Master Freelance Recruitment with Nathan Yeung

I really recognize that a lot of companies get this awkward point where they need to hire a marketing person, but they don't know who to hire. There's likely no marketing leader within the organization. So sometimes you have a technical leader, a sales leader, a founder, but not someone who actually understands marketing Psychology is super important because if you don't understand how you can do that via consumer psychology perspectives or frameworks, you're essentially just kind of climbing up the steepest mountain of Everest by choice. Foreign.

Welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Bob Goverow. I will be your host as usual, and this is actually a really interesting episode for me. If you want to learn about marketing, you're going to learn a lot about it today, specifically related to consumer psychology and some of the ways that you can get the most bang for your buck in marketing. But before I jump in there, I just want to remind you that this podcast, the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast, is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success, from mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. This specific episode is called Unlocking Consumer Psychology. The Insights from marketing strategist Nathan Young. And I want to just share with you a little bit about Nathan. Now, Nathan has worked with some really large organizations both in the IT space and in the SaaS space, has also worked with celebrity people both on Shark Tank and Dragon's Den. So he's had the opportunity to work with some of the most successful organizations and individuals that we would know in our home. Now, Nathan, who is going to be our guest today, Nathan Young. He's the founder of Find you'd audience, has over 10 years of experience in B2B marketing. He's worked with top Canadian companies like Constellation Software and Procom, and has been engaged by Shark Tank's Robert Herjavec as well. With 18 years of SEO experience and 9 plus years as a performance, digital marketing, marketing and media buyer, Nathan has driven growth for over 50 clients, particularly in the B2B SaaS space. He's also served as a guest lecturer at at UC Berkeley and St. John's University. I can tell you he's very well articulated. He's a fantastic guy. He's got an organization that I can't wait to share with you a little bit about because I know that his organization will likely be a great support network for helping you get your marketing initiatives off the ground. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome my guest in today, Nathan Young. Nathan, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Yeah, no, my absolute pleasure. So listen, you've got some exciting things to share, but what I usually love to start with Nathan, is, you know, everyone who's listening is an entrepreneur, a business owner or someone who's connected with entrepreneurs. And everyone has a very unique story. I would love to hear what has got you from, you know, where you started to where you are today.

The wild, wild background went to school for marketing. What was a VP of Finance at the age of 21 was Operational Consultant, slash management consultant for kind of angel investors inside of some of their portfolio companies and investments. And then I was a CEO for an ad technology company. And then essentially I've been running now this firm for seven and a half years. So I've gone a little bit on the finance, I've gone operations. I was again an operator in kind of, I guess Mar Stack company, ad technology company. And now I've been running this firm for seven and a half years. So not a straight trajectory. And a lot of people are probably like, why marketing? Well, I went to school for marketing. I always enjoyed marketing and I think as I had the experiences to work in so many different companies, I recognized how challenging marketing was. So on an intellectual level, I enjoy the stimulation I get from marketing. I wouldn't say it's the most profitable business. I know lots of more profitable businesses. But it's definitely, I would say, one of the more challenging functions in an organization.

100%. And you know what, it's everyone says they're a marketer, but to actually find people who know what they're doing is pretty incredible. So let's talk about your company a little bit because I'm a little bit fascinated with everything that I saw online because as we were just chatting about before we popped on here, you guys have a great like part time marketing office or a fully outsourced market office. Tell me a little bit about your business.

It's really simple. We, you know, again, going through my experiences as an operational consultant, I really recognize that a lot of companies get this awkward point where they need to hire a marketing person, but they don't know who to hire. And the reason a lot of companies have that issue is because they recognize first of all there's likely no marketing leader within the organization. So sometimes you have a technical leader, a sales leader, a founder, but not someone who actually understands marketing. So you already have an inherent issue where you don't actually have someone who has leadership to hire that person. And then you get into the issue where when you hire that person you start recognizing that one, they don't have leadership properties because you can't afford it, because you're not going for that $180,000 employee right off the bat. You're likely going for somewhere between 65 and 85, which is kind of a manager of sorts. And that individual, while is experienced, likely has four years of experience, only has kind of one or two high aptitude skill sets when it comes to marketing. So then you start recognizing, well, are those the two tactical skill sets you need within your organization? And you wouldn't know that because you don't have marketing leadership. So you hire the wrong person and then you get really upset. And then eight or nine, 10 months later, you're very upset with the entire process. And unfortunately that person leaves. And I've seen this time and time again. So what our whole business model was we're the best first hire you ever will get. And the reason is, is because not only do you get the marketing leadership for myself, which means I help set the direction and the foundation of your marketing function, but then you also have myself and my team that helps you execute that. So we don't do this in a silo. We propose our direction. We give you kind of the kitchen sink and we go, this is what we should be doing. We work with you to understand your constraints and then we actually help execute you. Execute that for you versus then handing it off to you and then having you find someone to execute which still has the same problems as the scenario before. I've given you strategy, I've given you these opportunities. But how do you know who you're supposed to be hiring now or who, which agency to partner with? You still don't actually know how to, to audit that very well. And so then you get into the other problem of actually seeing if the executes well on, on those sides. So we fit that that area where we're, we're really looking for companies, you know, sub 50 employees, 2 to 20 million in ARR where they're like, we need marketing. We've been reactive in marketing. We have to do more. But hiring someone just doesn't make sense. And so then we fill in that gap because then you get access to all of our tactical experts, right? Our SEO expert, our media buying expert, our content writing expert, our events and trade shows experts, our creative team. You get all of that. You're not going to get that in one manager.

No, I, and I love that offer. And hey, anybody who doesn't have a marketing team, listen up, right? It's not that I'm, I'm going to plug Nathan right at this moment. I'm going to share his info at the end because I want him to share some of his, his ideas and concepts with you first. Because of course in marketing we build the know like and trust factor, so we're going to do that first. But I can tell you guys from personal experience, I started out exactly like Nathan was talking about. We hired somebody in marketing that really I just identified as, they seem to be very loud and, and they were getting attention and not really necessarily even understanding the difference in marketing between lead generation and brand awareness. And really one, you know, gets the trophy, the other one gets the pocketbook. And you know, the lead generation strategy is really where, where people need to focus on. And Nathan, I love, you know, talking about marketing strategy because guys, unless you spend a lot of time trying to understand, you know, your consumer insights, your, your buyer's patterns, what their pain points are, we probably have that information in there, but do we really know how to translate that into a marketing message? And that's where the strategy comes in. So it's so important that Nathan shared that component because then he's got his team that can actually do the act of getting that in place. So I really love the structure of your business and I think it's so important that anyone who's looking at marketing talk to an organization like Nathan's because they bring so much value and insights to the table. So there's a quick early plug for what you do, sir. I really love it. But so let's, let's talk a little bit about some of the insights and some of the value that you bring to the table. So one of the areas that I was again fascinated with was your understanding of consumer psychology and how they apply to marketing. Can you explain maybe a little bit about what that means and some of the insights that you can bring?

So I think what was annoying actually when I was going through marketing and going through all these experiences is I was learning what was best in class in all of these different industries. And while it was great that I had a ton of experience, I wanted it to be a bit more grounded around some foundational principles. And sure, you can, you can read about the 4Ps and blah, blah, blah. And you know, that's all great, but at the end of the day, fundamentally what we're trying to do is we're, we're trying to build trust. If you really think about it, every organization as a marketing function, if you can't build trust I can't communicate that you will believe that I can get you to a desired outcome. That's the whole premise of this. And that's why consumer psychology is super important. Because if you don't understand how you can do that via consumer psychology and consumer psychology perspectives or frameworks, and you're essentially just kind of climbing up the steepest mountain of Everest by choice because you know it's there. And one of the easiest concepts that I would recommend to almost anyone listening to this podcast is every consumer is lazy. And why am I doing that is because actually, as a, as a marketing strategist, my job is to take complex ideas and make it simple. Why? Because we're lazy. And if I don't make it simple enough, it's not going to be actionable for you. So if I were to see if there's like one word that would describe how you need to think about marketing is if you think your marketing isn't going to get a lazy person to remember you, or to action on you, or to understand you, your marketing has failed. And that's as simple as a concept that I can, I can give to everyone that is actionable. Because I can almost guarantee you, if you think about it just for a second, think about the last campaign you did, think about the last trade show you did, think about the last email you did, and really challenge yourself. If we think that person is the laziest person in the world, do you think you did a good enough job communicating your message? And you're probably going to figure out that you didn't. And that could be on how you deliver things, that could be how you package things, that could be on all kinds of different perspectives. But when you think about consumer psychology and people are lazy, marketing gets really, really simple. And that could be actually a very easy kind of North Star guide that I like to kind of teach people 100%.

And you know what? And I have made so many of those mistakes over the last 16 years, it's crazy. And I'm sure it's cost me a fortune in making those mistakes. One in particular that I remember, I was actually speaking at an event with Kevin o', Leary, which was great and did a, did a decent job on stage to the point where we had a four hour lineup at our booth, which is amazing. And so by the time I got over there, we were giving books away and, you know, getting all the, all the info out to people. And this was a real big clicking moment for me where we realized that everybody took all of our stuff, but we didn't get any of their stuff. And it was a huge lost opportunity. One, because we didn't feel like we would have had that crazy of a rush of people who were interested in what it is that we were doing. But second, when we realized that everything was gone, we're like, oh man. Now we're really hopeful that they reach out to us. And to your point, you know, if they're lazy, they're not reaching out to us, they're wanting us to reach out to them. And we lost that opportunity and probably lost a fairly substantial return on that investment. So 100% agree with you, sir. You know, lazy buyers are a bit of a problem.

Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really. So I, the whole reason I came to this is I'm publishing a book hopefully this year, if I can actually finally get to the final edits of it. And I went on this journey through 200 different kind of consumer psychology research reports. And this was a theme that came out and I started to notice how much it resonated throughout almost every article I was reading. And I was like, oh my God, we are just this lazy. Like everything leads to laziness. How much we want to conserve energy, how we don't want to challenge our beliefs, like everything goes back to this. It's like we're just trying to conserve energy and if we can, we will.

Yeah, absolutely. So, so on that same sort of topic, you know, when we're thinking of engaging audiences based on their psychology, based on their laziness, what are some key strategies that we could bring to the table to help engage these people so that we get past that laziness and we get them to take action?

Sure. And like there's, there's tons of great examples of this and you know, I'll, I'll use a couple things. Friction in terms of the Purch distribution as sometimes they call it, or even place if you look at Amazon and their, their one click purchase, like that's a perfect example of us being lazy. Right. So it's like rather than filling out the, the checkout form, you have this one button that literally checks out for you and ultimately destroys your financial planning skills for the rest of your life. Right. Because it's so instantaneous. That's a perfect example of how, how we are inherently lazy and how incredibly effective it is for, for Amazon. When we think about it, 95% of our buyers are not in market. That's a very general statistic. I don't like using it, but it's simple. So you're going to remember this. And if you remember that, that means 95% of the time, someone's actually not going to know they have a need. And then whatever that need kind of comes to the surface. It could be a conversation with the cfo, could be a conversation with your team members, could be you on the peloton and someone in the peloton, a coach saying something that sparks a thought process, whatever that is, you're going to have to remember that you have to be top of mind. And if you're not top of mind, if you're not the first three, and especially if you're not the first, you have to recognize that that player, whoever, whoever that brand is, comes in first, is going to be your ultimate competitor and they get to set the rules. So a great example I have of this is when you think about cars or anything that you don't know, and when you don't know something and then you go to that website and then you look at their features, you end up taking those features and compari it to all your other competitors. And that means they set the field. So you can see how just being top of mind plays a massive role. It's a massive advantage against your competitors because you get to set the rules, the rules of engagement. I have 500 horsepower. Do you have 500 horsepower? Do you have Italian leather versus plastic leather? Do you have multi? All these things that you probably don't really care about or won't even notice, you end up comparing because now you're lazy. Someone's given you your comparisons, now you take those comparisons because they were given to you, and you're comparing it to other people. So when you think about lazy, you gotta. You gotta think about. You have to be top of mind, you have to be frequent, or you're missing out. All this advantage I've just talked about, right? And this comes down to, again, how creative you are as well. I always say to a lot of people, the middle is where you go to die. And I. And this is actually for everything. This is in terms of messaging, so this is in terms of positioning, this is in terms of creative. If you're in that middle road where you're not right or left, you're kind of like a fusion Chinese restaurant that's serving Italian. The Asian people are unhappy and the Italians aren't happy. No one wins. And when you do your creative, you got to think about it that way. Speak to a consumer, speak to them. Well, speak to them simply and speak to them creatively. Don't be bland. Right. And so this is all the things where you can take this idea of being lazy and this person is incredibly lazy, and just reflect back that everything you're doing needs to be memorable, needs to be easy, needs to be simple. And if you don't do that, you're losing opportunities everywhere. And, you know, another great example is how people go, oh, my business is good, but their website looks like it's from the 1950s. Right.

If they have one.

Yeah. Or, or they, or they have one and they just. And this comes to another consumer psychology tactic, which is we're generally overconfident people and there's stats around this and you're losing so much opportunity by not reflecting on the fact that you're lazy and.

Your consumers are lazy 100%. So let's. And I love that and fantastic insights. So thinking of the other side, so making it easy for them. You mentioned trust. And so if we're thinking of trust, and I know we always, you know, use the know like trust factor. Make sure they know you, make sure they like you, and then make sure they trust you. What are some ways that you can engage with a potential consumer or a prospect and build trust as quickly as possible?

I, I think the number. So there's a, there's a trust matrix or trust triangle. And one of is, is empathy. And if you actually think about it, empathy in terms of marketing is actually us understanding your pain points and describing benefits and solutions. Right. And I think the fastest and easiest way for you to gain trust is to be proactive, which is actually the number one reason why agencies get fired is they're not proactive, which means likely the client has lost trust in that agency representing their best interest. So if you are proactive in your customer engagements, you're already likely doing a great job, probably far better than most. Because what you're doing by doing that is you're practicing empathy. And I don't want to sound like this is some inner child trauma like conversation. It's not. But, but as a, as a brand, as a, as a business, you're actually practicing empathy. You're going to a customer and saying, hey, I know you use us and I know we don't talk a lot, but I'm actually reaching out because I just want to know, is there anything better that I could be doing today? Is there something that we should be thinking about that might be more, more impactful to your business? And I always go to clients. And they go, the moment you get a customer calling you, asking you, hey, what's coming up in the next release, that's the moment you know you want. Like, that's the moment you know you have a customer evangelist who's just like, so excited and trusts you so much that they're calling you excited, being like, oh, I know you're releasing this new product, like, what's going on? Tell me about it. That's when, you know, you add trust. And I can guarantee you and Deloitte has a study on this. CEOs say that 90% of their customers trust them. The actual statistic was, I think, 20 or 30%. There's a 60 to 70 point gap of overconfidence in CEOs and how much you trust. And that's how much opportunity is on the table right now.

Yeah, 100%. And as a CEO and for all those CEOs, listening, for sure, when we're portraying outwards our confidence in our people, in our teams and our services, we. We oversell for sure. Without question. And Nathan had talked about reflecting and making sure that you're seeing the other side, the other perspective. One of the ways that we do this is we send out client satisfaction surveys to get actual valuable insights directly from the clients so that we can deal with any of the holes in our bucket. I usually talk about the holes in the bucket analogy of, you know, lost opportunity. So when we get those client satisfaction surveys, we can actually see too, from a deliverable standpoint, where did we miss this? How can we continue to be better? And I think from every element of our business, we can continue to focus on how do we get better as a leader, as a marketer, as a finance expert, as an operations person, always looking at it, reflecting and saying, what is it that we can do to take ourselves to the next level? So love that. From the. From the trust factor as well. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, the marketing concept and the role of storytelling and the role that storytelling plays in creating your brand and capturing attention.

I think, I think that's a great topic to talk about because I think we oversimplify that. We go, storytelling is a great way to do it, but, like, why. Why is storytelling so powerful? And the reason why storytelling is so powerful is. Is because it does really kind of activate a different part of whoever you're talking to, his brain. And you, I think everyone knows this and you know this. When you went to school, you deactivate halfway through the lecture. Why do you do Activate. It's because it's boring, it's dry, it's logical. And that means you're not engaged. And when you're not engaged, you're not getting any stimulus. And if you're not getting stimulus, you get a little sleepy. What happens when you're sleepy? You're pretty darn forgetful. And the reason why storytelling works is because you're. You're taking that person and you're taking them out of that logical frame. You're taking them into a personal frame. And that personal frame is. Is that. Is that story, right? It's. It's the story of whether how you started the business, or you've now taken them into a framework that they're used to, which is, hey, there's a problem, there's a hero, and there's a solution. So you're actually. What you're doing is, is you're taking a memory that they've grown up with, we've all read stories, and. And you're actually framing your business around that older framework of storytelling that they're very much used to. Not only that, they associate good memories from that. If you really think about it, right? Every child remembers stories. And there's. There's a reason for that because it was a very intimate moment. And again, I don't want this to be an inner child thing, but a lot of this has to do with us growing up. But like a lot of storytelling comes from when we were children, and those memories tend to be associated with healthy, good memories. So that's why storytelling is so disarming, because you're taking this logical, transactional conversation into a place of safety and kindness and comfort. And when you do that, you get attention, and when you do that, you get less resistance. And so all of these cognitive defense mechanisms that they have are relaxing. And so therefore, you have a much more open conversation. So that's why storytelling is so hard. And if you want to put it simply, I can simplify this. It activates the emotional part of your brain. But that's not a great, you know, description. What I described is really like, what exactly is really happening and why saying that it's just about emotion just oversimplifies an overly complex process that actually really happens, for sure.

And so when we're thinking of storytelling, and I know Gary Vee talks about this all the time as someone who is, well, let's call him a marketing expert, but when he talks about storytelling, he. He tells people that. Well, one, he says, get video out. Get video. But not everybody is meant for video, not meaning that they're unattractive, but that it, like getting in front of a camera is like the most daunting task that they could ever have. Can you speak to, you know, the different methods of storytelling? Maybe video, maybe audio, maybe written and, you know, maybe is it important to find out which way you tell your best story and which ways are maybe the most effective? I don't know if that's an area that we can hop into, but, but I love it.

I. I'm going through different channels in my brain and, and mediums and you know, I would say that Gary V. Is probably correct that video is probably going to be the easiest to consume. I think if you're an individual who is very scared to be on video and be on camera, which is totally understandable, you're going to have a bit more of an uphill battle to get the impact and influence that you want from storytelling. Because the medium of which you're providing that story is going to be a little bit sensorily capped if you think about it, right? Not only am I not being able to see you, I can't hear you, I don't have a transcript. So you're limiting yourself in the sensory environment. So you can certainly tell your story in other forms formats. But whether or not the impact and influence would be the same is likely. What's going to change? I think consistency also plays a huge impact on how storytelling lands. And so therefore, if you are a person who just hates being on audio and camera and you really don't want to do that, you could probably do it by email. But you're going to have to be really thoughtful on how you do that by email because then you're going to have to understand that you're competing with email. Right? And you're competing with everything that's in email. So I don't think there's a hard no on the medium, but I will simply say the medium will cause constraints. And that constraint will be typically around how much that's going to land and how much impact and influence it will have.

And to your point earlier, you know, people are traditionally lazy and naturally lazy, so what's the easiest way for them to consume information is on their phone. It's watching a video. They don't have to look it up. It shows up in their feedback. Again, you know, getting that, that form of marketing or information in front of them so that they consume it in the easiest way possible. It's no energy. So again, completely agree with that. Okay, let's talk about again. I know we've been talking about consumer behavior, but can you share maybe some of the tools and methods that you use for analyzing that and maybe how we convert that data into useful information for marketing?

I think the easiest thing that you can't do is. Well, there's two things. One are surveys and thoughtful surveys. So doing that well, focus groups or community groups I think some people are now calling it, they've kind of now blended. I feel like focus groups are now the community groups and community marketing is now becoming focus groups in disguise because that's really what people are doing when they're building communities. They're really actually just harvesting this community to build a community, but also to take a whole bunch of data from them, understand what they like, what they don't like. So I think that that is one way to, to gather data. And then obviously the third is, is just pure data. And that data can come in the form of Google Search console, Google Analytics. I think sometimes even in terms of Microsoft has something called Clarity, which is their kind of version of Google Analytics. And really looking at your data and then tying that in with your CRM data and your sales data, you'll generate observations from that. One of the key things that I also think is super important is making sure that you work with your sales teams and to ensure that they have questions that are generating observations for you at scale so that you can also then take your sales conversations whether they're closed or not, to also garner more market observations. So I think there's a lot of different avenues. And the one thing that I would caution a lot of people is you want to look at a practice that is. So we have a framework at FYI where we call has to be practical and it has to be sustainable. And what I'm trying to say here is you have to be able to do it well and you have to be able to sustain that campaign or activity for a long period of time without taxing the resources of your organization unnecessarily. So if you think you have the capabilities of if you have mailchimp or if you have one of these platforms, you can, you can do surveys tomorrow, do it. That's easy. You're not taxing and you could probably do it well. If you don't have any email platform for whatever reason, I'm not judging you. You're going to have to send it from your Gmail account. That might not be practical, that might not necessarily be sustainable. So I really caution when I talk about these analytics Tool. One, I know they're expensive. Two, I know there's a learning curve. But three, you need to make sure you choose one that's practical and sustainable for you. Don't jump onto the shiny objects where you're like, oh, communities. It's like, yeah, but do you have a coordinator? Do you have someone who's going to manage that? Do you have someone who's going to program that? Don't jump onto the shiny object thing. Do what you can do to continue improving your marketing function. Don't jump on the shiny object, especially if you don't have the resources to do it for sure.

And maybe I'll just jump in there and give maybe one comment. From my perspective on this too is, you know, and I think you're being nicer about it than, than I would probably be. But guys, if you want to get into marketing and you want to start spending money on ads and getting in front of people, you need to track it. You know, again, failed, been there, failed, spent money wasn't generating returns. You need to be tracking this information. And if you don't have an email marketing system in place, you know, it's just another platform to constantly stay in front of your clients and keep engaged and connected with them, you know, and being able to see the analytics of whether or not they're enjoying what you're sending or not, whether they're opening it, whether they're ignoring you completely, whether your leads are coming in. Are your leads high quality, low quality, Are they fitting your, your target demographic or are they not? Does your copy need to change? Like, the more sophisticated you get into marketing and investing in marketing, the more you need these analytics because you can start spending a lot of money in getting this right. And if you want to grow and you want to build a big organization, you're going to need to get your marketing dialed in. And that's where Nathan and his team are like, they're top notch when it comes to this, this part of the world, right? And to, as an entry level in, to getting a team with high level expertise. It's hugely important. But you know, if you're starting to invest in the money to work with teams like Nathan's, you need to be able to invest in getting some of these analytic tools in place. I can tell you we spend a lot of time analyzing it because we don't want to spend money on ads and getting in front of people if it's not the right people. We all have a limited amount of time. So let's make sure that we're using our time and our resources effectively. So, Nathan, I love that as well.

And also one of the reasons, and I'm not pumping myself up, one of the reasons why you want to use us is I can help you find easy ways to get that data. And a good example is I was just listening to a jewelry store and they're like, we're going to do lab grown diamonds. I was like, why? They're like, margins are great. I was like, look, I know, Matt, margins are great, but where are you getting the data from? Like, what do you mean? I was like, why do you think anyone's buying this product? And they're like, well, why wouldn't they be buying it so much cheaper? I was like, that's your perspective. Can we just do a test? And they're like, how are you going to do a test? I was like, easy. I'm going to go on Marketplace right now and I'm going to post a bunch of these and I'm going to see if anyone buys it. And they're like, oh, that's a good idea. I was like, yeah, it's going to save you a lot of money. And now we're going to actually know if your price point and your product is even in demand. And so that's my job. Right. So my job is to help help these companies find answers and. And find cheap ways to get to those answers as well.

Yeah.

And.

And even to go back to one of your comments earlier, like, don't jump into the shiny object syndrome. Been there, done that. That we're on CRM platform. I'm going to say number, it's three, but it's technically four because we had two at once. And if you don't know, you don't know what you don't know. And so we were trying. I took the long route, which again, 16 years ago, Nathan, I wish I had met you. And it would have taken a lot of strain and a few wrinkles out of my life, but learning about a CRM platform, their. Their power, you know, the benefit of having one in place, which one's the best for you.

The.

The rule is it's kind of like it doesn't matter specifically. You just need the people who know how to use it and get the results that you want. Right. So it's there. Hopefully that's, you know, a couple months of stress out of your life. Just pick one, but have somebody who knows how to use it. And so we went through that and we. We failed. And, you know, we Couldn't find one because we didn't know how to use it properly. So obviously it was the system's fault, not our fault at the time. But then we. We brought somebody in house who. You're talking about all those specialized skills. I was very fortunate to find an extraordinary marketing person to bring in house. I can tell you, I protect her. She's my little unicorn. Because you're not typically going to find somebody who can do all of the things like Nathan's talking about. It's not typically somebody who can do it. I just found a chameleon who essentially was thrown in and had to learn all of these things in a small agency and she was moving out of a larger city and I scooped her up and so that doesn't happen. You know, the organizations like Nathan's have individuals who have all of those skill sets. So. So if she ever leaves me, which I hope never happens, Nathan, I will be giving you a call on that for sure. But you know, guys, it.

It is.

It's something where Nathan's talking about marketing strategy as a key starting point of finding out what your strategy is first. What are the outcomes you're trying to create? What are the means to get there? If you haven't had experience in marketing or testing out any of these things, it's going to take you a really long time to learn it. Find somebody who's been there, done that, knows how to get the outcomes that you want and work with them to do it. Otherwise you're going to spin your tires. And I don't know if you have any thoughts on that too, Nathan, but honestly, I've spent so much time in the past finding agencies or not working with agencies who knew how to get the outcomes that I wanted. Because I think I said to Nathan before we started, you know, everybody feels like they're a marketer, but, you know, a small percentage of those marketing professionals know how to do marketing, which is good. They're really just good at talking.

Yeah. And I think that's why we do well, because we've worked with so many different industries and so many different sized clients. You know, everything from like Constellation Software, largest B2B SaaS company in Canada, to Procom, largest IT recruiting company, Canada Firm X, the largest data room provider in Canada, to oligopolies where it's like they're the. They're one of four people that for some reason service all of the H VAC systems for every single ice rink. Like, don't ask me how I got into that business, but we were asked to consult for it. And what's really interesting is the one thing that I'll leave for a lot of, for the listening today is like the marketing approach is actually the same. So I think a lot of people don't see this. People think B2C and B2B are different. They are, but they're only different because of the constraint of the consumer. And the actual approach to marketing is always the same. How we look at, look at marketing should always be the same. And the way we look at marketing is always the same. And how we look at marketing is what is, what are your financial constraints, how much money do you have, what's your budget, how much human capital constraints do you have? Meaning, do you have the talent? Do we have the talent, do you have the talent to support whatever we plan to do that's going to attract that ideal customer profile properly? And three, what are your time constraints? And I know that's an ambiguous one, but. So I'll give you, I'll put, make this a bit more concrete. When the VC is breathing down your neck and you gotta produce, you got a short timeframe, so you gotta do short things that aren't necessary mid or long term in strategy. And when you look at all three of those and then you look at the constraints of your icp, what ends up happening is in the world of marketing, there is only a subset of tactics that you, you should prioritize. And what I mean by that is ultimately every single channel and every single tactic works for every single company. That's not the point. The point is, is what's going to drive the highest probability of results in the near term for you today because you have limitations, you have all these constraints. And that's what I mean by marketing is actually the same for every organization. But there's very few companies or even people as you've, you've recognized that actually have that skill set or that experience to navigate that well. And that's because when you're in an agency, you're lucky. You get to work with a lot of companies. But if you're a corporate marketer, you're very siloed. And you're siloed in a very specific ICP in a very specific organization. So you come out of that organization with a very thin slice of the marketing lens. And in the agency where you've been lucky, you get an individual who typically does have a pretty broad skillset. And if it's a small agency, hypothetically, they'd have a pretty high aptitude. Across those skill sets. But most people in agencies tend to be hyper specific in a tactical skill set. So then they're only good at that, but then they're good at that in multiple industries. So they can do investment banks, they can do financial services, they can do engineers, no problem. And so, you know, the, the resources and the, the talent pool and the perspectives, they're actually quite limited if you really think about it. So there's, there's no big four accounting firm for marketing. Right. There's no one that actually like pumps out auditors or like marketing people with these broad skill sets. So this, this profession in itself is actually quite isolated, which means there's actually very few people that actually have a lot of experience that are able to actually help a broad set of customers.

Absolutely. And just a quick note for everybody, side note, because I do want to ask you, Nathan, about what maybe some of the emerging trends are in marketing and consumer behavior and how that's being impacted right now. But before we jump into there, just a quick side note for everybody, when, when Nathan's talking about what are your constraints? When we talk about building businesses that have value and being able to drive a high, high sale price on an exit, one of the questions you have to ask yourself is if your business were to double in revenue tomorrow, would you be able to handle it? And ultimately, if you want to build a fast growing organization, you've got to figure out how you get your resources able to, to deliver on a higher volume. Because when you're looking at a potential buyer in your space, they will look at that and say, okay, there's opportunity for growth here. It's not going to take me reinventing the wheel to be able to start adding fuel to the fire. So quick side note on that, but back to you, Nathan. What are some of the emerging trends in marketing and the consumer behavior has changed? And I, you know, we see it over the last couple of years, since that nasty Covid situation in 2020, people have changed a little bit. What have you seen and what are some of the emerging trends where we can maybe get in front of people, create that trust factor, and maybe even help the lazy ones to engage with us a little bit more.

I love direct mail.

Interesting. Why?

Why I love direct mail because it's like fashion kind of just comes and goes sometimes. And I think a great example is, is that in order to generate an experience, in order to generate a memory, if you actually read memory books, one of the things that you want to do is you want to do something Outside of the expected normal. And the expected normal is an email, a call, a text, which are all very common things today in terms of how you want to message someone. Very rarely do you actually get direct mail anymore. Now, I'm not saying that direct mail is possible. So again, going back to constraints, a great example is general managers at hotels. They're on site 99% of the time. Government people, they're on site 99% of the Time. Salespeople. In any type of organization, you're probably going to get 50, 50 from remote and on site. So I'm not saying direct mail works everywhere, but I'm saying direct mail is a very interesting medium. It's also more interesting because generative AI is still going to have a hard time generatively trying to produce direct mail. It's, it's not, it's not there yet. So there's this ability for you to be differentiated, there's ability for you to be personalized, there's ability for you to do all these things, and more importantly, it's landing on their lap. So I love direct mail as a channel, but it's a very hard channel for a lot of organizations to scale. So I'm not saying that it's an easy thing. You're asking a trend. I'm saying I think this is a trend because I think it's an opportunity. I'm not saying it's easy to do. So I think that's an opportunity. The second thing that I think is going to become more and more important is probably primary research. I think with generative AI, what's going to end up happening is we're going to overly rely on meta analysis versus primary research. And that means that generative AI is going to accumulate all this data point and smash it into this beautiful white paper that you're producing. But it's not going to be primary data. So I think in the future, primary data and primary research is going to become more and more important, especially as we continue to rely on generative AI to generate insights. And so I think if you can find ways to generate primary research at scale, whether that's through surveys, whether that's through a research firm, I think you're going to have a bit of a content edge going forward because you'll be able to say, no, this isn't a meta analysis, this is an accumulation of secondary data. No, this is primary data. This is what we're seeing directly from the market. And I think that's going to be a very unique content edge in the future. The third thing that I do think that everyone should know, generative AI is going to change the way not only marketing does anything, but really anything else. And I've said this on a couple podcasts, I suspect that generative AI sooner or later will have paid search, which means you can then highlight and actually pay for keywords for you to rank on inside of the search engine, which I think is a very natural way for them to generate revenue. Deal.

Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't, I haven't heard that one before. I like it. Well, it makes sense, right? Definitely makes sense on the way things are going. One last question here for you. So if you're putting yourself in in the position of our audience again, business owners, entrepreneurs who are looking to grow growth, mindset, let's say they haven't got a, a marketing strategy in place, what would be the first thing that you would tell them to do? What's the first step that they should take in order to start getting their ducks in a row related to a marketing strategy?

I have this so. So this is based on something called the zero moment of truth, which is a Google term, which is basically when a user goes through their journey and then it's the moment where they go from hey, I want to buy this. And in FY we call it the Journey from 0 to 100. And really it's a very simple exercise which I feel like a lot of people just don't do. And it's purely an anecdotal exercise. Don't make the scientific, don't be perfectionist, sit down and just imagine one of your current customers, you can call them if you'd like, or just a fictitious customer and just ask them what are all the touch points you think this individual gets in order to come to their decision and anecdotally place weights on them. So visiting your website, getting a phone call from you, watching a YouTube review, reading something on Reddit, going on product hunt, seeing a review website, just be anecdotal, imagine yourself in their shoes and you are going through this experience and place a weight on that. And then when you're done, and then they finally get to the point where they want to purchase, ask yourself, which one of these touch points can you do at scale within your organization today? That's where you're going to want to focus on. If you have no resources and you're super tight, that's where you want to focus on. So that might be your LinkedIn post, that might be Twitter, that might be you getting on all these review websites because it's low touch, low resources, little bit up front of our investment. That might be Google Ads. Whatever it is, whatever you can do, that's going to be your North Star. And that's a great way for you to start figuring out am I wasting my time on things that one I can't do well and I can't sustain? And do I even think that it actually pushes the needle? If it doesn't push the needle, you shouldn't be doing it. That's why I say Omnichannel is important. You want to be on Reddit, you want to be on Reviews, you want to be on Quora, you want to be on Pinterest, you want to be on Google. They all impact, but how much? And so the goal is, is like, it's like the 80, 20 rule. You want to focus on the 20% that's pushing them that 80 points. And if you don't, then you need to question why are you doing it? Because you might be spinning your wheels on something that's just not really worth your time.

Nathan, that was awesome and this whole conversation has been incredible and I hope it's. I know. I'm confident it's going to have a huge impact on our audience. Nathan, if someone were to be looking, and I don't even know that you've shared the name of your company, which is find your audience throughout this, but if someone was looking to work with you or to, to reach out to you, connect with you, learn how maybe you could support them, what's the best way for them to find you?

They can go onto our website and like every other company, we have a calendly link for you to book a meeting with me for a discovery call, or you can just find me on LinkedIn, send me a message. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so, so happy to communicate there as well. And you can learn about me on LinkedIn because I'm posting my, my little consumer psychology shorts almost every single day, but those would probably be the two easiest places. And then, and hopefully maybe sometime you'll see me on Amazon selling a book.

Absolutely. And when is that book expected to come out?

I am hoping for the end of this year. And I say that with some trepidations because I've gone through now multiple review cycles and I'm feeling the same distaste for writing this book as I did last year as I left it for a year on my shelf. And I find that's what happens when you write a book, you fall in love with it. For a little bit and then you really dislike it.

Yeah, you love the idea of it for sure, from the beginning and then the process defeats you 100%. I can, I can, I can vouch for that. Nathan, this has been incredible, guys. This is the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. I hope you've enjoyed this, Nathan. You've been a fantastic guest sharing your insights today. For those of you who are listening, make sure you drop in any comments, any questions. We'll make sure that we answer them. We're here to support you along your journey, make sure that you like and follow our podcast because if you don't, you'll miss out on on opportunities to hear great guests like Nathan come in and share their insights on how you can change your marketing world and how, in fact, you might be able to find someone who can do a lot of that marketing legwork for you and help support you with your business growth. If you know somebody who would benefit from the information and the knowledge that's been shared today, please share it with them. We're on a mission to empower entrepreneurs to change the world. And the more insights and the more support we can provide to this community, the greater opportunity we're going to have to be able to do that. Nathan, thank you once again for joining me today. And for everyone else, this is the Wealthy Entrepreneur. Thanks for joining us. Can't wait to see you again next week.