The BEST Ways to Learn Marketing in 2025

0:00You know what our top performing episode over the last few years has been on Spotify the whole time? what? How to learn marketing. So I figured before we move into one of your topics, we're going to tell you how to learn marketing in 2025. So I'll start first. I think one of the best ways to learn marketing, there are a lot of great creators, short form creators on Instagram, for example, right? You have Alex Garcia. I think he's fantastic. There's a couple of good newsletters out there. There's marketing brew. There's the newsletter operator, which is a community, for example, there's a Slack community, right?

0:32I think there's a lot of marketing communities out there. So let's, let's, let's hang on the newsletter operator. There's paid media communities as well. I think it's worth it to pay for these to learn because everyone's teaching each other. There's workshops every week. They bring in guest speakers and all that. Plus you learn from other people and building your network. I think, especially if you're in your early twenties or so, you're going to learn a lot that way. Um, our way of doing in the past, sure. You can read books and everything. Seth Godin is kind of the marketing master, right? Um, I don't think books are the way because by the time a book is out, it's already outdated, So I think it's best to listen to podcasts.

1:04There's Marketing Against the Grain. There's this podcast. I think there's people to follow. Marketing Examined on Twitter, he's great to follow as well. And there's just a lot of these people sharing case studies and they're motivated to do so, whether it's on Twitter or whether it's on LinkedIn. Who else is good? Kyle Poyar, P-O-Y-A-R on LinkedIn. He shares a lot of insights on LinkedIn account-based marketing and he has all these case studies and things like that. I'm just name dropping a couple people. I think you'll find who best fits you. You might like brand marketing. You might like short form.

1:36You might like creative or whatever. I think you've got to figure out what that is first and then go find these people. Don't be like one of those weaklings that appears on an interview, for example. And when you get asked the question, how do you get better at your job? It's like, oh, I read blogs and I listen to podcasts. I'm like, okay, what do you listen to, right? And they can't give any answers. Don't be a weenie.

1:58The best way I would say to learn marketing, and it's a similar answer to the past, but there's actually a quite twist because of AI. How Eric and I and most people learn marketing is you go and you create your own WordPress website about whatever topic that you're interested or Shopify, and you try to go get traffic and sales or leads or whatever your goal is. And you have to create content, you have to promote it on the social web, you have to build links, and you can use these AI tools to help you out, whether it's translate and transcribe into multiple languages like Hey Jen, or whether it's something as simple as using chat GPT to help you do research so that way you can write better blog articles, right?

2:35And what I would recommend is go start your own website and go look at your traffic on week over week basis and try to grow it. And if you don't have a ton of money or resources, that's okay and that's actually even better. You should go and see how the tools out there, whether it's SEMrush or Ahrefs or Ubersuggest or ATP or Eric has a lead gen tool account-based marketing legion tool on LinkedIn. There you go. Use some of them to help you out and see the results week over week. Some weeks are going to be great. Most weeks are going to be terrible. Learn from your failures and adapt and keep focusing and doubling down on the stuff that's working.

3:14Yeah. I think what's also really important. So there's, we kind of gave two steps here, right? The first step is, okay, you got to learn, you got to build a foundation. The second step is you have to go out there and you have to experiment because that's how you're actually going to learn this stuff, right? Actually building scar tissue. The third thing though, that's really important here is, um, I got this from the Caleb who worked with, um, the Hormozis and he worked with Gary V, right? And so we had a chat yesterday and he likes to use the eye of Sauron, um, reference. So Lord of the Rings, right?

3:41So you have to use the eye of Sauron to focus on one channel. It's, if it's going to be SEO, focus on SEO. Don't try to do all these things in the beginning because you have no resources, right? Um, sure you can try to test a lot, but if you test too many things at once, you're only going to learn a little bit, right? But if you test, focus on one and it starts to do well, you double down, you're going to learn a lot faster. For Neil, I think in the beginning it was SEO. For me in the beginning it was SEO as well, or to be more frank, it was blogging. And I torched my first site. It was lightshowvideos.com.

4:09I learned there's no TAM for that. Okay. Ranking number one for lightshow videos didn't drive any revenue at all. The second one I made was howtogetridofpimples.net. I bought a lot of dirty links. I bought a lot of crappy articles and I spun up a lot of them. So what happened? My traffic shot up to like 50 ,000, 60 ,000 a day, which is pretty damn good, right? But what happened day two? Oh, all the traffic dropped to zero, right? So you learn your other lessons there and you take your looking because you experiment these things, but you're not going to learn experience solely through just listening to people or reading things.

4:39Yeah. And going on to the next topic, which is a huge topic, I'm assuming you saw this, Omnicom becomes the largest agency with their IPG acquisition. I saw that. What do you think about that? So$26 billion in revenue. They say they're going to cut$750 million in expenses. Meaning a lot of people. Yeah, just through efficiencies. And I can see that. They pretty much, our agencies offer the same services. There's a lot of cost cutting. I think there's going to be some ripple effects. It's two gigantic companies. Combining them is not going to be easy because each company has tons of brands underneath them.

5:12It is going to be really messy and going to take a long time. And the interesting thing too is like they're all, within each one, it's a bunch of cultures because they bought all these agencies and you're combining a bunch more. Go ahead. I think what's happening to the whole marketing agency space, they're pretty much replicating the old telco model where they're just buying each other up and they're becoming bigger and bigger. But I think it's bad. See, the thing with the telcos is it's a pretty sticky product. You got a cell phone. A cell phone is essential and you need it. You're not going to end up canceling it.

5:42This is why AT &T just gives you dividends and it's almost 5%. It's ridiculously high. Forget the stock price. you're getting around 5 % dividends on your money. Stock price isn't going up like crazy, but the dividends aren't bad because these companies cashflow well and they have amazing margins. But you look at the agency world, they have much more churn than a cell phone provider. It's not as sticky in my opinion. And I think it's bad because instead of trying to innovate on their product and make it better, they're just relying on the same old business. And for a lot of these guys, it's declining business.

6:18and they're not doing well. And I don't see them trying to focus on innovation. Instead, I just see them trying to look at these companies as financial models. And don't get me wrong. We both do M &A, and that is a financial model as well, a way to make money. But that's not the key way you or I grow. We try to really grow by innovating. And I think that is the better way to grow versus just, hey, my agency Omnicom, which isn't doing well, it's been declining the last time I checked. Let me just go buy up another bigger agency that's also struggling and just combine it and we'll just have more revenue.

6:50Well, you got two agencies and two companies that aren't doing that hot. Yes, they're big, but they're not doing as hot and they're not really growing when the total market is growing. And if you look at global ad revenue, it's topping a trillion dollars in 2025 with 82 % being made up from digital. That's a ridiculously high number. Yep. My take on this one is I also agree that it's bad, right? And I think we were talking on the phone about this. You mentioned this, is that when they scoop up a lot of these agencies, they being like an Omnicom or an IPG, for example, what happens is they usually have to write off the deal or they have to discount the deal significantly, right?

7:30Because they'll buy it and it turns out, oh, this acquisition isn't as good as we thought it was, right? They might not do a good job with integrating them or they might not do a good job with innovating, right? Because the problem is it's just a financial spreadsheet, right? And when you're operating solely based on that financial spreadsheet, you're not thinking too much about the customer. You're thinking more about how do I drive more returns, financial returns. So here's an interesting, I spoke at Brussels, an event in Brussels called BAM. I think it's called Belgium something agency for marketers.

8:03I don't know exactly what it's called, but it's called BAM. I don't know what it stands for, but it was in Brussels. And one of the speakers that I met created, or he set up the Bain London office, Bain Paris office, and Bain Munich office. So this guy's done really well. He's pretty much semi-retired. And now he does consulting only for the holdcoast, and he does it for like the C-levels. All right? I'm talking about IPG, Omnicom, WPP, Dentsu, et cetera. Right? He said something that's really interesting. Do you want to know the number one reason why acquisitions fail in holdcoast? no i mean yes i do i'm trying to set up a reel for you ask the question again do you do you know the number one reason why acquisitions fail and hold close no okay you think you do what is it no i'm saying i don't i thought you do know i do know but i'm trying to set up a reel for you tell me what you think it is because you're probably right but i'm curious no okay so acquisitions fail in my opinion because of poor integration the number one reason they fail is not actually integration.

9:10It's these holding companies are run by people on a spreadsheet, financial people, and they look at these businesses as a spreadsheet. So from day one, they look at where they can optimize costs and they're looking to juice the number short term. So what happens in the short run? Isn't that what I said earlier? I said they're operating like a spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Previously, right? Yeah, previously. So I shouldn't change my answer, but it's like the two kind of go hand in hand in my mind. I've kind of thought ahead already. Yeah, well, integration is more how you integrate into the main organization.

9:40When you care about the financial spreadsheet, you don't care so much about the integration. And that's getting everyone together to work well. It's such a people-oriented business that it just falls apart. They care about the integration from day one because there's synergies from cross-selling and cost reduction. Okay, continue. So the integration, yes, they could do a better job on integration. But they love integrating because, again, you can cross-sell throughout the whole network and you can cut costs. There's reduction of HR, reduction of legal, reduction of accounting, right? So the more they integrate, actually the better off they are for them.

10:11Temporarily, but then it ends up not doing that well long-term. No, no, the integration is actually the right move. If you look at Publicis, which is the holding company that's doing the best, they pitch an integrated approach. They've done extremely well integrating. But the difference with a lot of the other holding companies and maybe Publicis is guilty of this as well is the main reason acquisitions fail is They operate it by a spreadsheet and off of numbers, and they want to hit numbers at all costs. So they push hard on that. And it's not that they didn't necessarily integrate. And in the first few years, a lot of them do well because they're about cost cutting.

10:46But it hurts the reputation and the brand in the long run and the service quality in the long run. And it causes the business not to perform as well years later. But in the short run, they're making a killing. In the long run, they're just getting crushed. And they try to do that to hit their earnings calls, hit the stock numbers, but it's just really crushing them. But the integration side, to go back to that, when they don't integrate, it's harder to cross sell. So they try to integrate when possible, and the sooner they can do it, the happier they are. Because if you only offer influencer marketing services and they offer everything else, they want to sell the crap out of your influencer marketing because it helps their overall numbers for the agency.

11:25So what I'm saying is, you're right, right? I'm just saying from integration, I'm not saying you shouldn't integrate. I'm saying absolutely you shouldn't integrate. I'm saying in the long run, I'm thinking about the long term here, the integration is poor. And when you have poor integration, things fall apart, right? And it's because of the main reason you gave, which I'm wrong on the main reason, right? But I think the main reason you gave on they're operating like a spreadsheet means that the people at the top, they're running at the wrong, and so you don't get to integrate well. But you've seen agencies that integrate well, right?

11:52It's because they're not thinking about the spreadsheets all the time. So I'm kind of going around it a little bit, but yeah. And the other issue is the reason Publicis was able to integrate well is they've done chunkier acquisitions and they haven't done as many. But if you look at WPP, Dentsu, and a few of the other players, they've done so many acquisitions. It's hard to integrate all of those companies. You know, this is actually a lesson, even when it comes to VC, for example, right? So for the product that we have, sure, we can raise probably$10,$15,$20 million or whatever. But the thing is, you start to bring in stakeholders, right?

12:25It starts to become this like Frankenstein. And same thing with IPG or Omnicom. When you do too many of these things, you become like this Frankenstein. And you become this giant ship and it's hard to maneuver. And then what happens? Well, things start to fall apart really quickly. Let's use a good example here. So we talked to a couple people from Accenture. We paid people for these calls, right? How many employees does Accenture have right now? I think 600 ,000. Is it somewhere around there? So that was in 2021. 2021, 624 ,000, 2022, 721 ,000, 2023, 733 ,000. Now it's 2024, 774 ,000 people. Okay.

13:00So I was like, I talked to one of the guys, he's like, he closed like, you know,$30 million this year in sales and AI sales. I was like, oh, that's fantastic. Right. I'm like, so I'm like, oh, but like, it seems like you, it seems like you want to leave. Right. He's like, yeah, you know, I'm looking for my next day. I'm like, but you're making good money. I'm like, so why do you want to leave? He's like, well, the thing is, there's a lot of politics. It takes too long to get anything done. There's a lot of redundancies as well. And when it comes to selling this AI stuff, a lot of their entire, I was like, so what would you do if you were a CEO?

13:30That question again, right? He's like, honestly, I would trade my entire staff on like what it is that we actually sell, right? And to be a lot more consistent there. So it's like, oh, communication is not a good thing. It's just like this, he's like, it's just hard to get anything done. And there's a lot of bureaucracy. And a lot of the things that we're selling are basic. I'm like, hey, so when you you guys sell AI, how does it work? It's staff augmentation. And I'm like, wait, that's like old school stuff. That doesn't sound very like you guys are innovating there. And that's the problem when you have such a, I don't know, like a giant ship, it's hard to move.

14:01It is hard. And companies of all sizes have different problems. Accenture, from the stock price perspective, has done pretty well over the last five years. I'm looking at their stock, they're up 75.60%. What's their market cap? $244 billion. That's pretty good. So overall, they've done a good job. Accenture also, during the peak during COVID, did you know they were acquiring a company a week? Oh, were they? Yeah, a company a week. Well, Accenture does really well with M &A, and I know I just talked about earlier how some of the advertising holding companies acquired too many agencies while publicists acquired the bigger media ones.

14:36What Accenture did that was really interesting is they acquired smaller agencies in specific regions that specialize in a service offering that they may be weak at. And then they integrate it really quick and they push in their partners to take it over and it just becomes part of Accenture. And the reason that is an easier model is they're acquiring really tiny companies for the skillset, not really for the revenue or the profitability. and Accenture looks at some of the companies that we're acquiring. Like I've seen people send me their offers from Accenture and some of these companies are really tiny where they're only doing like six, seven million in revenue.

15:14I think that's good revenue, but when you're a company with a market cap of$244 billion and to put it in perspective, their quarterly revenue is around$16 billion. That's roughly 64 billion a year. a five, six,$7 million company doesn't really move the needle. But again, if you're just buying it for the employees and the talent and the skillset, and then you just integrate it into your business, that's not a bad approach. And then they have their partners take over the relationships and grow them. And they try to force people into the central model and culture, and it's worked well for them. So, you know, hats off to them for that.

15:53Yeah. By the way, I don't know if you saw these stats, but do you think the economy is slowing down right now or speeding up? I can tell you the stock market's speeding up, but I don't know about the economy. Crypto's speeding up too. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, by the way, guys, just because the stock market's going up is not a reflection of the economy. But we can say this. So Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, shared the total global Black Friday Cyber Monday sales by Shopify merchants over the last five years. So in 2020, 5.1 billion. 2021, 6.3 billion. Let's just move over to 2023.

16:26So last year, 2023, 9.3 billion. This year, is it up or down? Up. 11.5 billion. That seems like the biggest jump. That is a big jump. And even if you look at inflation, they've grown way more than what the inflation numbers are. So I think at least looking at this, we can say that, okay, the economy is doing okay right now. At least during holiday spending, maybe people are ramping up for Christmas, but I don't know during the... But you would have thought that people would have dialed it back a little bit, right? But Black Friday is always big because of the holiday and people still want to buy gifts.

16:57Look at the growth. Yeah, the growth is good. But GDP growth is not that great in the United States. But you know, did you see that interview with Jeff Bezos and Andrew Sorkinson? Yeah, the New York Times interview. Did you see it? I didn't watch the whole thing. I watched part of it. It's good. You should watch the whole thing. I'm going to re-watch it. But he's just basically saying like, look, man, we've got to cut our costs which I think with the Doge, the Department of government efficiency. I think Elon and Vivek will do a good job there. We're making$5 trillion a year right now. We're spending$7 trillion.

17:28I think we can cut a little bit there. But the main thing that Jeff Bezos said is, look, we've got to grow our way out of this. We're coming up with the coolest technology. I'm optimistic about it. I think we'll figure out a way to grow out of it. He's actually back at Amazon. He said he's working harder than he ever has. It's like, oh, what is he working on? He's working on AI, right? I doubt he's working harder than when he first started, but yes, I get the point. But he said it, he said it, yeah, yeah. I also doubt it, okay? But it's cool. But there are a lot of good lessons in there. I think, I highly recommend you guys watch that one.

17:59I think, I watched the other ones. It's called New York Times Deal Book. You don't need to watch the other ones, just watch the Jeff Bezos one. Like the Sam Haltman one, it just makes me like, I'm just like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I trust this guy, right? So 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.

18:32Say 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. Shopify 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 a game. With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school.

19:05Go 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 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 it was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it.

19:39One 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. No 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.

20:14That's Framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. I don't know Sam at all. I'm sure he's a good guy. Yeah, he's a good guy. None of us know him, yeah. But when Bezos talks, I don't think he cares about the money. He already has enough. You know what he said? But him and Bill Gates were getting interviewed on stage a long time ago, right? And this is when Jeff Bezos had supplanted Bill Gates as the number one richest guy, right? And then the reporter was like, so how does it feel to be overtaken by Bezos over here? And then Bezos looked at Bill Gates and was like, you kind of whispered, you're welcome, right?

20:54Basically saying that's not what matters to them at the end of the day. They don't wake up thinking about being the richest person. They just think about doing cool stuff. Yes. I don't think they care if they have$100 billion or$105 billion or whatever. I think they care about their overall mission and their impact. Yes, and what is fun. Because if you look at Gates, he's donated half his money roughly. And if he didn't sell any Microsoft stock, he would be the world's first trillionaire. Look at how much Buffett donated. Look at how much a lot of these people donated. And yet a lot of people see them as evil.

21:26It's fascinating to me. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency. see if you want to learn more about our little agency community to help you grow faster. I think Neil, we're actually speaking in 10 days to the community. So that's that. And yeah, we'll see you tomorrow.