Latest / Imperfect Marketing / 264: Experimentation and Focus The Twin Pillars of Marketing Success with Guest Marcus Schaller

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264: Experimentation and Focus The Twin Pillars of Marketing Success with Guest Marcus Schaller · Imperfect Marketing

• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, kendra Korman, and today I'm really excited to be talking about marketing bottlenecks and really doing the right marketing at the right time with Marcus Schaller.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Welcome, marcus.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here with you.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: So I'm really excited to hear more about how did you get into dealing with and addressing and helping people with their marketing issues and bottlenecks and barriers to getting the job done.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: All the marketing joys that we deal with, right.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: It actually it's kind of funny I got into marketing somewhat by accident a little over 20 years ago Back well, maybe more than that now back in the 90s, mid 90s, I started a personal training business, like a fitness business, right, and I didn't have a marketing or sales background and obviously the biggest thing is you have to figure out how to get clients, like most businesses.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: So very quickly I discovered that I was much more interested in marketing and sales than I was in like counting reps in the gym.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: So I quickly realized that that was much closer to my calling and I started, you know, just really focusing on building my own business at the time and learning as much as I could.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: And within a couple of years that kind of morphed into me leaving that, you know, shutting down that business and really focusing on helping.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: At first, solopreneurs before there was really a thing called solopreneur really figuring out like lead generation.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: You know, at the time there was no social media.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: There was, you know, websites were still kind of new, believe it or not and people really struggled with like, hey, you know, I'm a consultant or I'm a coach or I'm a, you know a freelancer of some type or they have some kind of service, and at the time, you know it's not easy now trying to reach people, but at the time and there was no like LinkedIn was new, like it was just a totally different world.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: So we're still doing things like sales letters I mean physical letters, right.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: So fast forward now.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: You know, after a few years I was doing some workshops in New York city, where I'm originally from, and then content marketing, as you know, became a thing.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Right, it became very much like a core aspect of marketing.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: So the demand really shifted to a lot of somewhat larger companies needing help with creating content.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: So that just developed my career, just kind of.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Just that just developed my.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: My career just kind of went in that direction.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: And, um, now, more recently, uh, my focus is on, you know, helping entrepreneurs, specifically ones that sell, uh, expertise so think trainers, consultants and coaches and really helping them figure out, like you know how to, to your point, what we're going to talk about.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: How do you focus on the right spots?
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: Right, because you could drive yourself crazy trying to quote, market your business, but I see way too many people spending way too much time and money fixing things that just don't need to be fixed at that point.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: So a couple of things that I love about what you were talking about.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: One you started your own business.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: I have so much respect for hairstylists, real estate agents, some of these people.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: They're starting at age 18.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: I had no idea what I wanted to do at 18, let alone you know.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: I think I changed majors three times in college and it's just pretty amazing.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: You know what it takes to figure it out, and I have so much respect for all of those people building their own businesses from scratch.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: There's you know now that I've done it.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: When I was older, I was like I don't know how I would have done this when I was 18.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Although I knew more when I was 18 than when I started my business when I was like 30 something.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: So we knew a lot when we were 18, weren't, didn't we?
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: I know right, I knew everything.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: I know, and I didn't even have Google cause I'm older than Google.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: I heard someone say that the other day.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: It's like if you were born after 1980 something or 1990 something.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: They're like you're older than Google.
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: I'm significantly older than Google.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: And like it just blows people away.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: But no, I so.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: I love that you talked about again starting your own business understanding it and how things evolved, because, yeah, technology changed.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: It's just.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: It's amazing how much we can reach people and I still tell people sometimes to do sales letters, so there's nothing wrong with that there's an opportunity.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: When I say that was back in the day, I don't mean don't do it.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: I think there's an opportunity to do the uh, whatever works.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Right, depends on the day.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, instead of walking, talking whatever works you know exactly Right.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: No, I love that.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about you.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Know again, everybody I talk to, they're all struggling with the workload.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: They're, you know, cmo, CFO, ceo, chief revenue officer, everything else, any C-suite you name, right.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, they're in charge of washing the dishes.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: So they struggle to stay on top of their marketing.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: And what do you do to help them?
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: What do you say to them to help focus that in better yeah, that's a great question.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: I think there's, you know, if you're talking particularly for slightly larger organizations.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: So when you say CMO or chief revenue, I'm picturing maybe there's a startup and they've got maybe a few dozen people or a couple hundred people Right.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: So that is a very specific kind of pressure.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: One is this kind of FOMO thing you know of always needing to keep up with the latest, the latest and greatest shiny objects, and marketing becomes often very much about chasing whatever everybody else is saying is working Right and what gets thrown out I don't want to say thrown out the window, what sometimes can be forgotten is the fundamentals, right.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: So one of my favorite examples I use of this is, you know, with websites, right, it's like it becomes about building something with this very fancy kind of visual brand and the technology, whatever, the tools within it, and then the messaging, the actual offer and value prop and target audience and ideal customer type.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: All that is, oh, we got to figure that out now, right.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: And I think that's where it becomes about being able to demonstrate, quote, unquote.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: Look at all this marketing we're doing for investors or whoever it is, and the things like the strategy, the positioning, the narrative, all that stuff that's not, as I'll say, sexy, right?
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: That's a little harder to demonstrate.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: It's much easier to be able to show oh, look how many likes we have on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: Whatever the kids are doing these days, you know.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, those vanity metrics.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: I don't.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: I don't make an impact.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: That's not where people should be looking.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: But I would say, you know, even at smaller organizations solopreneurs they're chasing what other people are having success with whether it was at a networking event, chamber event, a Facebook group.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: They're a part of someone posted on LinkedIn about how they grew their email list to 100,000 people in 30 days and you're like, oh my gosh.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: I have 100.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: The world is ending and it's like, okay, no, no, it's not about chasing shiny objects, so let's talk about.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: I mean again, you talked a little bit about your career and how it's shifted and how technology has changed.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: How do you help people reframe what they're looking at from a marketing challenge perspective to find other solutions, Because we have unlimited solutions nowadays and I think that's part of the problem.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: It is definitely a part of the problem.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: And real quick, back to your point about people on LinkedIn and hey, I grew my list, that's all great, right.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: I have this weird perspective where I don't really believe in the legitimacy of best practices when it comes to marketing.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Ultimately, we're talking about human beings and we're talking about markets.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: We're not talking about static.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: If you work in a lab, there's a best practice for handling Petri dishes, of course, because it's not.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: The rules aren't changing every other day.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: So it's all about context.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: If somebody goes on LinkedIn and they're struggling and they see, hey, I, you know, 10x my lead generation, whatever that's very enticing.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: But then what you have to realize is that it's all context At that moment in time, first of all assuming it's even true, so let's just get past that part, right.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: But at that moment in time, that person in that business, with that target market, was able to do something that has nothing at all to do with whether I can do it or you can do it or anybody else.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: So that's a big part.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: So, to answer your question, what I do most of my work now is focusing on strategy and coaching and advising, right, so that's a big part of my shift.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: I still do copywriting and content creation a lot, depending on the needs of the client, but basically, well, we don't start with tactics.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: We don't start with.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Nobody will ever hear me guarantee I'm going to 10X your lead generate.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: It's just never going to come out of my mouth, right.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: What I start with all the time is understanding where the client is, whether it's a larger company, whether it's an individual.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: What are your strengths?
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: What are the ideal client types you're trying to get?
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: What are the challenges you're having.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Reaching those people, what has been working?
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: I want to understand their situation, their unique situation, and in those conversations with them, they're actually getting a better understanding of their own situation, because nobody ever probably asks them these questions, right, so they're able to actually articulate it for the first time to another person.
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: And then, and only then, once we have this understanding of what we're starting with, then we can start exploring where are you trying to reach?
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: Where's the gap?
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: What's your current situation, what's your ideal future state, all that stuff, and then we can start exploring possible tactics, right?
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: So I'll give you an example.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: If somebody says, which will happen a lot, they'll be like oh, I hate prospecting or I hate writing content, but the last thing I'm going to do well, guess what you need to do?
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: You need to start prospecting that way.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Maybe they do, and maybe that's part of the work we'll do together is to get them past that hump.
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: But ultimately, we all have certain strengths.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: So some people, like you, do a podcast.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: I do a podcast.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: We do it because we love doing this, right.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: So like, yeah, drive a bus through that, right?
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: You know it'd be silly to not do that.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: But understanding that for each individual that's listening is saying like, you have certain things, that you're going to have certain talents and interests.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: And start there, not with what somebody else me included tells you you should do because you're watching it on LinkedIn or anything like that.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: I still remember I had a strategy session with a client.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: She came in for a VIP day and she's like I know I need to do cold calling, but I really hate it and I'm like then let's not do it.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: You're not going to do it, so let's not put that in the plan.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Could it help you?
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, If you don't like it.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: No, who knows, Do you know what I mean?
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Like there's other ways to do this.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Let's change those cold calls into warm introductions.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Just do it a different way and yeah, so I get it 100%.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: So everybody listening or watching Payson, no matter what any of us say is the right way to do, it might not be the right way for you and it's okay to disagree.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: I love it when I disagree with people on the show because I'm like, I'm like, good, this is too.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: I had a gentleman earlier this year.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: He sends daily emails.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Like, yeah, I just I can't get behind that, like I can't send 365 emails to people, so I'm like I don't know about that, but he has huge success with it.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: Again, that's who he is, that's his style, that's his audience and, again, I think the most important thing I said out of that was that's his audience.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: I love how you ask questions to figure out where they're at, find out who their audience is, find out what they know, because people are scared to pick up that phone.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's one of the things that I usually do tell them they do have to do, because you do have to talk to your target.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: So you understand them.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: But out of the have tos, I think that's the only thing I tell them that they have to do.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: What are your thoughts on that?
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: No, and I wanted to add to that to the have tos.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: It's like there is a point where you know, look, to be honest, most of us would rather be able to just post on LinkedIn a couple of times a week and get all the clients we ever could be.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, like, let's be truthful about it, right?
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: So I have to do things every day that I don't feel like doing.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: There is a point to that sometimes.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: So you know, but you don't start with here's what you got to do the five minute conversation that now I get you and I understand everything about you.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: And now I'm going to give you the formula that you've never heard before, because I'm so brilliant, scary talented.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: You've never seen that 10 point checklist on anything, right?
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: It's like that kind of thing where we can say let's start with what you're really loving doing and then we can start building from there.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: And I had a conversation like that recently where somebody was talking about LinkedIn and reaching out through connections and I said could you see yourself doing it?
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: Maybe two, two people a day, one or two people a day, because his market's not huge, right?
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: We're talking about big engagement.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: You know building relationships, cause what I don't want to see people do is just default to what's easiest or what they're most comfortable with.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: All the time, and I think for a lot of people that winds up being they're just going to a chamber event or a local event that may or may not have anything to do with their target audience.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: So they wind up just like I'm marketing myself, but they're just doing things they're comfortable with and then a year later they're really like freaking out because they're wondering why nobody understands what they do.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: You know or cares.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Well, and I think that that supports something that it's taken me a while to get used to and really get through my head coming out of corporate and it's been 10 years since I've left corporate and that's how long it's taken me to get this out of my head.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: But busy does not equal productive.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: So going to meetings, posting on LinkedIn, they're all good things, depending on who your audience is and if they're there or if the people that can introduce you to your audience are there.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: But just because you're doing all that stuff doesn't mean you're being productive or being successful in what you're doing, and I think that there's an important separation there.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Just to what you're saying and it's useful.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Sometimes there is a really it makes a lot of sense to try a lot of different things.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: It's all about experimentation.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: This took me a long time to learn.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: You were talking about kind of like deep, deep programming yourself from corporate life.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: I had it in my head years ago that I was supposed to be perfect from day one, that everything I did was supposed to work, like everything I ever wrote was supposed to be whatever really the possible.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: First of all, because everything's an experiment.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: So even if you're thinking about like go to that chamber meeting, you might find that you love doing it and you're meeting people and maybe there's a referral through, that's great.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: But it's like also do the other stuff right, and there might be a point, especially early in someone's business, as they're building it, they might be doing a lot of little stuff around, but they're just testing things, right.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: I do that all the time.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: I'm always trying different lists or different ways, and so there is a little bit of, I'll say, wasted effort in the sense that it didn't give you what you wanted, but it's really in part of this exploration of these prototypes, right, you're putting out these little bets and you're seeing what's working and what's not, and you're doubling down on the stuff that's working.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: You start doing that on a regular basis.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: You'll be absolutely blown away with how quickly you can start scaling up.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: And that's again why you want to take with a grain of salt anything you're reading online.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: Because, yes, if somebody says, hey, here's something I did to boost my traffic, that's a raw, that's some raw material to test out, do it like, explore that.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: But don't let yourself believe that's like oh, that's the only way to do it.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: Or if I do it just the way they do it, then I'll succeed.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: And if I didn't succeed, that means there's something wrong with me, you know.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Yes, 100%.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: There's a million different ways to do all of this and I think you know, if you come to it from an abundance mentality of you, know for most of us there's more than enough business out there.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: It's just about reaching those people, coming from that abundance mentality, and reaching them, and they're not all doing the same thing.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: They might be similar in you know, their beliefs and the thing their pain points and the things that they're struggling with, but they're not all the same Right, and so there's different ways to reach different people.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about how do we get better at doing marketing, getting around the bottlenecks that we're finding ourselves in, reframing what do we need to do to identify and prioritize working around those so that we can experiment?
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, first thing I recommend is look at things as a system, not as disparate pieces or activities, right?
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: So, for example, your website is part of a system, your outreach emails are part of a system.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: They all support each other, so there's a time and a place to focus on different aspects of it.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: So there's a time and a place to focus on different aspects of it, right?
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: So, hypothetically, if you're starting out and you're like okay, I know, I want a website, like that might be the closest thing to best practice, I would ever suggest Like, yes, have a website, please.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: There's no reason not to right, but I also need to make sure that I understand what's the problem I solve.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: Who am I trying to reach?
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Like, it might not be the right answer yet, but you have to have an idea of that.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: So it's almost like, if you think of it as a system and you see all these let's say they're questions that you need to find answers to, right, you start with the basics first, right?
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: So you don't start with I'm going to spend 10 grand on a website that's going to look so amazing and it's just going to be so impressive, right?
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: And then and and it's just sits there because they the messaging on it was an afterthought, right, it was like well, I guess I got to fill it with words.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: Now, right, that's an example of you're making it all about one thing, similar to if all you're doing is going to networking events, right, that's fine, go to networking events.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: But if you're not thinking about your positioning, if you're not thinking about the clients you're trying to serve, the problem, what you do is you go there and you go hi.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: I'm passionate about leadership, whatever, right, you know I.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: And then they're going great, well, nice to meet you.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: And they walk away, right, so it all has to work together and it doesn't mean you're going to again have it all figured out from day one, but start with a prototype version of each one.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Hey, I know I can go to these events, I know I love speaking, I know I can like writing on LinkedIn, I know that I have kind of an idea of who I want to serve.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: So I'm going to start with that basic theory or that hypothesis first.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: But you have it, all these little pieces in place, and it's almost like a puzzle, right, Because now you have it all in place, you have a basic website that maybe you did yourself, maybe somebody did for a couple hundred bucks, whatever it is and you go, huh.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: Now you notice like I think my messaging is starting to come together.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: I think I know what I want to offer.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: So you update the offer a little bit on the website.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: You have a little better idea what you're saying.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: In a networking event it all kind of builds on each other, right.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: But if you look at it like that, as opposed to if I you know, if I spend a ton of money on whatever, if I hire somebody to do lead generation for me, it's going to solve all my problems.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: It doesn't right, because it all is part of a system and the biggest part of it is also how you're going to actually sell in a conversation, how you're going to serve.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: So if you're not even thinking about that, you got to think about that, because if you get them on a call and you're just kind of like, hey, you should hire me, you know, maybe it works, but there's.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: So there's all sorts of pieces to consider and you want to.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: you want to start understanding each one of those, if that makes sense.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: It does to me, hopefully it does to those listening and watching.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: I just lost everybody.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: They're like sounds confusing.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: I think I'm just going to hire the person that does the lead generation.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Exactly no, so I think, but I think one of the things that is important is that if you are starting out.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: You don't necessarily need to know all of it right away, Nope and you don't need to know what your offer can tweak over time.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: Originally.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: I was just going to be a marketing director for small businesses and then I moved into and became an outsourced marketing department and you know.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: So it evolved over time as to what I enjoyed doing, really, what my clients needed more than anything else.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: They didn't need me to just be a marketing director, they needed the whole department, and so I was able to bring that to them.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: It evolved over time and that's, I think, one of the really important pieces there.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about the content.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: I think you've talked a lot about the messaging.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of AI.
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: However, I don't necessarily think AI always gets it right, especially when it comes to that important messaging.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Always gets it right, especially when it comes to that important messaging.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: Do you?
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: This wasn't in our pre-discussed questions, so I'm like I'm ready for you.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: All right, good, good, good so so what are your thoughts about leveraging AI when you're working through that messaging?
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: So?
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: I have thoughts about AI.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: I think, on one hand, you had just posted something about this on LinkedIn about using it to create more content from the same amount summaries, show notes, things like that.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: I've been starting to use ChatGP for similar reasons.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: Right, I'll do a podcast episode where I used to go through it the entire way and write notes, which is fine, there's nothing wrong with it.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: I like doing that, right?
• 22:48
  Speaker 2: I'm kind of weird that way, but lately I've been like you know what this is actually slowing me down way too much, and so I've been running a transcript through there and then looking at what ChatGPT comes up with, getting better at the prompts.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: So it's not just as generic as generic can be, but I think the danger in it is that people think that content itself has value.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: Content has zero value.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: When I started 20 years ago, if you didn't need book or white paper, you were way ahead of the curve, right?
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: You were way ahead of the competition that wasn't bothering with a lot of stuff.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: Those days are over.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: So if somebody is putting out, I'm going to create all these blog posts, all these podcast episodes, all these whatever.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: There's nobody out there in any market going gosh.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: I really wish I had more content to consume, because I just don't have enough.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: It just doesn't exist.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: What you have, or what they really need and want, is somebody to speak to their specific situation and problems and challenges and goals and all that.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: So imagine, hypothetically, if you're listening to us talk right now and whatever it is you do for a living, whatever challenge you're dealing with, if somebody were to send you an email saying, in the right way they're actually expressing that they have something that they'd like to talk to you about that would be able to solve that problem.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: You're going to respond to that email, unless you're just totally anti-cold calling or whatever.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, that's hard to scale, but that's still what you're trying to get to.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: So AI can be wonderful for that.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: If you have a podcast that is really good quality and focused and niched and targeted and you're solving specific problems for specific people and you want to figure out ways to be able to produce that more easily and be able to create micro content do it, but AI conversations aren't about that all the time.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Right, a lot of AI conversations are.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: I just wrote 300 blog posts in 10 minutes, like I've literally seen that on LinkedIn and I'm going like you know, or people listening yourself.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you can relate to this.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: You post something that you put a lot of thought into and people are replying with.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: What was obviously run through ChatGP is summarizing what you said in one sentence and then asking related questions.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: It's so transparent and nonsense.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: So that's my little rant about AI.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: Use it, but realize that the value in the content is not how many words you can spit out into the universe.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: It's your unique perspective on a problem that you can help somebody solve that they actually care about.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: And AI can help you frame that.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Ai can help you word that, and it's not going to be perfect, and I think that that's important because I think, as we're talking about, you know, not having the time to do it all and bottlenecks and things like that, I think AI is a tool that we can use to help us there, but the keywords help.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: It doesn't do it for you, and if it's doing it for you, then you're doing it wrong.
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: And I have to back up too, and I can be guilty of assuming that everybody likes to write as much as I do, and I don't even like to write that much.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: But it's like I've been doing it professionally for so long that I'm comfortable sitting down and writing a blog post or LinkedIn whatever and I realize not everybody's like that the blank page can be really frightening.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: So if you're using AI to be able to develop your ideas, awesome.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: Whatever way you use it, everybody listening knows what feels right and authentic to them.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: So we know when we're crossing the line into just BSing people with you.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: Know, but it's a tool like any other, just like a podcast.
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: You know, recording equipment is a tool.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: A podcast could be garbage.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: You could have the best mic in the world and it could still be just meaningless.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: You can be recording off an iPhone in the woods and it could be the best mic in the world and it could still be just meaningless.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: You can have, you can be recording off an iPhone in the woods and it could be the best podcast ever.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: So make it.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: The content really is about you and what you're bringing to it that nobody else can bring in the same exact way.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and as long as it speaks to your audience, it's solving their problems and it's speaking directly to them.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: I think that's the key, so I love it.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Experimentation careful with AI.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: You don't have to do everything that you hate, right, if you think there's a million different ways to do marketing out there.
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: So definitely start to think about where you're going to succeed and do little experiments everywhere and then double down on what's working.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: I think that those are huge takeaways for for everybody.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: So, as you're headed here into 2025, kick it off strong with prioritizing your marketing, maybe in a little bit different way.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: So, marcus, this has been a fantastic conversation, great information.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I could have a conversation for you that would go on for a couple more hours, I can tell but since nobody's going to listen to that, you and I are going to find it interesting.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Let's go ahead.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: We'll wrap up here, but I do want to ask you a question, and that's what I ask all my guests.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: This show is called Imperfect Marketing, because marketing is anything but a perfect science.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned along the way?
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: So I mentioned earlier about my, you know, when I was younger, having that personal training business before I knew anything about what I was doing, I learned this lesson early, thankfully Right.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: So again, before I mean, the websites existed, but it wasn't the way it is now.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: So you know, I I was, I was living in a very like nice part of San Diego was very a lot.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: You know, there was this grocery store nearby, I think I I don't know how they even reached out to me, but somebody selling ad space on shopping carts.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: Right Now I'm like thinking that's perfect, it's amazing If I have the name of my business and my picture.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: I don't even know what I had on there and it was like some cheesy tagline and a phone number.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: Because, again, no website at that point for me at least.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: How could it lose, right?
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: So it was like five grand.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: It was like five grand in 1997 or something like that.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Like five grand is a lot now, right?
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: So the lesson I learned was don't drop five grand in 1997 or something like that.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: Like five grand is a lot now, right?
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: So the lesson I learned was don't drop five grand on one idea, right?
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: Because the problem with it wasn't that it couldn't have worked.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: It might've worked really well.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: By the way, it didn't work.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: I didn't get a single call from it.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: But ultimately, the lesson I learned was it's all going back to the experimentation.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: So when you're thinking about choices and tactics, if you've got X number of dollars to mess with or time to invest in different things, you want to test different things first before you again go all in on something, right?
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: So at the time, again, we didn't have as much to.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: I would never do that today, even if I didn't know what I was doing, right.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: But just be careful.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: People will try to sell you stuff and guarantee whatever.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: Just realize, if you have so much money to play with, spread it out a little bit and then, once you start seeing results for something, that's when you can start investing more into it.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: So that's my biggest takeaway that I learned.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: Well, and I think if anybody is guaranteeing you anything like walk away, turn away.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: Backwards Homer Simpson style through the bush.
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: Yes, exactly yeah.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Because so much of what we do is dependent on us as as the as the business owner, as the salesperson is, whatever it is.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: So someone on the outside can't guarantee anything.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely not results that's going to come to you.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: They can guarantee.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: Like to be fair, like with my coaching, I do offer a guarantee for a certain amount of time, because I don't want people to feel like they're investing in a relationship with no kind of net right.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: So there is a.
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: It's okay to have a guarantee.
• 30:44
  Speaker 2: It's when somebody is coming at you with a pitch and they're basically saying they can guarantee certain results.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, you know, maybe I don't know, I can't.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: Good on them.
• 30:54
  Speaker 2: They're able to.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: I agree with you a hundred percent.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: This has been a fantastic conversation.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: I really enjoyed it, Um again.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: So start thinking about experimentation.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Start thinking about what you're going to try new this year.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Start thinking about what really worked well in 2024.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: And then go ahead and double down on it, right, but still leave that room for experimentation, because you don't know what's going to be coming up next and things are always changing.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: So thank you again, Marcus, for joining me.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: Thank you all for tuning in to this episode of Imperfect Marketing.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: Have a great rest of your day.