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Cultivating creativity for business success with Jodie Newman
17 Plays8 months ago
In today's episode, Jodie Newman joins us from The Business Allotment. We explore the essential role of creativity in SEO and business strategy. Jodie shares her journey from a furniture and product design background to becoming an expert in fostering creative processes within organisations.
Find Jodie on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodienewman/
Key Discussion Points:
- Creativity as a Business Tool: Jodie discusses how creativity is not just about producing art; it's a strategic tool that can propel business innovation and differentiate companies from their competition.
- The Mechanics of Creativity: The conversation dives into how creativity works in the brain and how businesses can systematically foster it to improve problem-solving and idea generation.
- Transforming Business Approaches: Jodie highlights her work with large and small businesses, using creative sessions to redefine company strategies and enhance team engagement and ownership of projects.
- The Power of Creative Thinking: Andrew Laws and Jodie discuss how rethinking traditional approaches can lead to significant business advantages, exemplified by Jodie’s successful reworking of promotional strategies for major clients like Shell.
- Practical Tips for Fostering Creativity: Listeners gain valuable insights into practical tools and methods for cultivating creativity within their teams and projects, which is crucial for standing out in competitive industries.
Featured Guest: Jodie Newman - Creativity Consultant and Author
- Background: Jodie specialises in integrating creative thinking into business strategies.
Episode Highlights:
- Jodie's Personal Journey: Learn how her educational background influenced her professional path from a design student to a creativity consultant.
- Creativity in Unexpected Places: Discover how even industries traditionally seen as non-creative, like SEO, can benefit immensely from creative approaches.
- The Impact of Creativity on Business Success: Examples of how creative thinking has transformed company strategies and led to marketing and customer engagement breakthroughs.
Closing Thoughts: Creativity isn’t just an art; it’s a vital business skill. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to inject innovative thinking into their business practices, enhancing both personal and organisational growth.
Connect with Jodie: For those inspired by this episode, Jodie offers listeners a unique opportunity to receive a creative workout and tool if they connect with her on LinkedIn, mentioning this podcast. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodienewman/
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Transcript
Introduction to LAN Edition with SEO Experts
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast. This is a very special edition. This is one of our LAN editions of the podcast, which remember, is now a daily podcast until I get knackered and stop doing it. So what is LAN? LAN is live action networking. Over the past few months, I've brought you various fascinating people from the world of SEO and digital marketing.
00:00:22
Speaker
But there's somebody I've been really wanting to talk to because they're a specialist in a subject which I think you can't do SEO without having copied it out a bit at the end there, didn't I?
Jodie Newman & Her Creative Approach
00:00:35
Speaker
Honored guest, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, I'm Jodie Newman from the Business Allotment. It's a place where businesses grow creatively. Just so brilliant. I love the fact you just got that ready. It's just, I'm trying to write my, I'm trying to write my little slogan thing at the moment. I saw a talk at BizEx, which is like the action coach conference, somebody called Donald Miller, who wrote something called The Story. The story or selling by a store. I should really know, shouldn't I?
00:01:03
Speaker
So I've been trying to perfect it. So at the moment I'm like my reticulated, I'm just very aware of it. So I like, can you give us that again? Because that's such a neat little line. Yes. So it's the place where businesses grow creatively. So absolutely great. So listeners, I know Jodie through The Creative Collective, which is one of my favourite networking groups. And
00:01:29
Speaker
When the creative collective started, I think some people were quite surprised that me, an SEO type person was in there. So saying, well, surely SEO isn't a creative industry. And I said, it absolutely is. It really is. When you've got black and white rules, then creativity is a massive part of figuring out how to adapt to that and how to move around it.
The Role of Creativity in SEO & Marketing
00:01:55
Speaker
But Jodie, I want to dig a little bit into your, I want to dig into your past without this sound, starting to sound like it's Trisha. I'm not going to cry. I don't have a sad backstory. Good. I'm glad to hear that. So you weren't, you didn't kind of start off in, you didn't start off necessarily as a professional creative.
00:02:21
Speaker
Not in the traditional sense of the word. No, I suppose not. I was a student of creativity because that was my whole education. So I did a degree in furniture and product design and then a Master of Arts at the Royal College in furniture design. So creativity is very much in my DNA.
00:02:40
Speaker
I entirely take back my statement. I've just read your biography as well to remind myself so sorry about that. So you started off very much in a creative way. Yes well certainly you know you know in that kind of education piece I was and that's what sparked I mean obviously I had a kind of a creative bent in terms of wanting to produce stuff and design stuff etc.
00:03:06
Speaker
But actually what happened while I was doing that was alongside that, what we'd never got taught, but what fascinated me and what kind of picked my curiosity was more the kind of the mechanics of creativity. How the hell did I turn up one day to the studio with a brief in front of me to say, design a chair for XYZ? And I would, you know, fill a sketchbook full of ideas and it just kept rolling and you really felt in that kind of creative zone. And then the next day, literally nothing.
00:03:35
Speaker
And how can one brain be so bloody contrary in terms of how creativity happens? And that's what started my research. So I off my own bat really just did loads and loads of reading and research and tried to get under the skin of what's happening in your brain without being a neuroscientist.
00:03:53
Speaker
I get easily bored with long, complicated academic texts. So it's very much kind of the easy to access thinking around, okay, what happens? What's the process? Is there a process? And then of course, how can we cheat the process? Because that's what interested me as someone as a creative who had to come up with the goods. And I spent a decade in marketing and ended up putting in a idea generation
00:04:22
Speaker
format to help the agency answer briefs more creatively. That's something I'd like to sort of pick apart because that's something that's really interesting. I think some people, some people, a lot of people almost have like a superstition around their creativity and, and it's fair enough to sort of bring fancy creativity and protect it from things, you know, protect it from
00:04:43
Speaker
I don't know, getting blind drunk all the time, just to think of a really extreme example. Yes. But in terms of actually feeding it and nurturing it, I know roughly what will help me be creative. But the idea that you've actually kind of formalized this process, I find incredibly interesting because you ran some quite large organizations through this process.
Jodie's Journey: Idea Generation & Success Stories
00:05:06
Speaker
Yes. And so where to start? So, yes.
00:05:13
Speaker
creatives I find tend not want to look at their creativity head on. In case it gets run away. Yeah, it gets scared and it runs away. To which I say, do give it a good old eyeballs, because nothing will happen. And I think why that might be the case, let's put aside creative ego. I mean, I'm not dabbling there, we'll be there all day. But in terms of
00:05:42
Speaker
the process of creativity, because it happens via the subconscious, I think people feel they intuit ideas, which to some, I mean, you know, we won't get into the semantics of it. Intuition is involved because intuition for me is made up of kind of great hunches and experience and insight of stuff that you've done before. So, you know, yeah, it's kind of you, you do use your intuition to sniff out a great idea.
00:06:12
Speaker
But actually what's going on is, is it's not formulaic, but you can certainly put a process around it. And I don't think you can cheat it, but my God, you can help it on its way. And so I used to run idea generation sessions for all sorts. I mean, I did three days in a basement with all the heads of, um, uh, all the territories, the franchise territories for shell. Okay.
00:06:37
Speaker
to come up with their big summer promotion, which ran across all the European territories and had a terrible take up because somebody went, here's an idea. Do this, everyone. And none of the directors of the territories could be asked. You know, it wasn't their idea. They didn't really understand it. The powerful thing about creativity in terms of working into organizations or teams is it generates this massive sense of ownership. And so
00:07:05
Speaker
we came up with this summer promotion idea that KI facilitated, the ideas didn't come from me, they came from around the table. And they went from about a 5% take up of this promotion to 95%. That is just the power of creativity to engender ownership into an organization, its ideas, its movement forward. It's a super powerful tool
00:07:31
Speaker
And it feels so fripper us and well, we don't need creativity in this business. And I would always say, yes, you bloody do. See, I'd always fight that. And it's in my younger days, it was a frustration to, to want to pursue creative things, but to be very much almost straight up told, no, you've got to get a real job. And so I've always been a bit sensitive. It's been a bit, a bit salty, like, you know, like having a paper cut that won't quite heal when people sort of
00:08:00
Speaker
decry the value of creativity. But I've noticed people's attitude towards it does appear to be changing. Now we've got a client who I saw in the meeting, I very flippantly sort of said, Well, just come up with some ideas for such and such. Yeah, we can't. That's, that's why we've got you here. Yeah, that's why you're valuable. I was like,
00:08:19
Speaker
And this stuff doesn't just occur to some people. No, it doesn't. You know, creativity is a skill. Unlike any skill, you can use tools and practice to be better. Now that is not to say everyone is going to turn into a bloody ninja ideas generating machine, but
00:08:36
Speaker
everyone can be better. I used to facilitate sessions and people were the first thing that would come out of their mouth is, I'm not creative, I don't have any ideas. Okay, because that's what they've been told. And that is the way we're pretty much educated in this country. Going back to your thing about black and white stuff, because creativity isn't binary, but our education is. So we go in as creative humans and come out as humans who are able to answer a set of questions to achieve a set of data to prove that education is working.
00:09:06
Speaker
Okay, the whole thing is ruined. You can swear if you want. It's fucked. It's absolutely fucked. So yeah, so you know, creativity is in that gray area. And it is, you know, and it's difficult to define and it's difficult to quantify and it's difficult to measure. And so that's why a lot of people stay out of it. But it is, it is changing outside of education.
The Increasing Value of Creativity in Business
00:09:30
Speaker
You know, I think it was probably
00:09:32
Speaker
six years ago now, it could have been even longer that LinkedIn ran one of their kind of research things and asked a whole load of employers what the number one soft skill was they were looking for and creativity topped the list. Now that wouldn't have probably happened, you know, 10, 15 years ago. So people in it, I mean, I don't want to open the AI can of words, but at this point in time,
00:09:56
Speaker
You know, if you're coming up with ideas, I've spent a lot of time on some of the AI things. They are quite shit still, coming up with great innovative ideas. It still turns in, turns out. Yeah, that's right. And also scraping other people's ideas and cobblings together, you know, a little bit sick in my mouth. So, you know, we still do, we still can play that, you know, kind of card and have that advantage. So people are recognizing that whatever industry you are in,
00:10:26
Speaker
it has a benefit. And, you know, I have people in the business allotment, I have loads of creative businesses, obviously, but I have accountants, listeners, IFAs, those kind of people who recognize doing things creatively, that having a creative approach to running your business in every aspect, from how you onboard your clients, to what your invoice looks like, to, you know, how you market yourself,
00:10:52
Speaker
If you apply a few creative processes in there, you'll get different thinking. And if you get different thinking, you move away from your competitors because you're saying something or doing something differently. And that's your competitive advantage. I reckon you ought to write a book about this stuff, Jodie. Oh, well. Sorry, we're not using video for this, but I just like a comedy, comedy wink there.
00:11:16
Speaker
Yes, I did. I mean, it's old. No, I never think about it. But yes, practical guide to creativity. You'll find it on Amazon or on my website. Yes. And it's kind of got that toolkit in the middle because for me, I don't really want to wang on about the kind of academic side of creativity and what that is. It's so practical, you know, and get yourself a toolkit of creative tools to help you in your business, to help you be more
00:11:42
Speaker
creative about how you approach SEO or how you onboard your client. Anything that you do, it will make a difference. And it's super practical. And I get a lot of stuff done with my clients because it's also a really quick process because you are circumnavigating all those kind of logic cycles that we've had ingrained in us to think logically through a problem.
00:12:05
Speaker
and turgidly work through it and come out with something unsurprising at the end, or do something different, access a different part of your brain, come up with mad stuff. You know what? Might just bloody work. I want your job. It sounds fantastic. I've been doing SEO for 25 years and I get a kick out of finding those pathways, finding those ways through the problems.
00:12:32
Speaker
Me and a few other people in digital marketing looked at whether we could form a superhero team almost. We registered the domain name and everything, where we would go into businesses and just try and help them in that way. We completely fell on our asses with it.
00:12:49
Speaker
Well, to be fair, we don't have the skills to do that. We can't, you can't just go into a business and go, well, no one's going to give you money to say, let me float in. Let me just be like a, you know, Colombo or be like, just one more thing. And then I'll magically give you an answer. They'd be like, well, that sounds shit. I'm not going to give you any money. So you, you telling me you've got this process and I need to read your book is that's really quite cool. That's quite exciting.
Viewing Business Through a Creative Lens
00:13:15
Speaker
I like that.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it is, you know, I find it exciting to help people access different ways of thinking about their business. I think as business owners, or as department heads, or whatever we're doing, we get to a level of expertise where we know what we're doing inside out. Business owners know our, you know, our own businesses inside out. Inside out is a terrible creative perspective. And outside in,
00:13:42
Speaker
is a brilliant creative perspective. So what I tend to end up doing in my clients through the tools and the processes I use, it's kind of leading them gently by the hands while they're not looking almost like the back of their business. And then I go now look, and they're outside their business looking in. And it's amazing the insights you get. And once you have insights, you get ideas, once you get ideas, you know, you get stuff to change and to try.
00:14:08
Speaker
Creativity isn't for the faint-hearted, because failure is an inherent part of the creative process. And again, going back, I don't want to give education too hard a time, but failure is kind of engineered out of us as an acceptable way of being. And we all know as humans, it's an intrinsic part of just being human, and it's definitely a critical part of being creative.
00:14:34
Speaker
lot of it's littered with failures. Some of them, you know, okay, that was a terrible idea. I now see that and I'll put it in the bin. For most of them, you go, do you know what? There's so many moving parts to anything we do. You can pick that up, tweak this bit, try again, do this, change that. And it's
00:14:52
Speaker
Creativity is an iterative process. It's not an end point. It is literally a journey. One of the other people I saw talk at BizEx was someone called Jamel Kureshi, who's a mindset, like a sports and business mindset. There's a few people kind of doing this now. And one of the quotes I wrote down, he said, nothing breeds failure like success. Yeah. And I think with your explanation of the creative process, if you arrived at a destination fully, you failed.
00:15:22
Speaker
You've missed the opportunities. Yes, and I think it's unsustainable business. I mean, just look at Dyson, I think it was like 5,147 prototypes, okay, for his first bag list.
00:15:35
Speaker
said Hoover, that was a mistake vacuum. And you know, and still they iterate and reiterate because they have to make a sustainable business, you know, and they want to, you know, let's give them fair dues, want to make a better product and give their clients a better experience of cleaning their house and drying their hands and what else, you know, whatever else they do.
00:15:56
Speaker
So I think it is always initiative project. I think that the bravery has to start right at the very beginning because we filter our own ideas. We have, you know, we can have this internal monologue, this narrative to say, well, that's a shit idea. Don't write that one down. Well, that's, that will never work. We also have that. I did a little video series, ages gone LinkedIn of idea killers. Um, anyone in a meeting goes, yes, but immediately idea stone dead.
00:16:25
Speaker
Or, well, we've tried that. Again, you know, absolute steak to the heart of a new idea. You know, new ideas, I said, they're like little baby birds. Okay. They're only just hatched. They can fit in the palm of your hand. They're so small. If you threw that out the nest and expect it to fly, forget it. You've got a dead bird on the pavement. You need to nurture it. You give it time. You feed it with kind of other thoughts and you let it blossom. And then you let it go. And with half a chance, it will soar.
00:16:55
Speaker
but that whole initial ideas process takes a lot of bravery to say the stupid because you have to say the stupid because more often or not, that's where the creative goal lies. I ran an idea generation session for an agency.
00:17:11
Speaker
it was for a high street shoe brand, and it was for a pitch situation. And I always liked to get people who had nothing to do with anything to do with the brief in the session, we have the security guard in. Wow. Come on, come on, mate. Come and sit in on this thing. It'll be fun. So he came and sat in. And we had a number of tools that I sort of led everyone through.
00:17:33
Speaker
And at one point, he was looking at a card of David Beckham, and he said, bloody hell, I'd give anything to be in his shoes. And we all laughed. And I wrote it down. That was the best idea that came up. And the idea of being in a sports person's shoes for the day won that agency the pitch. Wow.
00:17:54
Speaker
So it is that fresh eyes, it is that thinking the stupid, saying it out loud. And he only said that out loud because he felt comfortable enough in that environment to say stuff like that. And he said it as a joke, I just have quite a good radar for ideas, and particularly stupid ideas. And it's often the ones that are said as a piss take that have the gold in them.
00:18:22
Speaker
I absolutely love that story. So I'm not expecting you just to give away the farm, but what are your tools? If you sit down with a company says, okay, let's go through the journey here. So where is somebody going to be at typically just before they contact you or contact the business allotment?
Overcoming Creative Blocks in Business
00:18:42
Speaker
So it can be, so I've worked quite a lot with agencies, digital agencies, stuff like that. So it kind of
00:18:50
Speaker
really separates into two camps when I'm working with those kinds of organisations. It will either be that they're finding they're not winning enough pitches, because you do get, and I'll talk about this briefly in the book, this sort of organisational think. And even if you have ideas sessions, which often people just think, well, you know, we've got a creative team or we have, you know, we've got a senior team who are really good at ideas, but they're all
00:19:18
Speaker
churning out the same ideas over and over again because everyone has a kind of creative territory, a thinking territory and if you're a creative that will be a big territory but it has fences and you need external tools and thinking to enable you to jump into fresh territory over those fences because you know our brain's fairly lazy I think inherently and it you know pushing it to do that so but you know as a creative you will also have
00:19:47
Speaker
lots of tools that are in your roller decks of creative thinking tools that you use instinctively. So that's what because you've been trained in it, you know, and you've had experience of it. So I would say they would usually be in a place where something is happening where they're feeling, okay, you know, either we're not winning pitches, or our work, you know, our creative output, if you are in a marketing environment, you know, isn't quite up to the standard it should be. But I work a lot with non creative businesses who actually just want
00:20:18
Speaker
that approach applied to their strategy for the next year, for creating a vision, for bringing the business together and going, okay, we need a bit of a strategic restart here. So, you know, we can work, I can work with either a senior team or the entire organization to go, all right, let's all be creative about this. And we, you know, I mean, I ran the press association, this is going back some now. I think I probably ran 200 or 300 of their staff, so it's not everybody through
00:20:48
Speaker
creative sessions, thinking about the future of their business. And we came up with a blueprint for the future for the entire business based on ideas that came from all the different mixtures of staff and functions and seniority and everything. And so going back to my point about it being a fantastic engagement tool, it can be used like that. I often work with, I've just done a session with
00:21:14
Speaker
social enterprise and another one pretty much straight after with a digital marketing agency where I work just with the senior teams being creative about what is the future of our business because what will happen otherwise you will sit down and think the same thoughts you've always thought and do the same plan as you've always done and you'll end up pretty much where you started because sometimes everything else has moved on around you and you've got to think differently to get a competitive advantage to understand how to talk about what you do so the beauty of that creative
00:21:44
Speaker
approach is that I can work on brand proposition on, you know, I ran a session yesterday about client onboarding, doing something really on brand and unusual to get their clients so excited about working with them. They've kind of been sold before any, any work has been delivered. That's great. You know, I work a lot about these brand experiences because that's a creative
00:22:09
Speaker
thought process. How do we bring our brand to life at the point at which our customers and our prospects touch it? I don't do the visual branding, but I can certainly, you know, we can be creative about how we build a story and then how we bring it to life. And those brand experiences do so much work for business.
00:22:29
Speaker
So it can be things like that. But I can also run what I would call traditional creative thinking. So how do we communicate better with our clients? We might have a team of eight people in there and we'll do that. I used to go into brands like Dorothy Perkins and BHS and run days with their marketing and PR teams. What's the new big in-store idea for kind of autumn, winter?
00:22:57
Speaker
So it's these big broad briefs that you just need a different way of thinking about. So the creative approach is so flexible and that's why I love it because I can work one-to-one with a one-person business owner and absolutely get everything in place to
00:23:16
Speaker
tell a story that's fantastic and that they love telling and sets them apart from their audience. And we do, you know, kind of crazy things with how they might onboard a client or, you know, deliver the work back to them, you know, all those kind of stuff or work, you know, in teams with bigger businesses. So these so far, the things we've talked about are very much
00:23:40
Speaker
What kind of project work? You're coming in and you're saying, you know, there is an objective that you want to expand or you perhaps you want to discover what the objective is going to be. And you're talking about kind of workshop days and workshops and things. I'm really interested in on your thoughts on how you can develop a creative culture within a business.
Fostering a Creative Culture in Teams
00:24:00
Speaker
Now, I'll tell you why, because this is a loaded thing. I'm going through my processes with a very talented man called John Munson at the moment, who's a digital delivery guy. Brilliant.
00:24:10
Speaker
And one of the things that I'm very keen on is developing my team as creative. So our weekly meetings, we've been doing the lion thing. So what happened last week? What issues have you got? Oh, what opportunities have you got in what you're doing next week? And we've done this for about at least a year. And we've realized, because our project management systems
00:24:36
Speaker
We've done a lot of work to make them really clear. We all know what we did last week. We all know what we're doing next week. We all know what the issues are. We tend to know what the opportunities are. So I've written down three questions I want to run past you and I feel like I'm putting you on the spot a bit here. Well, let's see, shall we?
00:24:52
Speaker
So everybody who works at ESEO and actually, yeah, all the creatives in our network, everyone we work with, we're all musicians and writers mostly. So I thought, right, that's one of our real skills. That's something I want to put front and centre when we have teamings just to remind us all this is why we're here. So three questions. What have you discovered this week?
00:25:20
Speaker
Next question is, what surprised you this week? And the last question is, what are you experimenting with this week? I need to say that because these are notes from a conference that might not be original thought from me. That might be Jamell Cressy coming up with it. But I wrote it down and I made sure that I wasn't going to forget that. Yeah. OK, so I'm just picking which thoughts to verbalise.
00:25:50
Speaker
What have I discovered? I've discovered that there is a different way to think about niche. So, because I've just run a seminar for my business shed members, that's the club that I run, because I was having too many conversations where people were getting their knickers in too much of a twist about, oh, niche, I don't understand it. What is it? Do I need it? I don't think I need, do I need it? What is it? Round and round and round they'd go. And I,
00:26:21
Speaker
googled it and now I also this is another thing that I discovered in fact this is what I've been surprised about and I don't know where the original thought came from somebody at some point wrote a blog or an article online you'll probably be able to tell exactly what's happened here Andrew about niche and they had five points okay
00:26:41
Speaker
all fair, you know, it wouldn't surprise you to read them all fairly. Yeah, okay, that that's sort of sensible advice when you're looking for niche, which always slightly makes me nervous slash sends me into a boredom coma. And then the first 11 pages of Google with that article regurgitated word for word in every single resource and blog and everyone like everyone was just using these five steps to find your niche. And
00:27:12
Speaker
I got to page 13 before I found somebody saying something different about niche. And I think, well, that's no surprise then that people find it difficult to find their own niche because it wasn't amazing advice at the beginning. And that's what everyone else has then gone on to say. It was most peculiar. It was very regurgitated. From an SEO perspective, to a certain extent, there is a homogenization of thought and of advice because Google's
00:27:41
Speaker
The big challenge Google has, my goodness, I'm actually talking about SEO on an SEO podcast. I can only apologize. Google's big challenge is that they don't understand the world. Yes. If you think of Google as a very inquisitive child, what, you know, why, why, why? And the funny thing is when your children go through that phase,
00:28:10
Speaker
they sort of get to the point where they give up and just wander off. Okay, fine. And you're sort of exhausted. Google's like that child. Instead of wandering off, they get to a point where they go, right, well, we've asked why lots of times. Now we have to decide.
00:28:26
Speaker
what's important in this area? What's the important answer to this question that people ask? Because all Google is is a question and answer thing. Yes. And because of that, you get homogenized results. So if Google's understanding of how to establish your target niche focuses around five questions, and if loads of people have written that,
00:28:50
Speaker
then you're going to get all that at the top. It's a really interesting point. I might write about that some more because the challenge then becomes more difficult to become a disrupter because Google can only assess the quality and authority of something that has already happened. The skill and the exciting thing about you going into a business is that you're
00:29:19
Speaker
establishing ideas that haven't happened. So you're kind of the complete opposite end of the scale, but it's something that I'm very aware of in SEO that to the extent that some of the SEO software, if you want to write an article, it will go and look at what's already ranking and tell you what words to use.
00:29:38
Speaker
which is like, yeah, well, you know, we have to sort of figure that out. But what I'm always because otherwise, we're just probably just not going to get the topic where Google's been around too long for us any, any of us to really disrupt it. And people ask me, people ask me, you know, do you think AI will kill SEO? And I'm like, I hope so.
00:30:02
Speaker
because I don't think SEO is the be all and end all. I think we've got probably at least five or 10 years, but at this age, it's not a perfect system and it never has been. And it's almost find it weird that it's become an industry. So I'm very interested in your thought process there because it's... So I've sort of wandered into a not a cul-de-sac. What's the opposite of a cul-de-sac?
00:30:31
Speaker
A broad open field full of opportunity, Andrew. That's it. And that's more likely to send my brain whizzing off in the cul-de-sac. Yeah, no, you've really hit something there. It's so frustrating because I tend to do, and it's not just niche, because what I tend to do is I've got five sheds I run a month packed full of members who are small business owners, and I listen to them talking and
00:30:57
Speaker
We all work together and I hear what their problems are and I go and design a tool to help them. And then I look online to see what help is out there. And the major problem is it's all regurgitated crap from one or two key sources. And then, you know, kind of some peripheral stuff. And I think that is a major problem because actually what tends to be out there often is, you know, I'm talking from the small business owners perspective,
00:31:26
Speaker
It's completely over-engineered for quick, creative work. It's engineered for bigger corporations. So these poor small business owners go, all right, I'll, you know, how to write a marketing plan? All right, well, I'll download these 82 templates and I'll start. And then, you know, three months later, like, well, so I've got a marketing plan. I'm like, mate, we need an hour. That's it. Because you need it to be fit for purpose and you need to approach it creatively so that it absolutely delivers on, you know, kind of what you're wanting to achieve.
00:31:56
Speaker
not, you know, this kind of over-engineered, regurgitated stuff that everyone is doing. Because if you take all that information and act on it, you're going to end up doing exactly the same thing as all your competitors and nobody wins. You absolutely are. And my opinion for most of the websites that I'm, I have to be really, I'm not going to mention clients or anything like that, but a lot of them, I think that's not the end of the journey.
00:32:26
Speaker
I think when a lot of people write content for the website, they don't take into consideration what part of the buying journey they're fulfilling. So an example, the SEO website, our website, the part of the journey that our website is fulfilling is empowering people and giving them as much knowledge as they can have to get them as far as they can get themselves whilst positioning us, quite frankly, as the authority so that when they want more help,
00:32:55
Speaker
We're getting a better quality of clients because they're informed before they ever speak to us.
Websites as Evolving Customer Tools
00:33:01
Speaker
But a lot of people seem to see their websites as the end point, which they're not. It's still not a human thing. It's a shot window, isn't it? You're having a browse. You might go in. You might walk on by.
00:33:15
Speaker
you know, and that's why, you know, when people say, I'm going to do my website and finish it and then move on. And I'm like, well, okay, but it's an evolving tool, you know, and if someone wanders past your website that you haven't touched for three years, and there's like dead wasps in the window, and a half dress mannequin. Your officials are so good. Immediately know exactly what that is.
Connect with Jodie for More Creative Insights
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think we've gone slightly over time, but I didn't want to slam the door on anything we were talking about there. But what's the best way for people to contact you? I spend a ludicrous amount of time on LinkedIn. So if you just search for Jodie Newman and you see someone peering through a polo mint, that's me. Brilliant.
00:34:04
Speaker
Well, thank you ever so much for spending time with us today. It's been an absolute joy. I'm quite happy just to sit and just listen to you talk, actually. You have an angle which is incredibly interesting and appealing. So I hope my listeners have enjoyed this as well. So there you go, listeners. Go hunt down Jodie. Oh, that's slightly aggressive. I'm not taking it.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'll be careful not to take that as the clip if I kind of use it any of this information. Go find, go find Jodie and say hello. And well, after that, your magical journey of creativity can begin. So just amazed me to say, go on. If they do connect with me on LinkedIn, tell me that you've come via the podcast and I'll give you one creative workout and one creative tool to walk away with.
00:34:57
Speaker
There you go. Can't say fairer than that. Okay. What only remains for me to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye, Jodie? Goodbye. Thanks for having me. It's been a blast. No one's ever said like their own name, like the two Ronnies thing. Would you like to say goodbye, Jodie? Goodbye, Jodie. I've ruined it now. Bye for me. Right. Thanks for listening, everyone. Bye.