Clickbait Doesn't Work Anymore, Stop Using It.. What We Are Doing Different In Marketing Than Our Competition, China Is Exposing US Brands

0:04I've seen two things in the past, I would say 12 months, two things when it comes to content. um the first one being clickbait and if you look at most of the content that does well on the social web in today's world it's people who aren't leveraging clickbait but yet when markers tend to create content they all want to talk about like uh instant gratification headlines um and ones that just are so bombtastic as i like calling them and i'll give you an example of this so i use some people that help me script out some of my social content and they create hooks for me. And I'm going to have a conversation with them today.

0:47And I just filmed eight videos yesterday and I was recording some of this content and let's say one of the videos was on LinkedIn. They would have sub hooks. And the reason we do sub hooks is, is if you look at most of social platforms, the number one factor on how well your content does is the retention. So the more people that watch the whole video, the more likely they are to show everyone your content. The problem that you end up finding is if you do a hook at the beginning, you can draw people in, but after a minute or so people lose attention and they start leaving, which is why you want to continually have sub hooks.

1:25So if you have a hook every minute, just general rule of thumb, it doesn't have to be. What you'll find is people will continually stick around with your video much longer and you'll do better. But the problem that a lot of marketers like doing with their subhooks is they use bombtastic language. So going back to the LinkedIn video I recorded, they kept using subhooks like, now this next LinkedIn strategy is the real key to going viral. And then after you do that, and then the next hook will be, this is the number one mistake marketers make on LinkedIn. You have to avoid at all costs. and they keep using these quote unquote bomb-tastic as I like calling them hooks and I just hate it and I think it's played out.

2:11Even if that tactic is the real tactic to go viral or even if that tactic is the number one mistake that people make, using hooks like that are just played out and it may work well in the consumer world, it does terrible in the B2B world. What we're doing now with our long-form YouTube videos, so we recorded in the same studio now, but I recorded for the first time last Saturday. It felt so good because it's just the old, old school marketing headlines. We have like, it could just be like the 10 commandments of marketing or seven new marketing tools that we have. Right. And these videos start to do well, or I might have one on, oh, AI agents, the ultimate beginner's guide, which is like not bombastic.

2:49It's like stuff you would have seen seven years ago or so, but these videos now, what I want to say, so clickbait doesn't work any anymore, at least not for us, but what I will say, cause people are tired of clickbait. Right. But what's working is ultra high quality content. So remember we talked about Chloe Shi. So she has a million followers now on Instagram. And it's because everything's so highly edited, right? But when I think about now, the videos you and I make, the concepts will come to us. And you and I, I got this from you actually, I'll make like a 20 to 30 minute loom talking about what I want to talk about.

3:20And it'll be a screencast, right? And then they use a teleprompter. And then boom, what used to be a five minute video is now a 30 minute video. I was like, I didn't even know I talked for 30 minutes, right? And then what used to be like seven minutes is now like 45 minutes. I was like, how? Because we spend more time on it. It's everything now. The way to explode your social growth this year isn't to do the stupid hack or whatever. It's just to level up the quality to such an insane level because that's what everyone's doing. Yeah. And dude, like I released a video the other day and it was on personal branding.

3:50And in the video, I talk about how my personal brand generates 10 million a year. And that's roughly what we generate each year from it. So then they ended up using the title in the video, how it generates a hundred million a year. No joke. And I was like, where'd you guys get the a hundred million a year is 10. So then I told him right away. And then I like, screw this. I just changed it to 10 myself. The headline didn't perform as well. So then they changed it to like the secret to building a 10 billion, a 10, 10 million dollar personal brand. And I changed it. They wanted to use a number and I just put something that was more realistic.

4:25and my version was, because I break down how I did it and I said, this is the blueprint I use to build a personal brand that generates 10 million a year. I'm not telling people they're going to generate 10 million a year. I'm not saying they're going to generate 100 or even one. I'm just telling people, this is the blueprint I use to grow my brand and this is how much I make and this is how it works. And even in that video, I talk about, or I've talked about in many videos, I don't know if I actually do it in that video, on how personal branding is not where it's at. I think you need to have a personal brand these days to separate yourself, but a corporate brand's more valuable.

4:57But I don't feel that was bombtastic. I just felt I was just telling the truth on, here's just the blueprint I use, take it for what it is. And I don't care if I get half the amount of views. I don't want the views who are clicking on it because they want to make$100 million personal rent. I don't want those people watching my content. You know what's interesting? Finish it off first. Yeah, the reason I don't want them to watch my content is those people are looking for shortcuts in life and there aren't shortcuts. It's interesting because when I talk to this, this guy who's around let's call him 21 years old or so he's really good with organic social and he's really good with short form content and he's like you know the difference between me and you eric is you actually have a lot of life experience and you can share a lot of stories the problem with me is i don't have a lot of experience right now so i have to come out with something that's more bomb tastic or like some hook some crazy hook and then i have to do a lot of research he's like but you can just riff and that's the difference between us older creators and the younger ones and so you have this one over here and what we're doing different in marketing than our competition i I think even in this podcast now, we're trying to share more stories because the feedback we've gotten is we like the stories that you guys have.

5:58And I do think we tend to do pretty interesting things in our lives and business. I'm being I just think we do. We do. Because like I have a lot of fun and I'm like, I wish I could share. We're sharing more of this stuff now. But what I just mentioned earlier, too, is we're leveling up the quality. We're paying more attention, especially to the YouTube videos, the products that we have to at least on our end. I see distribution as a moat. I see data as a moat. And so what we're trying to do with carrot right now is we're trying to collect as much data as possible. And we might even give away these reporting features that a lot of people charge thousands of dollars for.

6:30We might just give it away for free because then we could collect a lot more data there. And whatever ad manager stuff that we have, that's going to help guide that and then feed the AI. And then where the click flow stuff I talked about on SEO side, you know, a lot of that will probably be given away for free too. But that is, those are some things that we're doing that are a little different than the competition. I'm keen to understand from, from your side too, that's, that's different. I would say similar to what you're saying and what you're doing, focusing on creating volume of content, but the volume, not necessarily in the post frequency, but the length.

7:04So we're creating much longer content. We're doing more global content while our competition is focused typically on one region. We're doing a lot of events all around the world for branding. We're sticking with the bigger events. Even you and I were texting the other day or emailing on, that was yesterday, right? on the HubSpot event. So we're doing bigger and bigger events. We talked about it in the past podcast where we're being more selective. Like after the YPO one, I'm going to Web Summit. Oh, nice. That's great. So I'll go to Web Summit Rio. I do the Toronto one, although now it's in Vancouver.

7:37I don't know if I'm going to end up doing the one in Portugal. I've done that, the Lisbon one before. How many do they have per year? They have Qatar as well. They get paid to do some of these. Oh yeah, the governments pay them. Yeah, they make good money from this. But yeah, so when I was looking at events, that's what we're doing there. I'm also doubling down on our ideal customer profile. If you look at a lot of people, they understand marketing, but they create marketing for the masses. Even agencies that I'm competing against that only work with enterprise, they still create content for the masses.

8:09I'm trying to adjust things and just focus on my ideal customer. And it's okay if I get less views, less comments, less followers. I just want more of my ideal customer and less of everyone else. I don't mean it in a bad way. I love everyone else too, but I believe that is what's going to cause us to do better. And then I'm also, and this is not really marketing related. I'm rethinking strategy in my corporations. We have so many different divisions and not all of them are profitable. The non-profitable ones, funny enough, I don't want to do anything with. I actually like them and I want to keep them and grow them and fix them up and I think next year almost every division will be profitable um the ones that aren't I think they'll be break even but I'm thinking about offloading certain assets and then doubling down on our core competency to just grow faster but it'll it'll hurt us in the short run if I offload some of our core assets yeah I think that's good and there's other stuff we can't talk about but there's you know just think about it this way you're listening to marketing school but business both in business and marketing you're looking to arbitrage all day and so we talked about maybe two days ago just arbitraging right so whatever you can where you can find a misplaced a mispriced product or service and you can charge more for it that's what we want to do or it can also come down to acquisitions too at the end of the day i also think what's different too is so you mentioned you you do there's there's one difference i mean you and i speak at events but we also do events too so next week i look at me as like the amount of effort i put into that that's me very much doing that event and so Neil might do one where sometimes um if we're speaking somewhere you know we might throw a dinner right and that's something I've done quite a bit um Neil does that as well and then usually once a year I'll do an event so like even though this year I'm focused on the YPO one next year I'll bring my event back um because those those have always been fun and I'll probably do it in Beverly Hills because it's you know it's local it's easy I can walk there what else are we doing that's that's different than the competition right now you're doing a lot of dinners you do dinners yeah with the yp or groups yeah you're oh yeah oh let me tell you so let me tell you the format we have for that dinner so you know yp has like 11 chapters in in la do you know that 11 11 that's a lot are you include like malibu malibu there's santa monica there's los and you can cut los angeles gold los angeles Beverly Hills Bel Air yeah so there's a lot maybe even more than 11 but my point is so yp guys is an entrepreneur group or or just business operator group we're doing these ypo plus one dinners and so this is our little innovation here and i didn't come up with this idea but basically there's like three or four core people and then every month or every other month we'll invite one other ypo from a different chapter and then that way this group continues to grow and we all invite them into whatsapp because everything's so disjointed right now so the thing might happen here where this group becomes so big It's like all of YPO Los Angeles where we can throw like a mega event.

11:01And so it might become that, but that just goes down to the whole, like it starts at a small level and it gets bigger and bigger over time. But yeah. Um, what else before we move on? If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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13:11Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. are you doing any more of those like events that you attended where you had to spend like five grand i forgot the name but didn't you have to spend five grand or was that say it spent five grand to go to a conference five grand to go to a conference there was a ticket that he bought he flew in here was it say it or you it was some event in ucla oh that was the all-in conference was it five grand yeah it's it's no it's 7.5 seven thousand five hundred dollars for a ticket are you are you doing more of that stuff did it work out for you okay so So the All In, this is the All In podcast.

13:49So I went to the very first one in Miami when I lived in Miami, right? That was$7 ,500. So Syed met me for that one. And that one was like you saw Matt Mullenweg from WordPress walking around. You saw like a lot of interesting people walking around. And then the next year they did in LA. I had moved back to LA already. So I was like, oh, I can see LA. So I paid another$7 ,500. It was, these events are too big. So I didn't do a dinner. It was too big. And then I hung out with like a couple people each time. but it didn't lead to anything really at the end of the day, nor was I really looking for it to lead to anything.

14:19But I would just say, if you're looking for business, those types of events are too big and broad. You're better off speaking and then throwing a dinner than anything. That's what I would say, but I didn't do that. And then what was the one where Andrew Wilkinson also went to, was that all in summit, all in podcasts or Andrew Wilkinson, you, Andrew Wilkinson. No. So that was Andrew Wilkinson's partner, Chris Sparling from tiny. so Syed Chris and I were hanging out for lunch at the very first one in Miami got it and the first one would you say was better than the second one I think so yeah it got too big the second one but the first one you had like you had like I think Justin Khan from Twitch was there he's like walking around and then you had like just a lot of interesting founders were walking around that there's like some YouTubers there too just hanging out it's like oh I watch your stuff so yeah but that's that to me was more of a spectacle than anything like there's a really popular gambler you probably don't know who he is alan keating he plays huge pots on on high stakes poker and like 1.4 million dollar pot he'll lose or win like you know 2 million 3 million i'd be pissed yeah i lost yeah yeah i actually think that would be a great way to network eventually getting to the point where i would like like be in those games that would be a great way to network i get invited to a lot of poker games i don't know what the stakes are but they all know i would lose my neighbor his stakes they play at are like like people are losing like they're buying in like 100 200 grad my neighbor i hear chips shuffling all the time when i walk by yeah and and some of these people do crazy stuff like there's a lot of people in the background they're kind of like semi-parties they even have like catered chefs people who like massage your back while you're giving or when you're playing poker because you may get tired of sitting there for like three four hours i don't know how long that's sort of so serve you drinks too yeah yeah Yeah.

16:03So, but yeah, not my cup of tea. I'm just going to lose money. Yeah. You only, you only do it when you think there's a guaranteed return. Yeah. And I know there's a guaranteed loss for me. Yeah. Have you seen that? This is funny. The, so on X, at least you can see all these Chinese people on Tik TOK exposing us brands, like$2 immerse bag or mess bag, or like I make this Louis Vuitton bag for, you know,$10 in the United, in China. They expose everything. I recently started seeing that on Instagram. And it's like these Apple headphones. You guys pay$800. I'm making up the price. We sell them for$40.

16:40It's the same exact one. And they show you the sound. And they tell you what the pros and cons, the differences versus the original in theirs. And they're like, you can test it out. And I was just like, man. Look at this. It says China is retaliating against the U.S. I guess the tariffs by exposing the 100 to 1 ,000 % markups by U.S. brands on items manufactured in China for pennies on the dollar. So the one is Lululemon. She's like walking around the factory exposing Lululemon. And then you have Birkenstocks. You know what Birkenstocks? The shoes. Yeah. He's just like exposing them. And it's actually the real company.

17:13And do they sell them? They sell them direct to Birkenstock. But you can buy directly from them? I think you can buy direct. Yeah. Sephora Tide Pods laundry pods this guy led this guy Tony that guy is funny what's up Tony yeah and you can buy some of that stuff online like I saw that Cartier thing I don't buy jewelry but they were just like oh you can end up getting it now from China for this much this is how much we sell it to Cartier for and this is where they shop and get their jewelry from and I was like huh never knew this yeah yeah I mean I don't think it's gonna do anything I think people will just continue buying so people like status like people like i think the fact that someone paid two thousand dollars or like seven thousand or a hundred thousand dollars for a birkin or something it it it validates them you know what i mean i've never bought a birkin not for me i mean yeah you and i are not like that yeah yeah you know i propose with the one carol wedding ring i see i don't know that so this is how ignorant i am so what what is supposed to be standard and what's like above average for the carrots so let's just say they say that what's the rule of thumb no you're supposed to propose with a few months worth of your paycheck no it doesn't know either it's something like that a few weeks or a few months and i propose with less than a day's worth of my income but like but what size are you supposed to get i didn't even get a one carat ring is eight carat really big that's really big so when i say one carat i'm rounding yeah but but But you had a wife that understands your values and her values too.

18:42And that's not what she values. Yeah, she doesn't care for jewelry. She never really wore jewelry in the first place. I've offered to buy her more expensive rings. Oh, when I propose, you can pay for it for me. No, no, no. It's okay. Everyone has their thing. You must spend money on certain things. I like buying technology and my health. But anyway, guys, hope you guys enjoyed that session. That is it for today. We're going to be recording in Miami using my DJ Osmo next week. Neil and I will be. And we'll see you in Miami.