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B2B Niche Marketing Strategy: Driving High-Quality Leads Through Focused Positioning with Joshua Rystedt · The Growth Class with Phil Masiello

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, and welcome back to the another episode of the Growth Class.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Phil Mastiello, and today we're getting into the trenches with another founder who put points on the scoreboard.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: My guest today, Joshua Rystett from R Creative.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Joshua's team specializes in high-stakes industries like architecture, construction, finance, where a slow site, bad campaign just doesn't look bad, it costs real money.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to talk about building trust in complex markets, cutting through the marketing clutter, driving leads when the stakes are the highest.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, Joshua, great to have you on.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us today.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here, Phil.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, why don't you take us back, give us a little bit of background in you and then what you built and why you built it, and then explain your business a bit.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I started as a freelance web developer, was doing that for about a decade, and uh my wife was a content writer working with the largest publishing house in the world, Penguin Random House, uh, but started to make more money working at night, uh doing boring web pages, product descriptions for her clients.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she realized a lot of her writing clients needed web work and vice versa.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So she turned to me and she said, we should start a little agency.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, That's dumb.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have a full-time job.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not doing that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh two weeks later, I quit my job, wrecked my car on the beltway around Baltimore.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but we started, we started the we started the agency.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was originally two laptops side by side, um, and uh just combining that the web development and the content writing synergy.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we weren't sure what markets to jump into out of the gate.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh some of our initial clients were financial advisors, specifically uh more independent financial advisors, like with LPL Financial.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh that got our feet wet in compliance and dealing with compliance requirements.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So uh that really moved our agency very quickly down a direction of working with um, let's say difficult to work with clients where there's compliance regulation, other agencies don't want to touch it.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we started to grow and hire staff and we just went from there.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we're on year nine now, coming up on our first decade here next year.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: You you worked with your wife.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: I did.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I did.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to say I still do because I I have a home office, but she worked with me as my co-founder for the first uh what five years or so, and she's now retired from the business, works harder than ever, raising our kids.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: She built her content writing service line and the methodology behind it.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so now I do mostly I love people.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I do mostly sales, team development, and you know, we let our creative professionals do most of the heavy lifting while we just build the company.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Gotcha.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's uh I I don't know if I could.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I know a lot of guys that um work with their wives.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know if I could uh if I could ever do that.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's there's pros and cons to it for sure.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like there are aspects that I actually miss about working with my wife.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like she's her her I I her education in business school and her um analytical way of thinking are absolutely assets.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then you're also so close to that person.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the downside too, because like the personal and the business can get all intertwined, and it's hard to shut down the business conversations.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like before you know it, you're talking business at dinner.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: You get into bed and you're talking business.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like it could just nuts.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: I like the segmentation a little bit more.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like the separation.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that um it would be really difficult for me to to work with my wife.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, she's got a different skill set than I have.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um and I don't think I'd want that 24-7 sort of work environment in my house.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was difficult.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like we had uh you know, we had offices uh in Baltimore.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: We still have one in in uh Detroit, outside of Detroit, and we have one in uh New York.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we we had one here, and um right before right around COVID, right, everybody was tra everybody was leaving and and we wound up shutting it down and and everybody was working from home.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the kids were home from school, right?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so we had like we had four kids here, plus my wife was working here and I was working here, and I found it very I mean, I loved having everybody close, but I found it very disruptive to because everybody was here, you know, and there was no separation.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I I thought that um that would be that would be it would be tough for me, I think, to to be able to be that close to uh you know to my wife every day.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we were originally working side by side out of the house with the the kids around.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I I like that I have an office I can go to now.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: I still work out of my house sometimes, but you know, the separation uh also helps uh founder psychology, I think, too.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just okay, I'm at my work desk, it's work time, let's go, let's get that done, and uh focus on the family when you're with family.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's great.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um the uh so so who do you help and and how do you help them?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: We uh we primarily help commit-size or regional firms in finance, healthcare, and AEC, that's architecture, engineering, and construction.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, especially firms that might say, my website doesn't do anything for me, or we only get referral business.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um those are ideal clients for us because those industries are ripe for lead generation, especially semi-automated lead generation, and they just haven't been able either they haven't put the money into it or they've worked with firms that don't know those industries well, right?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like construction has a 681% return on search engine optimization, one of the highest in any market.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: But many construction firms don't touch it because the when they do, they work with some company that knows how to sell widgets uh using SEO and doesn't know construction, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um we uh those are fun companies to work with, especially when you start pulling some results in and they see results they haven't seen before.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we don't um you know in our company we don't deal with like many industrial companies, although we do have a sister business that does B2B uh automation outreach for for businesses.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and but I will say th this, we we do have one client in the construction business.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And interesting.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: How did that come about?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well it came it came about uh because we uh through a friend who knew the owner, and it's not a small business.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually a huge business.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it came about about eight years ago and they came to us because they wanted to run ads f to get drivers because they have they have like um I forget the number, two hundred uh concrete trucks.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they had like they were short, like sixty drivers.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then they also have a construction company and uh major construction company.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: But nobody knew who they were.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're a local company, everybody thought they were this small little company, and um it turns out they're huge.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so we started running ads to get drivers, uh, and they were effective.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then they said, okay, and I said, you know, what would make this more effective, and which is and I said, and we'd also be picking up on a trend on social is if we created a social media account about the concrete company and started doing some ASMR concrete pouring.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: People love it, right?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and so we started doing that, and and the f their internal people jumped all over it.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: They they loved having the social media channels, you know, we do, TikTok, f Instagram, and uh Facebook.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and everybody loves these videos of concrete pouring.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know why.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and so that became a thing and it made the ads better.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then um they the they started to get a good flow of drivers, and once they get drivers, they don't lose them.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: But they started adding more trucks because the company was growing.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and then what happened was they said, Hey, you know, we um we want to do some advertising for the construction company.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, you know, well, the best thing you could do is like, you know, B2B outreach, but you know, they were like, No, no, no, no, no, we do that already.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm talking about is I he want the the CEO, the owner of the company wants to see his brand out there.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: He wants to see people out there.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And and I said, Okay, we can do that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so we I said, Look, we're experts at doing connected TV advertising.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how it's gonna work.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'll be honest with you, I don't know how it's going to work.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: I said, we it's great for products, but I don't know how it's gonna work.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, but I can definitely do it down to the zip code, I can show the ads, you know.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And um and we uh we started running them, and what I found was that I can pull a list, just like you would for B2B outreach, I can pull a list of email addresses of the right people that are going to buy the product, and I can put those into the DSP, the demand side platform, and those people will see the ad on their television sets or their devices, whatever they're watching, because it's connected.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it was unbelievably effective.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: When you think about it, you say to yourself, well, you know, how much were you spending?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: We were spending maybe$10,000 a month, right?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: But one deal, one deal pays for 10 years worth of that.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: So so uh so they were like, you know, this is great.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think of billboards?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, billboards are great for brand recognition, you just have to be careful with it.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think about radio?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I said, we can develop some radio spots.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think about having our our branding on the carousels at the airport?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because when these developers come in that are developing, you know, all these different uh uh businesses, you know, all these different buildings, we want them to know who we are.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, well, we we have a commercial, we can put it, we can run it there.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: We started doing that.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean it's hysterical because we we actually do more with them than we do with anybody else in terms of channels.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're in, we have like, I think, you know, besides we have we have ads going online, we have ads going uh on TV, we have ads going on radio, we have ads going at the at the airports, we have ads going on billboards, we have ads going everywhere.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's hysterical to me.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Hey, so some of these companies, especially in construction, it's a very relational, relationally driven business.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh the the loyalty between vendors can be extremely strong when the results are there, right?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's so funny you're running ads for like uh for for jobs, because typically that's in the like recruiting space.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: You'll run ads for jobs and um and and but the the principles are largely the same.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to be thinking about you know, your target audience is the job seeker and the the you know the product that you're offering is the job.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: They just you know the principles apply.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, our whole pitch was, you know, if you have a CDL, why go over the road when you could be home for dinner every night because you're driving a concrete truck.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that worked.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so we um we we they were highly effective and they still are, still are because we still run them.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we just change the the amount that we're running.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: We run ads for for the construction side of it as well.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it just cracks me up some of the things that we've done that worked that I was totally surprised for.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I was honest with them and said, you know, I don't know if this is gonna work, but it has worked.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yeah, they do outreach.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: They they but you're 100% right, man.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: When they get a client, they they stick to it.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing about them is, you know, they go from uh basically the North Carolina, Northern North Carolina all up to Philadelphia west to West Virginia now.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um but they've been expanding it.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um they have the two largest cranes in in North America.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Like they own them.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we did a video, a time-lapsed video of them putting the crane up, which we used on social media, which people loved, you know, because it takes like a day.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then the big question was like on social media, these discussions that you get, uh and again, it's it's all about brand building at this point.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about brand recognition.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the discussions that people have when they see that crane is like, you know, how does the guy up there go to the bathroom?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, he goes up in the morning, he doesn't come down until the end of his shift.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: You figure it out.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: I will say he comes down with a bucket, but um, you know, but it's amazing uh how and then the other beauty is like when they're doing the cranes, because they build these these massive buildings downtown, downtown DC, uh the University of Maryland, I mean, all over the place.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they get the guys that are up there, you know, they're working, but they have some downtime, right?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: They take their lunch break or whatever, and sometimes they're up there at five o'clock and in the fall, you know, the sun's going down, and they get these amazing pictures, just amazing pictures of the landscape, which they send to us, and then we use them on social.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, people just people love it.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the visuals in construction are huge.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, sometimes you just get that inkling of uh, hey, let's try something new, let's try something different, and uh it just kind of sticks.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had early on in my business when we were really uh trying to find our way, we had a client in a financial advisor.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think I want to say they had five CFPs at the firm.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: They had a few, you know, regionally known, and they were trying to get more attention in the regional market.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but all these financial advisors do the same thing, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they're all copying the same stinking posts from their same broker dealers or whatever, right?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's all canned content.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um we we had this idea that a lot of people when they go, when when they're considering, hey, I need a financial advisor, they delay going because they're there's a little bit of a fear factor.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what are they gonna think when they see all my finances, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna, you know, how prepared I am for for retirement or not prepared, what questions are they gonna ask me, stuff like that.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they don't need to be afraid or nervous, but they are.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we thought, well, let's um let's just film some videos of you guys answering the kind of questions usually get like the first time someone comes in for a meeting, right?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like some of those initial questions that everyone asks.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so the the financial advisors are like, I don't know how we're gonna do on video.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: We can't follow script.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, that's fine.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we had them like we had like a bulleted list, and we were like, we'll make it even easier.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: We want to interview you, you don't need to sit by yourself.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we put two advisors on two stools facing each other, just talk almost like podcast environments.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just like one ask another a question and answer it.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we took the transcripts from those videos and churned out like blog posts and a whole bunch of stuff, and uh, those did extremely well.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: We called it Ask an Advisor, right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it just drove a ton of traffic, reduced bounce rate on the pages, organic leads through the website.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we made sure to just craft it so that we weren't making any guaranteed statements.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, these are like entry-level softball questions, but they're the kind of things that the customer wants to know.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it allowed us to do something with the financial financial advisory firm that a lot of their competition wasn't doing because they're with a little bit of a freer broker dealer.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: We we were able to get away with it too.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like you're working with Edward Jones or something where everything's buttoned up.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh off we went.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: But you can repurpose that content in a lot of different ways.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes you just need to think outside the box a little bit instead of saying, hey, let me plug, plug it into the equation we're using for everyone else, which he sometimes that works.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: It works for a reason, plug it in.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but sometimes we need to think outside the box a little bit like you were doing.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I think you know, it's tough because like you know, automated B2B outreach, emails, you know, cold email, that type of stuff, it sort of really stopped working well after uh COVID.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um you know, you have to be a little bit more creative with it in order to get it to work.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, we you could do a lot more on LinkedIn and and things like that, but it's really difficult uh today to to to to do that.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the scammers have sort of, you know, killed it.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they've they've also I think killed SMS texting, you know, as a as a medium because you know everybody's suspect when they get a text now unless it's from somebody that they know.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it and nobody wants to click the link in the text.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all because of all these uh, you know, scammers.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so you know, you have scammed then and then I think also we're dealing with and we see this on the B2B side.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think consumer side sees this just as much, but uh, I think it's a volume problem too.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like you said, like after COVID, but with with AI making it easier than ever, especially with written content, to just churn out email blasts, churn out social media, you know, like LinkedIn in messages or whatever, like you can just like slam uh that that funnel with a ton of content.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I think there's a lot of companies that are just not being very strategic with it, you know, and they're just like throwing spaghetti against the wall.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so the the buyer, whether you're talking to business or consumer, is just getting inundated with junk.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like what we all have experienced in email for 20 years is now true of every social media feed, our email, I mean, our text message box, our even your voicemail with all the robocalls.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just like the sheer amount of advertising that we get on every medium is so great that I think a lot of buyers are tuning out, and you need to find new ways to um get that to interrupt and get that attention, especially bring that unique human element to it so that it it stands out.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's definitely a challenge for us right now.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we we we're more effective on LinkedIn and we just have a specialized way of doing it for business-to-business type stuff.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I agree with you.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason is because there's so many shitty people out there that are doing it, and what their methodology is is hey, you know, you have a URL like it's crunchgrowth.com.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, give me 15 versions, go and buy 15 versions of that URL, and we're gonna send out, you know, a thousand emails a month from each one.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna send out 15,000 emails.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: And my response to that is always even a blind squirrel is gonna get a worm everyone, uh, get a nut every once in a while.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that doesn't do anything.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're basically just becoming a spam company.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, and and too many companies bought into it and allowed people to do that, and and you know, we are in the position we're in.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, you have to be a little bit more innovative with how you're gonna capture people's attention, not just uh you know, not just on the B2B side, but even on the consumer side.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: And video, I think, works well.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um even to a certain extent, social media uh using video for business to business works well.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like we've done it effectively for some SaaS products and and some some other things that uh we've been able to to break through and get you know and get sales out of it.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I'm curious if you're seeing the same same thing I'm seeing here with with video, especially on like LinkedIn.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm finding that uh responsiveness, like um uh likes, interactions, comments on videos even that are less professional, are are way up right now.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like someone films a video from their iPhone, you film a video from your car, whatever, right?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: People, people are loving that content because it just seems authentic.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been telling, you know, clients or contacts like, hey, video is great.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like even if you just film yourself talking about something in your business, you know, you can throw it in an automated caption software, have it spit out some captions, get it up on social media.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's not, you could always do better.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to help you do better.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can pay me to do better.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: But even just doing that goes a long way because it's it's you know, it's authentic and it's you talking, and especially if your brand's built around you or it was your idea, like it goes it goes a long way.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost like paradoxical.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like as all of this just sheer wall of content we're we're getting thrown at, um, I think that these authentic videos, uh, even when the production quality is lower than maybe you you could have done, um, people are responding.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it it lowers the barrier to entry to video, I think, for a lot of a lot of people.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we came up in the direct response TV and and uh shopping channel TV world.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so we learned how to use video to get the message across pretty quickly in an effective way.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then as we saw with uh uh this change in social media or this change with video becoming more uh responsive for for selling, what we find is that yeah.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um the lower the quality, the better off, the more authentic, because people are they're they're hesitant when they don't want to do business, especially people under 40.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to do business with, you know, big companies.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And big companies tend to overproduce things.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you're doing TV ads or connected TV and all that, you need to have better quality, right?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's got to be 4K, it's got to be, you know, 24 frames per second and all that stuff.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: So but but on social media, yeah, the more authentic, the better.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been, you know, it's been that way for for a couple of years.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we do it.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: I create content almost every day.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: But the more the the more produced it is, the worse it is.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: The better it, the more authentic and just you talking, you know, about what you did, why you did it.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's so much more effective.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing now, and I am and I am totally on board with this, is a lot of brands are you know shying away from what we call AI slop, because there's so many AI people out there that are just creating shrappy content with AI that's garbage.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and look, I I love AI, we use it every single day, and it has its place.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Data analytics and and you know, ideation and stuff like that, uh, you know, taking mundane tasks and doing it.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to creating content, you have to be authentic and people are you know, consumers shy away from it, customers shy away from it.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody shies away from it.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: How can you sit there and say that, you know, this is authentic content and this is user-generated content when when you're creating that user-generated content using an AI product?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's not authentic.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's not user-generated content.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's you creating it with a with you know with a with a um, what do you call it?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: So um anyway.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think it turns it turns uh you know every two out of three LinkedIn users into a bot.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's you see it on on Meta, you see it on LinkedIn, you know, and and I think LinkedIn's doing a pretty good job of cleaning up the the bots, but not Meta.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: That Meta's just full of crap.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um But okay, we're we're down to like the last minute.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: So any last parting words about what it is, life, entrepreneurship, anything you want to talk about.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: If you had to do it all over again, what would you do?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if I had to do it all over again, I don't know if I don't know if I would have done it the same way.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I bootstrapped my business, man.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: I had no business starting a business.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: If someone was to come to me in the exact position I was in 10 years ago and said, sorry about that, and said, uh, hey, should I should I start a business right now?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would absolutely tell them no.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: And figure if I tell them no and they still do it, maybe they actually have the guts to make it happen.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I um I think that um I think that the the message that I want to share and and has been really important for me lately in differentiating my business is don't be afraid to niche down.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you're listening and you're in the B2B space, don't be afraid to niche down, especially if you're a small business or you're you're just getting into that mid-sized tier.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's a temptation, hey, we help everyone that does needs X or what have you, because you don't want to rule out sales to anybody.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: It might seem like basic business logic to a lot of us, but don't be afraid to make your target market one market, two markets, three markets, and no more.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you do one thing really well, you do two things really well, no more.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, look, even though my digital marketing agency, my Martech agency, we can do the full stack of marketing from top of the funnel all the way to a custom web app.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we can, you know, technology is pretty agnostic now, but we talk about, we serve finance, healthcare, and AEC, and we build integrated automated websites.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh by niching down, paradoxically, we end up with better leads, better sales, and better customers, whether in those markets or outside of them.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I think that was a lesson I had to learn really early.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: I um I didn't go to business school unlike my wife.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've had to learn a lot the hard way, and it's been a lot of fun.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, I don't I don't think I would do it the same way if I had to start over.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I hope I would do better if I had to start over.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there you go.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Do better earlier.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: I hear you, man.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's all for today.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Big shout out to Joshua pulling back the curtain on how R Creative is doing things differently and actually moving the needle for their clients.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So go see where they're up to at RCreative.marketing.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a founder who's ready to stop chasing vanity metrics and actually diagnose a line and scale your business, you know where to find me.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: So until next time, keep growing.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Phil.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.