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[0:17] Tonya Pinkins: Good morning, Laurel. My name is Tonya Pinkins and I am at PodMax and you are listening to my podcast recorded from PodMax.

[0:27] Tonya Pinkins: And my my you see, I'm just whatever. It's okay. Whatever. Say that. No, no, no. I'm I'm fine to be on my podcast because it's called You Can't SAY THAT. And it is the podcast where you can. So my guest today on PodMax is Laurel Mintz. Her company is Elevate My Brand. She's a wife. She's a mother. She's a businesswoman. And we are gonna talk today about how to elevate our brand, which is something I need to know. It's something everybody who listens to me needs to know. I am a total let-eyed about it. I'm just too old, not it. Uh what is a brand? Like, I feel like, do I have to be a commodity Laurel?

[1:08] Laurel Mintz: Well, I would actually say that you have to be the opposite of a commodity. You need to be unique, and a commodity is something that is just traded, you know, like on the stock market, right? So a brand is something that should be completely unique to you. And that's why it's important to build a brand. A brand is something that is that emotional tie, and it's the reason that someone either buys your product or your service or connects with you in a really emotional way. So no, your brand should not be a commodity, definitely not.

[1:34] Tonya Pinkins: So what is your brand, Laurel?

[1:36] Laurel Mintz: Um, so my brand is that we're a marketing agency, we're digital and experiential, and our whole motto, just like yours, is about, you know, just saying speaking the truth, right? Um, on our homepage of our website, it says, uh, you don't have to be big to get shit done. And that's really how what we believe. There are so many marketing agencies out there that um they sell you with one person and then they trade you off to another who's not an expert. We have what's called a pod model, so that everyone on our team is an expert and we really deliver for our clients. Aside from that, in terms of our ethos, obviously we're women led and women founded, and we believe so strongly that women are gonna rule the world and we lead with that um and the diversity angle as well. It's really important to us.

[2:16] Laurel Mintz: I am all about women running the world. I'm like, why have we gone belly up and let these guys take over? We know from raising our size handle it. No more.

[2:27] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, um, I'm I'm gonna ask you really specific things. I've looked at some of your videos on your site, they're really wonderful, succinct. You were talking on one of the videos about teasers. What is that?

[2:41] Laurel Mintz: Yeah, so a teaser is something that gets someone excited with a little snippet, right? Um, so on a website, for example, a teaser or an irresistible offer would be something that you give in exchange to get someone's information. Because let's face it, people aren't stupid anymore, right? They know that when you're landing on someone's website and you're asking them for their email, they need to get something of value in return. And that's really the what the teaser is. It's something of value that you're giving to that end person, and they're giving you their email because you want to market to them and they know what you are gonna provide provides value.

[3:15] Laurel Mintz: So, for example, on our website, we've got nine easy steps to marketing, which is kind of a DIY uh in that category, because we want to you know give a lot of value, and then we've also got a downloadable PDF that talks about the difference between sales and marketing, so it's very much relationship versus transactional, because those are the things that people just don't seem to get. And in today's day and age, it's so important. So that's what a teaser is.

[3:38] Tonya Pinkins: Okay, so I want to get really clear because every time I think about like, what do I have to offer? What do I want to get? So you're saying on Elevate My Brand, when people come to the site, you say, Wanna get 10 easy steps for this, that, and the other? Sign up here. So the offer can be advice. Anything.

[4:01] Laurel Mintz: Yeah, because let's face it, like we don't have a product, we have a service, right? So we need to provide value and show you we are the experts in this space. I'm not like a gap. I'm not going to give you 10% off your first order or free shipping, but this is how a service-based business or someone that's not product driven can drive that same value and uh convert to that really important KPI or key performance indicator, which would be the growth of your database.

[4:27] Tonya Pinkins: So the majority of people who you know tune in on the Broadway podcast network are writers, directors. I mean, some of them may have a product, but mostly it's services. What kind of offers could an actor or a director give on their website? What are they gonna offer?

[4:43] Laurel Mintz: So it comes back to that brand conversation, right? What is it that makes you different? Um, and really brainstorming how you if it's your voice, if it's you know, the angle that you come at at this from, or if it's just your years of experience. Like maybe you've been an author for so many years and you have this really easy way to outline your first chapter or to get to a place where you can pitch your book. So you might do something like you know, the five hot topics for directors today, or the the 10 ways to draft your first chapter, uh, or easy outline opportunities. You know, it's about how you provide the value that you give in your actual product or service and taking a little tiny bit of that and offering it for free.

[5:27] Tonya Pinkins: So give me one for an actor.

[5:30] Laurel Mintz: Hmm, for an actor, let's see. Well, an actor has the need to be many different personalities, right? And maybe their method or maybe they're not. So maybe their PDF would be something or their their um their offer would be something like I don't know, like 30 second ways to get into your into the murder, murder mindset, or 30 minutes, 30 seconds to get into, you know, the victim mentality, or you know, whatever those characters might be for that um actor. Um, you know, that would be how I would probably present them.

[6:05] Laurel Mintz: But for an actor, the people that are coming to their website, we have you kind of have to back up and ask, like, who are the people that are landing on my website, right? So we have to know are those directors, are those other actors, you know, that's who you're trying to service. So if it's other actors, I might suggest a different type of offer.

[6:23] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I mean, I think for actors, they want probably casting directors and writers and producers to come to their website, but in this this age where everybody's gotta be their own business, they probably want future audience members to come to their website too. So is there it might be their real, you know, that might be something that's easier for them because they're they're really looking to book jobs, right?

[6:46] Laurel Mintz: And the best way for you to book a job is to give you a snippet of who that person is as an actor. So a real might be an easier downloadable uh, you know, piece for an actor, I would think. But so many people, like there was a young girl who's in the movie Freaky, which was one of the big hits this year with Vince Vaughn. And um, I I I think I read that she had like a million Instagram followers, and that that was like her first movie just because she had so many followers.

[7:13] Tonya Pinkins: So she clearly wasn't trying to sell a reel. What is what is someone offering in that sense?

[7:20] Laurel Mintz: She's offering a community, right? So the reason that she got booked was because she already had an existing um audience of people who were interested in watching whatever it was she did, sold, you know, whatever. So for her, um, most likely she would she would create something, an irresistible offer that was something about how to build your social media community, right? Or how to build social media community for actors, right?

[7:41] Laurel Mintz: Um, because if that's the direction she's continuing down, someone would land on her page. Like you have to keep thinking of the reason why. Why does someone come to me? Why does someone hire me? Why does someone buy me? You know, answering those questions, why? And usually you can build those out of the FAQs, right? What are what are those questions that someone keeps asking you over and over and over again? Because then you know that that's what a majority of people who interact with you need to know.

[8:06] Laurel Mintz: And so if you create that irresistible offer around that why, around that FAQ that you're getting all the time, then you're providing real value to the people who are needing your product or service, and that's marketing gold.

[8:19] Tonya Pinkins: So the other way I get totally overwhelmed. Like Twitter's one world, Instagram's another world, Facebook's another world, pit, uh I'm I'm just all the socials.

[8:31] Laurel Mintz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm anti-social. Where do you get the most bang for your energy and time? Because they take a lot of energy and time and the creativity that's involved.

[8:43] Laurel Mintz: Yeah, it's a great question. And um, we differentiate ourselves as an agency because we're super data driven, right? So instead of me saying, This is what you should do, and this is what everyone should do. What we do is come at this from we look at the back end of your site, your social channels, and more importantly, what your specific competitors are doing.

[9:03] Laurel Mintz: So let's just say you're um you're a new beverage brand, right? And you're looking to launch into the universe and you don't know what channels you're supposed to be on or what kind of voice of the brand you want to develop. You would come to us and you would say, hey, Laurel, I've got this product and this brand. Um, here are the top three to five direct competitors that we believe we're capturing market share from, right? Because that's ultimately what you're doing when you're in social land. You're trying to capture eyeballs of an audience that doesn't know like or trust you yet, right?

[9:30] Laurel Mintz: So what we do is we have this really amazing licensed software that we run all of those things through, and we come back and we say, here's what the data tells us. The data tells us that these are the four channels that everyone in this universe is on, but also maybe you maybe there's nobody on YouTube. And maybe that's a channel that you can really own because the truth is you're not gonna be able to spend all of that money on growing your Instagram audience or on uh, you know, this insane amount of content that your competitors are pushing out there.

[9:58] Laurel Mintz: So I would never tell someone these are the channels you have to be on. I would say, well, let's see what your competitors are doing, where the white space is, how much budget you have, the best allocation of that budget, and then we can make a social plan going forward from there.

[10:12] Tonya Pinkins: So I heard you say a couple things that just was like, um where you said where's your you check out the back end, but then you said you have your own software that does that. So how people to understand those two things?

[10:26] Laurel Mintz: So the software program basically is list, it's called listening software. And it that's exactly what it does. It goes in and it crawls all of these different channels. So it crawls all of the social, your website, um, your keywords, like all of the different things that are what make up a successful brand. And so that allows us to develop uh what we call our marketing roadmap report where we can come back to you instead of saying, I feel I think, right? We it takes all of the subjectivity out of the creative process, which is part of the biggest challenge in this world because you know, opinion, and I know I'm not I can say whatever I want because this is the you can say anything, yeah.

[11:04] Laurel Mintz: Opinions are like assholes, right? Everyone has one. And the truth is is that when it relates to marketing, I don't give a shit what your opinion is. I want to know what the data says and then how we build a smart marketing plan from there.

[11:15] Tonya Pinkins: So okay, the listening software. What kind of things does the listening software tell you?

[11:27] Laurel Mintz: Well, like I said, it tells you here are them the channels that your direct and indirect competitors are on. And in that, in looking at that, we can see what does the audience really respond to? What is the voice within this world that is landing the most? Because it it literally does a comparative analysis to all of those brands to each other and to this brand that you have, right?

[11:48] Laurel Mintz: So it's graphs and charts, and it's like, you know, it's amazing. It's like, I know it's insane. Are you a mathematician?

[11:54] Laurel Mintz: I am not, but I can I can read the shit out of data, I tell you what. But are you telling me that this listening software is doing this all the time for everybody? Or are you specifically purchasing a software and saying, I'm gonna direct it at this software brand and the four competitors, and it's gonna bring me back specific data?

[12:13] Laurel Mintz: The latter. There's no way we could we could uh assess data from all of the different channels.

[12:18] Laurel Mintz: It's basically I'm a new brand, I'm trying to compete in this space. What do I need to do to do that? What do I need to spend in terms of marketing outbound advertising? What channels do I need to be on? What is the voice that I need to develop? Where's the white space and how do we execute? And that's really what the software pulls the data. And then as the experts, we overlay that expertise on top of the data and we say, here's what the numbers say, here's what that actually means, and here's the go forward plan.

[12:45] Tonya Pinkins: Now, do you work mostly with companies or with individuals?

[12:49] Laurel Mintz: We work mostly with companies. Uh we've been doing this for over 12 years and 250 brands later. Um, so we we work we we work with brands of all sizes though. I mean, and all companies start with one person. So we've certainly done branding messaging positioning for a new baby brand all the way up to you know globalization of huge brands that are you know in every market. So we do know the entire landscape.

[13:14] Laurel Mintz: So I think people do think of themselves as brands now. So let's say a young model comes to you and goes, I want to be the next brand that's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be my clothing, it's gonna be my jewelry, it's gonna be my scents, it's gonna be my this. What are you gonna tell her to do? She's just beautiful. That's all she's got going for. She's young and she's beautiful, but she wants to be a brand.

[13:36] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah.

[13:37] Laurel Mintz: So uh so the questions are like does she already have her website up and live? Does she have all of her branding built? Like, does she know what the brand is? It's just me. I'm beautiful and I want the world to love me and buy anything I say for them to buy.

[13:52] Tonya Pinkins: Got it.

[13:53] Laurel Mintz: So we start with our what we call a mind map session, which is really a fun whiteboard creative session. So it's about education because I think that's a big missing piece for a lot of these brands, right? Or people that think that they can, they always think that they have the best, the most interesting product, or that they're the most, you know, unique thing in the world. And the truth is is that they're very rare opportunities where there's something that nobody else has seen, right? And so part of our job as an agency is to educate them, especially when they're a brand new baby brand, to say this is actually what that means.

[14:24] Laurel Mintz: So in that session, we talk through what are your specific marketing goals. And if they come back and they're like, I want to sell a million bottles of perfume, that is not a marketing goal. A marketing goal is to build my brand, to build my um, you know, my brand guidelines, to build a social following, to increase my traffic to my website. Uh, you know, those are the kinds of marketing um conversations and goals that we need to know that that brand or individual understands. Because if you come to me and you're like, I've got this amazing sales goal and you haven't built a brand yet, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Sorry. But like you don't get it, right?

[15:00] Laurel Mintz: So part of my job is education. Like these are the foundational pieces that need to be built first and foremost before you can sell anything, because nobody knows who the fuck you are.

[15:09] Tonya Pinkins: Exactly.

[15:10] Laurel Mintz: Exactly. Okay. So there's a different thing between my marketing thing and my sales thing. Do you do the sales thing or do I have to go to somebody else for the sales thing?

[15:19] Laurel Mintz: So marketing is an inverted, an inverted triangle. This is called uh, you know, you know, it's brand marketing, right? So creating that awareness and visibility and then pushing them your that audience down through that funnel. Now, what we know is that pre-pandemic, it would take anywhere from six to eight touch points. So an email message, um, a Google ad, a social media message, uh, social advertising, an IRL experience, all of those were considered touch points so that someone could learn to know, like, and trust your brand and collect them into your universe.

[15:53] Laurel Mintz: Now, in this digital universe where everybody is digital, and that's really the only option, it's taking up to 16 plus touch points. So our job, I know it's fucking crazy. And I'm sorry, I have a potty mouth is that okay.

[16:05] Tonya Pinkins: No, you have a potty mouth so do I.

[16:09] Laurel Mintz: So our job is again to educate and to make them understand like you may have the best next soda in the world. But the truth is that you're going up against the Coca-Cola's who've been in market far longer. They've built so much brand equity and trust and they own you know 85 to 90% of that market share, it's going to be a real struggle for you to get there. So I need to know how much money we have to play with and then we can allocate that across the channel. So the first part of that conversation is that mind map session where we talk about what are your specific marketing goals, being really clear that goal that marketing and sales marketing comes first.

[16:42] Laurel Mintz: Marketing is building the relationship marketing is building trust marketing is is showing value for your product or service. The sales piece is at the bottom of that funnel and that's the transactional piece. But there's a whole hell of a lot of work that has to go into building that trust factor before anyone is ready to you know make a purchase decision in your category. And of course that depends on how high that price point is right if you're a pack of gum that doesn't take me as much time to decide I want to buy that if you're buying as it does if you're buying a Ferrari for example.

[17:10] Laurel Mintz: So engagement oh my God the engagement like I was told by someone that not only does the algorithm you know care how many likes but they care how many people engage and you engage and oh my God it just seems like like your life would just become on social media. Do you do that for your clients or do they do that themselves? And do you tell them how to do that to keep the engagement building?

[17:35] Laurel Mintz: Yes. So again, that listening software will tell us what is average engagement across that specific industry. Right. So I will come to you and I will say, all right, engagement rates typically look like X. We've looked at your social channels and your engagement is Y, which means there's this gap, or potentially they're in a really good position. Like we have to look at the numbers, um, not just what they think and feel. And then we develop a social media plan, depends on what their budget looks like, right? If they've got a big enough budget, then we'll not only devise the plan, but we will execute and measure and track everything and um make really smart data driven decisions to move that brand forward.

[18:12] Laurel Mintz: If they have a more limited budget, then we can develop that plan and show them what should happen and kind of guide them along. And it's more, I wouldn't say coaching, but it's like um consulting, it's more consulting and training, right? So it's all budget dependent.

[18:26] Tonya Pinkins: So when you say limited brand and bigger brand, give me some ranges of what a limited brand is that I only get coaching or a real budget. What's the difference range of prices?

[18:36] Laurel Mintz: Again, it depends on what the data shows us, right? If data shows us that in your category, you only need to post once a week, that's a really different budget than posting every single day on five different channels. So I would never give someone, I would never tell someone you have to have X budget. I would have to look at that data first, and that's why we have these, you know, very simplified baby step processes. So the mind map comes first. Do you understand what needs to happen to really build a smart brand? Right? Do you understand what marketing goals are? What does your budget actually look like? How has that currently been allocated and what steps need to happen right now before you're ready to hire an agency? Or if you are ready, what are the pieces that we are going to work on together, right?

[19:16] Laurel Mintz: Right. So that's the educational piece. And oftentimes in that session, I just give homework. I'm like, I highlight in different colors. I'm like, all right, these are all this is all the shit you need to get together before you're ready for us. And I'm super transparent about that because we know after doing this for so long, the kinds of brands that we can help and the people who just ain't ready. You know what I mean? Um, and oftentimes, if they're not ready, we'll come in and we'll say, look, we'll put together a package of consulting hours so we can at least guide you along that process.

[19:45] Laurel Mintz: If they are in a more sophisticated place or if they do have a little bit of a more elevated budget, then the next phase is going into that roadmap process where we're collecting that data, analyzing it, and developing a plan. But both of those processes are, I mean, the first step of that is $500, second step of that is $3,500, and then we move forward from there. So it's not a ridiculous budget. We're kind of slowing things down to make sure that first of all, you get it, and second of all, we're a good fit on both sides.

[20:14] Tonya Pinkins: And is that by a month? Is that a month or $35 a month?

[20:20] Laurel Mintz: So the $500 is for the road uh the mind map process. So that's the hour, hour and a half session with us in the whiteboard. It's the educational piece, flat fee. And then the $3,500 is about a 30-day listening phase. That's phase two for us. So we go through that process again, flat fee. And we also credit our clients back that amount if they move forward with us into execution. Because sometimes they just need to understand that they're not ready by the data. And sometimes we need to see, you know, this is a market that you can really own and hear the categories we need to build that plan out, and then we can move forward from there into execution. So again, it's about kind of slowing down to make this process much more efficient in the long run.

[21:00] Laurel Mintz: So after I've gotten through my education, my uh data of what the market looks like. Now, am I then hiring you for how long thereafter?

[21:12] Laurel Mintz: You can either work with us on an hourly basis. So we can do a, you know, a chunk of hours that we bill against, much like a lawyer would, or and more preferably, we've delet delivered to you an outline of all of the line items that you need to be successful. And that's a bigger budget, obviously. And typically we like to engage in a six to 12 month contract because then we can do price breaks on our hourly rate. So it becomes more efficient the longer you're with us and the bigger the project is. And that's pretty much across the board for agencies.

[21:40] Tonya Pinkins: And do you stay with people beyond a year? Or you, I mean, it's like marketing is you're their marketing, you're like now, you're their marketing person. So you're doing it and you're pivoting as the market pivots, etc.

[21:51] Laurel Mintz: It depends on the brand. A lot of times we'll come in and um, like for example, a lot of our service-based businesses, they only need a little bit of support. They need help with their email marketing campaigns, and they just need a little bit of social here and there. So it's not a huge execution. And most of those brands are with us for a long time because they don't have internal marketing team to execute. It's really more like moving hands, reporting data, uh, you know, kind of lean budget, uh, you know, on a month over-month basis. So we certainly have had clients with us for three, four years, et cetera. But our goal really is for them to only be with us for two to three years maximum because then we've grown the brand to a point where they can hire in-house marketing team, and then we come in and we execute special ops projects or we talk about what that next phase of elevation looks like.

[22:43] Tonya Pinkins: You was kind. You were smart, you is important, you is dead. Tonya Pinkins' horror film, Red Pill brings African American perspective to progressive movement. We are a majority in this country. And we're gonna win the election. Do you know what the red pill is? A red pill is someone who infiltrates a group and then destroys them from the inside. This place is spooky. Some people like to live dangerously. Yes, why are you so jumpy tonight? You know what, guys? I'm gonna go back tomorrow. Did you hear about the creature woman that attacked a father and son hunting down here? I don't see the case. This place creeps me out. I think we should call the sheriff's office. The only people missing or dead are brown people. They're after all of us. What do we do, Amelia? We die. But we take some of them with us.

[24:14] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, I'm Tonya Pinkins, and I would love to hear from you. You can text me at 917-724 8998. Tell me what you're up to, and I'll let you know what I'm up to. Text me. 8998. Let's keep in touch.