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Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

Written by: Blake Beus & Greg Marshall
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  • Summary

  • Modern marketing tactics that anyone can use to scale and grow
    Copyright 2021 All rights reserved.
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Episodes
  • TikTok cheating up... I mean heating up? EP0-55

    TikTok cheating up... I mean heating up? EP0-55
    Feb 17 2023
    Blake Beus  0:00   All right, so I sent you a text while you were vacationing, Greg Marshall  0:03   I was at my mountains, I Blake Beus  0:04   didn't even I didn't even know you were up in the mountains. But it was just a random text that I sent you about a thing that which Greg Marshall  0:10   is why my response was so delayed. I got it. Like, I remember getting like, at a random time when I had searched for like two seconds. Blake Beus  0:19   But I thought it was super, super, super interesting. And it was about tick tock and an internal practice they have called heating, like heating something up, right, bringing the heat, bringing the heat and, and my initial thoughts of this is, and we talked about this all the time. But my initial thoughts were this is why you shouldn't try to go viral. Yep. You shouldn't even put any effort into that. Because you may have literally zero control over you could be have, you could create the best content, most entertaining, whatever. And you just might not be one of the chosen few who gets slow, who was allowed to go viral. Greg Marshall  1:02   When you sent me this. And I took a look at the article. I was like interesting that they actually do a practice like this. Because I feel like off camera, we've discussed how these algorithms seems it's like there's it's almost like no rhyme or reason, in a way and organically to like, go viral member and we've done a podcast we were talking about going viral. And it's like, why going viral doesn't automatically increase business. And if you think about it, if platforms, I'm sure tick tock is not the only platform guaranteed, that does heating, right. And if you think about it, they're not going to pick stuff to go viral that has anything to do with selling anything, right? They're gonna pick stuff that gets more visibility, that can drive more behavior for the audience that they want to stay on the platform longer. Right. And so that's why going viral doesn't automatically translate into sales. And that's why if they do heating up, what do you think they do about sales type videos that are promoting Friday holding them down? Probably? Blake Beus  2:09   Right? Probably cold. Yeah, cold. So let's talk specifically about what heating up is, and this particular article, and this article was all about tick tock, but I'm sure there's something similar, maybe not so blatant in the others, but essentially, internally inside tick tock. They would have meetings where they would choose which content and which creators, they wanted to heat up, aka, go viral. Yeah. And they made those decisions purely based on how it would benefit the platform itself, and how it would benefit the growth of their own platform. In general. Now, if we take a big step back, and we talk about algorithms, right, a lot of people talk about algorithms as this like, cold calculated computer software, whatever algorithms are built and tuned by humans for the benefit of the parent company. Yeah, like, that's the whole point of them, it's not to benefit you and me, is to love us. Right? And I'm not. I mean, there's a lot of things we can say negative or positive about social media companies or large businesses, whatever. And I have a lot of strong feelings on that on that subject. But the point is, is having a good understanding of the incentives, why they're doing what they're doing whatever can help you in your marketing efforts play in their sandbox, because for the benefit of you know, you and your your business, but essentially, they would choose which content which content, they wanted to go viral. Yep. And so you could create great content, and it might even be better than the content that's going viral. But if you weren't noticed by the heating up team, and you weren't one of the Chosen of the heating up team, your content can fall flat could just never go anywhere. It could never get Greg Marshall  4:03   anywhere. Well, you want to know some interesting is? Do you listen to the podcast value? tainment at all? No, Patrick, I always say PVD. Patrick, but David, he actually had an episode. You guys should check this out on YouTube. He tested this. He said that on tick tock. He said that he figured out that there was some level of this happening when on his content when he started sharing things about US government that opposes the Chinese government. His content started to get he was normally averaging I think he said a couple 100,000 views on like every video and then he said all of a sudden his account like went from that to like 1000 views like significantly smaller and he shares the exact numbers. But he did actually say it's like they tested it within the team to figure out what types of content gets the most views and he noticed kind of this He grew, and then it didn't like a shark fin. He grew and then it liked his tank. And it never has really, like, come back. You've got a black mark. Yeah. And he discuss how he believes that ...
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    23 mins
  • Micro leads... Important or not? - EP054

    Micro leads... Important or not? - EP054
    Feb 8 2023
    Blake Beus  0:00   Alright, how do we start this one off? Greg Marshall  0:02   We're talking about micro lead generate. Right, Blake Beus  0:05   right, right. Greg Marshall  0:06   And maybe I don't even know if that's a name that someone has come up, you know, somewhere else, we're or you want to take credit for it, because technically you call it, which is micro lead generation is, well, why don't you explain kind of what we're talking about with micro lead generation? And how you came up with that name? Yeah, yeah. So Blake Beus  0:25   I mean, everybody in their dog talks about lead generation, getting them, you know, off of social media or off of wherever and onto your email list or your text messaging list. And all of that is great, everybody thinks about that talks about that, always putting effort into that. But there's like a little mini step before that, that you can do that works really well, under certain circumstances, that that should be considered. And it's this micro step, where you're basically basically generating leads that you don't know much about them yet, you don't know their name, you don't know, their email address you met may not even know exactly how many people are on that list. Yeah, but you're putting, you're putting concerted effort into building that list of leads, that you can then follow up with an offer for either, you know, a solid lead generation, or a product purchase offer or something like that. And so essentially, what we're talking about here is building audiences via whatever means that you can, that are much, much, much more likely to be interested in what your next offer is, that you can then target with traffic or with paid ads. Yep. So you're building a list of leads, but you don't know anything about them, other than they got on the list through whatever you were doing to get him on the list. So yeah, that's that's the concept there? Greg Marshall  1:54   Well, here's, here's a question. And you can actually do this both organically and paid. You can, you can utilize content and put money behind it to build this micro audience. But I'd like to get your opinion on. Why do you think not as many people talk about this audience? Proactively building right? Blake Beus  2:13   I think it's because it's it, it's hard to conceptualize what's happening there. It's not necessarily tangible, like an email list, I can go in there. And I can see oh, hey, we got x more leads on the list. My list is now you know, 15,000 people big Yeah, I spent this money to get there. I have all that information about them. And oftentimes, like business owners, whatever they want the hard numbers, well, they should want the hard numbers. Yeah. But sometimes there's these more intangible things you have to think about. And frankly, this used to be way more common. Back in the mail marketing days, the all of that stuff 50 years ago, because you just didn't have access to the data. Yep. But I felt my gut is telling me, that's why we don't have people talking about or not talking about it in this this way, per se. Greg Marshall  3:10   Yeah. And I think with these types of audiences, too, I think you're right, with the tangible, right, you don't have a tangible name, phone number email, to kind of control the, where the direction of the nurturing goes. But the tools that we have available now are, you can actually retarget or run ads towards people who have watched your videos who have liked your posts, or commented, and those people, in my opinion, if you were to define, like, you know, when you have this conversation, should I do paid? Or should I do organic, and there's always like one side, that's like, it's all about pay the others, it's all organic? Well, on the organic side, if, if you're willing to invest the time, effort and energy to build this organic following to grow your business, then that would mean that would mean that you believe that these audiences are valuable. Right? Or else you wouldn't do it right? Right. So why not proactively both organically and pay try to grow these audiences so that you can go ahead and try to get them involved in whatever it is that you are offering? Right? Right. And that's kind of where I see not everyone is even ready to give you their name phone number email right away. Some people need to see a little bit more ago. Can I trust giving my name or an email to this company because I don't want them hounding me or, or emailing me all the time or calling me right Blake Beus  4:39   or maybe they're not quite ready to purchase not because they don't trust you, but because they're not to that point. Yep. They need a little bit of leveling up. So you're capturing people kind of pre you know, pre being in the market ready to buy and you It's still a strategy that works. Greg Marshall  5:01   And I think it's a more long term strategy as well, because you're building these audiences of people that obviously aren't ready to buy ...
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    24 mins
  • Google made a HUGE mistake - EP-053

    Google made a HUGE mistake - EP-053
    Feb 1 2023
    Blake Beus  0:00   So we talked a lot about split tests. Yep. And we've talked about it a lot in the past and everything. And I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast episode recently called, is Google Search getting worse? And in there, they talked with some actual representatives from Google, about some of the things and I wanted to bring up because I thought it was relevant in the fact that the interpretation of the test results is incorrect. And even Google did this. Yeah. And so I kind of wanted to point this pointed out. So it's, it's I don't know if you feel this way. But I literally feel that Google search is getting Greg Marshall  0:40   worse. As far as being accurate. Yeah, what Blake Beus  0:43   you're looking at feels harder for me to find what I want. I don't know. Have you noticed? Is that been similar to you or your, your good, Greg Marshall  0:51   we know what I'm not. When it comes to Google search, and like, maybe I'm looking for somewhere to eat or products or something like that. I don't use it a ton outside of like researching marketing stuff. But it does feel a little bit less like integrated. Like, it does feel like I do have to, like, look a little bit deeper for what I want. Part of it could be the ads above six or eight or 12. Yeah, search ads before he can even get to the camera. And so yeah, you know, I probably haven't been paying attention as close because I'll just keep scrolling. So I find when I look, right. But if you're talking about immediacy, like I'm typing something, and it's not right there, I would say yes, it has gotten worse, because I'm not, I didn't notice I am scrolling more on Google. Yeah, what's the cause of that? So Blake Beus  1:41   there's, there's a lot of different causes for that. One of the things I do for a lot of my clients as I help find solutions for them, right, so, so, right now I have quite a few clients where we have data integration issues, right. So they want to bring their marketing and advertising data, and pair that and merge that with their email marketing CRM, like HubSpot, or or any of those and merge those things together. So they can actually have actionable data. And so, so I deal with a lot of these kinds of data integration things, but I have to do a lot of searching to find, maybe they need a tool or something like that. So I'll search for a tool or an integration system or whatever. And I would say over 50% of the articles that I find these days, are something along the lines of, you know, the top 10 tools for this. Yeah, and it's just regurgitated content. And then at the end, the paragraph is almost identical on all of them, it says something like, so as you can tell, no matter what you choose, you're gonna find a good solution. And it really depends on your needs. And I'm like, I want an opinion. Yeah, I want you to and you could tell that whoever danced, take a stance, and you can tell it, whoever wrote the article, didn't write the article to actually help you make a decision, they probably haven't even used any of the software, they're just kind of regurgitating things. And you're getting a lot more of that content on Google. In addition, you're getting Google adding things like they have, they have, depending on what you're searching, they'll have like a box along the top with some information, or they'll have the sidebar box, like a little widget on there. You see that if I search for like a movie star or something like a little box, there, they'll have like, if you're searching for a restaurant or something, they'll have like a widget with placements and things like that. So what kind of the end result is that when you search for something, you could have widgets, ads, another widget, a thing on the side, and then your organic search results, you literally have to scroll down under everything. Now, I don't hate ads. So obviously, we talk about ads all the time. I think ads are a very, very important part of running a business and marketing and everything. But Google has done a lot of different things to try to maximize their profits, get more people to stay on their system, as opposed to like bouncing off on to something else, and whatever. So that's a this is some foundational knowledge. On this podcast, they interview the person at Google and they shared this person had been with Google for a long time, 15 years or whatever. And, and essentially, they ran an accidental split test, okay, for 10 years. So they had 10 years of Google search data. And here's here's what the test was they had a test where some people would not get anything other than just the search results, and a few ads on top and then everyone else would get all the new bells and whistles. And as they added new bells and whistles that got busier and everything. The person who wrote that test was the person they were actually interviewing saying she had moved on been promoted whatever. And then 10 years down the road, someone comes to ...
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    24 mins
Personal Success Marketing & Sales Economics
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