The Marketing Hill Mash: Quick and Dirty Tricks for Upping Your Marketing Game
This podcast episode is packed with insights for marketers, emphasizing long-term strategies over short-term gains. Conor Gross discusses the pitfalls of spamming email inboxes and the importance of brand building for sustainable growth.
The trend towards short-form, native-looking video content is highlighted by Cody Plofker as essential for marketing success in 2024, across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts.
Long-Term Brand Building: Short tenure of CMOs often leads to tactics focused on immediate results, neglecting long-term brand equity. Sustainable growth necessitates a focus on brand over quick profit.
Video Marketing in 2024: Short-form video content is now the crux of effective marketing. Content needs to feel organic to the platform, and brands should repurpose long-form content across various short-form mediums.
SEO Misconceptions: Erin Orndorff argues SEO should be viewed as an organic traffic driver effective in the long term, correcting the misconception that SEO only bears fruit after many months.
Copywriting Through Customer Research: Katie Momo champions customer research as a cornerstone of great copywriting; it's not about creativity but about finding and using the customer's language.
Creative SEO Strategies: Rejoice Ojaku encourages marketers to think creatively in SEO, breaking free from rigid industry norms to create engaging and unique search campaigns.
The key takeaway is that enduring success in marketing requires both a forward-thinking approach to emerging trends and a foundation in strong brand building and customer understanding.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇
The Marketing Hill Mash: Quick and Dirty Tricks for Upping Your Marketing Game
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, welcome to another episode of the Marketing Hill Mash. This is Aiden Branigan, head of social here at the Marketing Millennials, and I hope everyone's having a great start to Q1. I know there's bound to be one or two things in this next batch of hot takes that will spark your creative spirit. Seriously, there's some gems in there. So let's dive right into the first clip with Conor Gross, where he says what all of us are thinking, spamming someone's inbox is a terrible long-term marketing strategy. 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. If you see the tenure of marketers and CMOs, it's 18 months. And when people are in a role for 18 months, and this happens multiple times, they come in their first year and the business goes up because they're doing a bunch of paid media. They don't care about brand, they're running a bunch, they know how to pump the numbers. And then year two, the numbers aren't the same as they were in year one. And it happens with right now, it's happening right now with paid media costs going up and all this stuff. And then they realize, oh, we don't have, we haven't been building brand. So then they either get fired because they're not hitting numbers or they move on to the next time. The CMOs that actually think and have a vested interest of being in a company for five years, that's where they, you see like brands like start skyrocketing because they care about brand. And then like, I'll be honest, man, like I can go, this is, this might sound cocky, but it's, it'll, it'll prove a point in a second. Like I can go make $100,000 in the next 30 days, but I go into my e-commerce brands and I'll, I'll send an email a day for the next 30 days. Okay. It'll drive sales, like guaranteed. It'll, it'll drive $100,000 worth of sales. And I know that for a fact, I'm not going to do that because my customers will hate me. I'll get banned from certain inboxes, but more than anything, there'll be like, who the hell keeps on sending me an email every single day? And guess what? Like it'll work. I will get the sales in the short term and then, you know, I'll have a really good quarter and I'll have a really good month, but people will start to hate the brands and tell their friends, don't sign up for them. They're going to spam your email every single day or like, you know, Hey, unsubscribe and I'm not going to think about y'all rather than thinking about y'all for like two to three times a month. When you send the occasional email. Now I'm not going to think about you guys ever for the next five to 10 years. And now I'm not going to be able to bring you up in conversations and all of that stuff. So like, if you want to build a brand, you got to go and play that long-term game and like, think about not only like how to go and think as a marketer, but like, okay, I was buying this stuff. Like, how would I want to go and buy it? How would I want to think about it? Is your brand still using Instagram? Like it's 2012? Well, it's 2024. So if that's the case, it's time to reevaluate your strategy. Cody Plofker, CMO at Jones Road Beauty explains why short form videos are the most valuable way to market your brand in 2024. If you're paying attention, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, you know, vertical short form videos is pretty much everything. It's it's clear. It's kind of the present. And I also think it's the future. And it really doesn't matter what platform, if TikTok gets banned, I'm not too worried because, you know, Instagram and YouTube are going to kind of swallow up a lot of that attention. But that's definitely a huge one. And I think it even relates to the kind of the style of ads, you know, a good ad should look native to the platform. And I think, you know, a lot of when Instagram was a photo sharing app, it makes sense that a static ad would perform well. But I think now it's really primarily video that marketers should be focusing on both organic and paid. I think that's like also and also like I think about it, too, is the a lot of people don't realize how much you could do with like one long form video and they make the mistake of just doing one long form video and not using it for anything else like ads or repurposing on YouTube shorts and TikTok and all those platforms. So 100 percent. I think, you know, like a lot of people will say every company is a media company. You know, I think every company needs to have some level of content creation as a core competency. And I think that extends for B2B SaaS as well as it does for direct to consumer brands. And that's what you just mentioned is probably the best way to go about it. Delay gratification is hard. If there's a cookie on the table, of course, you're going to eat it. So when companies invest in SEO and organic traffic, of course, they think it should produce results immediately. But is that how SEO really works? Aaron Orndorff, head of marketing at Recart, explains his take on the matter. Organic traffic is the tide that lifts all ships. And by organic traffic, I primarily mean a mixture of rising non-branded search terms that are driving traffic to your website and about 25 to 30 percent branded search terms. That should be the centerpiece of damn near every business. I'll just, yeah, online is organic is the tide that lifts all ships. I'm experiences now with my newsletter, for example, like the reason why going to do paid is much easier for my newsletter right now is because like I'm subsidizing the cost through like all I've done on social and stuff that is coming organically to my newsletter. So like instead of like having all my traffic come from paid, I'd have like over 50 percent coming from paid. So then my like blended tack is like now very low to acquire one newsletter subscriber where like the other. Yeah. If I just had paid, it would have been, it's hard to justify in the long term that that's a great strategy. Because I could yet keep having to pay to get a new cost. Again, it's that kind of seductive thing of it hits so fast and you have to have delayed gratification in a lot of ways that now you can you can speed it up. I also one of the other hills I would die on is SEO wins don't take six months to a year and a lot of practitioners or agencies will try to peddle that idea of it's a long term investment. I think you can get it to hit a lot faster if you're smart about it, you know what you're doing. But it is still delayed gratification compared to paid efforts or collabs or influencer affiliate like all of those things will hit faster. And when you feel that hit, it's easy to go push on them. And it's so easy to ignore what is a slower burn, but we're going to build up this base of evergreen and that is going to fuel everything else. That's how SEO works. That's how great social works. I mean, that's how great organic works. That's why organic is a channel because it's that slow burn. But once you start hitting it at a scale where people are searching for you or people heard about you on social or people heard you at that, it's like it's subsidizing all other things that you do, but it's not going to happen. It could happen quicker than you think, but it is something that you got to be patient. That's why in anything is like you need quick wins to keep because you need revenue in the door today, but you also need to play in a long game so you could survive. That's why like marathon runners, like they do training cycles and once they do the race, then they like go back, slow the cycle and then go fast, hard for a couple of months and then they slow down again until the next race. And it's like this like whole process that they go through. I wrote a tweet once that was nowhere near as popular as I thought it deserved to be. And it was something along the lines of Twitter is basically people at mile two of a marathon. And the idea was like, that's when you share about stuff, this thing hit, this is going off, I'm really excited, this is a big win. And it's such it's so it I keep using this word easy. It's so easy to fall into that trap. OK, so I'm going to chase this next one. I'm going to chase this next one. I'm going to chase this next one because you don't. We're just not naturally inclined to think in those long term. This is a marathon. Pace yourself, put in the work, go slow to go fast. 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. You don't have to be a great writer to become good at copywriting. Yeah, super hot take. I do know. But here's what Katie Momo believes are the two key components to becoming a great copywriter. Customer research. I feel like I talk about it all the time because it is so important and I get people to do so much of it, but it uncovers gold all the time that like literally I have goosebumps thinking about it. Like the things that we uncover by talking to our clients, it not only makes our copy more effective, it also makes it so much easier to write to the point where I have like a little product called copy and paste copy because it's talking about how we're able to get that feedback from people and literally just paste it on the page. Like some of the best performing copy I've ever written. I always say like the best copy isn't written, it's found. It's just going and taking the time to do that research piece and being able to talk to people in, you know, in real life, whether that is even just like a simple voice message over Instagram. Like I have uncovered the greatest stuff hidden on there. Jumping on a call like this, you can even have like, I call it a round table. You can have like five people, five clients on a call and just like shoot the breeze with them, ask them their opinions. And what's really fun about that is they can play off of each other because sometimes, you know, when you're like, you say something and then someone says something else and you're like, oh yeah, totally. That reminds me. So it can sort of create its own momentum when you get some people in the same room together, whether that's physically or digitally. It's such a great way to be able to, you know, have them really shoulder the load for you. And then it also makes your copy faster because you don't necessarily have to start from scratch. You have now a foundation that you can build on because they've, they've given you the meat of what you need to work with. One thing I really love that you said is the best copy is found, which I, I totally agree with that because I feel what Dave Gearhart is a good friend of mine always says like he's not the best copywriter. He just is the best at understanding customers and get getting the, taking their words and putting it up front. So some people are better actual copywriters that could just massage words and, but some people are just really good at putting insights that they put together that makes compelling copy, which is obviously you have to know copywriting, but if you combine the two superpowers of actually knowing how to do customer research and writing, I think that's the key to like the greatest copywriters. I hear people tell me all the time, they're like, oh, I can't write copy because I'm not creative. I'm like, copy is actually very, not super creative. It's quite like, like you said, it's more about psychology and research than it is about like writing skills or like people be like, oh, I don't have good grammar. I'm like, excellent. You're way ahead of the game with coffee because like we desecrate all that stuff. So a lot of people will have these like mental barriers as to like why they may not be good at copy, but when actually it puts them ahead of the pack and actually means that they're going to be better at copy than other people who are, you know, professional writers or went to school to study creative writing or things like that. SEO doesn't have to be boring, at least according to SEO specialist Rejoice Ojaku. Here's why she believes that too many marketers are settling for a boring, safe SEO game. A marketing hill that I think I would always die on is that not enough marketers are willing to take the creative route or make search creative. And that's something I always die on because I think as an SEO, when I started in the industry, everything had to be by the book in terms of how we approach search, how we see search, how we think about it and what can we create from that. And for me, I think naturally how SEO is built and how the industry is, it's not a creative space for you to kind of think about this quirky, new, fun ideas. It's very rigid in a way that we sort of do things because again, there's algorithms, there's the technical aspects. But for me, the hill I will always die on is that SEO can be extremely creative. You can use SEO and create amazing, creative, fun search campaigns. And we see loads of brands do it. We see Ikea do it when they utilize search in such a fun and funny, creative way by naming their products based on the search complaints people have on Google or people type in on Google and they attributed it to their products and they sold it that way. So they will come up when people type in, oh, how do two people sleep on a single bed, something like that. And I think that's what is missing. And that's the hill I always die on, that SEO is just not a creative industry. And a lot of SEOs are not as creative as they think they are. They're afraid to step out of that box and think about search in a more quirky way that can be fun, that can be exciting, that can really align with the new generation, really align with how reactive people are in terms of content. We have reactive PR, but not reactive content. Even though it can be harder, but I think there's a way we can do it. It just feels like we're scared to go down that route. I love that because I think also in an industry that, or in a profession that is rigid or like formatted, usually the format came from someone else who's doing best practices. So that means you're just doing what everybody else is doing instead of branching out and being new, which I love that take on. Most SEO people I know are just so by the book. And it's just like, if you don't do this or you don't do that, then you're screwed. And I'm like, oh, OK, I'm doing this wrong. Or even with their content, they're just like, the content has to have this and it has to have that. It can't flow this way. So it's cool to see other SEOs like going out and thinking creatively like you are. Thanks so much for listening. Tune in next week to hear more great insights from marketing's coolest 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.