The Marketing Advice We Avoid

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Host: Rich Mackey 
Producer: Zac Hazen

About Antidote 71: 
Think of us as your very own offsite, highly effective team of local marketing growth experts, from digital marketing to traditional (who you’d also happily grab a beer with). Antidote 71 is equal parts skill and personality. We’re super fun to hang out with (in our opinion) and exceptionally good at what we do. We love our work and care about the people we work with. 

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Transcript

Why Marketing Advice Spreads

Zac 0:00

There's no shortage of marketing advice online. Post every day, be on every platform, go viral, just run ads, SEO is dead, email is dead, everything is dead. In this episode, we're breaking down the marketing advice we hear all the time and why we disagree with some or most of it.

Rich 0:22

All right. So welcome to another episode where we shit talk some things. This will be a fun one. I love it. We'll just get that little explicit banner ready to go on this one. Ah, we won't be too bad. Um, yeah, I love this topic. So we're gonna talk today about marketing advice that uh that works in the right context, but then also like the stuff that gets shared, and you're like, oh, that looks like a magic bullet, and it's just absolute crap. Um, so we'll walk through a few rules and discuss like why they spread, why they might when they might be true, where they usually go wrong, and what's like happening um that you just need to avoid. And this is a fun one. I have seen so many videos online of like like what was the other one? There's like fire your marketing agency is how a lot of them start. Where there was a woman that said, you know, what was it? You're doing uh you're doing paid ads all wrong. You know, it's not about your targeting, it's about your strategy. And it's like, well, targeting is kind of part of strategy, but whatever. But she had, of course, a course to sell you that was 90 minutes where she would teach you how to do her method that's guaranteed to quadruple your results. And I was like, so part of me is always tempted to be like, I want to do it just to see and then just like go hounder about like how it didn't work.

Zac 1:37

I was gonna say a lot of marketing advice is just framed uh to sell you things. Snake, nothing more.

Cocktail Break With The Cosmonaut

Rich 1:44

We called it snake oil back in the day in the 1800s, if I recall. Uh okay, so we've got a cocktail today, though. So uh this one is named after my dog. Not really. My dog's name is Cosmo, but uh, we do call him cosmonaut or cosmonutter sometimes. Um, but the cosmonaut. So my guess is there's oh, I thought there would be vodka in this because it's kind of a Russian term, but it's not.

Zac 2:08

So this is created by Sasha Petrovsky, which sounds very Russian, in New York City, as a subtle tongue-in-cheek response to the rise of the cosmopolitan. So it's kind of their riff on a cosmopolitan, and it's another one of those really simple cocktails that I think sounds great. I mean, there's not much to it, but yeah.

Rich 2:31

Yeah, I have all these things, except lemons. I need to get lemons. So um, yeah, so it could also be like a cosmonaut, like not a cosmo, you know. But a little play on words there, I think, with that. But cosmonaut like astronaut. Uh okay, so um, just three ingredients. Uh two ounces of gin, three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice. It's like just a half a lemon, probably is gonna give you that much, and one bar spoon of raspberry preserves. So I have blackberry preserves that I would probably use. I'll bet that would be amazing too. Um, so you combine those all in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. That's gonna be important because your raspberry preserves are gonna be, I mean, it's jelly, right? Like it's preserved, so it's gonna be thick. But you need to get it like infused really very quickly in all of that gin. Um, shake it until you're chilled about five, 15 seconds or until it's chilled, I guess, and then strain it into a chilled cook glass and enjoy. Um, preserves are going to have seeds in them. So if you want to be uh cautious about this, your cocktail shaker strainer probably has holes that are too big for this, so you might want to run it through, you know, more of a sieve. Um I mean, you can put it through cheesecloth if you wanted to, or a fine mesh, yeah. I have a little, we've got a little round like uh strainer that's got a really tight metal mesh to it that I would use on this. And it also just sets right on top of your glass because it's designed for this. Um, but yeah, otherwise you can have seeds in your teeth, but whatever. This sounds great. Like make me a picture of this and let's just drink it on the porch every day.

Zac 4:03

I think most of these are ones that we can pretty confidently make at home, especially like this, the ones that we've done this year. And if I ever wanted to get into cocktail making, I feel like this one would be a really easy like start.

Rich 4:19

You know what? I would probably take two whole raspberries, like fresh ones, and just float them in it.

Zac 4:24

As an optional garnish, that's a good idea.

Big Budgets Versus Smart Focus

Rich 4:26

Yeah. Or a couple frozen blueberries might be good. The blueberry raspberry thing. Oh, yeah. You know? That would be good. Anyway, we're we're embellishing the drink, but this one really does need a garnish, I think. I mean, it's gonna be pretty, and cosmos usually have a lemon twist as a garnish. You could do that. Um, but yeah, so this is from punchdrink.com. We love them. Um, and it's called the Cosmonaut. Um, I think we'll take a break and get into uh the episode. All right, we're back. Did I step on you? You were gonna introduce, weren't you? I'll just uh you can say hi.

Zac 5:06

No, it's okay. Uh all right. We're back.

Rich 5:10

We are, and we're going to talk about uh crap marketing advice.

Zac 5:16

Yeah. Um some of these are more broad. Um they're kind of a collection of ones that I found across the internet. Uh, Reddit's a good place to find bad marketing advice. Um so if you if you're looking for that, go to Reddit. But um the first one we have here is you need a big budget to compete, like a big marketing budget.

Rich 5:38

I mean, it helps, right? Definitely helps. Um you can be messy and sloppy when you've got a big budget. But I'll tell you when I in my previous life, when I was working for a small regional wireless carrier, that they've all now been swallowed up by the major carriers, uh, still exists. Um we had a$30 million budget. When I started, we had a$10 million budget and we got it up to a$30 million budget, which was great. Um, but we were competing with uh Verizon, who had a$1.2 billion budget, and ATT that was spending$800 million a year. You just can't compete with them. I mean, and T-Mobile was spending less, but they were still on the four or$500 million. So it gets like you've got to really think through your priorities and where you go, but you don't have to have those giant budgets. Um I mean, there's also the point that half of your marketing budget is wasted. You just don't know which half. Well, if you're doing digital and lead gen, you probably know which half and you can bring that in. Um but yeah, I think there's a lot of noise for the big brands, right? Like they fight with each other, Coke and Pepsi like battle it out. But I guarantee you that you know, Olipop isn't spending what Coke and Pepsi are spending. Although they get bought by one of them now.

Zac 6:49

Probably. I know Poppy probably has. Maybe Poppy did, I think. Poppy definitely did. I don't know about Olipop, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Rich 6:56

I had an Ollipop grape the other day. I thought it was lovely. I was just like feeling.

Zac 6:59

That's my favorite flavor, I think. It tastes like it's like the most, it's a good grape flavor. It doesn't taste weird. Like it's almost a better grape soda, in my opinion, but yeah, it is.

Rich 7:10

And it's like it's like only what, like 20 or 30 calories or something. It's really low. Or 50, maybe. Anyway, so like you can spend less. Dollar Shave Club is a great example. They were not spending like what Gillette was. They've since been acquired by, I think, Unilever or somebody.

Zac 7:26

But and they've done some really creative marketing too.

Rich 7:30

Yep. Yeah, so you can um you can grow faster by focusing on a niche, right? Like, you know, Olipop isn't trying to be everything to everybody. Dollar Shave Club wasn't trying to knock Gillette and Chick off the top of the market right away. They were trying to go for this audience that was price conscious about razors and blades because they were just ridiculously expensive, um, but just wanted a decent razor and a decent shave. And that audience was a little bit irreverent. They were a little bit of kind of a rebel, and they were able to focus on them with mostly internet marketing. Um, I think it was viral the viral video that the founder did, you know, that took off first. Um, but it was just engaging content.

Zac 8:18

And I think I think that where the bad advice in this is, is you can't just throw money at your marketing and expect it to work. Yes, um, with some of the paid like advertising camp like platforms with like social and like Google search stuff, having a bigger budget is advantageous, but I don't think it's gonna make the marketing that you're doing better. You might have higher volume, but the quality of uh well we're gonna talk about this next, but the quality of weeds are getting in and the quality of like I don't know, you could you probably it's like you said you can uh be a lot you can be a little a little sloppy when you have more budget, but I don't think it's gonna make your marketing better having a bigger budget.

Rich 9:06

No. And I think oh sorry, more money just amplifies whatever's wrong or whatever's right. And so if you're getting the right leads in and you've got your targeting really honed in, incrementally adding budget to that is going to help. Throwing a whole bunch of money at that, if you don't have that honed in, you're gonna have huge impressions with a whole bunch of people that don't care. You're gonna have a whole bunch of clicks of looky lose and people just wanting to come see what you've got, but your actual conversion rates are going to plummet. And would your gross sales go up? Yeah, potentially, but your return on ad spend is gonna go down because you're hitting too many people and it's too, too broad. Like in this day and age, that kind of like I think we used to call it like shotgun or buckshot media approach where you just try to hit everybody and hope that like 10% of them are the people you want. It's more like, you know, like lasering in on who you want and getting those kind of 10 people to do what you want them to do. Um, and that's I think where you can really win as a small brand is you can be more efficient, you can be reaching the right people more tightly. You can be ignoring huge audiences. Hardest thing for people to do ever, because every business owner thinks that they have a thing for everybody. You don't figuring out who you're just not you're gonna ignore, you're not gonna worry about them, you're gonna leave them off to the side. Um, reminds me of um, I feel like I've got a story for everything from my past, but I worked on Propel Fitness Water in the early days. Now, granted, PepsiCo was a sub brand of Gatorade, so it had some of that momentum, but flavored waters were um mostly just for people who liked flavor. There was no fitness aspect to it, no vitamins in it, nothing like that. So they were kind of really trying to build a new market to expand the Gatorade brand. Um, and what what they found is like they went after in the beginning, um, it was mostly people who were active but not athletes. So they were below the Gatorade brand, but they were active more like I'm an amateur tennis in my town kind of person. Um I run every day kind of person who really liked hydrating and preferred a flavored water over a non-flavored, but they wanted the benefits of it. So they went after very active people. Now, one of the things they also did is they got on the shelf at Walmart. And Gatorade is on the shelf at Walmart. Gatorade is about athletes and, you know, replenishing the things that your body needs. Does Gatorade care that people who sit on their couch all day buy orange Gatorade at Walmart because they think it tastes good and they can find it at Walmart for cheap? No, they don't care. Do they advertise to them? No, they don't advertise to them. It happens to be there and they're just a bring-along audience. And Propel had the same thing. It was just people like I like blueberry water, or not blueberry, they never had a blueberry, but I like lemon-flavored water and they've got a lemon-flavored water, and it's at my Walmart, and it's easy for me to get, and away I go. So there's that distribution strategy, but when it came to their advertising dollars, it was a much smaller budget than a lot. I mean, it was a big budget, but it was a lot smaller than uh like what Gatorade was spending, or definitely than what Pepsi was spending on the flagship brands. Um, but they made it work by really honing in on who they wanted. Um, and I think that that's a really good example. Like if you can do it with a startup within a major company where you're really limited on what you could do, um, you can do it as a small business, 100%. Like you don't have to spend, you know,$2 million. You can take$2,000,$20,000, and actually get something out of it to be significant.

Why More Leads Can Hurt

Zac 12:40

And I think some of the best marketing is created or like is executed through those like smaller budgets, or when you're forced to think outside of the box and be more creative with what you're doing, because it's easy to make like a campaign, just throw a bunch of money at it and then get a bunch of leads. But going on to our next point, just because you get a lot of leads doesn't mean that it's more leads doesn't equal better marketing, for lack of a better term.

Rich 13:08

So people love this one because it's easy. Every platform gives you so it used to be impressions and clicks, right? Impressions impressions and clicks, we just more clicks is better. And it's like, well, no, then it became the right clicks are better. And now it's like, okay, the clicks that convert and turn into a lead are better. And yeah, if that's all you can measure, um, people love seeing volume, they love seeing those percent numbers go up. It's easy to optimize by number of leads on almost any platform. Um, but yeah, it's it's wrong. Why is it wrong, Zach? Because I agree with you 100%. This one sucks.

Zac 13:44

Because uh I think a lot of people say like a lot of companies sell to you like that are like how how do I say this? They always say you want more and more and more like leads. You want a high volume of leads, but if those leads are crap and they aren't gonna actually like convert into actual business, then it doesn't matter how many leads you get, you get thousands of leads and like only like and none of them are actually like good for your business. It's like when people sell like email lists that you can like send out stuff to or uh like stuff like that, or like buy lead, like big lists for like contacts.

Rich 14:21

Yeah, it's it's not a volume game, it's a quality game. Exactly. What's really interesting, more leads doesn't equal better marketing, like revenue growth equals better marketing, higher return on ad spend equals better marketing. Um, and that's really where I think everybody can get to is every business, even a nonprofit, is down to the dollars. It's about donations, it's about sales, it's about how much money is coming in. The other issue you have with a high lead volume, if you're a high-touch business like us, so when we get someone in, we have to physically do a discovery call. Like we can do a little bit of qualification via email or a form, but we've got to sit on the phone with them. And a lot of sales organizations are like that. And if you can only be responding to quality leads, you're gonna be much better off than responding to a higher volume of leads. Um, so yeah, it's just, I don't know, it drives me crazy. And we do have, you know, we've had some clients and I know a lot of people who the best thing we can track on right now is leads. We can't track on financial metrics yet. And a lot of what we do is we really try to push to get those in and get integrated with those systems because your platforms can optimize on revenue. Absolutely, they can optimize on revenue and return on ad spend as long as they're receiving the data. Um, and there's you know multiple ways to do that. But I this one drives me crazy because like like I we would need four leads a year if we had the right leads. You know, that'd probably we'd probably add two clients. Great, totally good, golden. Like, but does it do anything for me to have 5,000 leads this year? Yeah, it gives me a headache.

Zac 16:00

Well, and there's so many like tool marking tools like that are people are trying to sell you that'll get you like a ton of leads, or this will get you so many, everyone's trying to sell on volume without like wondering or thinking about okay, are like is the volume I'm getting actually valuable for my business, like you said, or am I just getting a lot of people's learning about who I am, but they don't give a shit. Like they go, do not give a shit about what I do or what my business does.

Rich 16:29

Yeah. And I think if you can measure your lead to conversion rate, your lead to customer rate, that's gonna help you understand how tight your positioning is, how tight your messaging is, and if you're reaching the right audience. And if that number is extremely low for your industry, especially, and you can just Google in your industry, you know, what's the conversion rate from a lead, you know, blah, blah, blah. Um, if it's extremely low, then you've got a lot of work to do in really honing in and optimizing your marketing. Um, you know, it's it's the old thing like we lose$2 for every one of these we, you know, we for every widget we sell, we lose$2, but we'll make it up on volume. It's like, no, you'll just go out of business faster. Like you can't make up for poor positioning or poor targeting with high volume on leads. It's you need to stupid.

Zac 17:18

Really understand your target audience and your customer and align your marketing to that journey of how they actually make decisions with like purchasing and buying services.

Rich 17:27

Yep. Next time I get an email for um, it'll be there's probably one in my inbox right now. If I go look, I'll forward it to you. But it's like, what if I told you I could get you 5,000 leads by the end of the month?

Zac 17:37

I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure we got one that was in on LinkedIn that said, Hey, Antidote71 and Zach, I can help get your podcast in front of more like people. And I was like, I was like, okay, like why are you calling me out by name?

Rich 17:54

Yeah, this isn't really a it's not necessarily a lead gen podcast. It's more of just a thought leadership and a fun project that we have. So yeah, so that one sucks. Volume isn't always everything. Um cash is give me more cash, that's great.

The Myth Of Posting Daily

Zac 18:08

Work on your positioning and targeting. Um, this final one is one that I see a lot, and everyone disagrees over this. Um, it kind of depends on who you are and what your business is, but a lot of people, especially influencers, say post every day to grow. Now, uh the reason that this is so like prevalent and people say this, especially like in B2C, and like if you're an influencer, is because um algorithm speculation. So there's a lot of different opinions on what different algorithms uh value in your content. And uh everybody's saying like you need to post every day and have a consistent schedule. That's only half true, right? Right? Having a consistent schedule is more important than posting every day. And 100% you might see some short-term engagement spikes from posting every day at first, but audience fatigue is super real. Um, if you're posting the same stuff every single day of every month, your audience is gonna get tired of it. Doesn't matter how good the content is, doesn't matter if it's perfect, like perfectly targeted towards your target audience. If you're not respecting their time and focusing on creating good in-depth content that meets them where they're at, it doesn't matter how much you post per day.

Rich 19:28

Yeah. For me, it's consistency. Like there's some creators that I follow, like influencers, whatever you want to call them, um mostly on Instagram, um that they post once a week or they post twice a week. Like some of the ones that I like the best, though, is like every there's one group, one uh set of guys that every Sunday at noon they do a vlog. Every Sunday at noon, it goes live on Instagram, um, YouTube, and TikTok, I believe it is. And I just know on Sunday afternoon I can go look for that. And it's great. Now they do other stuff during the week, but that's kind of their wrap-up weekly, kind of what's going on in their life and all that uh that's interesting. And they do like home renovations and other stuff, like they're really interesting to me. Like there's a lot of topics that overlap, like food and family and home home decorating and renovations and things. So they don't and they have huge numbers of people that jump in on those um and watch it that afternoon. And a lot of times they'll do uh uh a live chat during it, like they'll uh they'll open up a live chat, which is nice as well. But if they did that kind of content every single day, I would go crazy. Yeah, I think everyone would just it's too much. And I think uh there's also a few people that I do see post every day. Oh, sorry. Oh no, sorry, you're gonna be like people who I see post every day, but I get rep I get repetitive stuff, right? Like you said, like you're like, oh, I saw this two days ago and now it's back. Like, why? I don't care, like, and why am I seeing this again? Um, or it's just like the three-parter, right? Like, tune in tomorrow for more. Tune in tomorrow for the final story. No, I'm not gonna tune in tomorrow. You're not a TV show. Like, I'm done with you.

Zac 21:12

Well, and I think I think people sometimes get caught up in uh listening to advice that's not necessarily like for you when it comes to your social media. So there's a lot of general catch-all things that uh people will say, and like large like social media like users will say that work for them, and they'll sell you like this social media plant helped us like grow this big of an audience. Well, just because it helped them doesn't mean it's gonna help you. Much like marketing trends, just because someone's posting every day and it's working for them doesn't mean it'll work for your audience. So understanding that just because an algorithm might they might say an algorithm prefers this style of posting every day or this style. Of post doesn't mean it'll necessarily resonate with your target audience on that platform. Um, there's things you can do to uh basically fit within the algorithm that are worth like following, but posting every day is not one of them. Find what works for you, find uh cadence and consistency that works for you and go from there.

Rich 22:21

Yep, 100%. And I think that that's a really great place to kind of wrap things up. It's really about, I think this whole thing, it's about quality and consistency. It is not about how much money you spend, how often you do something, you know, or how much of like X you get in. Like you've really got to figure out what works for you. And I think the other piece is if somebody's telling you an absolute, you must post every day, you must spend more than your competitor, uh, you must have more leads this week than last week. If it's an absolute like that, and growth is the only option in spend, in whatever, um, there's probably some crap there going on. Like it's really um, it's really more nuanced than that. Um, and we didn't even get into some of the like real snake oil stuff. Like these are pretty broad like uh concepts and ideas that people share, right? Like, and and yes, they can work. Spending the most money in your market, yes, you can absolutely win at that. Um, are you gonna waste a whole lot? Yes, you are. Um, but if you don't have the budget for that, um then you know, being smart about it and being consistent about it is the way to go.

Nuance Beats Absolutes Plus CTAs

Zac 23:31

100%. As always, you can find our agency at anidote71.com and all of our socials are there as well. If you have a question you'd like to send our way, or maybe some bad marketing advice that you got from someone that you'd like to share for us to discuss, head to ctapodcast.live to shoot us an email, or even better, leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402 718 9971. Your question will make it into a future episode of the podcast.

Rich 23:58

All right. And I think uh the one thing I will note is um you're playing with TikTok now, right? For us, we're looking into it.

Zac 24:04

We're testing the new integration for HubSpot to see how well it can do and if it will be effective because there's still some things I'm curious about. I was looking at the like yesterday. I don't want to spoil it, but there's some things that they should probably add to improve the functionality of the website.

Rich 24:23

All right, so if you want to follow that one, it's not on the website, but it's just antidote underscore seven one, just like Instagram and threads, antidote underscore seven one. Um, and you can see what Zach does to experiment there, and we'll talk about it in a future episode, I'm sure. 100%. All right, with that, I had to throw that in. With that, we can we can be done. See you later, Zach. See ya.