SPECIAL LIMITED SERIES: ===> You're a FAILURE! Turn FAILURE into Success! AND sharing food with other people at restaurants? 🚽 <=== | BATHROOM Break #21 (COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

0:00Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and Subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine. Just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. welcome back to another episode of the bathroom break i got jay swendelson here the king of boca best hair and marketing and i know he hates when i say best hair and marketing i should see the dms he gets about his hair like people ask about his hair products so i don't you're an actual idiot you're an idiot it's official you're an idiot just for the record um and i'm daniel i'm just i'm just here to talk about jay's hair um okay we're we're gonna we today are going to talk about something we're really good at which is um failing at stuff so jay you want to bring in one of your biggest failures you've had in the last let's say a couple years?

1:23Yeah, I think failure is so valuable and people sometimes get scared of failure. But to me, I live life by a very simple thing, which is that regret is worse than failure. So I'd rather try a million things, have them all fail, than say, oh, I should have tried that. I didn't try that. And so one of the things that we tried in my media company, Guru Media Hub, is we thought we should have an awards program. And we had this great idea that we were going to make awards and all these different marketing categories like best email newsletter and best landing page and best all this other stuff and we launched guru awards we rolled it out and we committed all this money to doing it and it was nonsense uh the only people who cared were the people that won nobody else cared about the other people winning the awards and it was just it was bad it was just not cool um but coming out of that though uh we were able to see what people were interested in You know, what type of media products, what type of things people were interested in.

2:23And it opened our eyes to doing all sorts of other stuff. And that is what I found in every situation. When you fail, you don't just like, all right, I failed and now I disappear. Opportunities present themselves that you never would have expected. So I'm a big fan of failing. I'm very good at it. What about you, Daniel? Have you failed with any of your endeavors? actually i'll i'll give a story that like led led to the marketing millennials but when i i always when i was in marketing ops i always wanted to like get into social media and i just didn't know how to so i would i created a food blog account it didn't do anything i I created, I tried to do random things on TikTok, didn't do anything back in the day.

3:15But what it led me to know is that I understand social media. I just didn't understand there isn't like I had to talk about something that I'm actually an expert in and expertise was like the key. So I started on a channel five years ago for Organic Reach. linkedin and that's what led to the marketing millennials but it took me failing on instagram failing on tiktok failing on other platforms to even think about pivoting to a platform that i could talk about something that i'm passionate good at which is marketing so there's so many things that happened leading up to the marketing millennials that it wasn't just like one day i I just decided to be good at social media and it happened.

4:07There was so many different things I was doing leading up to that point. Yeah. And I think that's really, really important is that you have to be able to pivot, right? You cannot stand on principle with your business or your marketing strategy, right? And the other big thing that I wish I knew earlier on in my life was that this idea of failing fast, right? You have to be able to see whatever it is that you're starting out doing, whether it's a marketing program or a new business idea or a new service. And you have to be able to see, okay, we've started this thing and there is, there's no there there.

4:39Like this thing is not going to get exponentially better. And I always have this rule of like a hundred percent that I operate with, which is whatever I'm doing. Okay. Let's say it's a marketing campaign. If the performance of that marketing campaign performance went up by a hundred percent, or if I have a product that I'm trying to sell and I sold 100 % more or whatever it is, if it goes up by 100%, is that good enough? And then if it's not good enough, if the click-through rate doubling isn't good enough, selling double the amount of products isn't good enough, whatever it is, then the odds of me actually being able to double what I'm doing is very, very hard to get there.

5:18And if 100 % increase is not good enough, then it's bad and I move on as fast as humanly possible. I think failing fast is really important. What do you think? No, I think that's why I think I love social media so much is that it's a bunch of micro tests of ideas. And it's a way to fail fast in a pretty easy environment where the market is telling you this idea is bad and this idea is good by how much engagement likes comments you're getting um so i think that i always use social media as a testing ground for good and bad ideas before i even go to the next stage for content for example this is more of a content idea but You can fail with an idea because it was put together wrong.

6:17The formatting was wrong. But it allows you to fail in an environment where, okay, it flopped. Let's go to the next idea. But the one thing that I've learned that marketers need to do from these failures and a mistake I made earlier in my career with this is you have to have postmortems and say like, why did this happen? And then you have to document the key takeaways and share those takeaways with the whole team. Because if you don't share it with the whole team, they could be making the same mistake, especially in a bigger market. They could be making the same mistake as you did and wasting so much of the marketing time because you didn't share the mistakes you made with your team.

7:06So documentation on mistakes and takeaways is so key. And also the communication of these mistakes in your team is so crucial. You might think it's not a big idea to share it, but it could stop so many people in your organization from making the same mistake as you did. And the learnings also can help accelerate some ideas that they have in the future as well. You know, I'm curious about with the sharing, and this might be a little off topic, but you said something on a previous episode that stuck with me that you, I don't know if it's a Google Doc or a Slack or what you all do, but let's say you share a piece of content somewhere and people write like really positive feedback, maybe on a podcast episode or a piece of social content.

7:51And then you'll put into the Slack, oh, here's a positive comment, whatever. And you have like a whole documentation of positive feedback or something like that. I mean, that's really, I think that sticks with me because I need to do a better job of kind of like this organized sharing of stuff with your team besides for just basic metrics is that something that you do across the board where you're organizing all sorts of different things with your team one what the what the sharing thing we do is we have like an emoji that zaps it into a a file that keeps all the testimonials we have. So you put one emoji on, you can't use it.

8:35The whole org can't use this emoji with this emoji only zaps testimonials to where you want to, to go to, to keep a repository of this. And it also helps for now, like the marketing team can like put it on websites that we use or landing pages and stuff like that. So that's one thing we do. I mean, there's also channels for like marketing meme inspiration, like marketing inspiration. We have channels for that so people can share new ideas openly and share what other cool people are doing. So I think that is crucial of like creating spaces in your organization to share what thing people are doing.

9:23And it's the same thing you do with like key takeaways. It just, you need to, I think having places where you can document stuff and share it across the world that everybody can see in that, in your marketing team is so crucial. I love that idea. I need to incorporate that more. All right. So before we wrap up, let's talk about sharing. When you go out to dinner and somebody is there, like a new couple you go out to dinner with, and they go, hey, you want to do sharesies for dinner? Like we all order and share with each other. Are you on board with sharesies with other people at dinner or are you like, screw that.

9:58I want to ride solo and whatever I'm ordering? That's actually a really great question. And we run into this problem a lot. but I'm actually, I think family style is fun because you get to try a bunch of things. It only depends if like the other couple like want to share. So like we'll ask like, hey, but it also has to be in a restaurant that is like known for that. Otherwise it's kind of weird to be like share. But me and Ari share like always when we go to dinner, we're like, we'll get two things we both want to share. Ari and her family always are like, let's share everything. but my brother is like anti like um sharing things um there's a lot of people no not my brother but one of my one of my family members is very anti-sharing things but i think i think shares these is fun unless only if the couple's like you're you're meat eaters and they're vegans it's like right i like shares these with appetizers but i think everyone should ride solo on their entrees.

11:03That's my vibe. I like that. What about a Chinese restaurant? You have to be shares. He's not there. But if you're at a regular restaurant, it's not family style. No. I don't like that. That's a little weird. I also get annoyed when you are at a restaurant like that and people are trying to list all three shares and then they take forever to figure out what they want like just that's annoying decide on the moment what you want it's not that hard like this yeah yeah it's ready golf always you gotta do it let's go yeah well we've covered a lot of ground today i don't actually know what we talked about but we did talk about it so that's very important uh daniel anything so we could wrap up here no um just enjoy your next bathroom break See you then.

11:58Later. Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work. Get out of there. All right. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This, Not That for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Marking Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marking tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email, subject line to any marking tips in the world.

12:34We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.