Why Failure Is Your Best Growth Hack | Bathroom Break #68 🚽

0:01Welcome to a new special series called The Bathroom Break. That extra 10 minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice. This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwetelson, from the Do This Not That podcast and SubjectLine.com. Each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out. We are back with another episode of Bathroom Break.

0:36I'm here with DJ Swettelson of Do This, Not That podcast, the number one podcast in the world. And I am Daniel Murray. You're so stupid. And the question I have for you today is, I know that it's hot in Florida. And are you a pool guy? Are you a beach guy? Are you a water park guy? like what type of like vibe or you just like stay inside guy i'm 100 a pool person i love a good pool um and you know i really do like water parks but my kids have aged out of it they're like you know older teenagers and ali has always thought uh water parks are absolutely literally the most disgusting things that exist on earth like i think that she thinks covid started in a water park somewhere which it might be true so yeah that's my job i feel like you could crush a water partner i love a good slide you know like a good slide you can't be a good or lazy river laser is the best good side or lazy river if you don't like a lazy river you should unfollow my show that's basically how strongly i feel uh so what are we talking about today we're talking about failing in marketing so why don't you kick it off and like what is your view on like failure marketing what should people do how should they think about failure uh first of all get get very comfortable having failure because failure is actually how you grow in anything, in your personal life, in your business, in your marketing.

2:03I mean, here, I'm the email guy, right? So just think about email for a second. Most people out there, their average email open rate is less than 50%, right? So out of the gate, you're failing. You're failing to get the majority of people to actually even open up your emails. And yet we celebrate getting a 47 % open rate. It's amazing. So I think the number one thing before you get into a little tactics and stuff is if you're not comfortable with failure, you're not going to grow period. End of story. A hundred percent. I think marketing is all about at bats. Um, and it could be the 11th, 12, 13 thing you do that could catapult your brand to the next level, get seen by someone else.

2:49And the good thing is like, nobody really likes, really, if you, unless it's like a terrible thought sees the bad marketing you do, because it doesn't get unseen, it gets unseen. People don't recognize it. So failing's okay. But I, one thing that we've, I used to, what I highly recommend is if you like failure should be reversed and thought about like a learning document like like failure is all about like we tested something and what do we learn from this test that we do so we don't repeat that mistake what i see a lot of mistakes people make is like they're very they're like okay with failure but then um nobody documents that flopped email, that flop landing page, that flop campaign, and the learnings.

3:39Was it the wrong audience? Was this color? Was this CTA? You have to do that and share that through an org because I see time and time again, people make the same mistakes because they didn't share the actual takeaways and learnings from that. I think that's worse than failing, not actually having a learning from the failure. It's so true because what happens is you do a campaign that does well and it was like, okay, what did we do? We got to do that again. And when you break down things, you do want to document your failures, but you have to document the tactics used, right? All the different tactics and you have to put them into buckets.

4:17So you know what didn't work. And the other big thing is that when you are documenting all of this, okay, it's not like you're throwing shade on somebody because, oh, that wasn't great. That was your idea. That was whatever. You have to celebrate the fact that you're sharing the learnings internally and you can't make people feel uncomfortable about a failure occurring. Because if you don't have an environment where failure is acceptable, then you're going to have a really hard time as a business or as a marketing department growing in any way. I also think that when you go into a campaign that you run or anything you run, you need to have a kill criteria or a tripwire to say after seven days, if I'm at like conversion rates don't raise by X percent or something doesn't happen here.

5:06We shut off this campaign and it's agreed upon ahead of time. Like you need to have some sort of tripwire in your system that flags something because otherwise you can go for months and months and not and run a failed your failed marketing for a long time. So I recommend like, you know, that the campaign could probably there's a chance it could fail. So have a key metric that you're tracking against. And you know if we hit this, if we don't hit this metric or we're trending way below it, we kill this campaign. And have that timeline mapped out so everybody's on the same page. They're like, okay, it's okay to kill this if we don't hit this metric.

5:48And in general, from a bigger business standpoint, I'm a big believer in failing fast. people get their ego tied to an idea they themselves like the idea so much uh and they hold on to something and that's where they spend a lot of money that's how businesses go out of business is they just they stay they hold on too long i'll give you an example so with my media business guru media hub we put on these events whatever and we're like oh we should have an awards program and we came up with a whole big idea we thought it was gonna be incredible we launched guru awards which probably nobody has ever heard of because we launched it and it was horrendous.

6:25Even though we had it all mapped up, we had a whole plan, but we knew really fast. We're like, you know what? There's no legs here. Even if this thing doubles or triples or quadruples in performance, there's no legs here. And we killed it. And we learned a lot from it. And we doubled down to other places. But holding on is really how you hurt a business. I think we all have those one or two examples. Even with the marketing millennials, we really thought i thought three years ago that we can we should go on tiktok and we just weren't good at doing it and we weren't seeing any growth and we i made a decision like let's just double down on the two channels that were working because like tiktok flop like for us we couldn't put the content on that channel to make it work so we pulled the channel instead of just keep them putting bad stuff out into the world.

7:17So like sometimes you have to pull it. And it also is like the thing too, with like continuing on that path, it's like, you're taking resources away from things that are like, like you're going to, that could actually work. So make sure like you're, you're not having your ego tied to a campaign, even if it was your idea, just like pull the plug and go to things that are going to work because results matter at the end of the day. So speaking of failures, have you ever tried like a diet or something and you just failed or everything that you try in your personal life? You just you crush it or a new workout routine.

7:55So many. I had a Barry's boot camp era. Oh, I like the Barry's. And then I had a era. It was an era. And then I had I used to work for this company called Snack Nation where I met Ari. and it was like a very health company. So many people, so I tried keto and I felt super sick on keto. And I tried trying vegetarian for a little bit, hated that. So it's like flopped a lot of - So you're a failure. I'm a failure. Perfect. Yeah, I fail all the time. Actually, the only thing I don't fail at is failing. So there you go. All right, well, thanks for checking this out. But hey, share this on your story on Instagram.

8:40Tag The Marketing Millennials or at Jay Schwetelson. And we will put you in our story if you put us in your story. So keep it real. And yeah, later. Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work. Get out of there. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This, Not That for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing. And I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. back from my bathroom break this is daniel go follow the mark in the line podcast but also tune into this series it's once a week the bathroom break we talk about marking tips that we just spew out and it could be anything from email subject line to any marking tips in the world we'll talk about it just give us a shout on linkedin and tell us what you want to hear peace out later