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Episode 126: Redefining Media and Lead Generation: A Conversation with Mark Herschberg · Imperfect Marketing

• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Today, I am very excited to have Mark Hirschberg here.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: He is the creator of Brain Bump and the author of the Career Toolkit Essential Skills for Success that no One Taught you.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: He spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups, in Fortune 500s and in academia.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: He helped start the undergraduate practice opportunities program, dubbed MIT's Career Success Accelerator, where he teaches annually.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: He also works with many nonprofits currently serving on the board of Plant.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: A Million Corrals, corals, corals, corals.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: There we go.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: One too many L's, I added.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Alright, thank you so much, mark, for joining me today.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I'm super excited to have you on.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: It's my pleasure to be here.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: So we're not necessarily here to talk about career success and things like that, that you wrote the one book but we are going to talk about media and being an author, a lot about media, and we'll talk a little bit also about lead generation.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: So talk to me a little bit about your view on the future of media.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: The current media channels where we tend to focus, that for most people it's email, it's social media.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: These have their place, but they are misaligned for evergreen content.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: If you're an author of a business book or a coach or thought leader in some way, where your content is evergreen, these channels don't work.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Because these channels are chronologically ordered.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: And what happens?
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: You blast down email.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: You have a thought about, let's say, leadership, so you blast on email today or you put it out on social media.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Now, half your audience.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: They're not paying attention because they're not on social media, they're too busy with other emails.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: The ones who do actually see your post or open your email, half of them say, yeah, that's great, but that's not my problem.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: My problem today is finding new customers, raising money, doing something else Good idea, not relevant to me.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: They ignore it.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: But they never go back six months later when suddenly they need that leadership advice.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: No one says, oh, let me search all your old emails, let me scroll through your whole social media posts.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Unless you said something offensive, we lose the access that the channel is trying to give us.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: We're just not aligned.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: We do this push, throw it against the wall, see what sticks and really the future of media.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: It needs to be pulled.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: It is about people taking what they need when and where they need it so you get alignment to their need.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Because that's a course when we think about marketing, what we want to do is provide the right option right when the customer wants it, and media is going to evolve to allow us to do that.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Very cool.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: I definitely like that because I think that, yeah, we email things.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: I was actually just talking to someone and they're like can I email about that again?
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: I'm like, yes, because there's a ton of people that didn't read your email, or if they read your email, that wasn't relevant to them at the time, so you can send things again.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: I was actually even talking to my interns and they post about something once and I'm like we need five posts on that and they're like but we already shared about it.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, but not everybody saw it.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Like 6% of the audience saw that one.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Let's hope another six sees this other one.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: And yeah, it is very linear and it can be exhausting because you really feel like you're bombarding people even when they're just ignoring it.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Not to mention my 012read folder in my email it actually is called 012read, so then it's towards the top and it basically I think I've got like 500 emails in there or something that I intended to go back to and may have gone back to one or two.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: What's worse, that 6% who do open that first email.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: When you say let's email again to get the other 94% Now that's 6% your most engaged audience is saying, hey, wait a second, maybe I shouldn't be opening your emails because I've seen this.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: It starts to get redundant.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: So there's this terrible damned if you do, damned if you don't balance where you're trying to engage more people, but not upset, but ones who are already engaged Now with an email.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: There are already some small solutions that start to do this.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: For example, when you have your onboarding funnel, when someone signs up for a new service or product or they go into some drip campaign and they're new, you go oh, welcome to my email list or welcome to this service, and you have a series of emails because now you know when and where that person is there in the I'm excited to try this bucket.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: You know their state and you can market right to that state, even though there are lots of other people in your email system who are not in that state and you're not sending them those messages.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: So what we want to do is take this idea and expand it so everyone can get content that is relevant to.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about some of the specific content that you were talking about earlier, about books, blogs, podcasts, things like that talks some of this more evergreen stuff.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: How do you see that coming together for people?
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: There's a number of ways to do it.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: I'm going to start with my app, because that's a good example of one way to implement it.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: It's not the only way, it's not the only tool.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: So in my book there are chapters on career skills or things on leadership, negotiating, networking.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: Where are you going to read that book?
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: Probably sitting at home, saying they're at home reading the books.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Oh, these are great networking tips.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: My book is full of very concrete Career is what to do.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: But you're not then networking because the only person around you is your dog and you know your dog pretty well already.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: It's a month later, when you're at some conference, that you're saying I need that networking tip right now.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: In theory, you can have the ebook with you, but who's opening up the ebook?
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: Let me scroll through, let me try and find it.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: I used to take notes on my books.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: I would read, but even then it's a pain to search through it.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: So, really, what's needed for that case?
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: There's two cases.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: This first case is you need to pull up in seconds what's contextually relevant.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: So the way the brain bump app is designed to work is it has those key points from my book.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: But other books, blogs, podcasts, talks and you say, okay, I'm about to walk into this conference.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: What are those networking tips?
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: And within seconds you pull up the tag networking because the book is linear.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: The book you're probably reading start to finish, but you need that tip on page 192.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: And then maybe the tip on 184.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: And so they're not ordered linearly, they're ordered by topic.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: You need the networking tips, ignore the leadership tips and you pull up by topic.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: You flip through right before you walked in the room so you're getting contextually relevant information, and so now this app allows you to pull what you need when and where you need it.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: You talked about the reposting and we often have to do that, but that's a lot of work.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: With this app, I don't have to repost.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: The content is there and, whether it's networking or so, and says I'm having some leadership challenges, they say I'm going to pull up those tips that I put in there years ago and now they can access it on the spot when they need it.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: I never have to go back and do it, because the nature of the system surfaces what's relevant when it's relevant to the right person.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: How does this change or help content creators, just from my perspective, with this podcast?
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: This podcast should hopefully be good for a very long time maybe not forever, but a very long time.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: How should I be thinking differently about my content and what I'm providing people?
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: We still need to produce long fan content podcasts like this, books, articles but we have to remember that sometimes people there might be some great advice that we have in this episode I know you have some in prior episodes but they don't want to have to search through the whole thing to go find it.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: They want to pull out those nuggets.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: Now you as a podcaster, and many other people already do some of this where you're taking some highlights say, oh, we're gonna post that 30 second audio clip, we're gonna post that quote, and that's the idea.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: But remember, right now we're posting that quote into these chronological channels like social media.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: It's the right thing but, fortunately, the best tool we have for it.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: It still gets lost in the ether.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: So, taking this clip, still produce a long form content, be able to effectively index into it.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: Whether you're building an index I'll give an example of that in a moment or whether you're pulling out just a clip and put it into one of these other channels, of which brain bumps is just one example, where it's no longer chronologically or linearly oriented, but oriented by me.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: Very cool.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: So talk to me about an index and indexing your content.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Here is a simple example.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: I have a blog on my website.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: I have multiple websites the Cognosco one.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: I only have a couple articles, that's linear, but the career toolkit one.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: I put out a post every week.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: I've got over 80 so far.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: That's a lot, and when someone shows up my website, they might not be looking for a post that I had the last two or three weeks.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: They might want a post from 50 weeks ago.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, it's ordered chronologically because by default that's how works, but everything there is tagged as well, so you can jump right to the negotiation posts or the posts on recruiting and you can go right to the content you want.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: You can index it in other ways, just like in a book, you can say you know what I'm going to, jump right to chapter seven or go into the back, say I'm going to jump to look up this particular thing.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: You don't have to use it linearly, and we can do that with other content.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: We're starting to see, by the way, youtube now provides indexing into a video, so I don't have to watch the whole 60 minute video because I don't need the first 10 minutes on the history or whatever.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: I want to jump right into minute 23 where you get to.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Here's how to implement it, and we're going to see more and more of this type of technology integrating with our content.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: No, it's very good.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: So so let's talk a little bit about what people need, because I'm very passionate about people really need to understand their target audience, where they're at in their buying process and their customer journey.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: How do content creators and then we'll transition into lead gen how do content creators need to engage their audiences to make this better or to help their audiences find stuff?
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: This actually ties in well to lead Gen, because, of course, once you've defined the buyer's journey, there are certain behaviors and actions that take place at different points of the journey.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: You can create content or tools or other things to help people and by how they're engaging with your tool, you can start to map them to different parts of the journey.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: So really think about that whole journey, think about what's needed on each step and then very intentionally create but also rank, track engagement against that, because that's going to help people map themselves to where they are on the journey, and then you know how to engage them automatically through your content, but also through other things that you're doing.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I like that, and I think that creating content that matches where they're at in the journey is really important, and then you can get that, those confirmations, really from people as they interact with that content, which is always good too.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about lead Gen.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: You've got a lot of experience in lead Gen working for some different companies in marketing not just in work with your book, the Career Tool, kid, or where you're at now.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: So talk to me a little bit about content for lead Gen, and is this change in media going to affect that at all?
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: As you mentioned at the start, I have been an executive typically a CTO or CPO, chief Technology Officer, chief Product Officer at many different tech companies, including some lead Gen companies, including some email marketing companies.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: So I have a deep background doing this and I think it will.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: Because, again, email marketing has mostly been thrown against the wall.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: See what sticks we're starting to get.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: Trip campaigns became a little more common about 10 years ago.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: Content marketing we're doing what we just talked about, where we put out different content.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: My companies, for example, enterprises, would come to us and say we're looking for this type of user.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: Think about, well, what is that user doing at that moment?
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Let's put out content to help them and then, of course, they want to download the content.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: We capture the information, we get the lead, but it's going to, I think, just get more refined.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: It's been very crude to date.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: We just throw out some content and we put through our channels, which could be email lists or partner websites that we work with.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: See who bites is really casting your line in the in the pond and seeing what fish bites.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: But we can be a little more targeted.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: In fact, some of what we were doing at one of my companies, and this is going back 10 years now so I can talk about and this is even out of date based on how people were engaging with the content.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: We were building up profiles of both individuals and organizations.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: If someone just looks at one article, maybe they're browsing, maybe they miss click, they were just curious, but if they start to engage with a lot of content, who the heck reads about firewalls for fun?
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Not many people, but someone who's looking to buy a new firewall for $30, $40,000.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: They're reading what do you look for?
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: What are the trends in firewalls?
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: What's the 2023 top 10 things to look for when purchasing a firewall?
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: Wow, they're reading about this.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: They must really be into it.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: Every once in a while, maybe they're going to speak at a conference or just looking for some ideas, but you start saying, most of the time, if someone's engaging that much with that type of content, you can make assumptions about where they are in the process, and so we were not doing simply one off Someone looked at this, so maybe they're here but really modeling them out over multiple touch points to build up a more coherent understanding of who these folks were, and I think we're going to see more of that this technology that was cutting edge 10 years ago is now becoming, I think, more off the shelf.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: And I think one of the important things that you're talking about here is I talk a lot about personalization in everything that we do.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: So, yes, content is one of them, or email marketing is one of them, but that kind of data and that kind of information can really let you personalize information for somebody more than just Dear First Name, right, because Dear First Name is that's the cost of doing business.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: That's not true personalization.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: You really want the content to resonate with and be engaged with by your prospects and customers, right?
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: That's right, and AI is going to come in and really help us do this.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: I have actually a provisional patent filed on a technology to this end.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: I can't get too much into it yet, even though a provisional is filed, but really, when you think about AI, this is what's going to allow us to customize content and really do so at a scale that we were never able to do before, where I can take my core content and I can customize this general value proposition.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: But for the senior leader of looking to buy it, for the engineer, for the finance person who's going to look and say, hey, let's think, is this a good deal?
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: So I can start to just take that initial corpus and really customize it to make it more palatable to all the decision makers, all the people with influence on this decision, and that's something that technology is going to be enabling over the coming years.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I can back that up because I've been using AI, I can say most of this year so far and a little bit last year.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: I tested some things last year.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: They didn't go so good, but ChatGPT has really changed the game, I think, for a lot of people and a lot of people the way they look at AI.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: I still remember using AI in constant contact and we were doing a newsletter for one of my clients and I think March is Poison Awareness Month or something like that, and it's like the AI does like suggested subjects and we always look at them just to see what it did.
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Hello poisoners.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: We're like, yeah, that was not the direction we were going for with our Poison Awareness Month email, but it's totally and completely, I think, changed the game and made it so that small to mid-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, can leverage this kind of technology and personalization at scale.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: And this is only phase one.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: Now lots of people talk about ChatGPT at the time.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: We're recording this in 2023.
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: Chatgpt 4 is coming out and it's better than 3.5, which is better than 3, and how much better, and sure it will keep getting better to a certain point, but that's not even, I think, the biggest change we'll be seeing.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: What we're seeing right now.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: This is phase one, where we have this raw tool, but it's still it's very raw.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: It's just the basic tool and you have to figure out what to do with it.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: What we're going to be seeing in about 12 to 24 months is better integration.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, microsoft is integrating it with its tools, but really better ways where you can just seamlessly pull it into what you're doing.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: In my world of technology, there's something called Co-Pilot.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: As you're sitting there writing code, it's literally looking at what you're doing and, because it has lots of examples of code, it can say, hey, I think here's what you're trying to do, and let me give you some suggestions along the way.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Now we know it can do a little of this for some things, like writing an email and say, hey, I think you're trying to write this email.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: It's clippy on steroids, but it's still limited in that integration and if it can be integrated into higher level activities.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: If you get an email and say okay, after type or reply, it automatically says you know what?
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Here's a bunch of emails you have.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Here's how I recommend you schedule your day.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Maybe you should set up appointments with these people.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: Here's some research papers that you might want to look at or things to read that are relevant.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: If it takes that next proactive step and we can, in theory, do that, but we have to still hook it up the infrastructure is not there to make it totally integrated into all the parts of our work.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: That's going to be coming in 12 to 24 months, where it's just easier to integrate seamlessly with so many of our daily tools that AI really is our Co-Pilot, just along with us for all of our tasks, not just writing email or code.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: I think that.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: So at the time of this reporting, I will add that Zapier talked about how it can connect AI, specifically chat GPT, with your email and all this other things and it can actually start drafting replies for you and give you suggestions.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: And I'm like telling people again at the time of this recording I'm like, do you know how to connect your email to chat GPT?
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: I'm like, let's not go there, people Again, we're still testing out the security and the security levels on all the different things.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: While I consider myself a bit of an early adopter, I'm also a security security cat.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: That always breaks me.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: Well, you can't be Backgrounds in cyber security, and AI presents a huge risk, not only if you automatically connect it it's like giving your seven year old a crack card and saying, oh, I trust you, yeah, I get some surprises but also just in terms of what we're integrating, what information is leaving our domain, going into other systems.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of risks.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: And then, of course, there's the usual questions of IP and that's gonna be in the courts for years, but there are your right to be worried.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: There are a lot of security risks, so proceed with caution.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I was listening to somebody that was talking about AI and they're like, yes, you might think that nobody in your company is using AI.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: They are.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: You need to like, deal with that, come up with policies and start drafting things that are gonna keep up with technology.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Because that's one of the biggest issues I think right now is companies just they can't keep up with the speed the technology is changing for them and it's creating opportunities like huge opportunities.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: I now save three hours a week on my podcasting just simply by leveraging AI to help me draft the show notes.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: And then I have to tweak them, but draft the show notes and give all of those extra steps along the way and, yeah, it's a huge time saver.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: It's amazing.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: It's going to be something that's out in the public and it's not confidential or anything like that, so I'm good with putting it into the AI systems, but for a lot of companies, they're not even aware that this stuff is happening and they're just sticking their head in the sea.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: If you're a small business or medium or large business.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: Here's why I recommend I have an article I put out on this you do need to experiment with AI because if you're not, your competitors are and they're going to gain the advantage.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: If all of their employees suddenly get back three hours a day, they're going to outpace you.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: So you have to be aware of this, you have to look to engage it, but, as you point out, you have to be careful.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: So what I recommend is you do some basic trial.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: You say to your organization we are going to experiment with chat, gpt or any of the other large language model tools out there.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: Pick the one you want.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: Here are the ground rules.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: Do not put in any proprietary data, set some guardrails and then say that's about it.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: And for the next, say, two weeks, you are expected to put in 10 hours.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: We recognize whatever other work you're doing, you're going to do a little less.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: We intentionally want you to spend time doing this and you need to commit that time because just say play around with it.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: You know what?
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: I'm so busy with my projects, I have this deadline.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: I don't do it, I don't put in the time, or someone says we're going to try it for an hour and it's like doing a web search in 1996.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: I tried it.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess I see it, but I don't see the value.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: They need to spend some time getting comfortable with it, familiar with it, understanding it.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: So you want to say, look, you have to commit these hours, try it out and then we're going to come back.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: You need to share how are you using it, what's working, what's not, or maybe ways you'd like to use it.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: You weren't sure if this could have been an IP or privacy issue, but I would have liked to have used it in this way.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: You collect all that data and then you have some review boards of your senior leaders or your IT people, but, importantly, people from the different functional areas come together and discuss.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: Here are the opportunities, here are the areas where we think we can gain some advantage.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: Let's really now think through the rules and risks and policies and then you can roll it out Again.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: You need to do this because your competitors are doing this.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: If you're not comfortable doing it, there are people like myself who go in and have the expertise and consult the companies and help them think through this, help them create this pilot program and think through the risks and then create programs to roll it out, but something you absolutely need to do.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: I think that's great and I think here in 2023, I don't think we can have a conversation about content out addressing AI.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: It's like ignoring the elephant in the room.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, mark.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: I appreciate your time.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: We talked a little bit about lead generation, a lot about not doing things quite as linearly and allowing things to be tagged so that people can index the content and access your content when and where they need it, which I think is really important, and we'll definitely have a link to the article that Mark mentioned and also to his app and a couple of other things for you.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: But before I let you go, mark, there's a question that I ask everybody that's on the show, and this show is called Imperfect Marketing because, as we all know, marketing is anything but a perfect science.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: So tell me in the listening audience, a little bit about what your biggest marketing lesson learned has been.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: There are so many and I'll first recommend a book, but then I'll give a recent lesson.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: One of my favorite books is In Search of Stupidity 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters, and it starts with Betamax vs VHS and continues until, I think, the Pentium ship.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: This is written in the 90s.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: But one thing I've seen over and over again as I've mentioned before, I'm a CTO.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: I've worked at a lot of tech companies.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: We mentioned some lead gen companies.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: I've done cybersecurity and enterprise software, and what I see over and over again is that good marketing of mediocre technology always beats out great technology with mediocre marketing, and, as an engineer, that always bothered me let the best product win.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: This is better, this is technically better, it should win.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: But marketing matters, and so you really need to think through your marketing strategy, and when you don't, when you think this product will sell itself, chances are it won't, and I have seen time and time again failure.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: There's that great book with lots of other examples.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: No, that's a great idea and a great book and I agree.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: And again, when we go talking about people finding content and finding what they need when they need it, part of that is the marketing machine that keeps right, it makes it, keeps it top of mind and in front of people.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: So I definitely get it.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: And so, even if you have a mediocre product, you can still win with marketing right.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: So really good.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much again, mark, I appreciate it.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: If you learned anything today, got anything out of our conversation, I would love it if you would rate and subscribe.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Wherever you're listening or if you're on our YouTube channel, be sure to ring that bell and subscribe for updates.
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you all so much for tuning in to another episode of Imperfect Marketing.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Have a great rest of your day.