The best marketing channel is where people spend the least amount of time, The greatest marketing myths, 1 person companies (some doing $300M+)

0:00The best marketing channel is where people spend the least amount of time. So I had a little fun. I did a ton of Google searches. I looked at a lot of different websites to figure out where people are spending their time on the internet or using at least a pipeline, right? Like the connection. So people spend two hours and 52 minutes according to status on emails a day. Now, most of that time on emails is just communicating, but literally two hours and 52 minutes. they spend two hours and 37 minutes on streaming like netflix uh hulu hbo max although it's called max now they spend two hours and 27 minutes a day on average on social media and search engines a whopping 15.4 minutes a day that's ridiculous i took the status and number for per month and then i had to divide it to get the daily time at least for that one now when people think like oh the ROI is where the attention is, right?

0:59In marketing, we always talk about, oh, go where the attention is. But just because that's where you think the tension is, doesn't necessarily mean that's where the ROI is. And a great example of this, what do you use email for on a daily basis? What's the main purpose of your email? Communicate. Yes. How many emails do you get a day pitching you something? Too many. And what do you do with most of them? Ignore. Do you even open them up? Nope. Yeah. Same here. I literally mark a lot of them as red. And then sometimes I get an email a week later from someone i'm like oh this wasn't someone pitching me they actually needed something you actually cleaned your inbox i just let it build oh i clean it every single day i'm too ocd yeah uh social media people spend roughly two and a half hours what do you spend on social media just mindless scrolling right unless i'm on twitter i'm trying to learn twitter same here but on instagram i just keep scrolling through the reels and i look that's why i have that thing that prevents me from logging in easily i just don't log into my social media that often.

1:55Oh, they're good about that. Yeah. Yeah. And then streaming, even though people are doing ads these days on like Netflix or on Amazon. Dude, I just upgraded my Amazon yesterday night because I was tired of seeing ads when I was watching Amazon. So I paid the$2 and something extra. There's a new add-on or ad-free for Amazon? Yes,$2 and something cents. Wow. On top of the prime. Yeah, I was pissed off, but I paid it. It's okay. Their actuaries are like, this will be good for us. It was expensive. Yeah. You're looking at roughly$30 a year. I don't want to spend the money. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you pay for every other streaming service too.

2:31No, I get a lot of them for free with T-Mobile. You do? Yes. T-Mobile gives you free Apple. What is it called? Apple Plus? You use T-Mobile? Yeah. Who uses T-Mobile? Would you get free streaming? Oh, I didn't know that. You don't want to. You have to look at the total price. What are you paying for your contract? The value you're getting from your international calls. And then you got to do a spreadsheet math to see what saves you the most. All right. Continue. Okay. So streaming, yeah, they're starting to serve ads. But like, dude, when you watch a TV show, you don't do tons of streaming, do you?

3:01You don't watch tons of movies. I watch not. Dude, have you seen Masters of the Air? I have not. I sell parts of it, but I didn't finish it. It's great. But anyway, yeah, I do watch stuff. I watch a lot of anime. But when you watch that stuff, you're watching it for entertainment. Yeah. You're not watching it to buy something. Yeah, I'm passively consuming. Yes, same here. but when you do a google search i have intention yes if you search for cheap laptop you're looking to buy a cheap laptop if you look for you know credit cards for uh people with bad credit you're looking for a credit card solution yep and you're not spending that much time on search you're just clicking through to a website but it's intention based it's a great toll booth google is the greatest toll booth on the internet yes yeah and i love it for that so although people like oh you You know, there's the tensions on social media.

3:52But if you look at it from an ad dollar perspective, Meta in 2022 generated, because not everyone's on their quarterly earnings, but in 2022, they generated$113 billion in ad revenue. Do you know how much? Yes. Do you know how much Google generated during the same time period? Double? Yeah, pretty much. $224 billion. Yeah. Yeah. I think it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it's... sure, you can get all the attention. We can get hundreds of millions of views, but the quality of the view matters. This is more of a B2B podcast, right? We don't talk about politics. We don't talk about so-and-so drama or whatever.

4:28We just talk about business, right? But that gives us a different audience. Yes. We've also found that if you just focus on what you're good at and nothing else, your audience monetizes way better than if you talk about everything. I got one here. This tweet is from Ross Simmons. So biggest marketing myths you've been told. So I figured, hey, we might, let's just talk about some of the biggest marketing myths out there. What do you think are some of the biggest marketing myths? For example, number one, people think SEO is dead. I've been hearing that since I started learning SEO in the very beginning, SEO is dead.

5:00Number two, email's dead. Is that on the list? No, it's not. Okay. Yeah, we should talk about that too. Yeah, but what's his list? Read off his list. Okay, his list is the best product wins. Number two, build it and they will come. Three, more creative because more effective. four good marketing equals immediate results five nobody reads this is too fast start with the first one we'll talk about it let me go 0.5 speed so people say i talk at 2x sometimes but number one the best product wins which isn't true a lot of people have built crappy products and they win you can have the best product but if no one knows about it or you're terrible about marketing it or a lot of times look at youtube they weren't the first player out there there was other great players before them and they got bloody and lost that's why it's a myth yeah it's a myth.

5:44Yeah. Number two, build it and they will come. Yeah. I learned that one the hard way. My first business, I built it and no one came to it. And then I learned about something called marketing. No, first business was a job website. Oh yeah. That's right. Cause you got mad at about monster. Yeah. Yeah. And then you learn internet marketing. Okay. Three, more creative equals more effective. No, you can build a ton of creatives and if they suck, they still suck. But at the same time, if you just have one creative, you do get fatigue. And if people keep seeing the same creative over and over again, it actually hurts you.

6:16So you need enough, but they all need to be good. I think the theme from this session, today's recording is really just scale. How do you scale? Not only scale, but how do you scale quality? Quality content also means quality creative as well. How do you keep leveling up the output while keeping the quality high? That's very hard. That's true. By the way, the reason we like doing podcasts is because we have quality conversations with people and we believe that we're doing quality work, naturally the content should be higher quality than other people. And it's just easier to talk like this versus like having to come up with ideas every time.

6:48And then we just share the cool stuff that we're reading. The quality content that we consume, we try to make it into quality conversations. Anyway, next one. So next one is nobody reads long form content anymore. No one reads long form content. That's very false. I read a lot of long form content. Yeah, me too. Majority of the content I read is long form. What are you reading? I read The Economist. Well, it's not really long form, but I read a lot of like stats. It's not that long. It's not? It's longer than a New York Times article in many cases, but it's not like that long form. A lot of the long form content that I read is like when people do analysis on something.

7:24So for example, Patrick Campbell is known for a long form analysis. He did a great competitive strategy one. It's super long. Yeah. Yeah. When he talked about, don't worry about your competitors. Like, you know, that myth, like Amazon talks about, oh, don't obsess by your customers, not your competition. But that, that analysis was really long. So I read a lot of stuff like that because it gives insights on what businesses should be focusing on. Yeah. Long form writing. You can tell like good writers, like Patrick's a very good writer. The, when you go very long, you're actually incentivized to share really interesting data too.

7:56And you're going to pick out a couple of nuggets that usually you might not get from a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. so uh there's a couple others one other ones down here too but um so one one guy said seo is dead so what are some myths that we think are that we've been told so seo is dead no seo is not dead what else is what else is dying what else is a myth email marketing is dead people still open up emails i don't know how companies can run uh a corporation without email dude you know it's funny like a year and a half ago, two years ago, maybe more, three or so years ago, I was talking to Tai Lopez.

8:33At the time he was acquiring a lot of companies like Dress Barn, Pier One, et cetera. Right. And they're like, cool, let's communicate on WhatsApp with all like people in your company and my company. I'm like, dude, no one uses WhatsApp for this. I'm like, people use email. It's an old school channel. It's still where he's like, oh, no one really uses you. I'm like, no, no, no, no. People are using - Nobody uses email, Tai? Like for internal communication. Yeah. right he was like you were telling you were talking to ty him and his team okay got it not just him but they were telling me that like oh yeah people more on like whatsapp is a new way i'm like dude in business people still communicate by email yeah there's nothing wrong with it it's not going away like all the gen z people they can say whatever right or even millennials but gen z they're coming into the job force and it's like when you come into job force who are your superiors there are people that use email so then you're forced to learn email and it's just it's It's like email will never die for a while because it's something that you can control.

9:29And then usually what happens with email if you're delivering good content is you can just ring the register every now and then. It's good for that. What Eric means by ring the register is you can send out a promo, selling them on a service or a product, and then cash starts coming in. Here's what I think we should talk through is ROI must be known for everything. And I think 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, when I was learning marketing, I was like, oh, damn, man. The new marketing, everything's going to be trackable. But we're in a world now where it's like, Maybe not so much. Well, laws are changing, so it's becoming hard to track everything.

10:00But Eric and I also through our career, we've learned the value of a brand. People buy Nike shoes because when people want shoes, they just know Nike. When people want a credit card, they look at Visa, Amex, MasterCard because they're just well-known brands. When you want an electric car, people think Tesla because they have the brand out there. Brands are powerful. So when we look at the biggest companies we work with, or majority of the companies we work with on the enterprise ad, majority of their revenue comes from just people knowing their brand. Yep. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real.

10:33I 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's got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos.

11:04Shopify 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.

11:40Framer 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 Framers 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.

12:10No 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. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association.

12:44All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Speaking of which, there's a, and this can be the last piece over here. This tweet's from Alexander Volodarsky and his tweet says this. I'm obsessed with one person companies and keep track of all I can find. Here's the full list. Star Dew Valley game generated$300 million in revenue in six years. One person company. What do they do? It's a game. There's only one person? Yeah. Search it up. Star Dew Valley. D-E-W. Star Dew Valley game. Star Dew Valley.

13:29Has anyone even heard of this game? I haven't heard of it. Rego Apps generated approximately$100 million in total revenue. Digital Inspiration builds Google plugins and generates$10 million in revenue per year. That's already three. Plenty of Fish. Don't you know that the owner, the founder of Plenty of Fish? It was a one-man shop. It wasn't one man. He later... Initially, it generated$10 million in annual revenue with just the founder. Later, he hired more employees and then sold it for$575 million. Yeah. Yeah. and that guy was like hardcore in the affiliate space too yeah it was good for him yeah but what did you find about stardew valley game i've never seen it but i'm gonna show it to everyone on the screen it's a farming game where you farm vegetables yeah it's like farmville yeah it's like farmville yeah good for them i've never played this thing i also don't really play games you play games right no but we tried i can't business is too fun business is the ultimate game but you used to play games yeah oh hardcore yeah um and you know built with obviously they generate 14 million revenue a year and it's one person really yeah it's still one person yeah i don't know i see the wheels turning in your head right now okay you know they're turning for yeah i know i know i know that's why you guys can keep listening to this oh my god let me send out an email today uh-huh um and then here let me see what else might be interesting to you here I probably won't get a response but I'll send out an email yeah tools for wisdom makes 2 million that's not for you but anyway oh Milled is a search engine for newsletter by Chaz with an annual revenue of 1 million dollars Milled?

15:07yeah I'll send you this tweet afterwards you can see all this stuff that's cool yeah anyway so you got anything else? no? alright that is it for today please don't forget to rate view and subscribe it helps us grow and if you're an agency owner Agency Owners Association, go apply. Markingschool.io slash agency. And we'll see you tomorrow.