Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Lynne Culpa, who is going to introduce herself and tell us why we should trust her.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: My gosh. So my name is Lynne Culpa. I run Cyber PR Army. And the reason you should trust me is because I work also in the arts industry, which, you know, we're a trustworthy lot. So Cyber Print army, we do digital marketing and SEO and we build websites and coaching and all that stuff. But my, my core and my love is always in music and the arts, which is where that I originally started in.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: I've worked with a couple of artists and the ecosystem around digital marketing is pretty intense, but also strangely, like bipolar of like the individual artist has no money, but is expected to do everything until they get a ton of money and then they also have to do everything and they have a brand team and, or a brand development and they're working with a label and then they suddenly it's. It's sink or swim, fast or slow. But that's not the only industry that's, you know, it goes slow and then super fast. You know, if you're waiting for contracts to come in for your custom walls, you know, you're waiting, you gotta go through all the paperwork and then you gotta go, go, go. So how do you coach people through living through your purchasing timeline? You know, like with digital, with marketing, you know, small businesses have that variable start stop of when they first get interest and maybe even that first impression and, and that's even like, that could be now on Claude, that could be on an AI overview to when they actually not just sign, but actually pay for the darn thing. It can be a very long cycle. So what's your experience with that challenge for small businesses, which is huge, and some of the things that you've coached or thought of that help through that challenge.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: I think the key word you said in that question was small businesses. And that is really the heart of it. It is convincing creators that they are a small business. And it's a really big hurdle because they are creators at heart, whether they are dancers, whether they're making instruments, whether they are writing music. To sit down and go, you need to understand, not necessarily how payroll is, but you need to understand how you're going to pay your people and you need to understand how to make a budget and you need to understand routing and touring and what things are going to cost and then just registering music or the legal documents. And this was all pre EI where you could kind of upload, where now you can upload a legal document and get a high level of it. So my first challenge is always, okay, let's sit down and talk about how this is your business, you are the president of your company and these are the things you need to take responsibility for. It's a very difficult conversation, but we get through it.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: And the coaching from there ends up being a lot of nowadays how digital systems, whether AI automated or even just having a website help, they are the support team. Because now with that evolution of AI being able to do so many low end tasks, the artist is able to have kind of this better prepared mini support team for their business. So yes, it's convincing them that they actually have a business and then telling them their support tools out there that can help them.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: No, I think that's true, you know, because there is, there is a push and bolt pull between those people who, you know, are hobbyists and then those who kind of, they see what they do. It's, it's a, as a profession, but they don't treat it the same as, you know, a pool installer. And like, you know what, I know that I'm going to hire people and we're going to install pools. There isn't a lot of, you know, there can be artistry. It's like a Japanese sort of artistry of like I'm doing the same thing again and again, but so well that it is an art which is very different from like a performance artist who, you know, let's. It's like podcasting. There are people who are making podcasts and they're so obsessed with, you know, their intro, their outro.
They spend thousands of dollars on equipment and they're never going to make that much money from the actual podcast. Even if it is like super successful. It's never going to come back. But there is that. The obsessive hobbyist versus the professional, you know, getting, figuring out, okay, if I'm going to ask for people to pay money for this, then at some point I do need to treat it with some business acumen and especially something that is audience based. You know, like there's that press release, that PR label on there of public relations which, you know, there are like rock star painters, you know, and, but most people who think of themselves, my wife's a painter and you know, she, she never really thinks of what she's doing as something, as like a public performance. But it is something at the higher echelons of where you do start to, you know, $500 paintings. A thousand dollars. The difference between a five dollar painting and a thousand dollar painting can literally be who knows you and is displaying your work at a gallery versus in your garage on a Saturday trying to get people to buy it. You know, there's that, that public relations piece can multiply it. So what is your experience in, you know, new digital PR versus how it used to be? Is it like in SEO, the more that it changes, the more that it stays the same? Or are things really different now with AI creeping into everything digital PR having, you know, tie ins and exits left and right and center. So what's your take on PR in this time and space for the small business crowd?
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Say that a lot of it has to do with the, the core piece which is getting your message out and that all the tools offer like even the, the morphing of SEO over the past couple years or you know, five years ago, did TikTok even exist? I'm not really sure when it came about, but you know what I mean, it didn't exist or like even before that reels videos, Instagram didn't exist. And then there was just, you know, this upstart Facebook that was just for people to connect.
So if you're getting your message out correctly, then you will adapt as tools come and go. So to me it is staying face forward out there, making sure you're storytelling and talking about the things that are important. And I'll use, for example, my husband and daughter played a show together over the summer and we took their hour performance. It was just a little show at the market and you can hear kids crying in the background and there's wind blowing and it's nothing, you know, it's not high production quality, but we just chopped it up and took like 30 second little clips and just posted them of, of them playing together here, playing together there. And that was in the summer, so they played in July and since then they've gotten two shows from it. Not pushing it, but that particular ensemble, the two of them together, and she's only 13 so it's not something we're pushing aggressively. They got two shows, so they were telling the story of how much fun they had in the summer and the songs they chose, she chose and the fun they had. And that resonated with people, that authenticity, that connection, that moment and the rawness too. And when I think about the AI and digital, like when AI came about it was like, oh, this is so cool. We're going to be able to do all these images, going to be able to do. We can do videos now and we're going to be able to do all this writing and what's the other thing I'm missing? Audio. So we're going to be able to demo songs and do album covers and do this and do that. And instead it ended up a flood of people who were not creators at their core, tasting what it's like to create and bless them.
It's something that is. Creating is a beautiful space to be in.
But now there are lots of copies of the exact same thing out there. The innovation, the corners have kind of worn off. So you get something like my husband and daughter with that really raw video of them playing and having fun. It stood out and it was different. And their storytelling allowed them to kind of PR themselves in a way that was non aggressive and people connected with it.
So I don't have the answer other than I'm seeing the pendulum swing away from as much AI generated stuff back to people questioning is this real, a real image or is this something that was generated separately? And those that are authentically creating are now standing out even more in a really beautiful way.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: I'm seeing that too. And we see that in the SEO sphere of those who like, threw themselves into the deepest part of the deep end and swum all the way to the bottom of the AI content generation lake. Like, I can make content dirt cheap and tons of it. I'm going to make a thousand articles and you know, we'll see the guy post on Twitter, look at my success, you know, and it'll show a graph up like this and then like he'll kind of disappear after a month and you check his stats and because yeah, the brand wasn't there. And Google spotted is like hcu, helpful content update, swats it down. Or you know, there are these aspects of it, of our industry that Google is obviously they've, they're fighting machine generation with machine learning to try to, you know, ensure that they have, you know, good content that they're displaying in their search results, which has led to some devastation, has led to, you know, some innocence getting caught in the crossfires. Tons of, you know, good cooking bloggers, lots of good travel folk suddenly struggling in what was a super, you know, valuable niche. And now, you know, it's kind of devastated and they're kind of, you know, the same volume of traffic. But there's also at the same time, you know, just as much SEO value as much search traffic going to local search. So there's, there is an authenticity thing going on between the Folks that are just whole hog, just copying and pasting right out of ChatGPT and just pasting them onto their site versus those who are trying to find ways to augment their content creation systems, you know, help with content ideation, you know, like even this show, like I use Claude after the fact to take the transcript and do, you know, create cleaned up recaps that quite frankly, when I started, you know, a couple years ago, it was really daunting to turn, you know, interview content into something usable because there's all the ERs, the UMS, and it was really, you know, difficult to get cleaned up. But you know, Claude can take a, a transcript and in two minutes turn it into like a back and forth dialogue, you know, 90% there of what you need to post. You just need to check the headers, add internal links, add some images and boom, Bob's your uncle. You've got, you know, 4,000 words of content which then you can repurpose and you know, redistribute. You can slice that into, you know, LinkedIn articles or LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, Instagram posts. But I see the value in that because it's like that human conversation, like where there is something.
My friend Michael McDougall from Right Thing Agency, he describes it as information gain of a conversation between two humans, two experts discussing something. Kind of gives something to the, the content generation cycle where even, you know, you know, SEO has its keyword research tools. Even keyword research tools suck in comparison to two experts trying to find something to dish about. Like what we're going to talk about the mishmash chemistry of art, you know, how we're throwing things back. You've had these experiences going to be totally different than just the cold interesting things about SEO. You know, like even the best keyword research tool is not going to come up with the intersection of PR in the music industry and AI. SEO.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: Yep, I 100% agree.
And unfortunately that that promotes more meetings and more one on ones. I can't live in my silo, in my introverted silo, because that's exactly it. And that's why creators create when it's so much more when they're with other creators. And then when you're talking and throwing ideas off of somebody else, you get down, you know, that rabbit hole and into this super duper niche that you never would have got on your own. That's when things become really interesting. And you're right, the AI and the large language models, what they're creating today is just, you know, here are the bullet points. Please create this. And they, they don't waver. But as humans, we, we have the ability to go off topic very easily. And that's awesome. I mean, it gives us our strength.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: I mean, it reminds me, I just heard an interview where somebody was talking about you can't have a favorite Beatle because the Beatles were successful because, you know, John Lennon took the stuffing out of George who was super pretentious about his, his things. And then Paul wanders into the room, is like, hey, let's play some music. And you know, you got Ringo in the background, but he changes the whole dynamic. So there's isn't necessarily like a, like anytime you say, oh, who's your favorite beetle? It's kind of a misnomer because even Paul's best stuff on his own is not the same as the Beatles because of the chemistry of what they all individually brought to the table. And that's a human aspect, the human factor which reflects in how we develop our brands and how we, you know, there's a reason why Noel Gallagher, the Gallagher brothers are not the most famous artists because they can't keep from strangling each other. You know, you know, you can take it back to all these examples where the human chemistry comes across in the content marketing.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: You know what, could you repeat that question? Because it ended up just kind of turning off and then turning back on.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: I guess the question is as your.
I didn't ask a question now that I'm thinking about it, but it was just commenting that there's, there's, there, there is something to the human chemistry aspect. But when it comes as a question to you, how do you try to capture what are the processes by which a small business owner can try to capture that chemistry, capture meaning and project it, capture what makes them special or stand out, or what are the things that you try to do in those conversations with your clients to get to extract that from them so that when they're putting out, you know, their articles or putting out videos that they're keeping in mind these items of authenticity that you and I are seeing is making a difference in the flood of AI.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Alright, well, first I have to comment about the Beatles because I was not like a big, big Beatles fan and my husband is like a massive Beatles fan. So I got introduced slowly to it. And one of the things as you were talking about it, I never understood, and maybe I still don't, but I never understood Ringo's placement within the group. I just didn't understand it, the dynamic it didn't make sense until the more I learned, the more I understood. It was so much more about who he was as a human and that allowed the other three to be their best selves.
And that without him specifically, that band would have been very, very different. Like another Paul McCartney on drums. Like, what would this band have been? So I 100% agree about never having. You never get two people to agree on who their favorite Beatle is, as well as the specific chemistry of all four of them so individual. It made what would become every song unique to them specifically. So I love that. And then when you we're talking about how to approach small businesses with their content creation, I find it becomes a weird conversation. And I don't know about you, but first it's, well, we don't have anything to talk about. Like we. What do we talk about? We sell pool supplies. What are we going to talk about? Well, you're going to talk about pool supplies for one, but you're going to talk about people having fun and how you're going to make it easy for them. And we're going to talk about the eco friendliness of it and the availability and the like. And I just go on and on and on. And they're like, oh, wow, yeah, I guess we could. So I think there's a little bit of. I try to get them to change, to switch places because they. The small business owner, I find, is always trying to sell to themselves. And, you know, there's that age old gosh business practice where they say, make the Persona of your perfect customer and blah, blah, nobody likes to do it. But as soon as you start to do it, you realize they're very different from who you are as the creator. And I find that's a huge hurdle small businesses have. They keep trying to sell to themselves. I struggle with that. And when you realize, no, the people that are buying from me are completely motivated by things that I'm not motivated for, then you can start telling the story because you know who's listening. It's the same thing. If you're gonna.
If you were going to speak to four groups today, one was a group of kindergarteners, one was a group of high schoolers, another is a group of PhDs, and another is a group of small business owners all talking about computers and the Internet. Those would be four very different presentations and they would be focused still on the same topic, but delivered differently. You would understand your audience, you would word it in very specific ways that they would understand, and that's how you would get through, you're not going to deliver the same talk to all of them. And I think that's where people get confused about who they're talking to and, and who all their, their core groups are. And sitting down and knocking that out first, then walking into the stories starts making a lot more sense and the storytelling of who they are as a business.
Yeah, understanding who they're talking to is always the first, the very first place we start.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: I think that's talking.
It's not just Persona, it's also, you know, thinking about the value that you're bringing. It's like, you know, with B2B, there are so many extra bureaucratic steps to getting approval for even a small purchase sometimes. And many, you know, B2B businesses forget that. And they're like, yeah, they just need to be convinced to buy it. So even with selling the same things, sometimes the personality or the additional needs of whom to whom you are selling can play a big role in how thorough you are at making this content. And we have to move further down the funnel. That's the type of content that we need to be working on and not the.
How do you fix a leaky faucet? Not need every single single plumber to come up with an article that lists five ways to stop a leaky faucet. Stop it. That. That's enough. There's are enough fixing leaky article articles. But what people do need to know before they call you up is are you going to show up on time? Are you going to, you know, are you accredited or do you have insurance? Like, you know, do you have the expertise? Like, how can I trust your recommendation? Like, those are the type of things you versus, you know, automax Pro, like, versus a specific named competitor. Where do you do specific business? Like, I was working with a client and they're like, we do this. I'm like, okay, that's a very specific thing. Where do you do that? It's like Florida, like all of Florida. Oh, no. Well, just in like Boca Raton, brother. If you're trying to, like, if you're saying you do Florida, you know, the Panhandle's way different from Boca Raton. That's a whole different country. That's a different country. So it's remembering those level of details. Talk to your customer. Super valuable. What else have you honed or found is a good messaging or way to explore those concepts with your clients to get into the usp, you know, the unique selling proposition.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: It's a lot into who, what, when, where, why, how which seems, I mean a lot of, a lot of the walkthroughs we start basic and then get into the, the weeds of who are you selling them to, why are they buying it, when are they using it, where as you mentioned, where can they access it? And getting into a lot of those really super niche for me as their partner is reading the news a lot and reading articles and stumbling into places where it's like, oh this, this applies to this so much. Like I was talking about at the very, very beginning with you, the music industry and the music industry, creators, dancers, musicians, all that, not understanding business but knowing it's super duper important.
So for example, I'm working with a company that hired me and said, you know what our, just to lean into SEO. Our SEO we have, we don't even show up. When you look up music marketing, I'm like, well that's a pretty, pretty broad term to try to show up for. But okay, let's take a look at your website. So I'm going to pivot a little bit. So many things are on the very granola first level, fixable level that people have the issues that they, that are just 100% addressable. So anyways, I went to the website and we did the technical SEO, we did the SEO review, we looked at everything. We're like, you realize 30% of your website's demo content about face care, right? And these pages are live. So I'm like, okay. So you know, there's, there's a little bit of a red flag there. And I'm like, you don't really actually use the word music promotion anywhere on the web website.
And a lot of your text is actually graphics. So how are we supposed to know you know what the text like little tiny things.
And I was like, oh, that I never, never really thought about that. And it's like, well, let's just, you know, start and clean that stuff up. That's like the low hanging fruit right there. And it's, it's little things like that, just cleaning them up. And like you were talking about trust, that's another piece that they'll get. Companies will get reviews or they will have people send them notes or they will sponsor local teams and then never mention it. And it's like these are trust issues or not issues, but trust validations. I said if you had two grocery stores that you could go to and one grocery store you didn't know anybody in, but the other grocery store, the owner's kid play soccer with your kid, you're Gonna go to the one whose owner's kid. Play soccer with your kid because you kind of know them. I'm like, what? Same two grocery stores. One the lawn is mowed and one isn't. Which one are you gonna go to? One has good lighting, one doesn't. There are key trust factors for every industry and everything you do, even things like Google reviews or talking about your Google reviews or talking about your participation in the community. I tell people, if you have roots, show your roots.
Because that's how people know if something goes wrong, they're going to be able to find you.
I know that sounds like super like, but that's what they want. Nothing worse than going to a website and going, huh? Like are they in my community much like you mentioned in Florida, do they actually serve here? Who am I going to get in touch with is their phone numbers. Can I find them if something goes wrong on social media, Are they answering posts and questions on their Facebook page? Like, are they actually replying? We had recently got some work done in our backyard and I, I sent out requests on, I don't know, five different websites to get the work done.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: And nobody called me back except for one. And it took them two weeks. I'm like, geez, two weeks to just reply. Mind you, I know it's busy and it the construction industry, very, very busy. But it was like, dear, that said, my husband texted one person he found on the Internet somewhere and they texted him and he's like, you're hired, you're hired. That was the barrier to entry right there. Just answering my reply. And you're like, well, if some industries are just so kind of barren with communications that all you have to do is reply and be thoughtful and communicate, then holy mack. There are companies missing out completely on getting new customers and nurturing customers and keeping their customers long term.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: No, it's so true. We tried to get a quote for, you know, getting our back patio screened in same situation. A dozen messages, calls, emails and you know, we had to go to a friend to request, hey, do you know somebody that's actually going to reply to a text? And it's funny because I worked with, with a, I work with a, I've given advice to lead truffle and they replace the form with a AI tool that immediately replies via text. You all just name and phone number. It's not 20 fields. Then it qualifies the lead for them and then notifies them if it's a qualified lead. So like there's solutions for the small business folks like you don't have to live on your phone, you don't have to hire a person full time just to potentially man that desk. You can be running around, but you really like it should be baseline of like, hey, if you want leads, you should have the functionality to instantly reply to them. But I don't know, I think maybe I'm missing on how hard that is. As an analyst, I see how, how long it takes for these replies to be made and I'm like that every second that goes by is an opportunity for them to find somebody else. So if you can shorten that follow up time from that, capture that, that's a huge difference from warm and soft, soft and cold leads, you know, so kind of rounding out the interview here as we get to to the end, I'm curious what's, what would be your key do this today takeaway after somebody listens to the this podcast, something they can physically do. Maybe an XYZ, a 1, 2, 3, a couple of steps, hip hips, skip, hop and jump. Maybe learn how to talk before you do a podcast interview that they can implement right away and benefit from it based off of your experience and what you're throwing down.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: All right, I would say first thing to do is fix your website.
So I'm not talking about doing a complete overhaul and you know, spending $20,000 on it, but as I mentioned, if you have demo content, maybe delete that. If it's slow loading, fix that. I had another client who wanted to hire me and said this is my company name. I looked it up and they literally had two separate websites. I've completely two different domain names. I'm like, which one are you? We're both, I'm like, fail. We gotta fix that. So fixing the website to me is, is really important piece because the website is kind of your proof of existence and the proof of everything. The second thing I would say would be to claim your digital house. So claim your Google business listings, claim your Facebook page, claim your Instagram. Even if you're not ready, claim them so that as your business matures and develops and your marketing starts spreading out, you are ready and cleaning up the ones that are existing that you don't even know about. Like the Google my business ones. That's really important because that's an instant piece that will show up whether or not you're ready. I would say pick your content. You don't need to do it all. You don't need to do reels and blogs and social media posts. I always tell people, start with what's manageable because you are not. You didn't get into it to be a marketer. You got into it to paint pottery. You got it because you're a restaurant. You want to cook food, pick something and say, every Tuesday, I'm making one post. That's it. That's okay. As long as it's consistent and you're replying and you can kind of work with the rhythm of your work life, then to me, that's awesome. So you've got website claiming all the digital pieces.
Pick one. Don't try to do everything.
And if you want to even nudge it up a step, start measuring things that make sense. So on Google my business, it'll say how many people tried to call your business. You can find that detail.
So I say, look, 118 people tried to call your business this month.
Did you land 118 new sales? No. Okay, well, what's happening? Some bots and some other things, but let's try to figure out are they making it through. And this contact page was landed on 322 times. Did you get 322 emails? Well, maybe you got 286 spams, but the rest of them should have been warm leads. So what happened to them? So looking at numbers and not just being overwhelmed, but going, okay, what, what is happening and how is it reaching me and the conversion?
So if your website's cleaned up, you've got your digital tools, you've picked your lane, your lane. Now the leads are trickling in.
How are you converting them? How are you making them happen? Much like you talked about, somebody filled out the form and they either get nothing that's two weeks later, or there's a little AI piece bot on there that's sending a text. We got your message. We just need 72 hours to get back to you because we're at the peak of our season. Gosh, if I had gotten that when I was looking around, I would have said, you know what, you got the three days, you take them. And I would have, would have texted later and said, hey, do you have the quote? Because the conversation started. Not even replying means your conversation hasn't. You haven't even broken bread with them. So, yep, they're, they're just gonna be in the win. So I would say those would be my core starting places. And then once you get in the rhythm of those, they can all build and branch out. So you can, you can build more things on your website, you can add more tools, you can add a blog or a podcast or a video. And then you can start looking at your Google Analytics and go, somebody please explain this to me. What are the things I need to know? Then you start getting that data and, and all of this allows you to make better decisions. So I'm like, start easy, develop yourself, develop your digital presence and then adapt as you grow.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: That's totally true. I was just reading a post by Kelly and Dune telepathic about, you know, getting things in line for when you're going to a conference. And one of the hugest things is just making sure that your site works and that your demo submission form is going to work. And then once your demo form submission works, that you actually have the workflow process capability to handle all of those demos, all of those conversations and be able to track the outcomes. Because otherwise you've dropped, you know, on a booth and all the people and all your merch several thousand and travel and expenses in June do if you actually can converted. Got any purchases off of that three months later? Maybe, hopefully, but probably not given the conferences that I've managed to get to go to. I've always appreciated my companies that have sent me to, to conferences with very questionable ROI statistics. Like I got a brave free dinner and, you know, drink tickets and a whole bunch of swag and merch. But none of these guys that I met at the table followed up in an effective way. They just sent me a generic, you know, cold campaign. Never actually talked to me again on social media about something that mattered. So definitely that connection and follow, follow through. I love that. Like, is your site broken? Can it actually convert? Seems like it should be fundamentals, but let's. Yeah, check those two things off. Love it. Thank you so much for your insight. Your time is there, is there any resources you have that you'd like to share? I'll make sure that you're linked in the show notes, but if you're. Which social media channel are you on where people can interact with you and get more of your wisdom through digital means?
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Well, the easiest place to find all the freebies we have is on our website. It's cyberprarmy.com thecastle so a lot of downloadable free resources and ways to get in touch with me and I always encourage people, if they have a question, just to book a coffee chat with me the forms there and we can brainstorm and see what we can come up with. And LinkedIn's always the best place to find me. So it's Lynn Culpa. C O L E P A U G h. Yeah, we can connect on there, too.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: You're welcome.
