The Art of Marketing (Full Masterclass)

Transcript

In this video, I'm going to explain every type of marketing. This video is for you if you are an entrepreneur or a brand owner and just want to understand the full scope of your toolkit, or if you work in marketing, you want to be a director of marketing, a VP of marketing, and know how this all works. So from positioning to funnels to email to SEO, I'm going to go through what each of these is, the role it plays in the brand ecosystem, and chat about it. By the end of this video, you're going to have a complete idea of the whole marketing toolkit and how it all works together. I'm stoked to talk through it with you. Let's lock in. So for some background, prior to becoming a full-time creator, I was the SVP of marketing at a brand called Gelblaster. Before that, I was the head of product and marketing at a CPG company here in California that had several brands. I was the VP of marketing at a consumer electronics company called 3DR and ran sales and marketing prior to that in an outdoors company. So I've been through the ringer of marketing of all times, from supporting retail to things that are purely online to big brands that are doing everything. And as part of that, I've had to learn a bit of each of these and think about what works and what doesn't in different types of businesses. And there isn't a lot of education around this kind of modern marketing. So if you do want to learn about it, I'm just going to walk through each piece and what it is, some examples and see what we can build. And I'm going to start with the most important one, the most important thing that I feel every business needs to consider and every marketer needs to have a grasp on, and that is positioning. So what is positioning? Positioning is how you take your product to market and how you compare it or put it in the market compared to your competitors. There are a couple different types of positioning. So for instance, when you walk into a Best Buy, you will see shelves that have three types of products. Best Buy merchandises their products with a good, better, best strategy. So they will have a best, a best in class item. Say if you were in action cameras, it might be a GoPro. And that's going to be expensive. That's going to be sold on brand or on really high-end stuff. And you're going to have a better, the core category, where they make the majority of the sales like your average product. And you're going to have a good, which is a product that positions itself purely on price that isn't as good as everything else. So in headphones, you might have a Bose or a Beats at the top, more in the middle company, and then something on the cheaper end, say a Skullcandy or someone like that who tries to present a premium experience but does it at a lower price point. But positioning is more than price. It's about who is your product appealing to and how, and how does it differentiate from the market. And it's a moving target because your positioning depends on the other offerings that are happening around it. So if you sell computers, the other people are selling computers with similar specs. Are you positioning it as a gaming PC or as a thing for work? It's about thinking through what the angles are for your product. And I like to look at an exercise. I think every brand owner and marketer should be able to do for the project they work on as a comparison between yourself and any other products. So if you are in an elevator, an elevator pitch scenario, and you say, oh, I work in the headphones industry, or I have a fashion brand, etc. And someone says, oh, like this brand, and they call out one of the big brands in the space, you need to be able to respond and say, oh, well, we actually do this. Here's our difference. Here's how we compare. Here's why you would buy our product. And that is going to be your positioning statement. And that quick synopsis is going to be a big driving force in your product. And so a few things that I want to call out as tactics for this that are worth considering. So obviously there is price. You can always look at a market that has some success and say, we're going to do something cheaper. That's an easy positioning strategy. On the far end, a much harder positioning strategy is you can always charge more by having a lifestyle product, something that people aspire to and want that has that brand technique. But that is going to be something that has a lot of intangibles that are hard to describe within companies and hard to achieve with marketing. There's also a few other techniques. One of my favorites is called position against. This is when you take a big item or a popular item and you pick something bad about it and you say, we are not this. Our main characteristic is that we are not the enemy here. I like to think about the whole prebiotic soda category, the Olipops and Poppies. Their main position is we are not Coke. We are not bad for you. We are the same thing, just not evil. And there are a lot of companies that present that in a certain way. Similar to this, but not exactly the same, is what I'll call counterculture positioning. Liquid Death is a perfect example of this. Death Wish Coffee and Black Rifle Coffee are a perfect example of this, where you say the mainstream of culture consumers inside a category, whatever it is, do a thing. They have a certain lifestyle. They have certain things they like. We're going to be the exact opposite of this. Usually you will see it is synonymous with a more gothic look, a more extreme look. And there's room for an extreme vertical in basically every category saying, we're going to take all the things around the branding, even around the product, and max it out. Death Wish Coffee and Black Rifle Coffee are a perfect example of this, where you say the mainstream of culture consumers inside a category, whatever it is, do a thing. They have a certain lifestyle. They have certain things they like. We're going to be the exact opposite of this. Usually you will see it is synonymous with a more gothic look, a more extreme look. And there's room for an extreme vertical in every category saying, we're going to take all the things around the branding, even around the product, and max it out. I like to bring up Death Wish Coffee a lot because they said, we're going to have more caffeine than any other coffee. We're going to put a skull and crossbones on the logo. It's not going to be some fun picture of a Colombian farm or these beans were grown. It is going to be a skull and crossbones. That is a good example of a counterculture positioning. But enough about how you actually put your brand out there in the universe. Let's talk about some of the other factors. So the next thing I want to talk about is what's called a funnel. You may have heard this term before, but really what a funnel is, is your web presence, your online web presence, combining websites and where people land and engage with your product and email. And I will hit those one at a time, email being a separate section. So in your marketing, you need to consider the web experience you have. And why it's considered a funnel is because people drop off along it. You start at the top, all this traffic comes in, they see you on social media, they watch your videos, they see your ads, whatever it is. That is your top of funnel. And then people get to your website and your funnel's cut down a little bit more. And then from there, you get people that explore more, they go to the product page, funnel gets cut down more. Add to your cart, finally check out customer. You have seen your funnel shrink until it gets to the very end. And what good marketers do is they analyze every part of this funnel in two ways. The first is, what are they doing from a marketing perspective at each level? What do you do to generate brand awareness with big campaigns or influencers or ads? What do you do once you actually get that customer? That's what we're going to zone in on here. When a customer comes to your website, what is their experience? How do you lose as few of those people as possible or get as many people to actually purchase with the highest value by the end of their website experience? And this is a really important one for every marketing team to think through because if you are getting any level of traffic, that traffic is precious. You are paying money in some regard to get those people to your website. And if you get them naturally because your brand has a big name or good SEO, we'll get to SEO later, that is a huge value that you are getting that you need to make the most of. So there's a lot about optimizing your funnel, about taking all the pages people land on in your website and ensuring there's the right message for them, the right imagery, you have the right call to actions that you're retaining them. One of the most common funnel things I end up working on when I talk to businesses is you'll see they're pushing all this traffic to their websites, but they don't actually ask anyone for their phone number or their email on the site. It's all about the purchase. And one thing that most marketers will learn the hard way is that soft call to actions help enable strong call to actions. So actually asking people for their email, getting people to sign up, getting them to take step one, gets you closer to step two and gets you to retain more people through your funnel over time versus just saying your only option is to buy. And so I always encourage people to have those opt-in areas. Now, when we really talk about optimizing the funnel, what do you do to encourage people to buy, right? Or encourage people to engage in that secondary call to action. So in that example I had of, hey, we want people to give you your email, putting a section on every page, get your email or your phone number. If I just put it out there saying, sign up for our news, that gets me some interest. If you say sign up and you're actually going to get this seven video bundle to show you exactly how to optimize your fitness journey or whatever it is, give them free content, give them some value, discount code, whatever it is, you're going to get a higher rate. And so your optimization as a marketer is going through all those decisions and being like, how do I improve it? Same thing with purchases. This is where it comes down to things like issues your customers have that prevents you from buying. How do I put them on page on your website? For instance, if people don't know how your clothes fit, they don't want to buy a $100 hoodie without knowing how it fits, showing that on the webpage and having pictures of a couple different body types so people can see it. That's an example of optimizing your funnel for any type of brand. After we get to the funnel, we get to the second end. This is email marketing. This is one of my favorites because many businesses don't do it well. It's an easy thing marketers can add to your toolkit. How your clothes fit, they don't want to buy a $100 hoodie without knowing how it fits. Showing that on the webpage and having pictures of a couple different body types so people can see it. That's an example of optimizing your funnel for any type of brand. After we get to the funnel, we get to the second end. This is email marketing. This is one of my favorites because many businesses don't do it well. It's an easy thing marketers can add to your toolkit. And I've done whole videos about this as well. But there are a couple types of email worth considering. So the first is just the campaigns that you send for email. So you have an email list, you email out to them regularly. So a couple of things that I encourage when you're doing this: it's not always be selling when you do this. You can share your best content, you can share ideas and journeys, you can have your communication not always be so sales focused. And then it will encourage people to be more likely to open it if they get some value. Second thing is to assign a personality to this. If your emails come from a person, a CEO or a representative, it begins to get over time a little bit more of some actual connection to the brand and to people. So it's your email campaigns and your email automation. This is emails that send automatically when someone makes a purchase, when someone leaves something in their cart, when someone signs up on your website. They get a welcome sequence or purchase a certain product that encourages you to cross-sell to another. And you're able to at all these platforms—Omnisend, MailChimp, Klaviyo—schedule those emails to happen automatically. And those journeys matter a lot because the more traffic you get, the more that happens automatically with information sharing, the more sales happen automatically. And the better that journey is, much like your funnel, the better the content is and the more of the questions that are answered by you as a marketer inside their journey, the better it goes. And so a core thing to think about, especially for new brand owners, because a lot of them ignore email to start, is how am I optimizing my campaigns? And then what am I doing for my retention and my automation over time? And you'll see the through line I'll talk about throughout this: what can you answer for the customer journey? What can you answer for your customer inside your website or your email or your positioning or what you do in retail? What are those questions that prevent them from buying? How does this hoodie fit? Is this thing made of 100% cotton? Can I take this if I have a heart condition? Whatever those questions are, how can you put those in your landing pages, in your emails, in your content to help make that journey easier? Now we're going to talk about retention. So sometimes retention falls under email, but it's a whole conversation. Retention is when someone is a customer, they become a buyer from you. How do you keep them? How do you get them to buy again and raise your average order value? And this is a huge thing because a lot of brands will have a starter product. So for instance, even in my brand, I sell a lot of shoe bags. Shoe bags is my entry-level product. The majority of people start with a $40 to $70 purchase of one to two shoe bags. Once I have them in there, my goal is to get them to purchase other things from my brand. So there's a retention program designed to get them educated on the other things I offer and get them to participate in higher ticket products and get to like the brand over time. This is the case for the majority of products. Even if you buy a car, if you buy a Toyota, Toyota's job is to get you to buy more Toyotas over time and not switch to Honda or upgrade eventually to a Mercedes. There's a lot of tactics and things around this, but it's a key principle that's one of the most ignored in marketing. Everyone focuses on that first sale or on performance marketing or your emails, but then they don't really think about the customers once you have them. And that's where we're going to talk about CX or customer support and the role in there. So most people don't put customer support under marketing, but I 100% do. Their customer experience you get in support of what happens when they have a problem or how you engage with people is a big part of the word of mouth they spread to their friends and whether they're likely to return to your brand even if you had a bad experience. I feel that marketing and customer service should be hand in hand. Customer service should be letting marketing know exactly what questions they're dealing with so we can try and solve that up front with content and messaging. It should be letting them know what advocates and positive things they have that you can begin to put as testimonials. they spread to their friends and whether they're likely to return to your brand even if you had a bad experience. I feel like marketing and customer service should be hand in hand. Customer service should be letting marketing know exactly what questions they're dealing with so we can try and solve that up front with content and messaging. It should be letting them know what advocates and positive things they have that you can begin to put as testimonials and marketing should be looking to customer support and to customer connections for new people to make content and for ideas to put inside all the things that they are producing from a content perspective. And one thing I want to call out here is as many of you know I worked for a while with a women's wear brand I still work with and one thing that was big for us is when we started googling customers, right? It's part of the retention strategy when we would just look at everyone that comes through we're just going to look up who you are and we began to notice some patterns inside our customers that helped engage with retention. A lot of people were buying and using our clothes to attend festivals and you could go online and see them wearing the clothes and tagging them in festivals and we realized we should incentivize that, build collections around that and also we realized that a lot of our customers were influencers, way more than we thought and so then there's a whole program around that and how do you see them. Maybe we send people stuff and this idea of retention can sometimes be very manual as well. So now let's pivot to some more technical elements of marketing. All right, today I'm going to walk a bit through workflows of using Artlist to help with creative scale. So first, what is creative scale? So there is now this desire by brands and content creators to make more content. In particular, content for different languages, different regions, different social media accounts and then lots of variants for ads. If you're doing any work inside Meta ads in particular this year, you know that there is just a burning desire for more creative at all times. So in Artlist, which is a platform I use for music, footage, and SFX for my content and my brand content, they have a couple key tools for this I want to talk through. So first, there's an extension where you can use Artlist within Premiere Pro. So if your team is using LUTs to achieve a specific look and you want everyone to have the same thing, you're able to pull those all up in app. I want to talk about this voiceover tool because this is useful for brands that are trying to go and actually have variants that appeal to different people. So for instance, if you filmed a POV video, you can test a male voiceover versus a female voiceover. You're going to run an ad in Australia or in England, then you can actually go set the tone of the ad you're running and generate a variant from it. It allows you to get content that's going to move across, especially regions, but also just testing for creative ads pretty well. You can control the speed of the voiceover, the inflection of the voiceover, and what you create will automatically be available inside your workflow like Premiere Pro. And the last thing we'll hit there is these artboards that they have. So basically, if your team is trying to work from one place and organize your music, organize your SFX, use the same things in different videos, organize LUTs, you can create an artboard here where you all have a shared workflow. And what's nice is it also gives you tailored content suggestions. So basically, I'm working on a project for a restaurant. It's going to then give me sound effects, footage, etc. that's relevant to that, generated by them to kick it off, and I can add any of that to the artboard. And you can see immediately there's ambiance footage for restaurants, cutting and sizzling sounds. They actually have useful content that I can just add to the artboard right away. Anyway, thank you so much to Artlist for sponsoring this video. It's an excellent tool both if you are a creator or if you are a brand looking to work on creative scale. You can learn more at the link in my description. We're going to talk about SEO, or search engine optimization. I'll shout out some software that will help you for this. So search engine optimization is: are the pages on your website getting traffic organically from people searching on Google? for sponsoring this video. It's an excellent tool, both of you are a creator or if you are a brand looking to work on creative scale, you can learn more at the link in my description. We're going to talk about SEO or search engine optimization. I'll shout out some software that will help you for this. So search engine optimization is are the pages on your website getting traffic organically from people searching on Google or God forbid Bing and finding your website. And so this is a major component of a lot of brands and is a complicated place right now as more and more people use things like Perplexity or use AI to search for their questions, the pool of the results you get from Google is shrinking, but it's certainly not dead and it's certainly still an important part of marketing. And so what I would encourage people to do if you want to learn this toolkit because it's complicated is there is software, there's Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F, and S-E-M-R-U-S-H. Those are two websites and software that will analyze your website and tell you what keywords you're already ranking for and where. When it comes to importance of this, being on top is really what matters. First couple results for a term. If someone's searching leather belts, you don't want to show up on number 12. You're either number 1 to 3 or it doesn't really matter. You also want to consider things like your brand name. I know plenty of brands that have a very similar brand name to someone else in a big category. Look at Road Clothing and Road Skin and who that's SEO is always a battle. Someone clicking on the wrong website and you're running an ad to get your own brand name and that's a money suck you have every day. So there's a lot to be thought around when you're naming a brand as well for SEO. You'll begin to look at all these opportunities and what you'll begin seeing is there's usually two opportunities for brands. One is on singular terms. So for instance if you sell a certain type of sunglass, you have a Japanese acetate sunglass, whatever that is, and people search for that thing and you'll see volume on those tools I mentioned before and you say, oh wow, there's actually not a lot of competition for this because the other thing you'll see in that software is a difficulty ranking of how hard it is to rank on the first page for that. There'll be a number between 0 and 100 and they have their proprietary systems and it'll tell you if it's good or bad. And as long as it's moderately easy, you'll say, oh this is an opportunity for me to own that search. So then what do you do from there? You mean to make good content about it, so you can make a dedicated page or a collection page of all the products you have about Japanese acetate sunglasses. On that page, why your brand does it, what makes it special. It doesn't hurt to embed a video about that on there as well and have your collection. How you have a page where you are focused on making it SEO optimized, you are putting your description in the header of the page, you're going to put that term in it, you're going to give it some value to people that do it, and then you're going to get traffic to it and link to it. And this is important because the way Google works for SEO is it weights how people, what people do when they're on the page and if they enjoy it and get a good experience from it and stay on it, whether people click the link when it shows up in search to people, and then also how much is directed to it from the rest of the internet. So the more websites and social media etc that actually links to that page and references it, the better it does. There's a whole science, both black hat and white hat, to how to do that that I won't dive into in this video, but that becomes the world, right? Make an optimized page for whatever it is and then drive your links and traffic to it so it begins to generate inside of Google, and this is a war of attrition. That actually links to that page and references it. The better it does, there's a whole science—both black hat and white hat—to how to do that, that I won't dive into in this video. But that becomes the world right? Make an optimized page for whatever it is, and then drive your links and traffic to it so it begins to generate inside of Google. And this is a war of attrition. It's a war of time. I'll give an anecdote on that in a second before I move on from SEO, but it can really make or break your business if you actually pay attention to it over the course of years, because that traffic eventually becomes just a big free generator that lasts forever. So example there: my friend Matt was launching a brand called chlorophyll water. Many of you may have heard me talk about this before. And I was encouraging him—he had asked for help when he did that—to help optimize his website. I had the agency at the time and to work on some of his launch strategy. And I was like, "Hey, the word chlorophyll and the word chlorophyll water are attainable. You can actually get to the results like number one or two on this in a couple months. No one's competing in it. It's pretty easy on Google. But it's going to take months. Like where it might take is four to six." And he wants to launch right now. And I'm like, "Just let us do this SEO campaign. Invest some money building these links, building these pages, get you on there so when you have this launch you take advantage of all the traffic. Versus if you generate all this attention at launch and you don't show up when someone searches for chlorophyll water, then you're not going to win." And so this is exactly what happened. We built up this SEO, we got him to I think it was like number one on chlorophyll water, number two on just chlorophyll. He did a massive launch. He was a master of seeding before seeding was even a thing. He had something like a billion impressions on TikTok from celebrity and influencer seeding of his water. And then was able to generate all that demand, get all those people to his website because he had locked in SEO prior. This is one of those things why I encourage marketers to learn things like this. So moving on, we are going to talk about retail support. Eventually your brand is going to get into stores. And this is a key one to think about because stores are going to ask, "What's in it for me? Why should I put your product in there versus any other product?" And then once you're actually in the stores, you're going to have to perform. People are going to need to buy it, and you're going to have to support that. It doesn't just automatically happen. So what do we do there? So the first is when you actually go into retail, bring some data and info and generate some support first. So for instance, in that previous scenario we talked about chlorophyll water, if he was able to say, "Hey look, I own all this SEO traffic. People don't really buy water online. I'm getting all this traffic in Wyoming, and here's a big retailer in Wyoming. Look at how much traffic we have. These people don't have any place to buy. I'd love for the deal to direct them to buy from you." That is a compelling conversation to have with a retailer. Same thing if you have a big marketing program. So for instance, when I was at Gelblast, there would be a ton of influencer marketing. And so we'd be able to say, "Hey, we actually can dedicate some influencers to specifically support your retail chain where they actually make content about it, and you begin to put a specific campaign to attach to the retailer." And then for other people it's going to be, "Hey, you actually need a position on your shelf. Right now you only have expensive items. We're going to offer you a cheaper alternative your customers want." You can basically get into retail based on positioning. So there are all kinds of things to think about. But then once you're actually in retail, what do you do? The first thing is merchandising. So merchandising is how your product is presented there. You'll notice things like products that have little tear-back boxes like protein bars that you can stick on a shelf that have some branding on them. That's entry-level merchandising. You'll see the little tags that are called aisle interrupters when you're walking down a retail aisle that someone has placed there that promote a product that call out that you should go look at it. These things work. Same thing with displays. You may have—you go into an Ulta or a Sephora and you look at how crazy the display is for a different brand. They are getting people to consider a brand because retail psychology is basically if someone actually takes the time to look and consider and look at your product. that are called aisle interrupters when you're walking down a retail aisle that someone has placed there that promote a product that call out that you should go look at it. These things work. Same thing with displays you may have. You go into an Ulta or a Sephora and you look at how crazy the display is for a different brand. They are getting people to consider a brand because retail psychology is if someone actually takes the time to look and consider and look at your product, you have a high chance that they are going to buy it. It's about getting that first look, and if you get that first look, it is your job of your product to lose that. You have the opportunity to lose it. Most of the time, you're going to be able to win it. So you need to be thinking about not only how do you support traffic and interest at the store level, but then once they're in the store, how do you make sure you are called out as an option. And then you're going to get to the last part, which is retail training. Some retails have trained sales floors. Some don't. But if they do, like the outdoors industry, REIs and Dick's Sporting Goods and stuff, train those people as much as they can. The more training they have, the more incentive those employees have, the better they are going to be able to sell your products. And a big part of what I did when I worked as a marketer in retail support was that training: online programs, in-person programs, field teams to make sure every person who was selling that product had it in their hands, had experienced it, would recommend it, and has much education on all the key questions. Now we're going to get to the fun part: content, influencers, and then we'll end on events and partnerships and you'll have the complete picture of what modern marketing looks like. So content. Everything now is becoming content. What do I mean by that? I mean that you used to think of content as just what you put on your social media page, but all the ads you run on Meta, that's content. Ads you run on your out of home or on TV, that's content. The training that you're going to end up doing for those retail employees I mentioned is content. Events and partnerships you do, even if someone shows up to a physical thing, guess what, they're making content. They're making videos about it. They're sending pictures to their friends. Same thing with your packaging experience. Almost all roads lead to content. And so it is a critical thing to be thinking through from your business perspective. And so this goes from actually testing your videos to designed assets, et cetera. And so what I'll say here, I have lots of other videos around content as a whole: is your job as a marketer to be as in-depth on this as possible. The most useful marketers understand social media networks. They know to tag related videos for shorts on YouTube, for a longer length. They know how to label a tutorial as something that's searchable when you actually put it on YouTube. They understand that TikTok brand accounts are not going to perform as well as creator accounts. They should probably have a multi-account strategy. They're going to know how to use trial reel. It's your job as a marketing leader, not just to rely on your social media person, but to have at least one person, including you, in the trenches knowing how this works and thinking like a creator as to what should succeed. And shifting over into influencer marketing, which is nice and tangential, there are two key types of influencer marketing to understand. The first is seeding, and the second is paid influencer marketing. So seeding is sending out your product for free to people to post. This is still a fantastic technique in this year of our Lord 2025. I'll be sending out as much stuff as you can afford to, especially if you have a cheaper product. And this involves building a system to find influencers that are useful or people that are up and coming, contact them friendly, actually send them things, check and monitor that someone actually posted this or not, begin to build a system where you graduate some of those people into doing paid work, and where you monitor what gets posted or not and make sure your product is getting out there in the world. That is initiative one. Initiative two is finding people you can pay to promote your product that generate sales and interest that is worth their amount of dollars. And the key thing I want to iterate there is I really feel like long-term partnerships, doing multiple posts with influencers, building out longer things versus one post for x amount of dollars, is the way to think about a lot of this now. What you as a marketer need to have is a way to track this, like a CRM system, a way to monitor this, and a way to find people. And identifying those three things is a complicated step and a difference for a lot of businesses. that generate sales and interest that is worth their amount of dollars and the key thing I want to iterate there is I really feel like long-term partnerships doing multiple posts with influencers building out longer things versus one post for x amount of dollars is the way to think about a lot of this now what you as a marketer need to have is a way to track this a CRM system a way to monitor this and a way to find people and identifying those three things is a complicated step and a difference for a lot of businesses between success and not and the more you outsource that to agencies which there are plenty of good ones the more it is costing you there's going to be an upcharge on all that the harder it is to justify the value and the closer you have it to the chest the more useful it is and as a marketer there are so many marketers I see hired now because they say hey, I have a 2,000 person seating list I have the addresses for all of them I know all of them open the packages and I can do that day one when I come in your company that is a hard thing to turn down when you are hiring so worth considering and you go business to business collection to collection with that same one too all right, so last topics we're going to talk about events we're going to talk about partnerships so a few different types of events there's consumer facing events where you basically have your consumers come and experience something there's B2B events where you are putting your product in front of retailers and trying to sell to them and there's selling events so let's break it down so selling events first I actually really encourage brands to do selling events so for instance for my valuables brand I went to ComplexCon ComplexCon is a selling event kids come to buy clothes there I sold a lot of clothes there we came about break even on attending that show that is a very big net positive to generate awareness generate enough money to justify going there but also you'll see things whether it's a farmer's market or a car show or whatever it is there are probably places where your audience gets together that it'd be great to build a repeatable format with which you can generate money at because selling in real life is still an amazing thing if you have a good extroverted person versus purely selling online so those are consumer shows and I would highly consider what that looks like then you have B2B shows are more expensive these are shows the Magic Convention and Fashion where you can actually go there and have a booth and retail buyers come same thing for a lot of these shows even IFA in Berlin consumer electronics buyers come there to buy for Europe there's all kinds of shows for buying selling now Expo West is a CPG show for food and natural organic products that buyers come to to find brands to carry on their shelves so a couple things worth noting for that is to succeed at shows they cost more money and you have to take it into your own hands you need to be scheduling meetings with buyers filling it up following up and actively selling at those shows and for a lot of people it's a good way to get in front of people but you need to have your ducks in a row understand your distribution understand where you can send product know how to get meetings with people, be reaching out on LinkedIn reaching out on cold email trying to get people by your booth and attracting it and have a goal whether it's for a consumer show or a B2B show it costs us this much money we need to write this much in POs or we need to get this much in direct sales because a lot of times people will begin to do these events they won't have that figured out and they'll start to realize there is not real brand ROI in doing this if you are not trying to get to a number and that ties to the first thing I mentioned which is these more consumer facing events to basically appreciate customers and do interesting things in the social media era if one of those takes off and people make a lot of content it's more value to these than ever this is a slippery slope where if you do those kind of events you need to basically activate your customer make sure they have a great experience make sure it's social media friendly and use it to create your own content you're going to have a very hard time justifying ROI so last we're going to hit on partnerships influencers and collaborations and you are going to have a complete picture of modern marketing so in partnerships this is what you're doing with others basically 1 plus 1 equals 2.5 to push your brand out there so a couple things we can talk about there the first is collaborations we've all seen people coming together to create a product second is licensing it's a partnership type where you basically say hey, I'm going to pay a royalty on a product to be able to sell a version of it talk about licensing first so you may have seen the brand of modern marketing so in partnerships this is what you're doing with others 1 plus 1 equals 2.5 to push your brand out there so a couple things we can talk about there the first is collaborations we've all seen people coming together to create a product second is licensing it's a partnership type where you say hey I'm going to pay a royalty on a product to be able to sell a version of it talk about licensing first so you may have seen the brand Warren Lotus popular fashion brand he licenses the NBA and the NFL makes versions of his clothing for every single team he pays a fee he pays a percentage and you'll see they'll have little logos and things on some of them and he's able to use this really popular iconography to sell to an existing fan base this is a genius marketing thing for him because he's able to take his iconography he's established and sell a thing to a passionate fan base who is more likely to say oh I don't want to support that I want to support that and the Celtics or and the Cowboys at the same time and this is something everyone from Simple Modern to represent there's all kinds of brands that do this and that is a paid partnership a paid partnership should 100% be on the table for your brand when you have the volume to support it and then collaborations is really about a structure and I'll do a whole collaborations video I want to bring one of my friends on who's a specialist in this at one point but this is about how can you create a product and then co-market it together and usually where this comes down to is logistics who's paying for the product how much does each person get who's selling it who's responsible for what assets really breaking down responsibility and agreeing to it and then having something come out but this is just another good example I think a lot of brands should be doing as long as you can create something interesting and unique and the best way to think about this as a marketer is a collaboration schedule where you go we have all of our normal releases we have our spring release and our fall release we do new product once a year if there's big spaces in there can we do a collaboration that fits that's a new product to fill that space there's a great entry level way to look at it without having to do an overkill another way to look at it is a whole program the way Moncler does with Genius where you may say hey we actually want to do a branded program over time where a bunch of people fill these slots this is great for a bigger brand to work with smaller brands those are just different ways to think about it so anyway I know we covered a lot of ground inside of this if you like this conversation around marketing and brand strategy my newsletter called Hyper is at mail.hyperstudios.us I'll link it down here I talk about stuff like this every week I didn't hit on some more nuanced stuff like PR and communications things that don't matter as much and there's a whole chunk of this that is performance marketing and spending money on ads that is probably worthy of its own video another one I'll try to bring an expert in on but just defining all these categories and just thinking through what they can do for your brand I feel is an important thing to learn and thanks for bearing with me still an important part of marketing. And so what I would encourage people to do if you want to learn this toolkit because it's complicated is there is software there's Ahrefs A-H-R-E-F and S-E-M-R-U-S-H Those are two websites and software that will basically analyze your website and tell you what keywords you're already ranking for and where. When it comes to importance of this being on top is really what matters. First couple results for a term if someone's searching leather belts you don't want to show up on number 12 you're either basically number 1 to 3 or it doesn't really matter. You also want to consider things like your brand name. I know plenty of brands that have a very similar brand name to someone else in a big category. Look at road clothing and road skin and who that's SEO is always a battle someone clicking on the wrong website and you're running an ad to get your own brand name and that's a money suck you have every day. So there's a lot to be thought around like you're naming an SEO as well. You'll begin to look at all these opportunities and what you'll begin seeing is there's usually two opportunities for brands. One is on singular terms. So for instance if you sell a certain type of sunglass you have a like you know Japanese acetate sunglass whatever that is and people look for that thing people search for it and you'll see volume on those tools I mentioned before and you say oh wow there's actually not a lot of competition for this because the other thing you'll see in that software is a difficulty ranking of how hard it is to rank on the first page for that. There'll be a number between 0 and 100 and they have their proprietary systems and it'll tell you if it's good or bad and as long as it's like moderately easy you'll say oh this is an opportunity for me to own that search. So then what do you do from there? So you mean to make good content about it so you can make a dedicated page or a collection page of all the products you have about Japanese acetate sunglasses on that page why your brand does it what makes it special it doesn't hurt to embed a video about that on there as well and have your collection how you have a page where you are focused on making it SEO optimized you are putting your description in the header of the page you're going to put that term in it you're going to give it some value to people that do it and then you're going to get traffic to it and link to it and this is important because the way Google works for SEO is it weights how people what people do when they're on the page and if they enjoy it and get a good experience from it and stay on it whether people click the link when it shows up in search to people and then also how much is directed to it from the rest of the internet so the more websites and social media etc that actually links to that page and references it the better it does there's a whole science both black hat and white hat to how to do that that I won't dive into in this video but that becomes the world right make an optimized page for whatever it is and then drive your links and traffic to it so it begins to generate inside of Google and this is a war of attrition it's a war of time I'll give an anecdote on that in a second before I move on from SEO but it can really make or break your business if you actually pay attention to it over the course of years because that traffic eventually becomes just a big free generator that kind of lasts forever so example there my friend Matt was launching a brand called chlorophyll water many of you may have heard me talk about this before and I was encouraging him he had asked for help when he did that to help kind of optimize his website I had the agency at the time and to work on some of his launch strategy and I was like hey the word chlorophyll and the word chlorophyll water are attainable you can actually get to the results like number one or two on this in a couple months no one's competing in it it's pretty easy on Google but it's going to take months like where it might take is four to six and he wants to launch right now and I'm like just let us do this SEO campaign invest in some money building these links building these pages get you on there so when you have this launch you take advantage of all the traffic versus if you generate all this attention at launch and you don't show up when someone searches for chlorophyll water then you're not going to win and so this is exactly what happened we built up this SEO we got him to I think it was like number one on chlorophyll water number two on just like chlorophyll he did a massive launch he was a master of seeding before seeding was even a thing he had something like a billion impressions on TikTok from celebrity and influencer seeding of his water and then was able to generate all that demand get all those people to his website because he had locked in SEO prior this is one of those things why I encourage marketers to learn things like this so moving on we are going to talk about retail support eventually your brand is going to get into stores and this is a key one to think about because stores are going to ask what's in it for me why should I put your product in there versus any other product and then once you're actually in the stores you're going to have to perform people are going to need to buy it and you're going to have to support that it doesn't just automatically happen so what do we do there so the first is when you actually go into retail bringing some data and info and generating some support first so for instance in that previous scenario we talked about chlorophyll water if he was able to say hey look I own all this SEO traffic people don't really buy water online I'm getting all this traffic in Wyoming and here's a big retailer in Wyoming look at how much traffic we have these people don't have any place to buy I love for the deal to direct them to buy from you that is a compelling conversation to have with a retailer same thing if you have a big marketing program so for instance when I was at Gelblast there would be a ton of influencer marketing and so we'd be able to say hey we actually can dedicate some influencers to specifically support your retail chain where they actually make content about it and you begin to put a specific campaign to attach to the retailer and then for other people it's going to be hey you actually need a position on your shelf right now you only have expensive items we're going to offer you a cheaper alternative your customers want you can basically get into retail based on positioning so there are all kind of things to think about but then once you're actually in retail what do you do the first thing is merchandising so merchandising is how your product is presented there you'll notice things like products that have little tear back boxes like protein bars you can stick on a shelf that have some branding on them that's like entry-level merchandising you'll see the little tags that are called aisle interrupters when you're walking down a retail aisle that someone has placed there that promote a product that call out that you should go look at it these things work same thing with displays you may have you go into an Ulta or a Sephora and you look at how crazy the display is for a different brand they are getting people to consider a brand because retail psychology is basically if someone actually takes the time to look and consider and look at your product you have a high chance that they are going to buy it it's about getting that first look and if you get that first look it is your job of your product to lose that you have the opportunity to lose it most of the time you're going to be able to win it so you need to be thinking about not only how do you support traffic and interest at the store level but then once they're in the store how do you make sure you are called out as an option and then you're going to get to the last part which is retail training some retails have trained sales floors some don't but if they do like the outdoors industry REIs and Dick's Sporting Goods and stuff train those people as much as they can the more training they have the more incentive those employees have the better they are going to be able to sell your products and a big part of what I did when I worked as a marketer in retail support was that training online programs in-person programs field teams to basically make sure every person who was selling that product had it in their hands had experienced it would recommend it and has much education on all the key questions now we're going to get to the fun part content influencers and then we'll end on events and partnerships and you'll have the complete picture of what modern marketing looks like so content everything now is becoming content what do I mean by that I mean that you used to think of content as just what you put on your social media page but all the ads you run on meta that's content ads you run on your out of home or on TV that's content the training that you're going to end up doing for those retail employees I mentioned is content events and partnerships you do even if someone shows up to a physical thing guess what they're making content they're making videos about it they're sending pictures to their friends same thing with your packaging experience almost all roads lead to content and so it is a critical thing to be thinking through from your business perspective and so this goes from actually testing your videos to designed assets etc and so what I'll say here I have lots of other videos around content as a whole is your job as a marketer to be as in-depth on this as possible the most useful marketers understand social media networks they know to tag related videos for shorts on YouTube for a longer length they know how to label a tutorial as something that's searchable when you actually put it on YouTube they understand that TikTok brand accounts are not going to perform as well as creator accounts they should probably have a multi-account strategy they're going to know how to use trial reel it's your job as a marketing leader not just to rely on your social media person but to have at least one person including you in the trenches knowing how this works and thinking like a creator as to what should succeed and shifting over into influencer marketing which is nice and tangential there are two key types of influencer marketing to understand the first is seeding and the second is paid influencer marketing so seeding is sending out your product for free to people to post this is still a fantastic technique in this year of our Lord 2025 I'll be sending out as much stuff as you can afford to especially if you have a cheaper product and this involves building a system to find influencers that are useful or people that are up and coming contact them friendly actually send them things check and monitor that someone actually posted this or not begin to build a system where you graduate some of those people into doing paid work and where you kind of monitor what gets posted or not and make sure your product is getting out there in the world that is kind of initiative one initiative two is finding people you can pay to promote your product that generate sales and interest that is worth their amount of dollars and the key thing I want to iterate there is I really feel like long-term partnerships doing multiple posts with influencers building out longer things versus one post for x amount of dollars is the way to think about a lot of this now what you as a marketer need to have is a way to track this like a CRM system a way to monitor this and a way to find people and identifying those three things is a complicated step and a difference for a lot of businesses between success and not and the more you outsource that to agencies which there are plenty of good ones the more it is costing you there's going to be an upcharge on all that the harder it is to justify the value and the closer you have it to the chest the more useful it is and as a marketer there are so many marketers I see hired now because they say hey you know I have a 2,000 person seating list I have the addresses for all of them I know all of them open the packages and I can do that day one when I come in your company that is a hard thing to turn down when you are hiring so worth considering and you go business to business collection to collection with that same one too all right so last topics we're going to talk about events we're going to talk about partnerships so a few different types of events there's consumer facing events where you basically have your consumers come and experience something there's B2B events where you are putting your product in front of retailers and trying to sell to them and there's selling events so let's break it down so selling events first I actually really encourage brands to do selling events so for instance for my valuables brand I went to ComplexCon ComplexCon is a selling event kids come to buy clothes there I sold a lot of clothes there we came about break even on attending that show that is a very big net positive to generate awareness generate enough money to justify going there but also you'll see things like whether it's a farmer's market or a car show or whatever it is there are probably places where your audience gets together that it'd be great to build a repeatable format with which you can generate money at because selling in real life is still an amazing thing if you have a good extroverted person versus purely selling online so those are consumer shows like that and I would highly consider what that looks like then you have B2B shows are more expensive these are shows like the Magic Convention and Fashion where you can actually go there and have a booth and retail buyers come same thing for a lot of these shows like even like IFA in Berlin consumer electronics buyers come there to buy for Europe there's all kinds of shows to have like buying selling now Expo West is a CPG show for food and natural organic products that buyers come to to find brands to carry on their shelves so a couple things worth noting for that is to succeed at shows like that they cost more money and you have to take it into your own hands you need to be scheduling meetings with buyers filling it up following up and actively selling at those shows and for a lot of people it's a good way to get in front of people but you need to have your ducks in a row understand your distribution understand where you can send product know how to get meetings with people be reaching out on LinkedIn reaching out on cold email trying to get people by your booth and attracting it and have a goal whether it's for a consumer show or a B2B show it costs us this much money we need to write this much in POs or we need to get this much in direct sales because a lot of times people will begin to do these events they won't have that figured out and they'll start to realize there is not real brand ROI in doing this if you are not trying to get to a number and that ties to the first thing I mentioned which is these more consumer facing events to basically appreciate customers and do interesting things in the social media era if one of those takes off and people make a lot of content it's kind of more value to these than ever this is a slippery slope where if you do those kind of events you need to basically activate your customer make sure they have a great experience make sure it's social media friendly and use it to create your own content you're going to have a very hard time justifying ROI so last we're going to hit on partnerships influencers and collaborations and you are going to have a complete picture of kind of modern marketing so in partnerships this is what you're doing with others basically 1 plus 1 equals 2.5 to push your brand out there so a couple things we can talk about there the first is collaborations like we've all seen people coming together to create a product second is licensing it's a partnership type where you basically say hey I'm going to pay a royalty on a product to be able to sell a version of it talk about licensing first so you may have seen the brand Warren Lotus popular fashion brand he licenses the NBA and the NFL makes versions of his clothing for every single team he pays a fee he pays a percentage and you'll see they'll have like little logos and things on some of them and he's able to use this really popular iconography to sell to an existing fan base this is a genius marketing thing for him because he's able to take his iconography he's established and sell a thing to a passionate fan base who is more likely to say oh I don't want to support that I want to support that and the Celtics or and the Cowboys at the same time and this is something everyone from Simple Modern to represent there's all kinds of brands that do this and that is a paid partnership a paid partnership should 100% be on the table for your brand when you have the volume to support it and then collaborations is really about a structure and I'll do a whole collaborations video I want to bring one of my friends on who's a specialist in this at one point but this is about how can you create a product and then co-market it together and usually where this comes down to is logistics who's paying for the product how much does each person get who's selling it who's responsible for what assets like really breaking down responsibility and agreeing to it and then having something come out but this is just another good example I think a lot of brands should be doing as long as you can create something interesting and unique and the best way to think about this as a marketer is a collaboration schedule where you go we have all of our normal releases we have our spring release in our fall release we do new product once a year you know if there's big spaces in there can we do a collaboration that fits that's a new product to fill that space there's a great entry level way to look at it without having to do an overkill another way to look at it is a whole program the way Moncler does with Genius where you may say hey we actually want to do a branded program over time where a bunch of people fill these slots this is great for a bigger brand to work with smaller brands those are just different ways to think about it so anyway I know we covered a lot of ground inside of this if you like this kind of conversation around marketing and brand strategy my newsletter called Hyper is at mail.hyperstudios.us I'll link it down here I talk about stuff like this every week I didn't hit on some like a little more nuanced stuff like PR and communications things that kind of don't matter as much and there's a whole chunk of this that is performance marketing and spending money on ads that is probably worthy of its own video another one I'll try to bring an expert in on but just defining all these categories and just thinking through what they can do for your brand I feel like is an important thing to learn and thanks for bearing with me all the time ! ! all name Thank you.