The Key To Great Marketing Is Simpler Than We Think
The Key to Great Marketing Is Simpler Than We Think
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the fuck up. What's up marketing besties and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Hill Mash. I'm Aiden, definitely not an intern, Branigan. Now buckle up because we're rewinding the tape and diving into the show's juiciest moments to unearth that one burning question we pose to all of our guests. What's a marketing hill you'd die on? For our first guest, Kassim Aslam, that hill means giving people what they want, when they want it, and then some. In his opinion, if you build a great product that exceeds expectations, you've captured your relationship with that customer forever. Think Apple or Mercedes Benz. Their products don't have to work as well as they do, but they do. And it's why people come back time and time again. Now let me let Kassim explain. Tideform. Forms that break the norm. Get more data like signups, feedback, and anything else with forms that are designed to be refreshingly different. Learn more and get started for free at tideform.com. Marketing is relationship building. Digital marketing is relationship building at scale. We're constantly fighting this weird narrative that is manipulation. So if I can just get you to see my logo enough, or these neuro-associative conditionings, or this sequence of events in this way, it's the difference between Stephen Covey's personality ethic and character ethic. The personality ethic says if you smile when you see somebody, they're going to like you because you triggered the dopamine receptors in their mind. The character ethic says smile when you see somebody because you're genuinely happy to see them. And I think the character ethic of marketing is that marketing is relationship building. And the way you build relationships is you give. You give first, you give last, you give more. And I know that sounds like really Santa Claus-y, but it's just kind of also true. And you can do that at scale. We've all been exposed. I think Apple does this really well. Apple gives far more than you pay it for, right? Like that device works all the damn time, and in ways that you didn't expect, and with apps that you didn't pay for. And they're one example of a bunch of them. Google's another really good example of that. Every feature offered by Google effectively is free. Now, there's the argument that if the product is free, then you're the product. But you end up having a relationship with these entities. And we can do those as small businesses, as podcasts, as content creators. You can build a relationship. So the hill that I die on is marketing is relationship building. I don't think that's Santa Claus-y at all, because I think so many people forget the narrative, and I think it needs to keep being reminded to a lot of marketers, because we all have been guilty of this. We have to hit a number. So we start doing things that become unrelationship building, and start ruining relationships. But there's a term that Adam from Workweek, CEO of Workweek, and I love a lot, but a lot of people think about positive signaling in the market. If I put out this piece of content, I'm helping someone if I'm doing something. But a lot of people don't think about negative signaling in the market. If I'm doing too much, or I'm annoying people too much, or if I'm interrupting too much, or I'm asking for too much, how is that affecting my audience? In the short term, yeah, we're getting that revenue goal, but how much are you deteriorating your existing customer base? Are you hurting the relationship? Exactly. And you can't measure that. It's a hard thing to measure, like, I am hurting X amount of relationship. And also, people only think about the customer level. What about like, you've been marketing to these people who've been in consideration phase of your product for years. They love you. They're just not ready to buy, and you keep being annoying to them. Now you're turning off potential buyers. So there's things that you've got to think about, like, maybe missing the revenue goal by this much to not do that one annoying thing will be X amount in the future. These little negative signaling things that people don't do, and that all comes down to relationship building and the principle of, like, giving more than you're asking for. But a lot of people do the opposite, is ask more than they give and create, have less value than more value. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but without curiosity, you might as well kiss your marketing career goodbye. Here's why Peter Housley thinks marketers must stay curious and clever. There is nothing like a core idea in marketing. By that, I mean grounded by a consumer insight and just a really clever breakthrough idea. The power of that in marketing, I think, is phenomenal. So I always want to make sure marketers are curious and a little bit creative and a little bit analytical. If I take a look at marketing teams, let's say medium-sized companies, 25 to 200 employees, generally speaking, the marketing department is going to be 10 to 15. They probably have like a creative department and a couple of ad buyers and a couple of campaign managers. So I would really hope that they can fuel creativity and big idea thinking. I love that. I think a lot of ways to separate yourself in marketing these days, because we just talked about people are having these tools now, they can use AI to do predictive models, but one thing that separates a lot of marketers is those big ideas that move the needle. You could do things that are just chip away as marketers, but that big idea that can 2X, 3X, 4X the business or 4X a channel or move the needle are game changers and you need creativity for that. More ways to grow your business with Typeform. Collect more and better data with forms that embed where people see them. From web to email, Typeform can help you ask the right questions at the right time to reveal deeper insights about your customers and prospects. Learn more and get started for free at Typeform.com. Sometimes the simplest solution is the answer to all of your problems. And let's be real, marketers love to complicate marketing. But for co-founder of the space station, Sean Holiday, good marketing is as simple as making good content. Now here's why. Good content is the number one key, in my opinion, to good marketing. We've seen it forever with Apple. We've seen where they're telling good stories that motivate you and want you to just use their product less than them having to do it. You can look back at great Pepsi campaigns and all the way through, but content always wins in marketing. And so if you're focused on paid ads, well, you got to have a killer piece of content to go put out in your paid ads. If you're working on organic, well, even better. You got to have really great content to organically grow that piece. If you're working on email marketing, if you're working on, I mean, the list goes on. If you don't have good original and engaging content, it's just not going to work. And you've seen that success in your posts. You post something that prompts questions on your LinkedIn and you see a thousand comments. You post something that's just more informative. You see a lot of likes and probably more shares, but maybe not as many comments. Maybe you post an image and you're going to get a ton of impressions and LinkedIn really likes that, but they're not going to necessarily convert to a new follow or a new connection request or whatever. And so you've learned that there's different kinds of content for different kinds of results. Very much the same within any world, in my opinion. So I die on the hill that if you don't have and start with good content, it won't matter how much reach, money you put behind it, it won't matter what name or person is talking about it. If it just doesn't, it doesn't make sense if it doesn't work. Also one thing you just said that is crucial and I just want to rewind back to it is a lot of people say, for example, channel, like why are you creating this type of content on YouTube or LinkedIn? And sometimes your goal is to create intention and depth of the audience. And sometimes your goal is to create awareness and getting as many eyeballs as possible. There's two different types of content ties for both those, depending on what your goal is. My goal, for example, on LinkedIn is to get as many eyeballs as like a Costco sampler to get them to my newsletter and podcasts. If this was my only channel, LinkedIn, I probably would focus more on just in depth quality because that's where people will get my expertise. But that's why I think like there's no right answer unless you go back to say, what is your goal of that piece of content and what are you trying to do? So I thought that was a great point that you made about different types of posts having different types of outcome. And no win, you know, jab, jab, jab, right hook, you know, to reference Gary. It's like no win to throw your right hook. So if Instagram is where you organically are growing and you're seeing good community building and that piece, don't go and just cook it with trying to push every promo and every new product and every piece that you have. Stay more authentic and real to what that community cares about and wants, whether that's knowledge or entertainment or anything than to go and try to use that channel and say, okay, I'm going to turn this channel up and this is going to be a massive piece of our revenue. And so just like you said, there's certain ways and elements to use each part of your marketing efforts. So hit the right hook super hard in your email or use your X, Y or Z thing to really be where you hit the mark. But then also use other places where you don't do that at all. And you stay very, very true and very organic and very transparent and all the clicky type words to just build a community that cares about and wants what you're doing. Now, throw out all your preconceived notions about content, because Jason Bradwell, the founder of B2B Better, believes creativity is king. According to him, 75% of ads published by B2B companies are just noise. Here's what he had to say about investing big in brand style and standing out from the crowd. Creativity and creative matters far more than you would expect it to. And it used to within B2B. There is just so much crap out there in terms of visual and aesthetic material. And there's a huge opportunity in place for brands that decide to put serious budget and investment behind developing their brand style and how they represent themselves visually within the market. I think if you're building out a marketing team, a designer or a group of designers that encompasses also video, illustrative, audio, and what have you, they need to be considered a critical function within your business, within your marketing function, because they're what's going to give you the edge over competitors. One thing that I also see in B2B marketing is when budgets are scaled, and you're not scaled, creative team resources are never scaled. So when you want to scale Facebook budget and test more ads or scale other channels, you don't have the resources to start doing cool stuff. So you do this cookie cutter thing on every single channel because you don't have resources to duplicate those efforts on each channel, which screws a lot of channels up. And then you're overspending for no reason on those other channels. Exactly right. Exactly. And there was a study that came out, I think it was the LinkedIn B2B Institute last year, which they'd analyzed 16,000 different pieces of B2B ad creative on LinkedIn. And they found that 75% of them or more were considered based on a scale they had developed almost entirely ineffective. And that was attributed to how poor the creative was. So essentially, what you're looking at here is 75% of ads that are being published by B2B companies on LinkedIn are driving absolutely nothing in terms of value. And that's a huge… If we're in a world now where we need to be considerate, more so than last year of budgets and getting that ROI, it makes absolutely no sense to me. And by the way, these designers, illustrators, they don't need to be internal to your organization. If you are a smaller company, building out a marketing team, commercial function from scratch, you can look and you should probably look if you want to get scale to outside resources that are readily available. You don't need to go on Twitter for an hour and put out a call for designers. I did it myself about three months ago. I got hundreds of responses from really high-caliber talent. So if you're a bit worried about committing to bringing someone in-house to lead your creative department, let's call it, then just bring someone on on a short-term basis and you'll see it will deliver value and then some very quickly. Thanks so much for listening. Tune in next week to hear more great insights from Marketing School's operators. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to the Marketing Millennials podcast and giving it a five-star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.
The Marketing Millennials podcast delivers candid conversations with the masterminds behind today's most successful brands, emphasizing the mantra, "stories or it didn't happen." A core theme resonated through the episode—the belief that marketing is fundamentally about relationship building.
Key insights from experts like Kasim Aslam and Sean Holiday underline the importance of value over manipulation, the power of good content, and the significant role creativity plays in standing out in a saturated B2B market.
Episode Highlights
Kasim Aslam advocates for marketing built on exceeding customer expectations, much like companies such as Apple do, arguing that this approach fosters lasting relationships.
The discussion highlights the pitfalls of negative signaling in marketing—overstepping in efforts to meet short-term goals at the cost of long-term relationships.
Peter Housley emphasizes the necessity for marketers to remain curious, creative, and analytical, fueling big ideas that can substantially grow a business.
Sean Holiday insists on the indispensability of high-quality content in marketing, without which, even significant financial backing falls flat.
Finally, there are calls for a shift in B2B marketing, urging companies to invest in standout creative work to cut through the noise of ineffective advertisements.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇