more informed purchase decision, often in your favor, and push marketing helpful.
Marketing can take the form of content, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, eBooks, social media. It can be, even the copy that appears in ads can be more helpful than salesy. To me it just makes perfect sense and I grew up in a big advertising agency in the world of push marketing, so
I’ve seen both sides.
George Coudounaris: my business partner and I, we started off in agency land as well. We were on the B2C side, you know, spending 20, 30 million a year mostly in Google Ads. And I gotta tell you, Timbo, we thought we were absolute rock stars when it came to marketing. Cuz we thought, you put a dollar in, you get a dollar 50 out.
How good is this? You can scale to infinity. And then [00:08:00] boy, oh boy, did I realize that I knew nothing about marketing
Tim Reid: Well, it’s not a bad, it’s not bad being able to put a dollar in and getting a dollar 50 out and please continue to do that for anyone who is doing, that type of marketing. It’s just that there’s other areas as well to explore. It’s if marketing’s a pie, then there are a lot of, there are a lot of slices and as small business owners.
In terms of your audience, are we talking small George or are we
talking medium? Is there a kind of
George Coudounaris: Yeah, the, yeah, small to medium b2b.
Tim Reid: so you know budgets are important. Budgets are tight, and one of the great things about helpful marketing too is that it doesn’t actually have to cost a whole lot
of dough.
George Coudounaris: Yeah. Yeah. And that was really the biggest thing is we started dealing with clients. didn’t really have the budget. And we realized as well that those that did have the big budget, the only reason we could get a dollar 50 out when we put a dollar in was because they’d already spent so much on brand and creating demand for that product.
And really all willed we were doing was closing that demand with things like Google Ads
Tim Reid: Yep. [00:09:00] Good observation.
George Coudounaris: Timbo when it comes to helpful market. Do you remember when you had your own, light bulb moment about the power of help by market?
Tim Reid: I actually read a book by Jay Bayer. Who, or Bayer, always b a e r. He’s a recent guest on my podcast, and he is a I love him. I love his view on marketing. His take on marketing. He wrote a book called Utility, Y O U. Utility, and he didn’t actually mention the word helpful, but it was just a way of actually being helpful in your marketing.
And he just gave example after example of businesses that were solution based. That’s what they were. They’d gone to the trouble of really deeply understanding who they’re selling to. And when I say that, so often businesses don’t spend a lot of time. identifying who their ideal client is, and if they do, they get it down to a demographic description. Oh, it’s a 40 to 55 year old male working in corporate earning [00:10:00] over 200 grand a year living in the eastern suburbs, which doesn’t actually tell us a whole lot about a person at all. But if you understand them psychographically and sociologically, then what problems do they have that you can solve? What does success look like to them?
How do they feel about your. , do they know a lot about it? Are they scared of it? Are they fearful? Are they excited? Asking these type of questions? And you’re gonna get a much richer marketing output because you just, you understand that person a lot more. I always draw the analogy, George, of writing a letter to someone, which we never do these days, but it could be an email.
And if I said to you, write a letter to Mary, you’d be like, dunno what to. Dunno who Mary is, but if I describe Mary to you in a way, in, in answering some of those questions that I just detailed, you’re gonna write a pretty good letter to Mary. You’re gonna have her leaning in, she’s gonna be interested, she’s gonna feel heard, understood, [00:11:00] and no different in writing your marketing copy or planning out your marketing campaign.
Understand that person and what problems they have and go about solving them.
George Coudounaris: yeah, it absolutely starts with really, truly, deeply understanding your customers. I’m so glad you brought that up, and that’s something that we really try and emphasize as well, is it starts with just deeply understanding who it is that you’re trying to serve and not everyone that you’re trying to serve.
Because I think I first heard of it on your podcast, Timbo, you want to pick a niche an inch wide and a mild. R rather than just trying to be everything to everyone. Otherwise, no one’s gonna pay attention to you at all.
Tim Reid: Yeah. And never true a word spoken. And you can have a number of niches. It doesn’t mean that you like, okay, this is who we are focusing on, and no one else. You can create a number of niches within a business, but at least start with one and nail that, and then and if you happen to polarize some people, in doing that.
So be it. Cuz they were never meant to be. Anyway, I was just reflecting as you were talking on a book. I’m [00:12:00] looking at my bookshelf at the moment, George, and it was that fellow who I interviewed. He was Jeff Bezos’s right hand man. In fact, they called him Jeff’s shadow
George Coudounaris: Yep.
Tim Reid: written a book calling someone, he’d written a book called Working Backwards, and it was literally the whole Amazon blueprint.
In a book, and so many business books including mine, they could be written on one page, but we don’t sell one page. We wouldn’t get paid. We have we have to write 30 or 40,000 words. But the premise of working backwards, and I, by the fact that you’re nodding your head, you’ve probably listened to the episode, was that start with what the customer wants, start with what the press release is going to read for this idea.
And now let’s work backwards and see if it’s valid. And, starting with the customer and what they want and need is a kind of, again, this ain’t brain surgery, George.
George Coudounaris: And that was a terrific episode. I did listen to it. I think I’ve listened to most of them timbo, so it’s a pretty safe bet. ,
Tim Reid: Hey, I’ve got a I’ve got
this is [00:13:00] breaking news, but it won’t be by the time this goes out, but tomorrow I have Fleetwood Max Manager from 1981 to 1999 coming in for an interview, which makes me laugh because it’s like, why on earth would I be wanting to speak to Fleetwood Max Manager? Well Wanna talk about the business of music. There’s always an angle.
George Coudounaris: That’s unreal. I love that. I love that. And look while we’re on listeners, like every episode of Tim Bowes, even if the title isn’t immediately clear, like what is going to be, so good about that episode, I promise like you will learn something from each and every episode. So please tune in Timbo.
We spoke a little bit about what the be helpful mindset is when it comes to marketing. Can you give us an idea as to, what that mindset does for your business? What the downstream effects are of helpful marketing?
Downstream impacts of helpful marketing
Tim Reid: it positions you as an opinion leader in your industry because you, you are like, as I as I say, someone has to be the most helpful in your industry. It may as well be you. Okay. And so if you [00:14:00] adopt the helpful mindset, it’s a bit like a moth to a flame. You’re going to attract people, particularly the high involvement purchase decisions this stuff rocks for.
It doesn’t necessarily work. If you’re selling chocolate bars, you can still be helpful. But if you have a high involve, if you’re selling a high involvement purchase decision, this stuff is gold. And taking that helpful. mindset all the way along in your customer service, in your marketing messages, in the way you deliver your product.
It all, every aspect of your business, it positions you as someone who cares. Your customer will feel understood. Often they become less price sensitive because they’ve gone, geez, this person knows what they’re talking about. They understand where I’m coming from. it takes your eye, it takes your eye off the price, and all of a sudden you focus on the fact that these guys are really helpful being positioned as an opinion leader in your industry isn’t a bad thing, and we couldn’t have said that 10 or 15 years ago where. To be an opinion leader, you probably needed to, have a regular gig on the [00:15:00] Today Show and be the go-to person for that industry. When that industry needed a spokesperson and you needed to be in the mass media, it’s not the case these days because the marketing?
landscapes changed so much, and just the fact that we have a smartphone in our pocket, on our person all day with a broadcast quality video camera, stills, camera, micro. I mean, We can seriously create some very helpful content on the spot without spending a fortune. So having that helpful mindset, George just makes bus, I think it actually makes business more enjoyable.
George Coudounaris: Oh look, there’s no doubt about it, Timbo. I joke that my dad’s a doctor. I think he would’ve liked a doctor as a son. And I was actually a failed lawyer. So I don’t know if that’s probably worse. But I like to think that our marketing is so helpful that, look, I’m not out here saving lives, but at least I’m trying to do some good every day and to help people.
And we’re truly playing the long game here with our business too. And we’ve only been at it for a couple of years or so and [00:16:00] we’ve already seen the efforts of being helpful like come back in spades to us and that’s not the intention with it. It’s really nice when it happens, but it’s a great way to.
Tim Reid: Oh, that’s
great news, mate. Keep it up.
George Coudounaris: Timbo, you’ve been doing it for much, much longer. Can you give us an idea as to how you’ve implemented this helpful mindset in your own business?
How Timbo’s implemented the helpful mindset in his own business?
Tim Reid: my podcast, the Small business?
Big Marketing Show is proof in point. I’m back engineering this story, George, because the way I started the Small Business big marketing show was opportunistic. And happy to tell that story, but it won’t answer this question.
I had an opportunity to create a podcast. Back in the day, I didn’t even know, no one knew what they were, cuz this is 14 years ago. So I did and I took that opportunity up and created what still exists today. And over the course of time, very well, actually, very quickly I realized that, wow, this has been super helpful to those who are listening.
And then that notion, that mindset then started to drive. [00:17:00] Who am I gonna get on next week? What topic am I going to cover? So then I’d go out on social media or just talk to my small business owning friends and colleagues and say, what’s bothering you? What don’t you understand? What would you like more help on?
Is there an area of marketing that’s really giving you the shits? Can I help you in that? And if they identified that, then I’d go, okay, I’m gonna go and make an episode on the, I’m gonna find the best person in Australia to talk about. Or in the world to talk about that topic and have a conversation and then put out a piece of content in the form of a podcast episode.
And that is helpful marketing right there. And I remember George, when I had the opportunity to create a podcast I’d actually discovered podcasting I’d discovered this podcast called Killer Innovations. And it was posted by this fellow, Phil McKinney, he was the Vice President of Innovation at Hewlett Packard in the. And I just found it scooting around the internet like 15 years ago, and I’m like, whoa, [00:18:00] here is an individual a piece of audio. that I can listen to for free as often as I want, wherever I want. This means two things. I can have my own show and I always wanted to be on radio. That’s my hidden well, and I have been, but I, anyway, back then I really just wanted to be on radio and the second part was like, this means that every small business owner has the opportunity to create their own. and that was when the light went on. I was like, this is amazing. And you create your own show and you position yourself as an expert, be super helpful in the information you deliver, and that can only be a positive for your business development
and growth.
George Coudounaris: I love how that still started with going out and asking, your target listeners, what it is that they were struggling with first, and then you went and found the expert after.
Tim Reid: Absolutely and that’s just a classic example of being helpful to any business owner listening or marketer listening. When was the last time you had a genuine, authentic [00:19:00] conversation with an existing customer or a lost customer or a dormant customer and just sat down with them over the phone on Zoom, over a coffee and just asked some hard questions what don’t you like about doing business with us? What could we do better? And that alone is being helpful. And then you take that the next step and you go and you don’t have to implement everything a customer says. That would be ridiculous. But if they suggest something where you go, that is an awesome idea, then go and implement it.
And then go back and tell that customer, Hey, you remember you talking over that coffee about how I should do this, and this. I’ve done it. Thank you. Helpful. Again, It’s just a helpful mindset and once you’re in it, you can’t get out of it, cuz you’re always looking for ways to solve problems to make the experience better.
Because at the end of the day, I guess we’re talking mainly to business owners. We are creating a business. It’s our baby, it’s our dream. Let’s
raise it the best we can.
George Coudounaris: It’s an endless well of ideas, [00:20:00] and we have a lot of marketers listen to the show as well. And unfortunately, so many of the marketers, timbo, are restricted in their access to existing customers. And often the as we’re talking B2B as well, the sales team are really protective over that relationship with the customer, which is, yeah, it’s such a shame timbo because often when sales are having that conversation with the customer, they’re not thinking about how can I help them?
Or even if they are asking questions about what’s bothering them, they’re just thinking about it with the lens of like, how can I sell more to you? Rather than like a, how can I help you
Tim Reid: Short term limited thinking. If I own a business if you were talking about a business that I owned like that,
I’d be furious. I’d be I’d be, I’d just, I’d be just be really disappointed because I’ve worked in corporate for a long time, George, and I don’t do silos. Now that it’s my business, you’re all in it together or get out, like it’s just, you want to, if you want to, the business grows.
Everyone’s gonna benefit. Protect your own.
One-way [00:21:00] street.
George Coudounaris: I love that approach. Timbo. Look, I hope things are changing. I like this is why when we really got into b2b, we just thought, God, people need to hear about Tim Bow’s. Helpful mindset, like we need this not just in the marketing team, but we needed to spread across like the company as a whole because there is such a clear division between marketing and sales, and the end result is just never a good one for the costume.
Tim Reid: No.
George Coudounaris: Timbo for the smaller businesses who are listening to this and the marketers there’s often just one in-house marketer in a business listening to this and they’re thinking, Timbo, we can’t focus on being helpful. We don’t have time. We need customers, we need revenue. Now, what do you say to those businesses?
What to do about limited resources to be helpful?
Tim Reid: my wish for anyone involved in marketing and business, George, is that it becomes a hobby. , right? When something’s a hobby, you will find the time for it, the energy for it, the money for it, and you will put it in your diary. as a regular recurring [00:22:00] event because it should be just as you visit your solicitor, your accountant, your bookkeeper, your real estate agent, make marketing a hobby and get it in there, right?
Because otherwise it just becomes an expense and an annoyance.
first of all, respect marketing. Realize how important it is and then. Spend the rest of your time slowly integrating helpful into all the push marking that you’re doing. I don’t expect you to embrace it straight away. You need to feel what it’s like to be helpful. You need to see a result.
The thing with being helpful is that it is a long game. You’re not gonna create a podcast episode today or a blog post, or you’re gonna, you’re not gonna write a book today and launch it tomorrow and get inquiry like that. You might get a, the phone might ring, but that would be on the off chance. It is a long game and you’ve just gotta lean into it that the salesperson listening to this is going well. Good luck with that. I’m gonna run some more Facebook ads, but and you should be doing both. So as a place to start, and I think it’s a really fun exercise to do if you want to start. [00:23:00] And if you have the ability to control this part of the marketing and the business that you work for, is to go and identify every single question you have ever been asked by a client or a prospect, and just write ’em down.
As of now, open up the notes app on your smartphone and use that, create a file of frequently asked questions. Now, this is much bigger than frequently asked questions, but just call the file that. Write down every question you’ve ever been asked. When you think you’ve run out, go and ask other people in the business.
When you think you’ve, that’s run out, go to Google and start typing in some searches that people would typically type in when searching for a business or a product that you sell. And have a look at what the other related searches are. and then go about answering each of those questions one by one. So what I mean by that, and basically what I’m getting to George, is I’d like to see on a business’s website, a knowledge center or a learning hub, I don’t care what you call it, it’s bigger than an [00:24:00] FAQ section.
And on that, in that knowledge center, , every single question you’ve ever been asked will be listed. And then if I click on one of those questions, I’ll be taken off to a page that is dedicated to answering that question in a very rich, detailed way. For example, There’s a company in the States called river Pools.
They’re in Phoenix, Arizona, and they’re a very large installer of fiberglass in-ground pools. In fact, they’re the biggest installer of fiberglass in-ground pools in North America, and they do exactly this. So there’s a question, the most common question they get asked is, how much does a fiberglass in-ground pool cost?
And they get asked that every day, multiple times, and they answer that every day multiple times, just like all businesses do. We’re answering the same questions, and the answers are going out into the. Unless we take the time to capture that answer. And, but so for example, if you go to the River Pool website, you’ll see a page that says, how much does a fiberglass in ground pool cost?
There’s a video from the owner, [00:25:00] there is copy, there is graphs and pictures, there’s links to other pages on the River Pool website. That’s how the web is formed. And as a. First of all, great seo, Google. Love it. So if someone types in North America, how much does a fiberglass in ground pool cost? Guess who’s coming up?
Number one organically on Google, and the second part of that is the one-on, so that’s mass marketing. The one-on-one nature of what I just explained is also incredibly powerful because next time someone calls river Pools and says, how much does a fiberglass in ground pool cost? The person at River Pools will answer that question face to face or on the phone, but at the end they’ll say, Hey, listen, can I give you a, can I email you a link to a page on our website that goes into even greater detail in answering that question.
they’re gonna think you’re a rockstar. They’re gonna think, look at the trouble this business has gone to, so as a way of launching a helpful marketing mindset, that is a great place to start. [00:26:00] Just identify every single question you’ve ever been
asked and go about answering them.
George Coudounaris: Such a great place to start. And I do love that mindset of treat it as a hobby for so many of our marketers. Even though marketing is their job, they’re actually spending so much of their day just doing whatever sales asks them to do, and they don’t get to dedicate time to that helpful marketing.
We. Really try and encourage them to try and dedicate, 15, 20% of their time into doing helpful marketing to just chip away at it. Because that’s a reality like is that they can’t spend a hundred percent of their time doing helpful marketing cuz the business has needs right now
Tim Reid: No they can’t. But they can start to the opposite of it. So I used to be the marketing manager at a large travel agency, large national travel agency. We won’t name them George, but we know who that is.
And you only need to read my book to find out. And this is almost 20 years ago.
So ability to create helpful marketing it was a lot more expensive back then, cuz the phones and the cameras and the microphone, they weren’t as good. , but [00:27:00] my job as the marketing manager for this large national travel agency was to generate inquiry for the stores. And I got paid on my KPIs were inquiry and profit.
Okay. So basically I was basically an advertising manager. I’d run ads in the paper, I’d craft up these sneaky specials, you know, 10 free flights to Bali. And the phones would go nuts. I’d get paid well. and once the 10 flights were gone, which was like five seconds, I’m left with 500 travel agents going, thanks for that.
I’ve now I’ve got a hundred disappointed customers who missed out on the 10 free fares, right? And I’m like, sorry guys. I get paid on inquiry if that was today. I’d still be running those advertising campaigns, but imagine the great, helpful content that I could be creating for that travel agency network.
Travel is such a sexy product to sell and there are so many questions and it’s a high involvement purchase decision. So whilst running all that [00:28:00] advertising and generating what is almost false inquiry, I can be building this incredible portfolio of travel knowledge. over time. Customers of of this travel brand would just love and they wouldn’t go anywhere else because you’re just being so insanely
helpful.
George Coudounaris: God, and that’ll serve the business for well after, you’re no longer there, timbo. The effects are there for a very long time.
Timbo, that’s a great example I think of like how to be helpful. I was gonna ask you what your favorite example of helpful content was, but I think you already gave us a great one in the pool.
Yeah. River pools. I thought that was fantastic For our listeners, Timbo, what legwork did the listeners need to do it their end before they can truly be helpful to their dream customer?
What legwork needs to be done to be able to create helpful content?
George Coudounaris: So you mentioned like really deeply understanding your customers. What else do you need to do, or can you elaborate on how you deeply understand those customers before you go about creating that helpful content?
Tim Reid: [00:29:00] Get out there and speak to them. So I worked in a very large advertising agency in my early days, and there was some. Heavy hitters, both on the agency side and the client side. Heavy hitters in terms of the marketing world in Australia. There’s one fellow by the name of Kevin Luscomb, who is the godfather of.
Advertising in Australia or one of, and Kevin, despite the fact That he had the Cornum mahogany office and was earning an absolute fortune and knew his staff intimately, only dealt with the big CEOs and CMOs in Australia, he left the agency I was working for was Clemmings, and he left Clemmings after a period of time and went and started a business called Growth Solutions.
And Growth Solutions would only deal. The top CEOs and the top CMOs in Australia. Mainly in the F M C G space, the fast moving consumer good space. Now these heavy hitters are used to going to fancy conferences in fancy boardrooms, in fancy [00:30:00] hotels, and that’s where they do their learning, right? Kevin, when they signed up to Kevin’s Growth Solutions package, the very first thing he would do.
Would march them down to the nearest supermarket and stand in the aisle where their product was sold and ask them to just be in their jeans and t-shirt, not in a suit. Ask them to just simply watch people buy in their category. Stand back and watch the person. Oh, she’s reaching up there. Oh, he’s reaching down there.
They grabbed that one and looked at the package, but put it back and grabbed that one after a while. Then Kevin would encourage them to go up and ask, excuse me, this is gonna sound weird, but I’m actually the boss of that company, and I’ve, and I was watching you buy that shopping liquid. Do you mind if I ask why you bought the Par Moli over the morning Fresh. To me, this seems very obvious. It might be a dent to the ego for the high paid marketing executive to have to go down to the supermarket where they sell their product, but what greater way of understanding [00:31:00] you get to see their actions and you get to hear their words. And you really need to listen.
Listen to the emotion they use in their voice is their hate, is their love is their confusion so talking about getting to know your customers intimately. There is no better way than actually having a
chat to them.
George Coudounaris: That is such a cool example. I love that they do that and yeah, everyone just has to speak to their customers, right? Marketers need to do it. I’ve seen people say that, you know, engineering teams need to, the CEO needs to, everyone in the company really needs to have that connection to the customer.
Tim Reid: and my fellow, I mentioned earlier, Jay Bear who’s a bit of a marketing favorite of mine, also wrote another book called Hug Your Haters and.
a great book,
George Coudounaris: That’s on my shelf as
Tim Reid: you go. Like it, it says what it does on the pack. Like we can learn so much from those who hates a big word, but who we’ve pissed off, who don’t like what we do, who are looking for alternatives, instead of letting them go and, swallow your [00:32:00] pride and go and give ’em a.
and ask what could we have done better? Apologize cuz they’re your biggest learnings. Not some $50,000 research report that some third party market research agency puts together. That might be helpful. There’s nothing beats being human. This just comes back to being human. Go and
have a chat,
George Coudounaris: Oh, Timbo because I was on the performance side of marketing for so long. I never got to speak to customers. I’d never spoken to one before, and I used to dive into analytics platforms like Google Analytics, and I’d analyze the data and I’d essentially, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was just making up stories and making up theories about why people were doing this and that, and why they preferred one product to another.
Now I realize, my God, if I just got five of our best customers and had a 20, 30 minute chat with them, I would’ve actually known. I didn’t have to guess.
Tim Reid: Yeah, I’ll give an example of that. It’s a bit of a weird one, but it’s an interview I did earlier [00:33:00] today with a fellow who owned and sold a very large national bespoke coffee brand and. The premise of the interview was, I was gonna interview him about his story cuz it’s quite an interesting one, but I thought, you know what?
I want to interview him about what would it take to open a successful cafe in 2023? That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go through all, location, marketing, branding, product, menu, start going through all these things and we just broke them down and went through. My very first question was around mindset and what mindset.
do you have to have in order to start a cafe? Because my belief is that many people start cafes because they get a payout from their corporate job and they think it’s a lifestyle decision. And that’s where my head was at. Not that I’m looking at starting a cafe, but every now and then it goes through my mind.
And he said, okay, do you love people? That was his first question back to me what mindset do I have to is you’ve gotta love people. I said yeah, I don’t mind people sometimes [00:34:00] I can take ’em or leave them, but generally I like people. He said let me tell you, and I go to a cafe every day.
We most of us do to get our coffee or whatever it may be, and. I look at these cafes and I think, geez, done well, that could be a fun business. He said, it is the most fickle, and this is the insight he gave me, which if I hadn’t of asked him and hadn’t had this conversation, the rookie might have gone and opened up a cafe.
He said, but it’s the most fickle business for $4 50. You can piss someone off if you get their coffee order wrong within a, within an inch of its life. He said, it’s a ridiculous business. He. He’s he’s had two occasions where he is, had to call the police because someone was so angry that the latte art wasn’t right on the buddy froth.
It’s like, get over that. But I think my point is, unless you ask these questions, you go ahead and make a decision based on an assumption or just something that you know, some in intuition that is completely wrong. So talking to your customers, asking the hard questions, asking the questions that you think may be. [00:35:00] Don’t worry. Just ask. Ask
away.
George Coudounaris: Terrific advice. Terrific advice, and oh my God, . I can’t believe people throwing tantrums over their latte. Art. They got a swan instead of a heart .
Tim Reid: the human condition, we are an unusual
creature.
George Coudounaris: Timbo coming back to the content side of helpful content. It’s really only helpful, in our pool marketing if that person who needs it actually gets to see that content. So how can we make sure that our dream customers are able to find and view that helpful content?
How to make sure dream customers find and see the helpful content?
Tim Reid: that’s the 64 million question, George, but I think one, you’ve gotta market your helpful marketing at the end of. I have a keynote around this actual topic, and at the very end, I give them a four step process to implement their helpful marketing. The very first step is you’ve gotta be 110% on being helpful, because being helpful actually requires you to put your head above the trench, be noticed, and share your [00:36:00] knowledge, right?
So you want to commit to it. You want to absolutely commit. by, nature of the fact that you are creating content on an ongoing basis, you are, like for example I’m creating a podcast. I put a podcast episode out tomorrow, last week, gets bumped down one and the week before gets bumped down. So I’m always going back into my. Re Re-sharing old episodes when I have a coaching client or someone at a conference that says, Hey, have you ever done an episode?
How to optimize my LinkedIn profile. I’ll go, funnily enough I have, and then I’ll send them that link. So that’s a bit of one-on-one stuff. Every now and then I might put together a little sort of summary of a number of episodes. I haven’t done that for a while, but the reality is you’ve just gotta keep sharing the helpful marketing that you are creating.
Both in a one-on-one sense. If you’ve got, like I interviewed Tom Willis. He’s a young bloke in Melbourne who started a business called Law Path. Okay. It’s the biggest online legal service for small businesses in Australia. He is big on helpful marketing [00:37:00] and he blogs and he does YouTube videos and he does all sorts of content creation.
He said the most popular blog post he’s ever written, and this is a legal business, is can I. Barefoot, right? He says it just pops up all the time. It’s had a heap of traffic. So sometimes identifying that, and he didn’t realize when he wrote that blog post that it was gonna get so much traffic.
But if you actively go and identify what is the top question that my, my customers are asking and go and create a blog post or a piece of content that answers that better than anyone else, any other business, then it’s gonna promote itself, right? It’s gonna have, it’s gonna get great. Google attention people are gonna share it.
People are gonna talk about it. And so sometimes your helpful marketing looks after itself. Like this, your podcast. Our, both our podcasts George, are forms of helpful marketing and, as they say, and you would’ve heard me say, and it [00:38:00] just, it’s coming home to me to roost more and more. But the best marketing is a great product or service, like full stop.
Cuz what do they say? You can’t. . You can’t polish a turd, but you can put glitter on it, right? and So you know, you got a bad product, you’ll sell it once, but you won’t get repeat customers no matter how good the marketing. So the idea of just, again, identifying the topics and the problems that your customers have, and creating really good content that solves it.
is a great way to promote it. It doesn’t hurt to put a a bit of paid money behind. If you’ve got a great piece of content then give it a bit of a, give it a bit of a push along on, on Facebook or LinkedIn with some
paid advertising.
George Coudounaris: That’s great advice. It’s something that we try and encourage people to do as well is like, Hey, stop just using your ads to push like direct response stuff to your dream customers. Like it’s not working. They don’t trust you yet. They’re not ready to buy. Put it behind your best pieces of helpful content so you can start forming a relationship with them.
So what I’m [00:39:00] hearing from you, Timbo, is really focus on, quality over quantity when it comes to helpful marketing material.
Tim Reid: Yeah, because otherwise it becomes daunting. So when I said earlier like, go and identify every question you’ve ever been asked. Maybe set yourself the goal of answering one of those questions per week in a blog post format that you can then put on your knowledge center.
Don’t try and do 10 a day. It’s not gonna happen, but just start to do it one a week and then you go, oh, this is cool. Don’t look at the scoreboard, don’t look to see if it’s had any likes, shares, retweets, comments not important right now. Let it marinate, let it get a bit of Google juice And then you’ll start to go, oh, hang on, this is actually really working for me and I’m gonna do more of it.
Like anything, if you get good feedback,
you’re gonna do more of it, right?
George Coudounaris: It’s a great, it’s a great approach. It’s a great way to start and look. It might even answer my next question, Timbo. We tell our listeners to go out there, create helpful marketing, but then [00:40:00] they just become so immediately intimidated. Buy the competition and what other people are doing out there.
Just like when Kevin and I wanted to start our marketing podcast, we foolishly were comparing ourselves to you, over 600 episodes and we just thought, God, we’ll never be as good as timbo, so why would anyone even bother listening to us? What would you say to people having those thoughts?
What to do if you feel intimidated to get started, particularly given the competition?
Tim Reid: People buy from people, number one. So so many people say to me, gee, is it too late to start a podcast? Or they actually say, it’s too late to start a podcast, isn’t it? Jeff Bezos talks about Amazon as being in its second hour. This is the biggest company in the world. And he go, oh. There’s so much to go.
And likewise podcasting is in its early days, people buy from people. So Yeah.
I’ve got a popular marketing podcast. Sure. Been doing it for 14 years, but doesn’t mean other people can’t start. And you’re evidence of this can’t start a marketing podcast for a whole lot of reasons. You ha, if you had rung me at the start and said, Hey, think you’re starting a podcast, but you scare the shit outta me, I’d be like, Hey.[00:41:00]
Number one, not everyone likes the way I deliver information, right? Sometimes I can be too flippant. Other people like a serious approach to it. Okay, well that’s not me. Some people buy into the personality of someone, some people for whatever reason, they’re gonna go, no, I like the way that information’s delivered over there versus over here, despite the fact that it’s very similar information.
So I think you’ve gotta really honor that. If you are thinking of starting some helpful marketing and creating content around that, is that, people are gonna be buying from you, not from the actual podcast or whatever it may be itself. The other part of that is that you. there is no shortage of content because I saw this crazy stat the other day, George.
There is 700 hours. Video uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day, 700 hours. So there’s another reason not to create content, but that’s flawed. If that’s what you’re gonna oh, oh, I’m not gonna do any more YouTube. I’m not gonna YouTube too much footage going up already. It’s not the point. Don’t [00:42:00] look at your competition, don’t look at what’s happening.
Focus on what you are good at and lean into that and own. that And let people decide, but don’t not do it cuz you think it’s been done before. Because I, if we bind into that, nothing’s gonna get created.
George Coudounaris: Yeah.
Tim Reid: whether they say a good idea has a thousand fathers a bad ideas an orphan.
I think it goes something like that.
George Coudounaris: I like that. That’s very good. And look, the barrier to entry has never been lower. And like we know, we just say to our listeners like, get out there. Just get started. As you said, Tim Vogue, don’t worry about the competition so much. Focus on what makes you unique and you’ll find your. ,
you know, If you serve that tribe and they’ll stick with you.
Tim Reid: Yeah. And what’s Seth Golden say? Every business needs a thousand cus a thousand raving fans. Not even customers, just raving fans,
George Coudounaris: Yep.
Tim Reid: about you. Even a thousand seems a lot to me, a handful of people who really love you. Be happy to polarize a certain [00:43:00] group of people, you know, and, and lean into that niche that you’re creating and just be super and be the most helpful in
that.
George Coudounaris: Timbo. I want to scratch my own edge now. Look, you are at well over 600 episodes on the Small Business Big Marketing podcast. What’s your secret to the longevity that you’ve had? Out in this game.
What’s Timbo’s secret to his longevity?
Tim Reid: It’s an interesting question, George. So, First to market. I can’t rely on that anymore cause it’s not important because it’s 14 years old this year. But that gave me a really good kick along. And for the first number of years, I ranked super highly in iTunes and the various podcast apps.
And then supply became a problem. Every, everyone, every man’s dog were doing a podcast. For the first 80 episodes, we had some very instant success, maybe because we were one of the first or the first Mark, business marketing podcast. But I also had a co-host, Luke and Luke’s still a good mate to this day, and we worked really well together.
Luke was everything. I wasn’t. Luke was this [00:44:00] mechanic. I don’t mean motor mechanic, but mechanic in his mindset. He loved to get under the hood of, you know, if we and, and I’m big picture, I was like, if we got a guest in front of us, I’m like, wow, where’d the idea come from? How’d you get it to market?
did you lie awake at night? Sweating. And these are all my top line questions. Whereas Luke’s under the hood, and if the guest says, oh, we ran some Google Edwards, Luke’s oh yeah, who’d you target? What did you spend? Where, and he’s wanting to know the nuts and bolts. And between the two of us, it made for actually pretty interesting listening, cuz sometimes I’d get pissed off with him.
Sometimes they’d get pissed off with me. But at the end of the day, we got the knowledge to the listener that, that we wanted to get to them. So early success came from that. I pride myself on having found a sweet spot and we’ve all gotta find a sweet spot, George. And my sweet spot is I can’t educate a hundred percent of the time, despite the fact that my podcast is about educating small business owners around marketing.
And I can’t entertain a hundred percent of the time because I’m not a standup comedian, [00:45:00] despite the fact that I’ve got a fair few dad jokes that personally I think rock. But that sweet spot in the middle between entertaining and educating has done me well. Okay?
Because I can deliver the information in an interesting and engaging way. And don’t ta don’t take it too seriously cuz it’s marketing mate. It’s marketing, right? Consistency is another reason for my success. I think you’ve just gotta set an expectation with your audience. My expectation that I set is that I’ll put an episode out every Tuesday.
Of every month, of every week, of every month, of every year which I do the quality of my guests, and I don’t mean big names, but I really pride myself in, tomorrow Fleetwood Max Manager will be here and we’ll have a talk about the business of music. Last week I had a butcher from Aubrey Wodonga on the.
Who happened to be a bit of a rockstar on TikTok. But at the end of the day, he’s just got a butcher shop and a farm in Aubrey with Donga. So the quality of my guests though, comes down to the fact that they got great stuff to share [00:46:00] and they share it in a really good way. I do a pre-interview with all my guests and establish can they talk?
Are they interesting? Are they hard? Um, And just make sure that, cuz you know, audio is a tough medium and you gotta pull, gotta pull a bit of a performance out of your guests every now and then. There’s some, did, does that help you along? Does that
scratch your rich a little bit or?
George Coudounaris: It. It definitely does. It really speaks. Like two of myself and my business partner Kevin, a lot. I think we sat down when we wanted to do the podcast, we already knew what we were gonna say. We said that we wanted to share the playbook that we wish we had when we got into B2B marketing, and we decided that it would roughly take us a hundred episodes to get it all out, and we wanted to share it step by.
So then people could follow from episode one to a hundred and have the whole journey. And we realized that to do that, in a reasonable timeframe, we’d have to do it every Monday. And so far, we’re 77, 78 episodes in and we’ve stuck to it. And [00:47:00] I think honestly, Timbo, it was just me. I know I would’ve made excuses.
And so just having that partner to keep you accountable to that process, I think was really important.
Tim Reid: yeah, that’s very true. I miss having A co-ho. But I haven’t had one for, 500 and or 600, whatever, many episodes. So you get used to it. But yeah, they, it they,
hold you accountable.
George Coudounaris: a and what I really love about your podcast Timbo is doesn’t matter, as you said, like whether it’s a big business owner, small business owner, I think you do so well to like elicit the story out of that person and you get so much emotion and feeling out of them that there’s always a great business and marketing lesson.
But it’s just a great story that sticks with. anyway. Storytelling is probably something that we’d like to work a little more into our own podcast. I think particularly with the barrier to entry becoming lower and lower, things like AI being able to create a lot more how-to content that storytelling [00:48:00] is what sets us apart from the machines and the
Tim Reid: if you want to add story, George, to your podcast and tell me if I’m telling you how to suck eggs, but it’s relatively simple in that you’re already making a point, you’re already making a number of points in each episode, whatever that, if you’ve got an episode on Google AdWords, there’s 3, 4, 5 points you want to get across during the course of that episode.
If you can support each of those points with a.
then you’re done. If you’re talking about, oh Time of day is really important for running those AdWords. And then you find a story where time of day was really critical, and it might be in your personal life, or it might be a campaign you worked on for a client where you got it wrong or right. But just finding those little stories and people, anyone listening? Oh, I don’t have a whole lot of stories. You. , you absolutely do. You’ve got a story for everything. You just need to sit back and reflect on and identify, do the work now and identify those 10 or 12 stories that you really love to tell and that you know can make a difference to [00:49:00] your
customer’s life.
George Coudounaris: I am gonna absolutely take that on board and we’ll be doing it from the next episode. I promise you. Timbo. , we will be timbo. You’ve been so generous. With your time. As you would say, this episode has been absolutely jam packed with G O L D, so
Tim Reid: Marketing, G O L D.
George Coudounaris: marketing, G O L D. And look, I’ve seen firsthand how your helpful approach to marketing really works.
Thank you so much for sharing it with us, for making us all better marketers, and more importantly, I think better people in the process. Um,
Tim Reid: you brother. Thank you for allowing me to be the wind beneath your wings. And may you pass that on to be the wind beneath some other young blokes wings in the
future.
George Coudounaris: Absolutely. Thank you so much Timbo. For our listeners where would you like to direct people?
Tim Reid: I would love them to go to small business big marketing.com. and if they feel inspired to subscribe to my podcast and join a little membership group that I’ve started where [00:50:00] I continue to add weekly doses of
marketing inspiration.
George Coudounaris: Beautiful. Thank you so much. Timbo listeners really encourage you to head there. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes. I’ve been inside Tim Bo’s communities before. They’re absolutely so valuable. Really encourage you to go and check them out. There’ll be plenty in it for you. Timbo, thank you so much for your time.
Tim Reid: George.
Kevin Chen: Wow. George, what an amazing milestone and achievement for us. This interview and episode has been, timbo is so influential in our journey. Listeners. I’m sure you got that from the conversation and in fact, he’s been influential both to us as marketers and in the podcast.
George Coudounaris: yes, Kev. I was so excited when he returned my email when I asked him to come on the show, and I’m so glad that we made the effort to be helpful, make a point of contact with him like a few years ago, hoping it would come around one day and we were literally just trying to thank him for being so helpful to us and to have him come round for it to comfortable circle.
It’s been a very cool [00:51:00] experience for us. It was so generous of him to share some of his own goal with us, and he’s really living this helpful mindset.
Kevin Chen: he definitely is. He’s still that symbolic helpful person. That we look to a lot of the times when we get down into the weeds and we need a bit of a guiding post. So we look to Timbo amongst many other very helpful people in the industry. But thank you Timbo, for always giving us that inspiration.
And listeners, again, we love these key quotes from Timbo that we hope that you will take away from this episode. The first is the whole B2B world needs a bit of marketing. And he likes to refer to it as P to P people to people, because it doesn’t really matter who you’re dealing with and what you’re dealing with.
At the end of the day, they’re humans at the other end.
George Coudounaris: And if related to that, he also said, understand that person and what problems they have and go about solving.
Kevin Chen: Well, Listeners, that’s, that one probably sounds pretty familiar. But this next one is also very good. [00:52:00] Someone has to be the most helpful person in your industry and it might as well be you. So that’s a really good one to give yourself permission to be the health work expert. And to get started, he also said that having that helpful mindset actually makes business more enjoyable.
So we talked about that at the beginning of the episode and we still think that rings very.
George Coudounaris: And I also love Kev, how Timbo talks about marketing as if it’s a hobby. And he says that you should make it your hobby because. When something’s a hobby, you actually love it and you want to do it, and you’re gonna keep it up and it’s not gonna be an annoyance, and it’s not gonna be just an expense for your business.
So view it as a hobby, and that’s a great way to do really helpful marketing that you actually stick to.
Kevin Chen: next one is there’s no better way to be helpful or get ready to be helpful than actually talking to your customers and getting to know them. So very much in the same vein as understanding problems, you have to talk to your customers in order to get that understanding.
And he also said that, You should focus [00:53:00] on quality over quantity, particularly at the start because as we mentioned before, it does get overwhelming when you first get started. It seems like you have to do 1,000,001 things at the same time, but as Timbo says, focus on quality over quantity, and you’ll slowly build that quantity over time.
The important thing is you’re moving the right direction with the quality of your content.
George Coudounaris: And listeners just get started. Go back and listen to episode one of Tim Bow’s podcast and listen to episode 600 and whatever that he just did, and look at the difference between them. He wasn’t an expert at podcasting before he begun. Golden. Listen to episode one of what Kevin and I do here at the B2B Playbook.
Hopefully we’ve become better than that. Kevin . You get better and better through those repetitions, and the most important thing is to take that first step and just get started. All right, listeners, go and find timbo on small business big marketing.com and check out his podcast and his members group. As always, Kevin and I are absolutely stoked that more and [00:54:00] more of you are joining us every Monday by tuning in to the B2B Playbook Podcast or checking out our YouTube channel.
If we can ask just one thing, it would be to please pass the show into someone who would find it helpful. We really, really appreciate it. It’s a huge help to that other person, hopeful. And if you’re listening or watching on our YouTube channel, leave us a comment. Tell us what you’d like. Tell us what you didn’t like.
Try not to be too mean. If it’s really personal, we’re okay. If it’s, you know what, that’s okay. Just say what you feel. We’ll respond accordingly. Anyway, thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Timbo. Thank you listeners. Take care and see you next week.
Kevin Chen: Take our listeners. Thank you, George. Thank you Timbo, and see you all next week.
[00:55:00]
