Latest / Glovisor Podcast / Ep. 53: Your Business Doesn’t Need More Marketing—It Needs This | Taylor Wilson - Creative Shizzle
Transcript
- Joe: In a world where business often rewards being louder, tougher, and more aggressive, one entrepreneur is proving that putting people first can be a powerful growth strategy. Welcome to the Glovisor Podcast, where we explore business growth, communication, and personal development through real conversations with people that make an impact. Our guest walked away from a corporate life after a health crisis and took a completely different approach to building a company. One centered on people, purpose, and reckless kindness. As the founder and CEO of a growing branding and marketing company, a TedX speaker, and the host of the Talking Shizzle podcast, She's demonstrating that kindness isn't simply a nice thing to do, it can be a powerful business strategy. Glovisor welcomes Taylor Wilson. Taylor Wilson: Hey Joe, how's it going? How are you? Joe: Great thanks. thank you for being here today. Taylor Wilson: Yeah, it's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. Joe: So let's start off, Taylor. Tell us a little bit more about what you do. Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I'm the founder and CEO of Creative Shizzle We are a branding, marketing, creative team for rent. I started the company, we've been in business five years, and we have 20 people all across the globe and over 50 clients. We work with over 300 brands in that time, and we really help fill gaps in for marketing teams, creative gaps, marketing implementation gaps. And so we work with a variety of businesses, startups. Non profit, every day is a new day. Joe: before we move on, how did you get to the name Shizzle? Taylor Wilson: I'm a big Snoop Dogg fan. And actually originally the n company name was Bar Lele. And one day I thought I want to develop some other like thought leadership platform where I could just put all of my creative shizzle, like all the stuff that's going on up here all the time and like thoughts and stuff like that. And so I was gonna start it just literally as like a blog or like a resource center for marketing and branding. And then I thought that should just be the company name. Like that's way way more fun. So it just I I think it literally came to me one day in the shower or something like that. And Joe: Yeah. So now what inspire you to pursue this path? Taylor Wilson: I felt like there was a gap for small businesses and and lean teams and I had spent probably fifteen years in marketing in the social impact sector. So I had worked with a lot of nonprofit organizations, people doing good, and I just felt like there was most of the agencies were wanting to always go after chasing the whales. And I thought there's a lot of businesses and organizations that are like small or mid-size, and they're just never gonna go hire like a huge, you know, million dollar year agency. And so I really felt like there's gotta be a way to scale this and make a business that also is profitable and healthy and can serve these people in a different way. And so that's originally where the idea came from, probably also working at some small companies myself. I worked at some small tech startups in in the nonprofit sector and was sometimes the marketing team of one and having to figure out how to do a lot with a little. And so I thought, how what if I could create a system for those people? Because there's a lot of them out there. And I just was like, having been one, I was really passionate about it and solving that problem. Joe: So can you give us an example or examples of what a branding and marketing company actually does for a small business? Taylor Wilson: Yeah, it's a really good question because branding is a word that I think is very squishy. And what I mean by that is people are like, what what does that really mean? You know? And I think a lot of times people just think brand is your logo or your color palette, like the the basic visual identity of a brand. when it comes to brand and marketing for a small business and how we think about it and how we approach it, is it's really about How do you position yourself to your ideal customer, your ideal, you know, person, your ideal audience that you're trying to bring into your world and interact with you or engage with you or do business with you? And so it's much more than just the logo, although that's part of it. So a lot of times what we do when we're first digging in with a small business owner is we literally just have conversations. A lot of times it's with the founder of the business. Someone like me who had an idea and thought, I think I've got a better way for this. Or someone who already has an established business, but they've maybe never really done any marketing or branding. And maybe the kid down the street did the logo and like it's not really that good. And they're ready to level up for their business so that they really can grow. And so we'll start off with having conversations where I ask them questions all about You know, like why do you do what you do? Who do you serve? What's the what's the value? If people if your customers didn't have you, like what would be the biggest thing that they're missing? and that really helps to drive conversation to pull like what what I want to do and what our job is is to pull a lot of information out of the business owner around the value prop of their business, how they really help transform their customers' lives in one way or another. Then we apply, I use the story brand framework. I'm a certified story brand coach. And so then kind of from there, we start actually putting pen to paper, giving people a real brand story to work from. And then that helps to inform all of the stuff that we put out into the world in terms of marketing and sales materials. And then after that part, that's when we start doing the actual design aspect. So I always, when I'm thinking about brand, I work. first and foremost on the words and the positioning, and then we apply design that matches the words and the positioning and what kind of vibe you're trying to give off to people. Yeah. Joe: So now that's the branding side. Then once you're done with all of that, now you move into the marketing side. And can Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Joe: you give us a few examples about what you do in the marketing segment? Taylor Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. So that's when I always think about brand is like differentiation and then marketing is amplification. So once you've got the brand established and you know how you want to show up into the world, then you have to show up into the world in a really regular, consistent way. And you can do that in a variety of mechanisms. so marketing is more like the function of getting your brand in front of people, engaging people. with your brand and then creating like a a life cycle of engagement with that audience. And so it could be part of marketing is then setting up a website or fixing a website. creating an email marketing program. social media is a huge aspect of what we do and how how we help small businesses and brands is just consistent presence on social media. So that might be LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. there's organic social media. So that's just I go to my Instagram, I put up a post. I don't pay anything. It just is showing up on my profile. And then there's paid media. So face meta ads that show up on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok advertising, Google advertising. There's a whole variety of different paid media that you can put out there into the world. And my big belief system is really about providing value through your content that pulls people in. So a lot of marketing is like giving stuff away build trust through your marketing and trust in your brand to pull people in to where they eventually have seen you enough and they trust you. And then they're self-selecting, raising their hand saying, Hey, I think you I think I need your help. I've been I see what you do and I think I need your help. And that's a lot like a lot of the business to business work that we do is very much centered around that. It's a little bit different when you're doing business to consumer, so B to C marketing where you're pushing a product and again all of them are built on the same principles. You wanna get in front of people, build trust, loop them in to your brand, and then you know, value, value, value, value, and then hook. So that's a thing that Gary Vee has always said. I'm a big fan of Gary V and he kind of says jab, jab, jab, hook, right? So like you give away, you give away, you give away, and then you make an ask. Joe: you've been in this business for a little bit of time here. Have you been seeing some type of shifts within the business and in the marketing and then also the the customers? Are are they asking for different things Taylor Wilson: Mm. Joe: than they were just a year ago? Taylor Wilson: It's definitely shifting. I think one of the biggest shifts that I'm noticing and seeing, and this just continues, people being expected to do the same amount of work or more work with less. I think some of that is driven by AI and people saying, Well, AI can just do this, you know. so there's definitely a shift in that. I would not necessarily say people are coming to us and asking for totally different things. At the end of the day, if you're a small business owner or you're the head of marketing at a startup, you want to get your name out there, you want to drive more leads, you want to drive more conversions. so you wanna drive growth and you wanna drive loyalty in your customer base. So I think like that intrinsic need within just running a business is still the same. I just think sometimes what's changing is like the mechanisms of how people go about doing it or think about going about doing it, has changed a little bit. And I think a lot of that's being driven by AI and just the economy we're in and it's a you know, the people are in like sort of a weird mental space right now, I think sometimes. so that I think has changed a little bit in terms of how people are thinking about marketing. Joe: Now can you share a client success story? Taylor Wilson: absolutely. one of my favorite ones is Southwest Texas College. So it's a a junior it was a junior two year college down in U Valley, Texas. And they we worked with them two and a half or so years ago. We did this big brand redo and and relaunch. they wanted to drop junior from the name. They were like, We're we really wanna be seen more as an institution. That is really preparing people for a four-year degree. And we want to level up our brand and our position in our community. And so that was a really fun project because we got to do the very start of like even talking through, well, what should the name be? We decided to just drop junior and call it Southwest Texas College. We did we worked with their market research firm along with the qualitative brand discovery research that we do and really got to understand their community, what we thought would like resonate with their community, not just student community, but also being in a small town, the whole community is like a lot of times when you're in a small town and there's a college, like they're kind of at the center of the community. And so we got to think through the name, the positioning. How do we want to show up for this community? How can we attract new students? And so we did a lot of work on the brand positioning. And then we got to do the entire cycle of creating a new logo, redeveloping their mascot. And then when you think about a college, and they have several campuses and several buildings and several different schools within the college. We had to think through like what is everything involved where we need to update the brand. And so it was fun because we got to we do a lot of digital work. But in this project, we got to do a lot of thinking around the entire brand. So we were doing social media templates and things like that that we always do and logo design and everything, but we were also literally designing car wraps for campus cars. And we did a a wrap for a an eighteen wheeler that I guess they had or used on campus and all of the signage. So like the signage when you enter the college, there's a big sign and then there's signs all over the place. And then there's different signs for different departments and different schools within the college. So that was a really fun project where we got to touch so many different aspects of like where the brand shows up. Swag for students and we had to think through like what would If I were eighteen years old, what would I want to wear? you know, so things like that. It was a really fun project and we had a good time doing that one. Joe: Sounds like a great project to work on 'cause you Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Joe: used every single element of your business. Taylor Wilson: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It was really, really a fun project. Great team to work Joe: Right. Taylor Wilson: with too. Joe: those are the bigger projects that you can handle, but you also work with the small business owners Taylor Wilson: Mm-hmm. Joe: and pretty much apply the same process to their business. Taylor Wilson: We do, yeah. So for small business owners, something that we've developed is a really accessible way for people to hire us. I'm a small business owner, like I said, I've worked at startups. I've been literally at the beginning of my business where I was a solopreneur. It was a team of one and it was me. And I needed to start building the business. And so, you know, self funding that business is not you know, something where you're like, I've got this huge budget and I'm just gonna go out and hire this big agency to do this. And so we actually for small business owners have created a monthly subscription offering where we can basically break out that kind of work and just do it over time over the course of, you know, kind of on a month to month basis. And so For example, we just onboarded a couple of new small businesses recently where they're like, Hey, I've never really done any marketing. I need to start doing some marketing. I don't even know what to do. You know, like where do I even begin? This is not my expertise. And so, you know, we've got a monthly subscription. where we can go in and say, Well, I'll help you with kind of laying a foundation for your business. And then we'll just step by step. get you up and running. So maybe first we need to fix your website and we'll just focus on that first. And then maybe we need to set up social media profiles for you. So we'll just focus on that first. And then once we have the social media profiles, let's start creating content for you. So we'll do that. And then we kind of evolve from there, you know, as the business grows, as we get marketing out into the world for them. And so We also have graphic design plans where if you all you need is design support from a creative team, you want us to do your design or your video editing. Let's say you film your reels and then you want us to edit them or anything like that. So we've got really accessible, affordable plans purposely built for small businesses. Joe: Now if listeners only remember one thing from today's conversation, what do you hope that message is? Taylor Wilson: Well, that if you've never done marketing or you feel like your brand is just sitting out there and it's not really doing anything for you, that's okay. it's okay if you need to fix the foundation or build the foundation. so I guess I would say to s especially to small business owners listening, like don't let that stop you from starting to make a change. Because you can take baby steps. Every single step that you take each day is a step in the right direction. And so that's where I again I have a lot of fun working with small businesses because, like I said, a lot of times you get the owner and the founder, and they're not a marketing expert. They're an expert in something else and they don't know what to do. And it's really fun to be able to coach and to guide and then to see them light up when they start to see results. and success and they're like, my gosh, I could have never done this on my own. This is so cool. And so I guess that would be my message is like don't don't launched is better than perfect. It's always good to like get started and you can perfect and you can optimize and you can iterate over time. Joe: Now, who will you say should be calling you as soon as possible? Taylor Wilson: If you are a solopreneur, we're a great fit for you. Or even if you're a marketing team at a larger company, but you are a small, lean marketing team and you need extra creative brand or marketing implementation support, we're a really great fit for you. we make it really easy to start working with us. We have month-to-month subscriptions, so it's super easy to just literally I tell people, try us. Try us if you don't like us, no hurt feelings. my goal and my team's goal is to not make people feel like they're locked into some long term contract. You know, a lot of agencies or like software companies, we're used to having them lock us into like at least a year or a two year or three year contract. And I would rather just do great work for you and make it easy and make it enjoyable and bring a little shizzle and make it on so that you want to keep working with our team and not be locked in. So yeah, really like when I think about who's a good fit for us, it's a lean marketing team. And sometimes that lean marketing team is a founder who has no marketing team. And sometimes it's a SaaS startup who does have a marketing team, but it's like a team of like two or three people and they're like, we just can't do it all. Joe: Just not enough bandwidth to go around. Taylor Wilson: Yeah, exactly. So we really do just help fill in gaps wherever those gaps are. Joe: So now where can our audience connect with you, learn more about what you do, and continue this conversation. Taylor Wilson: Yeah, well, if you go to Creative Shizzle, that's C-R-E-A-T-I-V-E S-H-I-Z-Z-L dot com. That's our website. You can email me taylor at creativeshizzle.com. That's a direct line to me. I'm on LinkedIn a lot. Look up Taylor Wilson, Creative Shizzle on LinkedIn. And I would say follow us on social media. On Instagram, I am go with. Taylor and I post a lot of my own kind of thoughts on branding and and marketing there. And that's a great way to connect with me. You can also DM me there on Instagram. Joe: Well Taylor, thank you so much for joining us and we really appreciate your time. Taylor Wilson: Awesome. Thanks, Joe. It was fun. Joe: Hey, you're welcome. Thanks everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, share it with someone who needs it. And don't forget to follow the Glovisor Podcast for more conversations that make an impact. Till the next time.