Biggest Mistakes To Avoid in Your Marketing Strategy with Erik Huberman, Founder + CEO of Hawke Media | Ep. 410

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast and thank you so much for listening. Today's episode is with Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawk Media. We talked about why most marketing strategies fall flat, how to make creative that actually converts, and the biggest mistakes brands are still making in 2025. Erik keeps it really real in this conversation. He has a way of simplifying marketing that I haven't heard from a lot of people. I'm excited for you all to listen and I hope you love the episode like I did. Thank you so much. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast.

0:43I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. What is up, Eric? Welcome to the Marketing Millennials Podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me. I want to give everybody a quick background. Could you go into like, what is Hawk Media? I know you're the founder and CEO, so they know where you're coming from. So yeah, background e-commerce built and sold a couple e-commerce brands. And then almost 12 years ago, started advising and consulting for a bunch of large and small brands on how to drive growth using marketing and just found that the marketing ecosystem is broken.

1:31Like there's no barrier to entry to say you're a marketer. I get hit up all the time by 17 year olds telling me they started an agency and are now selling people on marketing, but don't know what they're doing. So how do I do marketing? And so that is a very broad problem in the industry where every head of marketing, every founder I know has had a problem dealing with bad marketing agencies. And I thought that was ridiculous. So I decided to hire my own little SWAT team to sort of solve it right in front of me. And the idea was to be the best at what we did in marketing, but easy to work with, you know, nimble, cost-effective, flexible, et cetera.

2:01And fast forward, we now have about 250 full-time people. We've worked with almost 6 ,000 brands at this point, about a ton of success. And then on top of that, we have a venture fund where we've invested in over a hundred pieces of marketing technology and e-commerce tech that basically power the industry. And then we also have an AI tool that's digesting about 6 ,000 companies, marketing media and revenue data in real time. And then we're able to train our team against it, look at what an individual company is doing and basically create predictive analytics slash automated marketing strategy around it.

2:32So it's safe to say you're doing a little, like just a little bit of things. Yeah, just a few things. Yeah, just a few things. A lot of naps, a lot of sitting around, you know? Yeah, exactly. So you've worked with over 5 ,000 brands. When you zoom out, what is the one thing the winners do differently? I mean, at the end of the day, and this is sadly not that helpful, but great product always wins. If you build something that people really love, service or product, that's going to be where you win. Marketing is easy when that's the case. Growth is easy. Revenue growth forgives a lot of sins. Virality forgives a lot of sins.

3:11And I don't mean virality, like having a good video. I mean, people are talking about your product because it's so great telling other people to get your product. There's a lot to be said about just creating something great from a product standpoint. And that's the quick answer on that's where we see people when there's obviously a lot of tactics as well. So having a good product, what is the next stage? Have you dug deeper of all the people who are winning that has a good product? What are they doing differently than the others? Yeah, so there's a few things. One is articulating that differentiator and value proposition really specifically and succinctly.

3:46So we always talk about the sort of five to seven words, your positioning statement, however you want to put it, that allows people to go repeat it. And what I mean by that is people talk about an elevator pitch, 30 seconds in an elevator, I'm going to tell you about my company. But you don't have 30 seconds when it comes to word of mouth. You have two seconds. And so if I have time to pitch my business, I can take 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, and probably sell someone. What I need is for other people to go talk about me, they need to feel comfortable selling it. So you need to give people something really concise to say that creates intrigue and people wanting to check it out.

4:19For Hawk, it was where your outsource CMO and marketing team. Because then when people went and talked about Hawk Media, they'd go, oh yeah, they're your outsource CMO and marketing team. It was easy to regurgitate, easy to say. I even heard people say, they're like your outsource CMO or their fractional CMO or their CMO in a box. But it was always a play on something that we frankly seeded for them to say so that it was very comfortable for them to talk about us. Because the first time someone tries to pitch your company to someone else and they don't do a good job and the person looks at them sideways is the last time they talk to someone about your company.

4:48So you got to make that easy. So that's number two. Number three, probably the biggest thing I see people miss from just a marketing standpoint is the purchase cycle or consideration period. People are, we're in a day now where everybody has spreadsheets that they're managing marketing on, and they're looking at how much did I spend today on Facebook and how much did I make? And what's funny is intuitively almost everybody understands this, but then rationally they don't put it into practice, which is from the time someone sees an ad to the time they buy, there's usually a time period. And from our data, it's anywhere between three weeks and three months.

5:19So let's just say the average is around a month. The idea that you're going to look at a spend today and then look at the ROI today is frankly one of the dumbest things you can do in trying to measure your marketing because it takes time. It takes time for people to decide to purchase, to build that trust that they actually convert. And so what I see people miss is not only just that fact. So when they're ramping up spends, again, one of the ways I can really identify someone that's not very good at marketing is they tell me that when you ramp spend, something along the lines of like your ROAS goes down as you ramp spend and then it has to catch back up, but they don't know why.

5:51It's just like, oh yeah, when you spend more, your returns go down. It's like, no, it's just the timeline hasn't caught up yet. So if you spend the same amount of money every day, you're seeing the returns from a month from now. But after a month, it catches up and you start seeing the normalized returns. So if you spend more today, like if I spend$100 ,000 yesterday and zero today, you still are probably going to have some sales today because the people that saw the ad yesterday. So the idea that now your ROAS is infinite because you didn't spend any money today is the dumbest thing way to look at it.

6:21But frankly, the majority of marketers do look at it this way. And it goes the inverse. If I spend zero yesterday, or I'd say I spend$10 yesterday. And so one customer comes in today that trickled in from yesterday, but then I spent$100 ,000 today. No, I didn't spend$100 ,000 to get a customer. It's going to take another, again, month to even see the half-life of that spend. So understanding how to measure that is super important. And then knowing that all the things that you need to do during that month to help increase conversion, to help lower that timeframe, things like email marketing, SMS, great content, et cetera, that get people along faster and more frequently.

6:57I also think like what you said at the beginning that the five to seven statement that you need to make the positioning statement, I think people go into the tactic first and then they forget that part. And that's like the foundation of that tactic of like every ad should communicate somewhat of that message. And they go into running ads and they're like, why isn't this not working? I don't see results. But they haven't even nailed down their position before they even ran that$50 ,000,$100 ,000 ad. Yeah, that's exactly right. I always say, it's funny, we live in an agoraphobic world, sort of post-pandemic, that nobody wants to go out and talk to people.

7:42But at the end of the day, if you're starting a new company and you don't have that value proposition or sort of that statement nailed down yet, the best thing to do is to go try to sell people face-to-face and tell them about your product or service and see how they react. because then you can start to gauge like, oh, that didn't work. Nobody gave a shit about what I was saying. You have to have EQ enough to know that people aren't paying attention, that they're glazing over when you're talking. But that's how I came up with your outsourced CMO was just talking to people about what I was doing and seeing enough negative reactions to then identify when someone was actually intrigued by it and going, oh, there it is.

8:12That's what I need to talk about. So I know this is a touchy topic, but you said that, okay, it's three weeks to three months till a lot of people see a sale. But like most attribution models are like one day, seven day, like 14 day, which goes against what you just said that it takes like three months. So like, what is your advice to people like when they set up, like they're tracking their models to make sure like they capture the actual sales? Identify what your sales cycle is. Like go actually look at what does it take. Don't just pull a number out of thin air because you think it's a best practice.

8:49Or frankly, the reason most tracking is seven days now is because it's only what iOS allows to most of the platforms. They don't allow more than seven-day cookie windows. So that's why it's set at seven days. You technologically can't because Apple cut that off. So that's not because it's the best frame to look at. It's because that's what it's allowing. So you have to find other ways to track that, whether it's from the first point you collect an email address to when they convert, all sorts of other ways to track that. but you've got to build out better tracking than that or you're going to cut off your nose to spite your face like my favorite thing about people like again it goes back to the same kind of ignorance with marketers where and i blame marketers i don't blame founders for this because they're not supposed to know this but marketers are supposed to know this stuff where when ios 14 change happened and the tracking windows went from 28 days to seven the idea that your facebook performance went down versus just it went from 28 days to seven is really fascinating to me.

9:46Like, yeah, there were some other nuances about the change that cut off certain strategies that maybe affected some companies from a performance standpoint, but most of the people that think their performance went down didn't have any performance drop at all. They just had a tracking problem and they didn't never fixed it. So you ended up with all these companies that think that like consumer behavior changed on Facebook because they changed a cookie window. Like, no, it didn't. All that changed was your ability to track it, which again, affects some more deep, some deeper tactics that were being done.

10:14But at the end of the day, Facebook's still just as effective. We have tons of companies scaling like crazy. You just have to do a better job tracking and optimizing it. What is your advice on that tracking part? So the seven-day window, iOS doesn't allow, they dropped it from 28. What are you seeing the best companies do that are tracking? Besides, I say they figured out their sales cycle is 28 days or 31 days or something. Yeah, I mean, there's other tracking platforms like Glue. There's doing your own data tracking, just ways to track your conversions aside from just hoping that Facebook is tracking it.

10:48So it's building out your own analytics. And that's why we built Hawk AI too, is then you can actually compare apples to apples of like, how is everyone else doing on these platforms versus us? So are we outperforming the market? Because my view of it is like, if you're already outperforming the market on these platforms and it's not working, you need to fix your business, not change your marketing strategy. and so there's a lot of different ways to fix that tracking whether again that's why we built Hawk AI but there's also Glue there's several other platforms that have tried to do this in different ways there's a what's the other one oh there's Triple Whale and another one that North Beam that I've also tried nothing's perfect but I think that's part of the that's what like we talked about this internally the other day if I can have a platform that just tells me everything to do and it's just like, this is the fact, like just change this and adjust this and fix this and this is how you run your business, then I guess I don't need a head of marketing.

11:46Like the whole reason we have someone in that position managing those platforms is someone needs to distill that information, look at it, and then make cogent decisions based on their experience and their knowledge base using that data. So none of this is perfect, but you can get a lot closer to, you know, at least solid indicators of how things are performing. Because again, that in dashboard and Facebook is not a great indicator anymore. What is a growth tactic that you see over and over again that works long-term, not only short-term? So if I'm thinking like I want to have a long-term play.

12:19Yeah, I mean, the scalable, repeatable stuff is still the same that it has been for 15 years. It's Google and MetaAds, maybe TikTok now, then email and SMS now to complement it, and a great website, and then a consistent quality content coming out from your brand so that you're establishing who you are and creating more of a connection with your audience. That is the core playbook. From there, you expand off of it, you incorporate influencers, you incorporate other sorts of third-party validation to create more trust around it. But those pipes, that we kind of call them, of those basics are necessity these days to compete.

12:58i i it's funny because i think marketers try to over complicate this process but the way you're putting it is is simple like one come up with that positioning statement two here are like pretty much the pipes that you need if you here's the top of funnel here's middle funnel to keep retention of that list build that list you have to have a good product if you want to win otherwise you probably as we probably have a product problem if some of these things are broken or a messaging problem. Those are the two things. What do you think AI is coming into the picture? What is the biggest change that is in this growth role?

13:38Sadly, it's anywhere you need an entry-level employee or an intern at this point. It was intern until about six months ago. Now it's really taking the job of entry-level employees. Data analytics work, like going and pulling data and aggregating it and putting it together in a report, thought jogging. We use it as not prompt in the AI sense, but for us to be like, what are some good ideas we could do here? I love using AI as a little sidekick of even stupid stuff just as an example of what should I get my friend for his 40th birthday here are all the things he's interested in. It wasn't perfect and it gave me the thing, but it gave me some ideas that was like, oh, that's cool.

14:13I could take that this way. And I use that as an example because it's the same thing in marketing where it's like, here's the brand, here's the things it's doing, here's the target audience, here's the value proposition, blah, blah, blah. What do you think some good headlines could be? And it's not going to give you the headlines that you just copy, paste, but it's like, oh, I like that direction. It's just a thought partner that it can be on the creative side. And on the more execution-driven side and the more logical side, it can replace a lot. I mean, we've turned it into our analytics and reporting dashboard.

14:45It can help do a lot of the data mining you needed to do to get to an answer quicker so that you can focus on kind of the highest and best use goes back to if you're not thinking critically and thinking about how do I then leverage this to do some creative things there's no need for people anymore you can just go automate the shit and call it a day but in marketing the challenge is to differentiate yourself to stand out and I don't mean that in a like scream as loud as you can do the goofiest stunt that you can but like how do you actually keep get people's attention and keep it because that's the only way you're going to survive in a day like today.

15:20So you gave some of the pipes and consistent content was one of the things you said. Like, what is your belief on like the organic side? Like, like how important is it now versus like it was like 10 years ago for brands to be playing in that field? Yeah. So when we talk about organic social, I think it's more of a checkbox because they've done so much to throttle your ability to reach that other than YouTube reels, I'm sorry, YouTube shorts and somewhat Instagram reels, though not really. And then TikTok, you really don't go viral anymore. That being said, I think as a brand, once you've captured your audience, so it's not a top of the funnel strategy, it's actually the best way to put it.

15:59It's a mid-funnel strategy. You need to be a media destination for the people that are interested in your brand. That's how you continue to build trust, how you continue to keep them as a customer. That's how you build a solid foundation because they're not just going to buy shit from you every day. And even if they are, that's very transactional. They need to really be engaged with what you're about, who you are as a company. And the way to do that is through consistent content. And I believe that with AI automating all the other performance shit, I'm not saying it's done now, but let's say in the next few years, a lot of the math equations that are done by people are going to be gone and all the optimization will be able to happen automatically.

16:36Then what really matters and how you differentiate will be your content and your sort of assets, your collateral that's being used and all that. And that's where I don't believe AI is going to replace for a very long time. I think it's going to be too duplicative and it's going to look a lot of the same because it's going to be taking the same thesis around all of this. And so I think that's where you can win. And that's where the differentiator comes in. And it's always, you know, they've always said content is king. I just don't think anyone's ever explained that as to why. And to me, it's how do you engage people above and beyond a purchase decision so you keep them engaged with your brand.

17:09And by nature, they're going to buy more. They're going to do more. That's going to be part of their engagement. You said something interesting, like AI is going to get really good at, and it's really getting really good at like telling you where to put your money, like optimizing things that used to be like the advantage probably five, 10 years ago of like targeting, where should I put my money AI could do now? What's the best way to win in the creative space? Like, what are you thinking about? What is your recommendation for how much budget should be dedicated to just making great creative versus spending on these platforms?

17:46Yeah, I think that's a hard one to answer because I don't think great creative doesn't necessarily need to be high budget. The best creative out there sometimes is not expensive. So budget wise, that's a really hard one to answer just generically off the cuff. I always say you should take about 10 % of your budget and be investing in more high risk, high reward marketing, like going viral kind of stuff, stunts, things that are not necessarily scalable, but could, you know, give you a sugar rush while 90 % goes to that scalable, repeatable side. So that part I can answer, but in terms of content, how do you create great content?

18:20I mean, that is the, that's the challenge. That's the, that's where being a good marketer is important. There isn't a straight answer to that. You know, it's what really understanding the customer and what's going to compel them to want to engage in your business more? And what are they looking for? And one of my favorite things, sort of the lens to put things through is what is the value proposition of your business and how do you create content that also serves that value? So you reinforce the fact that you're the destination to serve that value. So easy example, if you're a running shoe company and people are buying my running shoes because they want to get out and go running and get in shape, I should be giving them all sorts of tips on how to go out and go run and how to get in shape.

18:58Like just how do I serve that value proposition with content as much as I am with my product? It's the thing that I like is like you're distilling this stuff as like a simple, like people should just like they over, everything you're saying is like, is overthought by so many marketers. Like we just get confused on tools, like disrupted by all the shiny new tools out there. Um, but really like, if you have these fundamentals down, you can easily go and where do you what levers do you normally see so like from the conversion part what are like the most like easiest way to like lift those like conversion levers like where do you see the most problems that people have when like converting off of an ad to like getting an email sign up or that's it it's just email marketing it's you'd be amazed how many companies still don't just build out a quality email funnel like and then on top of that SMS those two like and then content is the next checkbox, so to speak.

19:55Site optimization, once you have something to optimize, you have to have enough traffic to make sense that it's worth the time and effort to actually optimize. And those are the things. I mean, again, I think that is sort of our ethos. And I think the problem with the marketing world is it's not that complicated. It shouldn't be. It is actually pretty straightforward. It's all based on human psychology and human behavior. And unless you're personally a really awkward or, you know, different human being, generally you can kind of get the vibe of like, yeah, how do people reach me and get me interested in something?

20:26You know, if I go, if I see an ad for something, do I really buy it every time right away? You know, like I just bought a pair of running shoes or not running shoes, but like sneakers from on, which I've been seeing their brand everywhere for a few years before I went to a site and was like looking for a pair of something that fit and I want a certain color sneaker. And I was like, Oh, on, yeah, I've heard they're good because I had friends that have it. I've seen ads for it. I've seen content about them. I've seen runners running in them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, time to try these out.

20:55But it took two years for me to buy a pair of shoes there. Whereas if they were running their Facebook ads, they would have thought, you know, if they served me an ad, it would have been a complete failure on the spreadsheet. What is, what is your definition of like what, like how to build the brand side of the picture? Like, cause a lot of the stuff, they do great brand plays. What should people consider besides Facebook, Google? I mean, you could do brand plays on those channels too, but what are some brand moves that people should think to invest long-term? Brand to me is just synonymous with trust.

21:30That's what that means. Early on in a business, it's about third-party validation. So it's getting PR, it's influencers, it's celebrity endorsements, it's testimonials, reviews. And then frankly, content really plays into brand too, because it's allowing me to understand what you're about as a company. And originally you like the third party side is you borrowing trust from other parties to kind of lend to your brand because nobody trusts you yet. And then really the biggest thing is just consistency. What do you talk about and what are you consistent about that starts to become synonymous with your brand, whether it's, you know, Zappos and delivering happiness and being the best at customer service, or it's McDonald's and being synonymous with the obesity crisis.

22:09Like there's a lot of different things that play into branding, good and bad, but it usually ends up what you either talk about the most and deliver the most of, or what other people accuse you of or talk about you the most to again, good or bad. It's also like, I do this all the time as a fun, like I do a lot of public speaking about this. And I always ask the crowd, like anyone want to shout out who's the worst at customer service? And it is, I'd say 98 % of the time, a cell phone company or a cable company, one or the other. because it's just like, that's what people have gotten used to. Now, part of that is probably not fair.

22:44I'm sure they're not as bad as we all make them out to be, but at this point, their reputation and their consistently poor delivery has made it so that anyone that thinks about bad customer service thinks about cell phone or cable. So going back to how do you win in an age like this, imagine a cell phone or cable company that was like, we're going to be the best at customer service and how much business it could get because everyone fucking hates them. yeah it's always the industries that are like hard to penetrate that like airlines too where it's like they can get away with these like little things where like the easy entries like if you have bad customer service like you're gonna get screwed because you you're used to it um you see a lot of brands come to you like what is like the biggest thing they're doing wrong when they come to hawk meter like what like you see it you diagnose it like what is the problem that you usually see over and over again?

23:34Number one is not doing anything to nurture their customers. So we talk about, and I've kind of alluded, not beat around this bush, but we have a bestselling book that's taught at Columbia, NYU, University of Arizona called The Hawk Method. And it breaks down marketing into three principles, awareness, nurturing, and trust. And so that, again, going back to the idea of simplifying this, that's the three pillars you have to think about. So awareness, how do you introduce your product or service to a new potential customer? How do you get out there? So step one, I see a lot of people not doing anything to attract new potential customers.

24:06So they get really focused on their existing base, their existing list. It's expensive to create awareness. And so they double down and they can't figure out why they're not getting growth. And it's because your customers, no matter how hard you push, are going to leave you at some point. and I always use like there's the morbid example like they're going to die at some point like if you want to take out every other thing like they're moving they found a new brand they like they changed lifestyles whatever at the end of the day they're you're going to lose customers period not even a question so you have to be bringing in new customers all the time to even sustain let alone grow has to happen and then nurturing back to that sales cycle what do you do from the time that someone becomes aware you exist to actually get them to buy if you're not doing email, you're not doing SMS, you're not creating content, you're not going to convert that awareness at the same rate.