128: Differentiate, Entertain and Educate with Authority Marketer Jeff Beale

Robert Plank: Our guest today is best-selling author and marketing strategist, Jeff Beale. He helps businesses leverage their knowledge to gain authority status in their industry, and then he uses authority marketing to generate even higher converting leads. Hey, Jeff. I'm Robert. How are things today?

Jeff Beale: Things are going well. Thanks for having me on the show, Robert.

Robert Plank: I'm really glad that you're on. The stuff that you do, you help people gain authority status and do authority marketing, so what does that entail exactly?

Jeff Beale: Marketing basically in a layman's term is to become the go-to person in any product or service. Authority marketing is when somebody's hungry right on the street, they think of McDonald's, because, hey, McDonald's is an authority. When you're thirsty, you think of Coca-Cola, because Coca-Cola is an authority. Things of that nature. Becoming that authority no matter which industry it's in helps you leverage your credibility. It also helps you generate business based off the fact that whenever people think of what you offer or that industry, they think of you.

It's just the process of building that credibility, building that brand awareness so whenever they think of that, you're the first person that comes to mind, and usually the first person that comes to mind will be the one that gets the business unless you do something to mess it up.

Robert Plank: How does someone become an authority? Is it a matter of having a book or a blog, traffic, or social media or some combination? What does someone have to do exactly?

Jeff Beale: It's a combination. Actually, the first thing you would need to do is to first identify your audience. Know exactly who your audience is and then their needs, and then the last piece would be to find out where do they go to get information. Identify, let's say your audience. A lot of people like to identify their audience such as, well, they are this age, this gender, this ethnic group. I'm talking more of the psychological. For instance, let's go back to McDonald's. McDonald's serve people that are hungry. Coca-Cola serve people that are thirsty. It can get as basic as that, but you need to really know your audience, then understand their needs.

What is it that pains them, keeps them up at night, makes them pull the action trigger to do business with somebody? Once you understand that, then you can find out where do they go most often to find out who they want to do business with? What's the authority? Is it a magazine? A lot of people used to do the old traditional marketing, push marketing, on television and radio or a magazine. Nowadays, like you said, there's social media, there's bloggers, there's sites like Yo. There's tons of places that they go to to find out who is the best choice for what they are looking for.

Once you find that out, then it's all about quality content. It's all about putting out the best quality information for them to make an informed decision. That can be several ways. That can be social media posts. That can be blog posts. That can be what we're doing right now, podcasting is a great way of doing that. It can be videos. It can be many different things that you could put out as far as content, the type of content, but you find out what resonates the most around your audience and you deliver your actual content in a way that they easily digest it, they can get the information, they can make an informed decision, and they feel comfortable doing so.

Robert Plank: That all sounds like a pretty good plan, and that makes a lot of sense to me. How does this relate to what it is that you do? Is this a service you provide to others?

Jeff Beale: I do. Actually, I provide marketing strategies. With marketing strategies, my goal is to make you the authority in the industry, to make the brand awareness resonate amongst your audience. What I do is I look at putting together a strategy that makes sense for your company and finding out your audience, the need, your benefits, what's a good message for the audience and how to deliver it, what mediums and channels and platforms make the most sense, and then of course piecing it all together, putting it into a strategy that gets you in front of them in a way that they desire to see you, and help you deliver a message that they actually want to hear.

A lot of times, that's something that the business or business owners have difficulty doing because they're so close to the business that they assume a lot. First thing I tell companies, I tell the executives, "You are not your customer," because in most cases, you're not. In most cases, you don't buy what you're selling, and you're so informed because you started the company or you've been working in the business for so long, you have little things that you assume that you don't even think is a challenge or think is a point of decision that really is.

You might, for instance, for you doing podcasts, one thing that you may think of is, well, "Everybody uses Skype to record," but that's not true. To someone else, that might be something very, very difficult to understand. "How do I record? I understand how to sign up for Skype, but how do I actually record?" To you, it's easy. If you were selling, let's say, a course on how to podcast, you would just assume they knew, and you wouldn't even put that in your message, which that might be one of the biggest selling points of, "Let me show you a way that you can record with Skype in 5 minutes." That might be something that will make somebody pull the trigger, because they're like, "Oh wow. I can just 1, 2, 3, and do it. Great. I'm on," versus, "Let me show you the best way and I've been doing this for a hundred years."

"Yeah, okay, but I haven't, and I don't know what I'm doing. I just want it easy," and easy is the selling point, not the technology. It's just the ease of use.

Robert Plank: Right, and it seems like if you position it as ease of use, that's more relatable as opposed to if you just show, "Well, look how cool I am," then you're just showing off. You mention that little example about the podcasting and Skype. Even with that kind of thinking, some people don't even know how to install Skype or where to install Skype, even how to install the iTunes program to check on their podcast. They don't know what hardware they use to record. Yeah, that's huge and I totally agree with all that.

Kind of along those lines, I know you mentioned a lot of the things that you do when you're looking to improve someone else's business, do you have like a story or an example of a case study where you had a client and there were some things in their business that could use improving, and you kind of put them through your process, you went through and you found the best market, you figured out their customer, and you figured out what kind of things they should be doing?

Jeff Beale: Sure. One example that I found was a client that sold jewelry. They thought their audience was one thing, and come to find out, the audience was totally different based off of buyers, based off of research on who interacted with them. The interesting thing is, offline their audience was one thing, on-line their audience was totally different. They were taking the offline approach to an on-line audience, and that doesn't work.

Offline, you don't have things such as comments, likes, shares. Offline, you see it on TV, radio, and you are at the mercy of the television or radio. On-line, you can make choices and you can change and you can share your opinion, and that makes a big difference. After looking at it and finding out that you might even want to look at a different way of approaching it, more of an interactive approach was developed to help them.

Same thing with a client that I worked with that did media. One of the things that they did were, they were looking for how can they have more people engage with their shows? The key factor was they were looking at the old way to where ... Remember when you used to come in in prime time and you had to wait for prime time to watch a show?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Jeff Beale: You would actually schedule your day around it. Well, that's not the audience of today. Today everybody's on demand, and most people aren't watching it on television, they're watching it on a mobile device, and they may cast it to a larger monitor, which is the television, but they're looking on the go when they want to watch the shows. Nowadays, shows are even coming out before they're supposed to air. Like a show may be airing tonight, but if you subscribe to a cable provider, you can watch it midnight the night of, or you can watch it even a day before, and Hulu and Netflix have shown you how people love the fact that they can watch any show whenever they feel like watching it.

Looking at that and changing the approach on how to deliver these shows helped them change from a linear to a digital age, and it really helped improve them all the way across the board: viewership, search engine optimization, to search engine ranking, lowered their spend, and it helped because now that you know your audience, you're not fighting to find as many new audience as you are retaining old audience and having them evangelize the experience. Then that gets you new audience.

That's one of the challenges I found with many companies. They're so focused on finding new audience that they neglect the current audience, and then they spend additional money in reputation management, damage control. You have a cellphone, I'm assuming.

Robert Plank: Yes.

Jeff Beale: Like everyone. I use it as a cellphone theory. How many times have you seen commercials or heard of people that have plans that aren't available to you as a loyal customer? Then you call them and they say, "Well, that doesn't apply to you because you're already in a contract," or "You're already a customer." You're like, "Well, I'm a loyal customer. Why can't I get the discount that the new people get?" Well, that's the challenge is, they're always fighting to find new, new, new, and not trying to retain who they have. The interesting part about retaining current customers, first of all, they're easier, because they're already experiencing your brand and your product or service.

Second of all, they are, if happy, ready to tell somebody, if they're happy. They're ready to tell somebody if they're not, but you can leverage that to not only have them share the message but also get feedback from them to help improve what you have already. Improve either the marketing message, either the product or service, the customer service.

You can improve things because they're already dealing with you, and if you just look at your last, let's say, 5, 6 customers if you're smaller, or if you look at your last 2, 3 months of customers and you look at what their actions are, what their engagements are, what are their questions? What are the things they complain about? What are the things that they share? What are the things that they like? Then compile that information and make some marketing decisions based off of that, it's easier to find like-minded people than to just spend a lot of money on campaigns, and you're spending all this money on campaigns, throwing it out, seeing what sticks.

Once it sticks, if you're still not doing this type of backend research, you still don't know what to do next because you're still just throwing out stuff because you're not figuring out what worked, how can we now duplicate what worked and keep that going on and on?

That's one of the things that I always say. When you're doing authority marketing, it's all about being the 4 C's. It's all about having good content, making good contacts, have good communication, and then be consistent. That's the 4 C's. If you do those 4 C's, you will win when it comes to authority marketing.

Robert Plank: That's really cool. I think that's one of those things where it took me a while to kind of get it, especially seeing what a lot of these companies were doing, especially like the ones on social media where ... At first I thought, "Okay, well it's like this company, and they're just posting stuff on social media every now and then," but then when I've seen ... There's like a cupcake ... I don't know what you'd call it, the kind of person that bakes and sells cupcakes, there's this cupcake lady in our town, and she'll post pictures, and she'll do contests, and even the local news, they'll put full-on clips of their show just right there on Facebook, and I'm thinking, kind of like a little bit as you were describing what you were describing, I'm thinking, "Man, why would they put like a clip of their show right there on Facebook when ... ?"

I'm thinking, "Well, wouldn't them posting a clip take away from me watching their show?" And kind of the way you were explaining it, it's like, "Well, hardly anyone's watching on the TV live anyway, so it's kind of like a trade-off. They're giving away some of their best stuff in exchange, not only are they hoping it'll go viral or get some shares but, as you said, now they can look at the most popular content, or they can look at all of their audience, their likes, their fan page insights, all that stuff and figure out exactly who they're talking to, when it sounds like this out-of-date model that a lot of these companies are still hanging onto was just guessing. It was just let's just put out some stuff. Maybe the ad money worked, maybe not. Now you can go back and after running your experiments, go back and see how they did. Is that right?

Jeff Beale: That's correct. Also, with them putting the show on-line, it helps them separate themselves from their competitors because, think about this. If you had 2 cupcake bakers, I guess you would call it, or 2 cupcake stores in the same area, 1 has a show and 1 doesn't, how much advantage do you have when you say, "Well, you know, they may bake cupcakes and they may be good, I don't know, but we have a show, and you can see us bake our cupcakes, and people like our show."

Now you seem as if you are really an expert. Even if you're not, even if you have quick mix or something, you just seem, because people are like, "Well, they have to be good. They have a show." That gives you an advantage. Also, within the show, you can let them get to know you a little bit, and that's the beauty nowadays with social media, with Facebook Live and You Tube Live and all these other streaming, they can get to know you now.

You know the old saying in sales: People buy from who they know, like, and trust. They get to now know you. They get to see you enough to like you, and because you're up there in a credible source, they get to trust you versus an advertisement, which is cold. I don't know the last time you fell in love with a banner ad where you're like, "That banner ad made me feel all warm inside."

Robert Plank: Never.

Jeff Beale: Exactly. Now with the personality being displayed, you can have that feeling. So you say, "I really like that person." That's how it works.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is there's hope for the rest of us. We don't have to be super polished and rehearsed. We can just be ourselves and they'll fall in love with us as us.

Jeff Beale: That's the key, being yourself. The interesting thing with on-line especially, offline is still more polished and better, but on-line is the more authentic you are, the better. People don't mind the mistakes. It should be as good of quality as you can get it, but it doesn't have to be polished, because sometimes when it's too polished, they think it's paid actors and they don't think it's real. They think, "Oh well, they paid for that. It's advertisement. Of course, they're going to say it's great because they were paid to say it's great." When it's a person and it seems authentic and it seems as if you're just everyday Joe, now it's something that's relatable.

If you noticed over the past few years, what's the biggest craze on television? Reality TV. Reality TV is because it makes you feel as if you know somebody, even though working in that industry, I can tell you it's scripted, and it's all planned and so forth, and they know what to say next, so forth and so on, but you think it's real, and it feels real even though it's not. They do that to make it more personal. That's the beauty of now on-line, you can do things and it doesn't have to be 100% professionally polished, and people will resonate.

That's why You Tube videos can go into the millions, and it's some little kid dancing. Of course, I don't know if you can be able to sell anything with it unless it's a choreography or something of that nature, but people are like, "I just like it. It was so cool," and they share it, but when's the last time they've shared a polished commercial? They don't.

Robert Plank: Never, unless it's really funny.

Jeff Beale: Unless it's really funny. Yeah. I think the only ... The one I remember, the latest one I remember that was shared that was viral was the Van Damme when he was straddling those 2 tractor trailers.

Robert Plank: I think like every now and then there's something like a Dollar Shave Club commercial or something, but very rarely.

Jeff Beale: See, but they've figured it out, though. They figured out that men ... They don't really key in on the quality of the razor, if you think about it. They figured out that the humor will get people to share it. The mass volume of numbers will get in front of enough men, and those men will look at the deal and say, "You know what? That's a good deal, because I'm already spending X amount of dollars," and it stays in your head because you think of the entertainment of the actual commercial.

Those type of things do work, but most companies don't execute it in that way. Most companies execute it in the same way that they would a television advertisement, and it doesn't go viral because people are like, "Oh, it's another commercial." That's the reason the Internet has been so successful when it comes to video, and you look at any other type of source like Sirius Radio, any type of streaming source, what is the biggest thing that they harp on? "We don't show commercials." People don't want to see commercials. That's why.

Robert Plank: That's a pretty big insight right there. I think that that's why people need you to kind of clean up the marketing efforts, right?

Jeff Beale: Yeah, and the best thing about a commercial, people love a commercial that they don't even know is a commercial. Like I said, the Dollar Shaving Club, yeah, we know it's a commercial, but they don't say how great their razors are. They don't say anything about that. They don't say anything about, "We have been in the business with titanium and platinum," they just have fun, and people like that in the entertainment. If your commercial can entertain and educate, then you can win. You just figure out how can your commercial entertain and educate?

I was telling one client about floors. Well, when a person is looking to buy new flooring, the biggest thing on their mind besides cost, and they'll be willing to pay more if you can get the other values in line. They want it to be fast with installation, they want it to be painless with dealing with your business, and they want other people to say, "Wow! You've got the best floors ever!" Of course, resale value helps, if they can improve the resale value.

Most people don't really care about the type of quality of the wood, and they don't care about this is cherry oak versus ... They don't know and they really don't care. They just want when people walk in the door saying, "That is beautiful." Now, what I told them is, a lot of things they'll have questions about, you can put into some sort of advertisement or social post in which you're explaining to them some of the myths of floors. For instance, they may say your floor is water resistant. Being water resistant doesn't mean it's waterproof. If enough water gets on it, it's still going to damage the floor, and that's not what's told when it's sold to you, but that's what it is. It's not waterproof, just water resistant.

You could spill a glass of water and don't worry about it, but if you have a water leak, you'll still have to replace that floor. Those type of things make a person feel as if you know what you're talking about, because a lot of other people aren't going to tell them that. They may also know what's the difference between hardwood and laminate. Your knowing that difference and the difference of how you lay it to make your house look larger, and you have examples to show them, now make you a very credible source when it comes to dealing with somebody with the floor.

The last thing, most people when they get floors, especially when it comes to floor damage, they go through their insurance company. What are the 5 things you need to know when you talk to your insurance company? Because most people want the best value for what they're going to claim, so they're not going to want to be cheap, but they're not going to want to have to come out-of-pocket either. That's why they have insurance. You letting them know how to deal with your insurance company, the right answers to the right questions, this type of thing makes it easier to deal with you than other flooring companies that might just come in and give an estimate and say, "All right, this is how much we charge," and they maybe try to haggle with you to lower their rates.

People will pay more if they feel there's more quality. Think about this. When's the last time you went to a Bentley dealership and argued about how much a Bentley cost? You don't. You don't even know how much a Bentley costs half the time. Yeah, because you just know that they're said to be the top-of-the-line car. If you really did research on a Bentley, you find out they only get 12 miles to the gallon, you always have to take them in for service and everything at 5,000 miles, so they're really ... I talked to a guy that sold Bentleys, and he told me it's not affording owning one as far as like purchasing, it's actually the upkeep that most people can't afford.

Most of the time, these cars come back within a year because the upkeep is so much, people buy them and they can't afford them. They have to bring them back. Knowing that, the value has been put up so high with that quality of car. If you can do that with your business, to put up the value so high that people don't even want to ask how much do you charge, you'll win every time, because they've already made the decision that if this is not extremely out of my means, I am going to do business with them, they're not going to bark about the price.

That's the whole goal of authority marketing is to become an authority so much, now I'm not saying that you escalate your price because of it, but so much that that isn't even a concern when you get to the actual closing of the business, because they've already decided they're going to purchase. It's sort of like ... Think about it. How many times have you met people that say that they don't have any money, but then they show up with something that you know costs some money, and you're like, "I thought you didn't have any money?"

Robert Plank: They have priorities.

Jeff Beale: People buy what they want. Exactly. They'll go out and buy some Jordans for $200, but they might not pay their light bill, so you're like, "I thought you were broke." No, they were broke for that. That wasn't of value.

Robert Plank: That's funny, and it sounds like all the things that you're mentioning here today, it seems like you're going after like the emotion of some kind, whatever the hot button is there, like in the case of the Bentley thing it's like, well, who cares about all these little facts and figures when how cool for you to be driving it, and drive it off the lot, and drive it home, people see it. Even like with the floor case study you said there, the number 1 reason to get a new floor is to show it off so everything thinks, "Dang! How'd you get that?" Sure there's like a few little objections or common things there, but it seems like that combination you said there about how you kind of have the wow factor, I guess, have the big raw feeling from using it, and then you kind of have these objections that you know they already have but you explain them away quickly, and that way people can tell that you know what you're doing because you already have their questions in their mind before they even ask them.

Jeff Beale: Exactly. Exactly. It's all about emotions. It's all about understanding what drives a person to make a decision. To be honest, a lot of it doesn't include price. Truly, if you can tap into what makes them work, you can understand that. For instance, people that buy security systems, they don't buy security systems for all the features. They buy to be secure. You can have it to where your mobile phone connects and this and that but it never sets off an alarm ever, people aren't going to buy your security system, because they're like, "Well, that's nice, nice features, but if somebody breaks in, it's not going to help."

You find out what the emotional triggers are. That's why you can't just base it on demographics and geographics. You just can't say "Just because you're this age, this gender, this ethnic group, this income level, you will buy what I'm selling." It's really finding out what keeps them up at night?

Volvo did a great job when they went after the soccer moms. What did Volvo hang their hat on the most? "We are the safest car you'll ever buy." That's what they hung their hat on. They would show the mom with the kids. Moms were like, "I like BMW's, but if I ever was in an accident, I'd be safer in a Volvo," so they bought Volvos. For many years, they thought Volvos were the safest cars out. You look at, let's use televisions. We all love 4K, right?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Jeff Beale: The funny thing is when you ask the sales guy, which if you get an honest one who'll tell you, most of the time you'll never see 4K, because first of all you have to have the right cables, you have to have the right television station, you have to have the right cable box. You have all these things have to be in order for you to even see 4K. They can't sell you a 4K and say, "Well, you probably will see 4K once in a blue moon."

Same thing with cameras. They show you these pictures. It was funny. We was watching a commercial last night. My wife was telling me ... She has an iPhone, actually, and she was like, they were showing a commercial with all these pictures of great photos, and they said taken with the iPhone. My wife was like, "My iPhone pictures don't ever look like that." I said, "Yeah, because it's not Photoshopped." They never said it wasn't edited. They just said "taken with an iPhone."

What you're seeing is after it has been taken, put to production, post production has been done, Photoshop has been done and, yeah, now it looks beautiful, but they're not lying, but they know that most people buy these phones and they take selfies and they want to take pictures, and that's a driving force. People will buy a phone, and I'm guilty, because I just bought my last phone because of that, because I want to make sure my pictures are high quality. I want to make sure my videos are high quality, because I do videos for my marketing, so I want the clearest videos I can get from my phone.

What I found in my research of going through phones, here's the secret with that. Your cameras mostly have ... Most of them have the same megapixel rate. The key is the lighting. That's the key. You can have the highest pixel rate, but if you don't have a lot of light, you're not going to get those great pictures, so that's the secret to it, but they don't tell you that, because if that's the case, you wouldn't buy another phone, you would just go buy some professional lights.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Jeff Beale: And they sell phones.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. Lots of good stuff today, and you had lots of cool stories and little lessons here and there. Where can people find out more about Mr. Jeff Beale? Where can they find out about your book, your blog, and all that cool stuff?

Jeff Beale: Sure. They can actually go to MrMarketology.com. That has everything about me, but even more important, actually the all about me funny is 1 paragraph. You can only find 1 paragraph, but what you will find are marketing strategies such as this, and I'll be talking with other experts and sharing my point of view as well, and you'll find that on the site. Also, my social, all of them: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, not LinkedIn, Google Plus, are all Mr. Marketology, so if you go to those platforms, look up Mr. Marketology or put Mr. Marketology at the end, you'll find me.

Then you can even find me easily at JeffBeale.com. I try to make myself very accessible, so hopefully if I'm doing my job correctly, you can find me easily.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Thanks for all that stuff and, yeah, I really liked all the marketing nuggets you dropped on us today, and I think that ... The big thing other than the stuff like the 4 C's of marketing and differentiating and course correcting and stuff, I think that, especially that little Apple lesson about how ... That was pretty dang powerful for me. You want a camera that takes good pictures, and they kind of get you with this thing that's true, but also really dang cool, and even showing all these pictures taken with the iPhone, man, it kind of messes you up a little bit, doesn't it? Because you think, "Okay, I want to take good pictures for myself but, man, imagine the possibilities if I could use this same device to take all these awesome photos." Thanks for that lesson there.

Jeff Beale: Oh, you're welcome, man. If there's 1 takeaway that I would like the listeners to know is that understand your audience. Find out exactly who that is, what their needs are, and then find out how can you benefit them? If you can do that and put that into a compelling message, you won't have any problems becoming an authority in your market.

Robert Plank: Perfect. Well said. MrMarketology.com. Thanks so much for being on the show, Jeff.