SNS88 Saturday Night Special - Interview with Karen Lealand founder of the Sterling Marketing Group
[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Welcome to tonight's Saturday night, special episode 88.
[00:00:05] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:00:05] I'm Karen Tiber, Leland, and I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to recognize when you are not managing your energy well is key.
[00:00:24] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Maderer.
[00:00:32] Are my customers sitting on Facebook, picking people from base vendors from Facebook? Are my customers sitting on YouTube doing that? Are my customers listening to podcasts and doing that? Are my customers reading blogs are my customers on tic-tacs are my customers at clubhouse right now? And if they're on clubhouse,
[00:00:50]Scott Maderer: [00:00:50] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, [00:01:00] then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.
[00:01:17]In tonight, Saturday night special. I talked to Karen Tiber Leland about why you may be wasting your time marketing. Karen shares with you, the difference between drunk and sober marketing and why it matters. I also has Karen to share why brand management is more than marketing and why it should matter whether you're a person or a business or both, one area that a lot of folks need.
[00:01:41] Some help with is around the area of productivity, getting not just more things done, but actually getting the right things done can be really tough. I've got a course called productivity for your passion. That's designed to help you do [00:02:00] this and then to hold you accountable and walk with you so that you can tailor productivity, not just to be getting more done.
[00:02:10] But actually getting the right things done. What's more, we take the approach of looking at your personality and how you actually look at things in the world and tailor the productivity system to your personality. Because the truth is a lot of the systems that are out there are written really well for somebody with a particular personality type.
[00:02:30] But if you have a different approach to things, they just don't work, but there's tools and techniques and approaches that you can take that will work for anyone. And we help you do that and productivity for your passion. Check it out over@inspiredstewardship.com slash launch. Karen Tiber Leland is the founder of Sterling marketing group, a branding and marketing strategy and implementation firm.
[00:02:56] She has worked with LinkedIn, Google capital, one Marriott [00:03:00] hotels, and SC Johnson among others. Focus on helping CEOs personal and large and small businesses on building their brands. She's also a best-selling author of 10 traditionally published books selling over 400,000 copies. She's got several books, including no nonsense time management and the brand mapping strategy and her latest book coming out later this year is called drunk marketing.
[00:03:25] Karen, welcome to the show.
[00:03:28] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:03:28] Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. So
[00:03:31] Scott Maderer: [00:03:31] one of the things you use, a couple of terms when you're talking about marketing that are a little unique. And can you expand a little bit and clarify, what is it you mean when you talk about drunk marketing versus sober marketing?
[00:03:47] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:03:47] By the way, the name of my next book coming out is called no more drunk marketing.
[00:03:52] So here's what I mean by drunk marketing. When I first started doing this business about a decade ago, and this still happens today. [00:04:00] People would call me about once a week, I get a call from somebody. They says, hi, we spent $30,000 with a PR firm and we didn't get anything that we were happy with. We spent this much money on a website.
[00:04:11] We weren't happy. We spent this much money on Facebook ads. We weren't happy. Now that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Facebook ads or PR websites. Those are all great things. But what I started to realize is that people were doing these things in a vacuum without any strategy behind them, without any researcher strategy.
[00:04:28] So they were in a sense, just guessing about what would be a good thing to do. And I realized that's a little bit like what I would call drunk marketing. It's just doing stuff. Hoping it turns out as opposed to sober marketing, which is where you actually have a marketing strategy and plan based on the matrix of who you are, who your customers are, where they are, where they consume information, what you're trying to achieve and what logically makes sense for your business in terms of your, the marketing plan.
[00:04:58]Scott Maderer: [00:04:58] What I've seen a lot [00:05:00] from business owners is it's not even random. It. There is a direction to it. It's just a weird one.
[00:05:07] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:05:07] It's an unresearched direction. In other words, it's a direction that they're doing because something's hot. Oh, somebody called me of the day and they said, should I be on Tik TOK?
[00:05:17] And I said, no, exactly. I said, no, your clients are. Like 60 year old women. They're not on Tik TOK.
[00:05:26] Scott Maderer: [00:05:26] That's ridiculous, but there's a few 60 year old women on tip top, but not
[00:05:32] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:05:32] very many. The market isn't consuming information
[00:05:36] Scott Maderer: [00:05:36] on Tik TOK. And that's what I was going to say is what I've seen a lot of business owners do is they look at it and they go.
[00:05:42] It's either what's hot. What's coming next. I need to go there. Or it's is having success with fill in the blank. So therefore I have to be doing that even though their market may be completely different. Their client may be completely different. Their Custer, nothing's in common with but it doesn't [00:06:00] matter.
[00:06:00]Having success on Instagram. So I've got to have an Instagram feed.
[00:06:03] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:06:03] Yes exactly. And so that to me is drunk marketing,
[00:06:07] Scott Maderer: [00:06:07] like drink, texting. Okay. And good drug
[00:06:10] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:06:10] texting. That's a little different.
[00:06:12] Scott Maderer: [00:06:12] Oh, okay. No, I'm sorry. That's true for that. So one of the things too, when you think about that is how does this connect to business owners and their kind of mindset and energy around time?
[00:06:27] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:06:27] Yeah. So part of what I talk to people about, as I say, marketing and branding, whether it's personal marketing and branding or business marketing and branding or CEO, marketing, and branding, what all takes time. And if you want to use your time then you want to be, you want to have a strategy behind it that makes sure that you're doing the right things and you're doing the right things in the right way.
[00:06:49] And so part of what I talked to people about is that if you're going to make time for marketing, you want to make sure that you have first thought through are these actually the actions that I should be [00:07:00] taking. And I know that sounds so amazingly simple, but I'll be, I will tell you, I get calls every day.
[00:07:07] So many people don't do that. They don't do it for their businesses. They don't do it for their personal brands. And so for me, it's really this idea of. You don't just run out there and start brand-building cause there's over 40 different tactics you could use to build a brand personal or business.
[00:07:22] You're going to waste a lot of time and a lot of money. If you're just running out there, building that brand before you've actually. I stopped to think about, okay, what is the strategy here? So of those 40 tactics, I always tell my clients, there's usually two to five that are the main tactics you should be using.
[00:07:41] And the trick is figuring out what those two to five are, and then investing your time in those two to five.
[00:07:49] Scott Maderer: [00:07:49] So one of the terms, of course, I work with a lot of people on productivity and this sort of thing. And I think you and I have a little bit of common ground in that we don't like thinking about it from the point of view of time [00:08:00] management.
[00:08:01] So instead you talk too about energy management. Can you talk a little bit about why, why do you use that language instead? And some tips where they can begin to look at this as part of their energy management as a business owner.
[00:08:16]Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:08:16] I think if you look at the history of time management let's take 80 years ago, or even 75 years ago, a generation ago where people worked, they didn't necessarily all punch a time clock, but essentially yeah.
[00:08:31] People worked a set of given hours and being there those hours was the measure of their effectiveness. And you had to get your work done within those hours. So in those days it really was a function of time management because you worked nine to five as an example. Okay, moving forward a little bit in time, going to maybe 15 years ago, people started working less based on that kind of very restrictive time schedule.
[00:08:58] And it became more about what [00:09:00] you could get done. Rather than what you could get done in a period of time. So it was more about managing your energy. And the reason I say that is you think about an hour, an hours and immutable thing. An hour is an hour. There's only 24 hours in a day.
[00:09:14] There's seven days in a week. So then what's the difference when you take one person and they can get a lot done in an hour and another person who gets nothing done in an hour, it's the way they're managing their energy within that hour. It's not the time. The energy, I think where we are today.
[00:09:30] And I think COVID, didn't create this, but I think COVID accelerated this trend is I think we're even moving beyond energy management to focus management today because people are working from home, all different kinds of hours, all different lines of locations. People are know are being digital nomads, and they're traveling around the country and the world working.
[00:09:51] So I think today we're even looking more at focus management than we are at energy
[00:09:56] Scott Maderer: [00:09:56] management. And there's more and more things screaming for our attention [00:10:00] in today's world than, 15 years ago.
[00:10:02] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:10:02] Without a doubt. And and when you think about it, people, because a lot of people have been working from home with COVID.
[00:10:08] They have all these additional distractions, the dog, the cats, the kids, the spouses, et cetera, et cetera. And so your
[00:10:16] Scott Maderer: [00:10:16] spouse a distraction, they won't enjoy that. Don't don't do that.
[00:10:20] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:10:20] You didn't say this. It was just a female spouse. It could be a male.
[00:10:23] Scott Maderer: [00:10:23] No, I said they won't like that. I did not she they won't like that.
[00:10:26]Don't do that. Yeah. He or she, or. But whatever they won't enjoy that they'll do that. But
[00:10:31] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:10:31] the truth is that if you're sitting there and you're working and your spouse, as much as you love them, comes into the room and says, Hey, I'm what do you want for dinner tonight? Then that is a distraction.
[00:10:42] Might be a pleasant distraction because you love your spouse. The reality is that anytime you get distracted from something you're working on it takes an average of 20 minutes to get back to the thing you were working on. So you lose all that focus and momentum. And so that's just one of the issues that we're all having to learn to deal [00:11:00] with.
[00:11:00] As things have changed with more working from home.
[00:11:04] Scott Maderer: [00:11:04] Exactly. Yeah, no. And I think that was happening even before we quote, to work from home, because I know when I worked in a cubicle land, the same thing would happen. It wasn't your spouse walking in, but it was the person next door.
[00:11:18] It was the noise down the hall.
[00:11:20] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:11:20] Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to say about that. That's why I say that. I don't think COVID created this, but I think COVID has been an accelerant
[00:11:29] Scott Maderer: [00:11:29] to accelerated it. Yeah. Yeah. So earlier you mentioned, there's over 40 tactics minimum, and depending on how you slice and dice it, maybe even more to brand building, whether it's a company brand or a personal brand, can you talk a little bit about, and we don't have time to go into all 40 tactics for sure.
[00:11:49] But why should people worry about looking at it from the point of view of brand management? Not just marketing.
[00:11:55]Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:11:55] Because if you think about it, marketing is more the end, it's, if you think about [00:12:00] again, if you go back in history, branding and marketing were very separate things, right?
[00:12:05] They lived in very separate domains and they had an impact on each other, but they were separate. I think that the world we live in today, Branding and marketing, social media, even business development, all are like circles that intersect with each other. They all have a relationship with each other. So in my world, when I talk to people about marketing, to me, marketing is a tactical approach you take to getting customers.
[00:12:34] In a funnel, right? To getting customers in a funnel to start doing business with you, potentially branding is a much bigger context. Branding is getting known. Branding is getting people to see who you are. Branding is making people aware of your business and who you are. And then marketing is more moving them along the path to get to you.
[00:12:56] The problem is this there's a lot of overlap. So I'll give you a [00:13:00] perfect example. I get calls all the time and I get asked this question all the time. Somebody will call me and they'll say, hi, I Googled, personal branding and your name came up. And then I went and I looked at your website and I saw that you do a podcast and I listened to a couple of your podcasts.
[00:13:15] And I saw that you have a video series on YouTube. And I went and I looked at your video series and. And then I picked up the phone and called you, and I'm really interested in working with you and people will always say to me did the podcast, get you to the client? And I sit in the answer to that is, which of those things made the difference?
[00:13:31]The answer is all of them and none of them. Just like in basketball, when they talk about an assist, the guy may be the one who closes it through the hoop, but he had an assist from all the other people helping him on the team. It's like all of those things are what start to contribute to building that brand and that person coming to see me, that person calling me up.
[00:13:53] And so I think we have to think about it more as a marathon and less of us. The sprint these days [00:14:00] and all of those different branding activities, we do all those, or those tactical 40 items that we choose to do. Whichever ones, those are all touch points. And the goal of those touch points is to get the person to the place that by the time they call us or they come in contact with us, they already have a strong sense of who we are.
[00:14:21] What we do, what we're committed to at what we can offer them. So in a way it goes from being a cold outreach to much more of a warmer outreach. Does that mean?
[00:14:34] Scott Maderer: [00:14:34] Yeah, no, it does. And I've seen the same thing on, in my business, but one of the reasons I do the podcast is not necessarily to get customers, but it's just one more touch point where people hear my voice.
[00:14:46] They get to know me, they know what I stand for. And, they can get more comfortable with the idea of not just working with me, but also introducing me to someone else. And, maybe that person ends up working with me. [00:15:00] So it's not even directly one-on-one marketing, like I'm sending direct mail to someone and yet it is marketing at the same time.
[00:15:07] Exactly.
[00:15:08] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:15:08] And I think part of the trick with that is really understanding that there is no one, one size fits all and that there isn't any, just one thing that if you just do that, it's we don't live in what I call the, it's not oversized anymore, which is people used to think, Oh, if I can just get on Oprah, I'll sell a million copies of my book, which by the way, it wasn't even true for most people.
[00:15:29] It was just true for some people. But the reality is that we don't live in that world. There's many different touch points. So in a way you have to be ubiquitous and being ubiquitous. If you don't manage your time well through a good strategy. Means you end up doing a lot of activity without a lot of results.
[00:15:47] And you end up with a lot of wheel spinning, which is why to me, there's this direct connection between time management, energy management, focus management, and marketing and branding.
[00:15:58] Scott Maderer: [00:15:58] So let's look at that a [00:16:00] little deeper focusing on just a small business owner. Of course They will they'll know right away.
[00:16:05]We need to do branding. We need to do marketing. We need to put this stuff out there. And we just talked about time and energy is a drag on that as well, because there's only so many hours in the day. So they struggle with knowing where to spend that energy, where to spend that time, where to put that focus.
[00:16:21] What are some of the tips or advice that you would have for them to at least get started down this road in an effective way? One thing,
[00:16:27] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:16:27] and this is where I always start with my clients because I always start with the traditional SWAT analysis, which is I look at, okay, given the current state of their brand, again, this could be a personal brand, a CEO brand, and executive brand, a business brand doesn't matter, what is the state of their brand?
[00:16:43] So in other words, what are the strengths of that brand? So if you look at that brand in the marketplace, What is the strength of that brand, right? How is it competing? How is it doing well? What is the strength? What is the weakness of that brand? Where are the places where that brand is not standing up?
[00:16:59] So [00:17:00] well, what are the opportunities that brand currently has in terms of white space? And then what are the threats to that brand? Both short-term and long-term, it's amazing when you look. At just a very simple SWOT analysis for the brand, how much you can see already tells you what you should be focusing your time and your energy on.
[00:17:20] And again, it sounds so simple, but so many people don't even take the time to step back and do that kind of SWAT analysis on their brand. Now, admittedly, it's a little harder to do that for yourself because it's hard to see through the inside of your own eyelids. Like one of my, one of my favorite stories I like to tell is that.
[00:17:40] I years ago, I once got called by a vice president of marketing at LinkedIn. Cause he wanted to hire me to help him redo his LinkedIn profile. Wow. Okay. Has it's really hard to see for
[00:17:52] Scott Maderer: [00:17:52] yourself. So he's reading, he's in LinkedIn wanting to redo his LinkedIn. And then to bring in marketing and he's [00:18:00] the VP of marketing and he has to bring in.
[00:18:01] Okay. Yeah. That makes actual perfect sense. It's really logical
[00:18:05] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:18:05] actually, or how brilliant you are. It's, that's why lawyers don't defend themselves in court and doctors don't operate on themselves. It's really hard to do this stuff for yourself, but regardless, so it's really starting with this SWAT analysis.
[00:18:20] I think that's really one of the. Foundational things you have to do. And then I think the other, and that already knocks a bunch of things out of the park. By the way, if you're doing a SWOT analysis, you can start to see what would be appropriate. The other thing is really asking yourself, where do my customers consume information?
[00:18:39]Are my customers sitting on Facebook, picking people from face vendors from Facebook? Are my customers sitting on YouTube doing that? Are my customers listening to podcasts and doing that? Are my customers reading blogs are my customers on tic-tac or my customers on clubhouse right now. And if they're on clubhouse, what are they listening to?
[00:18:57]You have to do a little research to see where are [00:19:00] my consumers, my customers consuming information. Yeah. Cause you don't want to spend your time or your money. Doing activities in places where your customers aren't living, where they're not picking vendors doesn't make sense.
[00:19:14]Scott Maderer: [00:19:14] And again, that gets back to, you have to actually know who your client is and know them well as well.
[00:19:20] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:19:20] W undoubtedly, whenever people say to me who, when I say who's your client, they go, everyone. I go, Oh,
[00:19:27] Scott Maderer: [00:19:27] I'm in trouble. Those are the, yeah.
[00:19:30] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:19:30] Everyone is the single word. That's the kiss of death when it comes to marketing.
[00:19:37] Scott Maderer: [00:19:37] So let's get a little more tactical as well. We've talked a lot about time and energy and focus and.
[00:19:44] So when it comes to that task lists that I think all of us have business owners especially where, you cross five items on your, on, off, on your list and then you add 10 more and it just seems to never end what are some of the [00:20:00] ways that they can begin to master their planning to at least get the right things done on that list.
[00:20:05] If not everything.
[00:20:06]Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:20:06] First of all, you have to start with understanding. I think that most people live in a state of what I call magical thinking when it comes to their to-do list. So people write down all this stuff they want to get done during the day. And they, through magical thinking, they convince themselves they're going to get all or most of that done.
[00:20:25] Okay. As we all know that doesn't happen for the most productive person that generally doesn't happen. So the problem is when people have this kind of magical thinking towards their to-do list at the end of the day, they often feel. I'm going to use the word bad, but bad, guilty, upset, frustrated that they didn't get everything done on the to-do list, which only slows them down even further.
[00:20:51] So what I tell people is that really the key is that you have to pick the top two or three things that you absolutely feel are critical to get [00:21:00] done for that day that you're committed to getting done. And you have to manage yourself against getting those two to three things done. Then if other things get done on top of that, in addition to that, you consider that icing on the cake, right?
[00:21:15] It's a great win and you consider it icing on the cake, but you really only commit yourself to managing yourself against getting those two to three things done every day. Then at the end of the day, you have that sense of satisfaction. That things got done. And you don't have to feel Oh, bad or wake up in the middle of the night, sweating it.
[00:21:36] So that's, I think one thing that's really critical to all of
[00:21:39] Scott Maderer: [00:21:39] that before we change gears and ask you a couple of the questions that I try to ask every guest, is there anything else about time or energy or branding or marketing, your areas of expertise that you'd like to share with the
[00:21:53] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:21:53] listener?
[00:21:54] I think just that it's what I said earlier, which is the branding and [00:22:00] marketing today is a marathon. It's not a sprint. It's really about creating a consistent quality set of touch points that your potential client can follow. It's like leaving really good breadcrumbs, right? That, that you're.
[00:22:17] Potential client can follow so that they find you, but by the time they find you there, your brand is so well established in their mind that you're starting the conversation at a much higher level. And that's everything from the photo that you put up of yourself to what your LinkedIn profile looks like to your website, et cetera.
[00:22:37] It's really making sure that there is that consistent high quality messaging across all platforms. That's really critical today.
[00:22:48] Scott Maderer: [00:22:48] So one of the questions I try to ask every single one of my guests is around stewardship. Speaking of brand inspired, stewardship is part of my brand. And this concept of stewardship [00:23:00] is inherent to that.
[00:23:02] So as I've asked people, this question I've learned, everyone has a different definition of that. So what does stewardship mean to you and how has it impacted your life?
[00:23:12] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:23:12] Do you mean stewardship in the sense of stewardship over the brand or just stewardship
[00:23:17] Scott Maderer: [00:23:17] it's open-ended on purpose?
[00:23:19]Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:23:19] To me stewardship means, cause I understand what you're talking about.
[00:23:23]I think to me stewardship means three things. One is that it means that the things that are within your I'm going to call it your sphere of influence. I can't influence for example, climate change on mass, but I can't influence whether I recycle or not. So the things that are within I can't influence.
[00:23:44] The total state of love and harmony in the planet, but I can make sure that I'm kind to the people around me. So to me, stewardship means that the things that were, that are within my sphere of influence, whether they are in my business, my personal life, [00:24:00] My, my, my social life, my casual life that the things that are within my sphere of influence, it's my job and my responsibility to do the best job I can with those things, to the best of my ability in a responsible way.
[00:24:17] And consistent with my values. That's what stewardship means to me. It's like I was having this conversation with a friend the other day who runs a, his company is just about to go public. And he and his wife and I were having a conversation about business. And somehow this conversation came up and yeah.
[00:24:33] And he said, I said to him, what's the one philosophy, you run your business by. And he said the one thing I've always done is do the right thing. And he said, what's the one you run your business by. And I go do the right thing and we laughed. And we said, no wonder we're friends. Me to me.
[00:24:48] Stewardship is like that. It's that you have to do the right thing, not the thing. That's the most economically beneficial to you. Not the thing that necessarily [00:25:00] always feels the best, not the thing that is necessarily always looks the best to other people from the outside, but stewardship is doing the thing that is the right thing in a given circumstance, personal or professional that's within your sphere of influence.
[00:25:16] Scott Maderer: [00:25:16] Awesome. I love that definition. If you could travel into the far future, let's say I invented a machine and I could pick you up today and take you into the future a hundred, 150 years. And you could look back on your life. What is some of the impact that you hope you've had on the world?
[00:25:33]Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:25:33] I do hope that the people that have come across my path have been converted from drunk marketing to sober marketing.
[00:25:40] I do hope that is one contribution I've made. Mostly I would hope that. Everybody in my life, personal or professional basically said that I helped make them a more creative person or express their creativity more as a result of knowing me and by creativity, I don't mean paintings hanging on the wall.
[00:25:59] That's one [00:26:00] type of creativity. Some people's creativity is expressed in their business right. In their, the way they do their companies. So I would say, I would hope that. The impact I would have made is to really have supported other people in expressing their creativity.
[00:26:15]Scott Maderer: [00:26:15] you can find out more about Karen and all she does over@thesterlingmarketinggroup.com. You can also follow her on Facebook is Karen Leland dot SMG on LinkedIn is Karen Leland and on Twitter as Karen F Leland. Of course I'll have links to all of this over in the show notes as well. Karen, is there anything else you'd like to share with the Lister?
[00:26:39] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:26:39] Not really other than, I just want to say that as I think, I've got two new books out, I've got the no-nonsense time management, 50 weight, 50 tips to hack your time and get everything done is available on Amazon. And I have the new version, audio version of the brand mapping strategy design build and accelerate your brand is out on Amazon.
[00:26:56] So other than just that, if people want more details there in those two [00:27:00] books, that's pretty much it.
[00:27:01] Scott Maderer: [00:27:01] Awesome. Thank you so much for coming today. I appreciate it.
[00:27:04] Karen Tiber Lealand: [00:27:04] My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[00:27:06]Scott Maderer: [00:27:06] thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoy this episode. Please do us a favor. Go over to inspired stewardship.com/itunes rate.
[00:27:34] All one word iTunes rate. It'll take you through how to leave a rating and review and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed until next time, invest your time. Your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact the world. .