Feeling stuck with your marketing? You’re not alone.

You guys were on something and I wasn't listening to you. I was just making faces at the camera. I feel like there's gold in the hills. You're doing your job there. I'm trying. You're carrying the weight up. This podcast. No, I'm not. Oh my God. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, sir. I'm certainly not.

Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your host, Eric and Mike. Mike. Hi. How's it going? I'm okay. Okay. Yeah. Word on the street. You don't believe in marketing.

This is, this is one of the latest things that I have heard from you. I don't believe in marketing. You don't believe in marketing. And this is a marketing podcast, so like this is some major, I don't know if it's, I don't believe in marketing, but I, I'm left questioning some of the playbooks that are out there now.

Oh, do tell. I don't know. Yeah, I think it remains to be seen what happens to the, uh, kind of content marketing playbook of things, especially like being found through search engines and stuff like that. I just, what I've seen in a couple clients and everything, and I don't see any reason why it would change, is that the, the organic traffic that people are getting from.

Effort that they're doing writing blog posts or articles or insights, whatever you wanna call 'em mm-hmm. That the, it's leaning to less traffic than it was before and, and so it's leading me to question a lot of marketing practices. Yeah. This kind of goes back to an episode where we talked about is content.

Is AI killing content marketing, I think was the title of it. And it's just a, another kind of version of that same argument. But I think your angle on it, 'cause we talked about it a little bit. Well, we talk about it a lot actually. We do because there's, yeah. The heck are we doing, you know, is marketing really?

So what to say that I don't believe in marketing? I don't think that's true. Like I think that at one scale where your marketing is. You've got a healthy budget for things, um, that you're doing. A lot of these, like what we would call more brand marketing things that just trying to get your name out there mm-hmm.

Where those like, I know those are super important, like, but I, I think for a lot of the people we work with and a lot of people that are on the audience that mm-hmm. You know, in our audience that they don't have the budgets for that and just like kinda spraying their brand everywhere isn't really gonna be, um.

As effective. And so then, so then you're trying to look at more of the, the more tactical things or more like performance based things that you could be doing. Mm-hmm. To try and generate leads and get sales. Yeah, I, it's interesting because it makes me think about, you know, when you always listen to Wall Street News, you know, big companies, and this is happening now.

Currently a lot of companies are cutting staff big time. Yeah. Yeah. Really Probably. I think most of it's due to just, they're not sure what the future's gonna hold. Yeah. They don't know if their business is gonna be, and we've heard this from other businesses as well, like people are pulling back on the purse strings on a lot of things.

The first departments a lot of times are marketing. Oh yeah. They pull back on marketing immediately. They don't cut back on sales. No. And just to kinda reiterate, marketing and sales are different and they. Need to coexist. Yeah. And it's how leadership pulls on those levers is really what we're talking about, I think.

Yeah. Is is there, yes. I don't believe in just marketing. I agree. That's kind of the point you were making, right? Yep. Marketing can't exist with sales. Talk a little bit about like what that means though, because sales is like. Is a guy who meets you at the door and shakes your hand. Well, that doesn't apply to every business, right?

No, I mean, it kind of does. I mean, I guess virtually, right? Well, yeah. It depends on what you're selling and how, how you can, can you sell something without, mm-hmm. Like software products, you don't need to have somebody. Recently we, we tried out a new product, decided to move forward with it. And I didn't need an, I didn't need their, um, mm-hmm.

Their sales team to help me at any point in the process. That didn't stop them from many, making many calls and everything like that. They were not required to close the sale on this. I, their products was a good fit. I was able to move forward with it, and they created all the tools to do it. Now, the sales team could help maybe push this along or remind me.

Mm-hmm. It just so happened that this was a, that it wasn't a hundred percent required for that thing. So the, the, the sales team reached out to you sales team. So that's different than the marketing team, right? Yeah, because the marketing is, is just to redefine. It's creating that awareness. General awareness as well as supporting the sales staff with materials and mm-hmm.

All the information wrapped up a nice bow on top and everything like that so that their jobs are a lot easier to go out and get those kind of sales. Yeah. I'm wondering if marketing is kind of just sales for introverts, like. Um, that, that they don't want to, they don't wanna make those contacts with people.

They don't wanna have to make those calls, you know, and I, it's a totally different mindset that you need to have for that. I don't know, the more I just started thinking about it, like there's a certain fit for marketing and your company and your needs and everything, and I think on the smaller side of this.

The spectrum. I think it might be instead of like thinking, oh, I'm in marketing, they're in sales. Mm-hmm. I think really what you should be thinking of is like that you're an extension of the sales department. Yeah. And that you're doing things to help, um, generate leads for the sales thing, and you're tightly integrated with sales.

Mm-hmm. Um, you're probably not, you don't have. As you get bigger on the budget side of things, it's probably more, it's more common to have a marketing team that doesn't talk to the sales team, and then those teams become at odds on certain things. Right? Well, marketing, I gave you all the leads, why aren't you closing them?

Mm-hmm. And all this nonsense, right? Whereas like on the smaller side of things with smaller marketing budgets and everything, like if you can be more tightly integrated with the sales team and making sure that your. Your marketing is responding to the needs of the conversations that your sales team is having.

Mm-hmm. It's gonna be more effective. Your marketing's gonna be more effective. Interesting. You said marketing is sales for introverts. I like that there's a, because in a way you are, you're. You're not the person shaking the hand directly. You're not the one reaching out with the phone call or the email or you, you're building tools to do this stuff and automating it.

Yeah. But it is really kind of, you're taking more of a backseat and kind of building up a little bit more. Yeah. General awareness. And that's where I think leadership comes in and they're like, wait, so you're marketing like, what? Why do we need marketing? Like. This is what's really funny about it. 'cause the, I I think when you talk about, and I think we have to just acknowledge in almost every podcast we do now that there's an ai Yeah.

Specter over everything. Right? And everyone, anyone who you talk about when they talk about the future of. Marketing. Mm-hmm. Is that everything's be going to become more personal and more. Mm-hmm. You know, there's a connection with everything, and so if you are, let's say marketing is sales for introverts, right?

You could set up this whole, you could set up all these systems and you can be the puppet master, you can be the Wizard of Oz behind the big thing. Mm-hmm. Trying to pull all these levers and everything, and somebody might not even know who you are or who's responsible for all this stuff, right? Mm-hmm.

Well, you know, who else could do all that? Maybe if you're doing all that stuff pretty soon, it could be robots. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. So like the, so when they look at marketing budgets, they're like, oh, hey, if we've got somebody who, who's not going to be, mm-hmm. Out in front and making these personal connections and transcending this AI things and not providing things that AI can't provide, then yeah, maybe that's why I'm losing hope in marketing is because it's 'cause I do believe that the only way to differentiate is to add the, the personal touch to things.

But here's an interesting element to that that makes the world right now is just. It driving me mental with this stuff because to be perfectly honest with you, like in LinkedIn, I'm getting spammed by personal touch outreach. Hey Eric, it's, we saw personal this and we really appreciate your the like You can almost see the brackets where the variable Oh absolutely was put in there.

Yeah. Where they scraped a website and they said your. X sample of work, whatever that would be. Yeah. You know, it's like somebody went through our website and typed out just here's this variable, here's, here's what project and client they worked on. You can see through it. And then now the cold email outreach, which of course I get 40 a day mm-hmm.

Of people who are sending me personal emails. And believe me, I've been on this, I've looked, I've gone down the road of talking to experts about helping build us. Tools to do cold email outreach and maybe there was a sweet spot. It's kind of like when content marketing became popular a decade and a half ago, whatever it was.

Yeah. That, that was legit. And people did really well with that whole philosophy of things. Things are moving and shifting and becoming oversaturated immediately. Yeah. With these. Techniques and using the robots to do things, you can't keep up. I mean, it's a matter of like weeks before, like, oh yeah, that's a good, oh no, that's not a good idea anymore because it's just everywhere.

I think the speed of this change is, yeah, hard to keep up. I think our radar is really tuned to that too. Like we're probably more, more attuned to it that maybe others are. I, I guess a good question for you is. Do you feel like these, those cold emails or cold outreach in there, do you see that as a marketing function or a sales function?

Yeah. Interesting. Um, because I know it's automated and I know it comes from some sort of content marketing outreach campaign. I call it marketing. Yeah. It's feeling like sales. It's it's cold outreach that I would, you know, say is more on the, yeah. On the sales side of things, but yeah. You're a victim of this too.

I mean, what do you think? Is it sales or is it marketing? I think it's more sales. Like in the without automation, people would have to go through there and write these emails. Maybe they have some script, some, some yeah. Scripts, things it would, would take them longer to make these outreach. But I would assume it's a sales or person that is normally responsible.

Now every, every, every organization has their own mm-hmm. Structure and who they. Divide up and if we talk about marketing being a, an extension of a sales team mm-hmm. That, yeah, they probably would be on that. They would probably be doing the ones doing that. But I, I would argue that's not personal. Like I know they're trying to fake personal.

Yeah. But it's not, it's, that's where I think we're in a weird world right now, and this is honestly as we talk through this, it's a really kind of an existential crisis around. This whole podcast and about a lot of the things that we talked about, because we talked about content marketing and how important that was.

We talked about building emails and Yeah, setting up automated emails that go out and nurturing your audience and things like that. I feel like those are all valid approaches. Yes. But I feel like the cold part of these, to get new to build that list, that piece to me seems. Way more challenging right now because it's great that you got, if you have an audience, then do all you can to nurture that audience and take care of them.

Yeah. They are with you for a reason. And there was probably some personal touch that was made earlier, or a product fit or something like that, that they're like, yeah, I'm still very, this is valuable stuff, but to get the cold stuff now, and I have an example, an extreme example, that I, and I get two or three of these a day.

Eric, we will work for free. We'll give you 30 hours of free, we'll give you 10 free designs. We'll do 10 campaigns for free just to try us out. I mean, there's desperation out there with these. Yep. I mean, that to me is like the extreme, like, wow, you're, you, you are really betting the farm on trying to get.

New business. Yep. And they always say it's like orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire a new client than to, you know, keep an existing one. Right. So that probably fits into that thing. And if you have some kind of deal that's too good to be true and they can secure you as that. I mean, I could see why people might give away the free and try and wow people.

Mm-hmm. Um, in the services side of things, it seems. Quite risky, but, um, yeah, it's not a differentiating factor that makes me like, oh, okay. Yeah. Like I hear that five times a day. Like, why am I gonna just click on your email and say, you know, let's do it. Going back to your question about like, not believing in marketing, like, I think I just am, I've gotta, I, so all the stuff we're talking about with cold outreach and stuff like that mm-hmm.

I still don't even think of that as, uh. As marketing, like I said, I, I feel like it's a sales mm-hmm. Activity, so I'm still, maybe I need to readjust my definition of marketing. 'cause the, I could see why people are doing this, like a lot of the other channels aren't, maybe, aren't as effective as they used to be.

Like, SEO stuff is, doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like a good return on the investment if you're doing a lot of riding a ton and trying to. Led your site with relevant, relevant content. Yeah. Because everybody else is doing it and everybody's using the same tools. Well, yeah, and this is what I'm getting at is like the people that started to do this years ago, and we work with some of these clients.

Yep. They've built up a library of content that is just expansive and current and always being updated. Yep. And five, eight blogs a month of 15 to 1800 words. You know, they're filling the coffers with tons of great content. The. Google and all of the catalogers of the internet have tuned their radar onto these content producers.

And again, it's like you can't break into that. Like they've built up such a library in they're that they are the, they are the, the experts. It's hard to unseat them Yeah. And everything. Yeah. You can't, yeah. So how do you then start, oh, I'm gonna start making content now. You mentioned earlier something about like having, like being able to get.

Like if you have an audience and like building an email, so you build that audience email list and everything. I still think, like, what's funny about all this stuff is I do truly believe that in, at least in a digital space, if you can get people to that email list mm-hmm. That could be one of your most effective ways of reaching your people.

But that's over here. All the other people are over here. What are the mechanisms left? What are the tools in our belt to get people to that email list? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I feel like the organic methods are so hard now. Yeah. Like, so like maybe it's organic, organic marketing type things where they're, you're not paying to play, um, that I'm losing faith in.

Right. Uh, but I think if you do wanna try and. Carve out something in those more organic things, whether it's, maybe it's an SEO thing, maybe it's a, um, even advertise like if you're a putting ads somewhere. Mm-hmm. Or, or, or it's on social media. Like, I think you have to be so laser focused on your audience and their needs and even beyond that, like they're how they wanna be viewed.

Like you kind of have to build. A very focused brand around bingo, around this. Yes. To try and differentiate yourself, not to put more pressure on it, but I think you just have to, you have to be top notch in all of those activities and laser focused to try and differentiate at all. And if you're, if you don't hit the mark, you're just the same as everybody else and you're not gonna have any differentiation in that space.

But the, what's interesting is you brought up brand, which we didn't even talk about. And we usually talk about the importance of brand and you know, building systems around that. But this is where you've kind of backed into this whole brand topic, because I agree with you, brand is a hard thing. It's a long play.

Mm-hmm. It's gotta take a long time because buyers are very discerning. My argument for building a good, strong brand and brand isn't just a logo, we know. Mm-hmm. It's all the, you know, it's how everything fits in your head. I think Seth Godin said something like that. Um, but it, people need to have that familiarity with the brand because it takes exposure to that brand.

They say seven times, but really brand needs to so be dozens and dozens of times where you're just there and Oh, I've seen, oh, and then there's that. Oh, and oh, I recognize that. You know, like they're just in your universe, kind of. Mm-hmm. They're not overtly like, Hey, buy more now. Free, free, free. They're just like, here's what we believe in.

Here's what we support. Our brand represents this. Part of your personality in a sense. Yep, yep. It's expensive and it takes a long time and Yep. It's not an easy like push a button and all of a sudden your brand is incredible. I mean, you can do that, I guess with a Super Bowl commercial or, you know, GoDaddy used to try to do that with some of their mm-hmm.

Initial advertising campaigns were, they were competing in a sea of other, you know, website. URL providers and things like that in hosting, they had to do something different to break out of that. But let's play this out in a real life example, right? If you are a provider of website, of websites, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go really vague.

So you're, you're, you're hosting or you're building, or you're designing or you're maintaining, you're serving people who need a new website. Okay? So just a general, there's, there's millions of us out there. Yes. Millions, right? Yes. How do you stand out? Like, like how does, you know, like GoDaddy win a certain way.

They're like, Hey, we provide all the tools for people who want to do it themselves and mm-hmm. They're targeting scale by going after these people who have small shops. Right. They're, they tried to use their brand of saying like, Hey, we've got all the easy to use tools. It's all in one place. Mm-hmm.

Squarespace does the same thing. I mean, GoDaddy and Squarespace, let's just use those as an example. Okay. Yeah. What, like what do their brands represent? How are they differentiating between the two? That's a really great set of companies because I think that they did great, both did great jobs. Carving out those two spots in my brain, GoDaddy's reputation.

I wanna put a, I wanna put a point out that they spent. Probably billions at this point in Yeah. Brand marketing, both of them things. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Easily. Yeah. To, to establish that. Right. So it's not, they're not, they're not well in the same like, demographic of that we're talking about, but it, we can talk about the role of brand and Yeah.

And where they live in the, in the commerce universe basically. And to me, and you would probably agree with me, GoDaddy represents cheap. Everybody knows them. And low quality. Every person we know that's worked with GoDaddy wants to get outta GoDaddy. So they call us 'cause they hate GoDaddy, but they help them at the initial start of things.

Yes, yes. And they covered the base, base basics. They're the, the, um, gateway drug. Gateway drug. Did the have a website? Exactly, yeah. Squarespace. And they showed up in advertising environments like Super Bowl commercials, like. TV general, like radio, like everywhere, every podcast ever created. So when we open up ads, Squarespace, you can, you can advertise with us too.

Yeah. Yeah. But, and that's what Squarespace did, is they carved out a slightly different, more like. We're younger and we're more about quality and we're more about design, and we're gonna make it easy for you, but it's gonna be a really sexy website. Yep. And you're gonna love working with us. And that they did a good job.

They showed up in different places. It's interesting that they, do you think they, especially when you talk about GoDaddy and the the low quality side of things, they obviously were not curating that part for their brand. No. Right. Like nobody goes into that saying We got low quality. You can build a low quality website with us, but you can buy a cheap website with us.

Yes you can. Yeah. And cheap as people probably. When does that Venn diagram of cheap and great ever across, it's pretty rare. Especially in a high tech environment. Yeah, like a website hosting. Complicated world, you know, easy for things to go off the rails there. So we talk about branding, right? Yeah.

Branding is a big, big bubble. Marketing sits inside of there. Mm-hmm. Right? And the marketing is how you promote your brand, right? So being laser focused with your brand and your audience and your differentiation, um, is key no matter what. Like if you're gonna be marketing, having that differentiation.

Built into your brand is essential, especially if you're gonna try and do some of the mm-hmm. More low cost, grind it out. Um, organic methods of mm-hmm. Acquiring, acquiring leads. Marketing is like Bigfoot, Mike. You know, it exists, but you just can't identify it. You know, you, there's no proof. There's no, I would say it's the opposite.

Why? Because everybody, if we mention Bigfoot, yeah. They, they know the shape of it. They know the, the things of it. I'm not convinced people, your, your premise of them, of Bigfoot, we know it exists. I've called bullshit on that. The, it's the other side of it. Everybody, if big, if Bigfoot exists mm-hmm. Which he does.

We know what Bigfoot looks like. There's no, there's the, it's the fuzzy. Yeah. Giant man. Yeah. He's got a great brand. Yes. And I say he, maybe it's a she Of course. It's a she, it's a both. Yeah. It's a, it's an every, it's a whole community. I'm sure. It's not just one thing either, because, you know, it can't, like a myth and a brand that big can't just be on the shoulders of one being.

It needs to be a community. It's a whole thing. Just a whole. Bigfoot is a species. Yes. I think Bigfoot has an incredible brand. Okay. They have done an incredible job of putting Bigfoot in our heads so that we know it exists. We just can't put our fingers on the scientific proof that it exists, but it exists.

It's a brand. But I see marketing as the amplification of your brand in letting people know your brand exists. Yes, I do like that. Okay, let's have a scenario though. You've got 60 seconds to pitch the CFO Financial officer. Money guy. Okay. Money person. Okay. You're get, you got 60 seconds to pitch them on a rebrand or retooling of the brand.

Okay. Let's just say, okay, go. Well, let me do some background on the, the timer can't start, but right now this is gonna be a five minute conversation. That's fine. I'm not gonna do my 62nd pitch. Okay. Yeah, that'll be at the end. All right. I would be very. Cautious and, um, about using the word rebrand in any conversation with the CFO.

Okay. Because I think that's a loaded term. Mm-hmm. Branding, they're gonna start thinking of the more commonly held beliefs about what brand is Okay. Everything, right. So I would, I would start by poking holes in. Where I thought we were missing the mark in our marketing efforts. Okay. Right. So that means being able to assess like what we're providing to our customers.

Is it differentiated enough? It's kind of, um, I would, I would almost couch everything as like, we need to kind of reposition ourselves in the market. That a lot of that is branding type things. Right. But we, like, I would say, I would look at competitors and I would look at what our offering is and try and like get as objective as possible about it and say, Hey, like how are we different?

How are we meaningfully different than this, this, this, and this? Okay. How, and if, if we're not in any mm-hmm. Way other than saying, oh, we're better. Our customer service is better. Mm-hmm. Um, we care about our customers. That's all bs. That's not everybody does that. Everyone that does that, everybody does.

Everyone does that. Right? Does, yeah. How are we meaningfully different? That's what I would arm myself with before I go to the cfo. Right. And I would say that, like, say that in my opinion or my, my take on this is that. Marketing efforts are not as effective as possible because I don't think we've clearly differentiated ourselves from the market.

I think if we engage with in some exercises to position ourselves in a place outside of the competition, still doing what we do. And clearly define who we are, who we're for, and what we're providing for them in a way that diff, that differentiates from everybody. Our marketing spend in the future is gonna be far more effective because we've created a niche for ourself right now.

We don't have a niche for ourself. That's a good way to approach it. 'cause I think anytime any, like you said, anytime anybody hears, especially CFO, they hear rebrand. That sounds like we're throwing a bunch of stuff in the garbage. Yep. And all this money that we've invested in this has now lost money basically.

Yeah. And we're starting from scratch. Which you're not talking about, you're No, you're saying point it, you're let's sharpen the laser beam down into a really Yeah. Pinpoint market. Yeah. And then define around that, differentiate around that. And that's where the rebrand. Yes. Comes in and it's really a repositioning.

So I would say rebrand in my pitch in my 62nd pitch there. I probably would say the word rebrand in there, but I would not lead with it. Go. I wouldn't open and knock on the door. Hey, we talk about rebranding for our company. No, never gonna happen. I would come in and say, Hey, you realize how like our, our marketing just doesn't seem like, look how much we're spending on marketing right now.

Yeah. It doesn't seem like it's very effective. Um, here's why. I think it's mm-hmm. Here's all the competition. Mm-hmm. Look what they're saying. Right. And look what we're saying. Mm-hmm. Why would anybody choose us? Why? I mean, going back to the GoDaddy Squarespace thing, right? Like mm-hmm. There. There's a lot of people who graduate out from there, right?

Mm-hmm. They, their needs are more unique, and there are millions of companies that find their niches to help with that. I need a website thing. Yep. Right? So that, that's a huge, huge market. Uh, but if you have a smaller market that you're, you're in mm-hmm. You can create that differentiation and that will help.

Help focus your marketing efforts. So we talked about it, the belief in marketing and everything. I think marketing without a connection to sales and not having a clear focus for your brand is, is wasteful and useful. Probably not worth it. Yeah. So there you go. That's where we're circling back here. Yeah.

Marketing. So we believe in marketing. I, yeah. I don't, I, I, I, yeah. I. Totally believe in marketing. Okay, good. I was just, there are certain tactics I'm quite calling into question. Yes, your bigfoot's gonna be a lot more effective. That brand will just increase and grow. Show me the Bigfoot. That's all I'm saying.

Mike, there's plenty of photographic evidence out there If you are having this existential crisis about what is marketing and and worrying about. Is marketing really effective anymore because of all of these other tools that are out there? I think it does make sense to look at it from that perspective.

Look at your audience and really define that as specifically as you can, and that that's a hard thing. That's not like you just sit down and like, well, it's men and women, 18 to 34 and they're go to yoga. That's too broad. Like you have to be way more into and build in, in a sense, build a culture around what that avatar is, and that's where the value of you as a marketer will be proven to those decision makers who may be thinking about cutting the marketing department or cutting down on marketing sounds self-serving.

Hmm. But getting an outside perspective, especially when it comes to like how you are seen in the market and everything mm-hmm. Is I think, uh, could be well worth the investment. Like mm-hmm. I think you get. There. It's not even intentional or anything like that, but when you're talking about your own business and you're talking through all the different pieces and everything, there's, I think maybe you can make a lot of excuses why something is a certain way or why you shouldn't change that thing.

And maybe, maybe you're not as willing to sit with some uncomfortable truths about your positioning in the marketplace. Right? Yeah. 'cause that analysis could come back and it be like. You're saying the same thing as 85 of these other go organizations out there. Yeah. And that's, that's valuable information.

Yeah. But that's, that's could be the hard truth. But if you can get outside perspective on all that and um, and have somebody help you with that, I, I think it's gonna be better off. Well, I feel a little bit better. Yeah. That marketing still has some value. It does. I mean, how else without marketing? Yeah.

How are people gonna find out about you? Exactly. You only want, your salespeople can only go so many places that are constrained by regions and time and all of that stuff. Marketing needs to fill in the gaps to get your company out there. I like that. I like that a lot. So, um, it's not dead at all,

you know, it's evolution. Yep. Pulling on the evolution, marketing, evolution, marketing evolution. Mike, that sounds like a great place to end the podcast. Appreciate your insights yet again. Thanks for sitting on the couch. Yeah. Glad I can help. All right. Carry the torch for marketing or the lighter, whatever it is, but I'll, I'll carry it.

Carry those, those clickers. Yeah. For your grill? Yeah. Yeah. Got a couple of those. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks man. Alright. Thanks for tuning in. For more information and other episodes, subscribe to the marketing team of one podcast on YouTube, apple, or Spotify podcast networks. You can also chat with us on the r slash marketing team of one subreddit or visit marketing team of one.com to learn more.