SPECIAL SERIES == Top Free Marketing Tools! 🧠 Spy Like a Marketer 🕵️‍♀️ <== | BATHROOM Break #57 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That

0:01Welcome 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. we are back with another episode of bathroom break i'm here with the number one marketing podcaster in the world jay schwederson and i am daniel murray of the marketing millennials i want to get this started um jay you gave a keynote this this week stupid you really have no brain That's the problem.

0:56I did not give a keynote. No, my son just graduated high school, and I was, for a variety of weird reasons, I was one of the speakers. And it was, I'm just glad I didn't fully embarrass him. And, yeah, that was a weird experience. I heard from multiple people that it was one of your best keynotes. No, it was not. All I know is that afterwards, everyone was like, okay, you didn't embarrass your entire family. Okay, that's good. I'm embarrassing my family right now. Let's get into this thing. What we're talking about today is really how to reverse engineer, not either what your competition is doing or people in your category you think are crushing it.

1:40And there are certain things that you could do that are off the radar that there's very easy ways to kind of not steal their tactics, but kind of like see what they're doing and then use it yourself. So Daniel, how do we do this? How do you reverse engineer stuff? I think the first thing you need to do is just identify your competitors. And what one thing I always say is like, like people think that competitors are like the exact product you're competing with, but there's other versions of competitors that you need to analyze too. So there's category competitors. So like someone who's also selling marketing software, they're in your category.

2:16They might not be competing product to part of them. I might not be both email marketing but they also competing for budget for your in your category and then there's one step deeper is like is attention stealers so like you say your audience is millennials they're getting competed against all these other companies like hat companies clothing companies so you're competing with all these different podcasts newsletters are stealing attention from your audience so a couple of things that i like tools you can use to look into this is one is spark toro spark toro will tell you like who are the hidden influences like who your audience actually paying attention to like what podcast they're listening to what news sources so you can you could see where their attention's going it also help you market on those those places you can also do like exploding topics to see what topics they're interested.

3:15There's similar web to see what referral traffic you can look at. So there's a lot of ways to look at this, but first identify who is competing for your audience intention. And there's those three categories, direct competitors, category competitors, and attention stealers in those categories. Yeah. And we're going to put the links to all these different tools and the vast majority of them are free that you can use like what Daniel just mentioned. I'll mention a few other ones. There's one simple tool that I think is kind of fun and easy, which is any email you get from any company, any brand, anything, whatever.

3:48If you want to find out what email platform that they're using to send out their email, you literally just forward the email that you got to this email address, esp at sendview.io. And when you send an email to esp at sendview.io, within about three or four minutes, you can email back and it tells you the exact platform that the person's using. And then the other one I would throw out there is it's a really great use of ChatGPT. You can go to ChatGPT, the free version, and you could put a prompt in there or something similar to this saying, analyze the marketing strategies used on these websites.

4:24And you put in two, three websites and summarize the key tactics, what is their content marketing, social proof they're using, SEO strategies, CTAs, and what should I consider for my site? And it will spit back at you a whole recap. So if you're not leveraging the free tools that are out there, I think you're really missing out. Another two free tools I'll add is one is Built With. So it's a plugin that if you go to any site, it will show you the tech stack that your competitors are using. So this is really useful because you can see what tools they're using on their website, what's their forms, what they're pop-up using.

5:02So then you can learn how to reverse engineer what you should do for your site or if you're trying to start from scratch. Another really great tool is Facebook Meta Ad Library. Go to Meta Ad Library. You can see what ads they're running. This is a great way to look at other people's ads too. Go beyond your competitors. go out in other industries, because this can help you see what people are targeting. And I like to look at ads that have been running for a longer period of time, because if they're running for a longer period of time, that means they're converting. So like the newer ads might not be converting, but if you look, it's been running for two, three, four, two months, three months, these are ads that have been running for a long time.

5:42So that means they're working and they're keeping those ads up. Yeah. And in general, it's not like, oh, my competitor is doing this. I need to be doing this, you really want to look at the leaders in your category. They're leaders for a reason. And then I like to triangulate things. Like when I see, you know, the five companies are leading a particular category and they're all doing, you know, certain things, it's there for a reason. And that's really what you want to think about. Like another great site that's free, has a free version is SpyFu, S-P-Y-F-U.com. It's great because you can put in your domain, for example, of your site, and then it'll actually show you the competitors that it's finding that you're competing with, whether that's on keywords or organic traffic, and it'll actually show you the ads that are running.

6:25So SpyFu is another great one that's out there. Another thing that, I mean, is a free thing, and I used to do this in when I was in marketing ops is like go through their funnel. So like click the ad, fill out the form, see if an email is sent to you, see how long it takes someone to reach out to you, see what follow-ups you get um see the retargeting of that ad on other channels if they're targeting you on linkedin or or facebook or instagram like go through their funnel and click on an ad or click on a piece of content or and see every stage and then you can reverse engineer like hey they're doing this they're doing this and what jay said at the beginning is like this is just for you to know what they're not doing and you're doing and how could you be better and how could you reinvent the wheel it's not for you to copy their strategy because if you copy you're just going to fit in it's for you to know so you can play on the same playing field of these people um and actually know like their play it's like sports you got to know they're you got to watch film before you go play another team just so you know what moves they're trying to make so you can play a fair game against them.

7:40All right. So before we wrap up here, I'm super curious, something random. So Daniel, you've now, you moved to Miami. You've been down here a few months now. What is your review of living in Miami now that you're down here? I love Miami, first of all, like, cause I live, um, not in like central Miami, like in Brickle downtown. I live in a, um, a smaller part of Miami. I, I don't know if I can give a fair review yet because i haven't been through a summer yet of miami um but from at least like middle october to like end of may it's been not unbearable i think people overly hate on on florida for their heat um when they shouldn't be over hating what i mean you've been living here for a long time what are like your tips i mean you've been you've survived many summers many hurricanes.

8:32It's not the heat. You know, what happens with a hurricane, and I don't want to belittle a hurricane. It's very important. But when they announce there's a hurricane coming, usually they give you about a week's lead time. There's a hurricane. They throw you way out in the ocean. It's coming. And then when they announce it, you should take it seriously. But the problem is everyone takes it seriously very fast. So all of the supermarkets are like, oh my God, get everything. Get gas. And it's like chaos ensues. And I'm like, dude, we've been dealing with this forever. and you have a week, like calm down.

9:01So that's slightly annoying, which you'll get used to because that doesn't start until a little bit later on. But the heat, who cares? We live in air conditioning. What are we talking about? It's a nonsense. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You just go air conditioning, air conditioning. Someone said to me, like, it's Florida's winter. Like other people have like, yeah, other people have snow like half the year and they can't get, they need a shovel and stuff. Like, and you need to be inside in the heat. Like what's the difference of being inside an air conditioner? All right. Another amazing bathroom.

9:31Listen, everybody, if you don't follow Daniel's show, you need to. The Marking Millennials is the GOAT show. Leave him an amazing review too. He deserves it. Why not? And we'll check out the next one. 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 Mark and Millet podcast, but also tune into this series.

10:08It'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. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out. Later.