Biggest Mistakes To Avoid in Your Marketing Strategy with Erik Huberman, Founder + CEO of Hawke Media | Ep. 334

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. Eric 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.

0:42I'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 up what is up eric welcome to the market 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? 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.

1:31There'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, etc.

2:01And fast forward, we now have about 250 full time people. We've worked with almost 6000 brands at this point. I've had a ton of success. And then on top of that, we have a venture fund where we've invested in over 100 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.

2:33So we seem to say you're doing a little, like just a little bit of things. Yeah, just a few things. 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. Like 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. Like if you build something that people really love, service or product, like that's going to be where you win. Marketing is easy when that's the case. Growth is easy. um you know revenue growth forgives a lot of sins virality forgives a lot of sins and i don't mean virality like having a good video i mean your 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 um 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 like what is like the next stage have you dug deeper of like all the people who are winning that has a good product what are they doing differently than the others?

3:39Yeah. So there's a few things. One is articulating that differentiator and value proposition really specifically and succinctly. So 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 that people talk about an elevator pitch, 30 minutes, 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 So if I have time to pitch my business, I can take 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, and probably sell someone.

4:09What 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 in people wanting to check it out. For Hawk, it was where you're outsourced CMO and marketing team. Because then when people went and talked about Hawk Media, they'd go, oh, yeah, they're your outsourced CMO and marketing team. It was easy to regurgitate, easy to say. I even heard people say they're like your outsourced CMO or they're fractional CMO or they're your 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.

4:40Because 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. So 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.

5:16And from our data, it's anywhere between three weeks and three months. So 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 if 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.

5:50But they don't know why. It'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 gonna 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.

6:22But 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 a hundred grand a day. No, I didn't spend a hundred grand 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.

6:58I 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 and but they haven't even nailed down their position before they even ran that 50 ,000 100 ,000 dollar ad yeah it's exactly right it's and I always say like it's funny we live in an agoraphobic world sort of post pandemic that nobody wants to go out and talk to people but 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 like know that people aren't paying attention like that they're glazing over when you're talking but that's how i came up with your outsource cmo was just talking to people about what i was doing and seeing enough negative reactions to then identify when someone was like actually intrigued by it and going oh there it is that's what i need to talk about so i know this is like 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 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 yeah 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 or frankly the most The reason most tracking is seven days now is because it's only what iOS allows to most of the platforms.

8:57They 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 up better tracking than that or you're going to cut off your nose just by 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.

10:15But 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. Like 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.

10:49So it's building out your own analytics. That's why we built Hawk AI, too, is then you can actually compare apples to apples of how is everyone else doing on these platforms versus us. So are we outperforming the market? Because my view of it is 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. um and so there 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 uh what's the other one um oh there's triple whale and another one north beam that i've also tried nothing's perfect but i think that's part of the that's why 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 like 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 uh you know at least solid indicators of how things are performing because again the in dashboard and Facebook is not a great indicator anymore.

12:09What 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. Yeah, I mean, the scalable, repeatable stuff is still the same that it has been for 15 years. It's Google and meta ads, maybe TikTok now, then email and SMS now to complement it and and a great website, and then a consistent sort of quality, 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.

12:51But like that, those pipes that we kind of call them of like those basics are necessity these days to compete i 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.

13:27Those are the two things. What do you think AI is coming into the picture? What is the biggest change that is in this growth problem? I mean, in a growth role. Yeah. Sadly, 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. So data analytics work, like going and pulling data and aggregating it and putting it together in a report uh you know thought jogging we use it as sort of like a not prompt in the ai sense but like for us to be like what are some good ideas we could do here like i love using ai as a little sidekick of like uh even stupid stuff just as an example of like what should i get my friend for his 40th birthday here all the things he's interested in it wasn't perfect it didn't give me like the thing but it gave me some ideas that was like oh that's cool i could take that this way like there's 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 uh 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 like copy paste but it's like oh i like that direction it's like it's just a thought partner that it can be on the creative side and on the practice like 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 um it 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.

15:21So 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, um, 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.

16:00It'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 and other automating, 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.

16:37Then 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?

17:07So you keep them engaged with your brands and by nature they're going to buy more they're going to do more that's going to be part of their engagement you you said something interesting like ai is going to get really good at and it's already getting really good at like telling you where to put your money like optimizing like things that used to be like the advantage probably five ten years ago of like targeting where should i put my money ai could do now um the question i have is like now like how are what's the best way to win in the creative like space like what are you thinking about like creative force like paid creative like like what are the what are what are you what is your recommendation for like how much budget should be dedicated to just like making great creative versus um spending on these platforms yeah 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 it that's a really hard one to answer just you know generically off the cuff um 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 um so that part i can answer but in terms of content.

18:32How do you create great content? I 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 you know 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 like 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 is 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 but really like if you have these fundamentals down you can easily when where do you totally 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 converting off of an ad to getting an email, sign up, or...

19:57That's it. It's just email marketing. You'd be amazed how many companies still don't just build out a quality email funnel. And then on top of that, SMS. Those two. And then content is the next checkbox, so to speak. Site 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.

20:31And, you know, 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? You 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 and i was like okay time to try these out but 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.

21:18What 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. Like what, what, what should they, people can consider besides like these, like Facebook, Google, like, 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. That'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.

21:54And then, frankly, content really plays into brand too, because it's allowing me to understand what you're about as a company. And originally, 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. Like, there's a lot of different things that play into branding, good and bad.

22:29But 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. is 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. Like, I'm sure they're not as bad as we all make them out to be.

23:00But 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 like 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 they could get because everyone fucking hates them yeah those 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 going to get screwed because you're used to it.

23:36You see a lot of brands come to you. What is the biggest thing they're doing wrong when they come to Hawk Media? You see it, you diagnose it, what is the problem that you usually see over and over again? Yeah. Number 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.

24:11So 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. So 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.

24:45At the end of the day, 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. And awareness is expensive. So you're also competing with everyone else willing to pay for those eyeballs and doing the things to grab those eyeballs.

25:15And if you're not, once you gain those eyeballs, you're not doing everything with them to get them to become a customer and stay a customer. Again, you're going to have a hard time competing. And then the last piece back to trust or brand, 75 % of people won't buy from a company they don't trust. So you have to do things to create trust. Again, early on, third-party validation. And then over time, just be consistent with your message and be consistent in building that so that people see you around and start to believe. And that's just human nature back to it. You can't really shortcut any of that.

25:45The only sort of shortcuts I've seen is trust is a funny thing. There's actually a little side note and I've told the story a lot, but you ever watch how I met your mother? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, when Barney would always try to introduce Ted to girls and you just go, Hey, have you met Ted? And they'd be like, and for the audience, they don't know who Barney is. Barney's Ted's friend. Ted's trying to meet a girl. Barney's just trying to help them. And so he just walks up to random girls and goes, Hey, have you met Ted? And every time the girl would be like, no, hi Ted. And they, and he just walked, Barney would just walk away.

26:14Uh, I talked about this for years is like that third party validation doesn't necessarily need to become from a trusted source. People just gravitate towards someone that has a validator that the fact that they know another person is enough of a validator. And that works with brands too. If you're recommended by someone, even if I don't know who that recommendation is, who that person is, it still creates that. And so back to that story, what's fun is I told this for years. And then a couple of years ago, I ended up sitting in a lunch across the table from the showrunner for how I met your mother.

26:43And I told her that I had talked about this and not talked to her about and she's like oh yeah we used to go out all the time after filming and do that in bars and it worked every time like just that opener of like hey have you met this person or you should check this out and so even when you're thinking about your own marketing like getting someone else to talk about you goes really far even if people don't know who that person is yeah and so basically breaking down something is like one of those three buckets they're probably they're probably Exactly. Someone's missing something there. And that's where that framework came from.

27:18It was years of me analyzing businesses and looking for where the holes were and started to realize they really fell into three buckets. It was either they weren't creating any new top of the funnel, they weren't nurturing that top of the funnel, or they weren't creating any trust. And it was over and over and over again. It was one or two of those things they were missing. And so then I started to talk about it a lot. I started doing some public speaking and that's what turned into the book. and i think going even back like some of the the so-and-so best marketers just have like the best product and they're winning like some of the people i see talk like if like you could put like 10 marketers in their shoe and they probably would do exactly the same thing as they do because you going back because the product is great and then you put that same marketer in a crappy product and they're not going to scale it.

28:04So having a product, how do you... A marketer comes to you and they come and you right away see their product as crap. How do you tell a marketer to go back to that founder and say, hey, that's the hardest part as a marketer to go back to the founder? We won't say their product is crap because I've been proving wrong way too many times. By the way, I have no problem being direct with someone and being like, nobody wants your product. I'll say that. I won't say your product's crap but i'll be like no one wants your product so if we go and do everything right and no one's buying that is the conversation like you're and we can look at it like if the ads are working so like we we the value proposition so there's a lot of different ways you can see where it's failing let's say the ads are working people are clicking them they're going to the site and we're doing all the right email marketing and everything and they're just not converting though sometimes the answer is people just don't want your shit like they were interested and intrigued and then nobody's actually compelled to buy it it's not a marketing problem always it's sometimes like yeah nobody there isn't a market for your product nobody actually wants this um or have we not built enough trust and that's where that's where like us as an agency it's nice to come in is we can tell you here all the metrics we're looking at like the problem is you're getting all the traffic at the right expense but it's not converting and we're doing all the things we normally do that build the trust and do all this you know and nurture these things that should be working it might just be the product.

29:26And so those are things that you struggle with when, especially when it's early on and you haven't had product market fit. Once you have product market fit and you see that things are able to work, then it's just about finding the right early adopters to start buying the thing. But early on, that is what startups are about. You got to go see if there's actually a product market fit for what you're doing. And so again, I wouldn't call it a shitty product because there's products that again, I'm blown away. Anybody wanted to buy, but did really well. And so it's more just finding, is there a market for your product?