Marketing Secrets for 2024

0:00All right, so we're going to talk about marketing secrets for 2024 because we're already in Q4. might as well go into the new year times are getting tougher marketing is getting harder and let's do it that's right yeah that's right so in 2024 what are you doing that you think is going to be revolutionary and different i don't know if it's revolutionary i certainly think more people will be doing it i'm doing it right now we've been talking about this it's the the element of programmatic seo and ai enhanced content and so for example this podcast that we're doing right now, we're driving more and more traffic because we're talking about trending topics on the podcast side of things.

0:39But how is this translating over into Google, like for our blog? And so what we're doing is we're just taking the content, we're taking a transcription, and then we're having chat GPT, the OpenAI's API, create a blog post from it. We're analyzing to make sure it's not duplicate. We're layering on content. We're fact checking it. We're adding links and all that type of stuff, right? So I'll start with the basics. That's the first piece. The second piece is programmatic SEO. So again, we've talked about this HubSpot versus Salesforce pages, HubSpot. Let me back up a second. If you're HubSpot, you're looking to create hundreds and thousands of these permutations where you want to have HubSpot alternatives.

1:17You want to cover HubSpot versus Salesforce, all these keywords, right? And you can now do this. What was limited before because of dev resources and design resources, it's now more available to people. I would start with that. And you know what else we're doing? Did I show you the dubbed version of our podcast where we're speaking in Portuguese? No, but we're doing the same thing in all major languages. And we sound damn good. Yeah. The problem is with the dubbed versions from our tests, we can't get the mouth to align with the speech. Yeah. That's the only problem, and we wish the AI solutions out there could fix that.

1:51It'll get there. I mean, it's the beginning. I think it'll take time. That's one thing that we're doing. We're testing that with all our major videos. Because what we were doing is we were actually paying people to manually do this. and some countries, believe it or not, were a big miss and some were a hit and it was just random on which videos and which countries were getting the views and not. So we just started using technology to just do it in mass scale. The other thing we've been doing and testing - You just gave me an idea. So editors, we need to make the Marketing School podcast into separate podcasts in different languages.

2:22That will work, audio only. Yes, and then you don't have to worry about the dubbing. The other thing that we've been testing a lot with is AMP emails. So you're familiar with AMP, the technology. Have you been using AMP emails? AMP emails? No, like the, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't been using them, but I know what you're talking about. So with AMP emails, you can do a lot of cool stuff within your email. So for example, let's say you're an e-commerce site and you're selling t-shirts. Typically, you may send out an email blast selling t-shirts and then you're saying, hey, click here to go to the website and buy it.

2:53But now within the email, you can say, here are all the color variations and assume like you can pick from drop downs. And then you can also say what size and you can purchase right then and there in the email and pay and get it shipped to you without actually leaving Outlook or Gmail or whatever you're using. And we've seen a big hit or miss right now in which we're doing a lot of tests with AMP-based emails and the struggle that we're facing is we are seeing the deliverability not be as good. But for the people that are getting the emails versus it going into like the other inbox or promotions tab, we're seeing the conversions better.

3:32But the downside is we're seeing the deliverability just not as great, or the plate, deliverability is the wrong word. The placement, like in the inbox versus like the promotions tab, not as good as text-based emails. So it's just trying to find the right balance and we haven't cracked it yet, but we know we can get the AMP emails to convert better if we can get the placement in the inbox and making sure that the deliverability is great compared to text-based emails. else. We should talk about LinkedIn for a second too, because what we're doing with LinkedIn, we're using the influencer ads. You know what I'm talking about?

4:03So, um, whatever's performing, whatever's relevant, where I might be talking about new marketing secrets, where there's good engagement, we'll just run ads towards that. And we will run ads targeting, we'll be retargeting visitors from our website. Uh, maybe people that have stayed for over a minute or so, or people that are visiting our services pages cause we're an agency. Um, so that's, that's cool. Like there are these new ad formats for LinkedIn, but LinkedIn just announced something recently, I don't know if you saw it, but it's basically like, hey, just put in a URL and we will figure out the targeting for you.

4:32We'll create the creatives for you and we'll basically just start creating the ads for you. And I think a lot of these ad platforms are going to start to move in that direction more where it's more like just put in the URL and we'll try to do 90 % of the work for you. Yeah, but what they'll find is it doesn't do an efficient job of optimizing their spend. We'll see. I mean, maybe it's optimizing to get them to spend, but it's called It's called AI LinkedIn Ads. That's what it's called. Yeah. Look, I can see a lot of companies using it. I don't see the ROI being as good as having humans go in there and just test a lot of different.

5:03I don't know because I've heard – you might have heard the same thing, but I've heard from people that when they're running like Google Performance Max as an example, they just leave it on for a while. And then now the new paradigm shift, which we've talked about, is it's not about optimizing all the time. It's just kind of letting the AI do its work. And I think – I don't think it's quite there yet to your point. But I think in the next couple of years, it might start to trend more towards that. Hopefully, it would make life a lot easier. But I just don't see it there because the incentives are misaligned.

5:31If you look at – so like I've met up with – Accelerate, that's what it's called by the way. I've met up with Google, Bing, Facebook, a lot of the people that work at these companies. And they'll meet with a lot of their large spenders. So I've been at those lunches or dinners. and their job is to just try to convince you to spend more so that way it can help them hit their numbers and a lot of times it's just the incentives aren't aligned it's not a win-win their goal is to get you to spend more your goal is to spend less and generate more sales and i'm not saying that their campaigns using performance max or anything don't help they're great we just find a combination of that with humans performs better than just letting them have free reign yeah i think you know with with the ai stuff it's there there's been these case studies where it shows that an ai alone is not going to outperform a human but a human plus ai yeah they know how to use it it's going to be better and i think there should be the human should be verifying they should be trusting but they should also be verifying as well yeah so try out some of the stuff that eric and i we're talking about um another thing that we're trying to do right now is this is kind of marketing this is kind of like uh biz dev in which a lot of companies speak at conferences it's a great way to get your brand out there and you know i told you this in the past i used to charge your arm and leg for speaking sometimes i still charge uh but typically what we've been doing is barter deals we say we don't want to charge to speak we want you to set us up with meetings for your ideal uh Your best attendees that would be ideal customers for us and we've been finding that to be a super effective marketing strategy Because a they hear us speak and then B we get a one-on-one meeting with them and we try to close them So what do you talk about with them in those one-on-one meetings?

7:19You told me about this, but I just want the audience Yeah, so we try to figure out what their problems are and where they're struggling and where they see opportunities And we discuss where we see opportunities We do our homework before the meeting and then we try to figure out ways to expand or start the relationship. Typically start off small and then expand from there. And there are situations where, you know, I spoke at a SaaS conference last year where they'll give us the leads and then you just have your salespeople reach out to all of them and say, hey, oh, by the way, I don't know if you missed, you know, Neil's talk or Eric's talk or whatever.

7:49Here are the slides. And by the way, if you need help with this, it actually helps with booking meetings. And like, I'm surprised at how many bookings it leads to. It generates a lot of bookings and we find it to generate a lot of revenue as long as you're patient and you're willing to do the follow-up. Most people aren't willing to do the follow-up. Yep. So, okay, what else is there before we go? By the way, we're trying to do these longer episodes. Let us know if you like these longer ones because we're in person right now, for those of you that aren't watching. What is old? So we're talking about secrets here, right, for 2024.

8:17But let's talk about the old secrets that people don't really use. Like, for example, webinars still work really well. Depends on if you're B2B or not, but they crush it still. Even B2C, we see that work really well. um what we also found too is in marketing people were selling like a lot of high ticket offers we're finding it to perform much better if you sell lower ticket offers in quantity uh through webinars at least because you brought that up versus selling higher ticket like everyone was like oh let me sell a thousand dollar course a three thousand dollar course five or ten thousand we're finding it that people are performing better when they're like let me give away a lot more for free or make it dirt cheap um kind of like what alex hermosi did with his book launch i forgot with the hundred million dollar leads hundred million dollars yeah so um that that worked out really well for him i don't know how many people he had live but it was something ridiculous yeah and that's the other thing it's like how do you go going back to i mean his first book right hundred million dollar offers at the end of the marketing 101 is how good is your offer because that's going to decrease your cpa that's going to make things good across and by the way if your offer is so good people are going to talk about it too so it kind of helps from a word of mouth slash branding standpoint as well yeah and the other thing that we're doing on the seo standpoint who I know you talked a little about this, about creating like the HubSpot versus Salesforce pages.

9:31We still see the biggest traffic gains in SEO for at least businesses that are established being updating content versus writing new content. And AI writing new content, it just doesn't perform that well, but AI updating old content, we're finding it to work really well and we're seeing some nice traffic lifts. Not anything crazy like 20, 30 % gains on the pages that we're writing, But we're seeing single digit lives like six, seven, eight percent across the board. What of OK, let's say you produce a thousand new articles a month, right? What percent of those would be updates like 98 percent? OK, yeah.

10:09So that's that's a lot, right? When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos.

10:44Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. 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.

11:20Framer 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. It was easy to use, and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together.

11:50No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's Framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. And I do think we're actually trying to reallocate our new content budget just strictly to updating because we're already doing the programmatic piece already.

12:26The new content comes from this stuff that we talk about on my YouTube videos. And so we don't need full in-depth writers anymore. It's a Wikipedia model. Wikipedia is out there just trying to create a ton of new pages. Wikipedia ranks for everything because they keep updating their old pages. Yeah. So look, those are a couple of things that you can do that just for starters, your offer matters a lot. Updating your content matters a lot, too. And what else are we missing? I mean, look, we've talked about how like email newsletters are like this best thing since life. I talked to a guy recently.

12:55He spends like eight hundred thousand dollars a month just buying ads to get more emails. And his business does about 20 million dollars a year. And it's just a newsletter business. And I'm oversimplifying it. But like I think we have another newsletter. What kind of newsletter? It's like The Hustle or like, you know, Morning Brew, that type. And then I have another friend, his newsletter,$30 million a year, right? And so it's like these are great businesses. But, like, for us, what we would do, Neil's actually got a pretty good newsletter. Our newsletter's gotten pretty good with our MPS scores.

13:23That's our way of building relationships. And then down the road, we can have ads in there saying, hey, like, book a call with us or whatever. Like, Neil does a lot of webinars. He'd book a call. For us, we just put ads inside of our leveling up newsletter and that works out well. So what's old becomes new again. Cool. All right. So that's it for today. Let us know if you like this longer version. We worked very hard on it. So please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're watching on YouTube, check out this next video over here and we'll see you tomorrow.