Mind-Blowing Marketing Secrets Revealed for 2024 | Ep. 2589

All right, so we're going to talk about marketing secrets for 2024 because we're already in Q4. Might as well go into the new year. Times are getting tougher, marketing is getting harder, and let's do it.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. So in 2024, what are you doing that you think is going to be revolutionary and different?

I don't know if it's revolutionary. I certainly think more people will be doing it. I'm doing it right now. We've been talking about this. It's the the element of programmatic SEO and AI-enhanced content. And so, for example, this podcast that we're doing right now, we're driving more and more traffic because we're talking about trending topics on the podcast side of things.

Yeah.

But how is this translating over into Google, like for our blog? And so what we're doing is we're just taking the content, we're taking a transcription, and then we're having ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, create a blog post from it. We're analyzing to make sure it's not duplicate. We're layering on content. We're fact-checking it, we're adding links and all that type of stuff, right? So that's— I'll start with the basics. Like, that's the first piece. The second piece is, uh, programmatic SEO. So again, we've talked about this HubSpot versus Salesforce pages. HubSpot, um, let me back up a second. If you're HubSpot, you're looking to create hundreds and thousands of these permutations where you want to have HubSpot alternatives, you want to cover HubSpot versus Salesforce, all these keywords, right? And you can now do this. What was limited before because of dev resources and design resources, it's now more available to people. I would start with that. And you know what else we're doing? Did I show you the dubbed version of our podcast where we're speaking in Portuguese?

No, but we're doing the same thing in all major languages.

And we sound damn good. Yeah.

The problem is with the dubbed versions from our tests, we can't get the mouth to align with the speech. That's the only problem. And we wish the AI solutions out there could fix that.

They'll get there. I mean, it's—

I think it'll take time. That's one thing that we're doing. We're testing that with all our major videos. Because what we were doing is we were actually paying people to manually do this. And some countries, believe it or not, were a big miss and some were a hit. And it was just random on which videos and which countries were getting the views and not. So we just started using technology to just do it in mass scale. The other thing we've been doing and testing—

You just gave me an idea. So editors, we need to make the Marketing School Podcast into separate podcasts in different languages. That will work. Audio only.

Yes. And then you don't have to worry about the dubbing. The other thing that we've been testing a lot with is AMP emails. So you're familiar with AMP, the technology? Have you been using AMP emails?

AMP emails? No, like the— oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't been using them, but I know what you're talking about.

So with AMP emails, you can do a lot of cool stuff within your email. So for example, let's say you're an e-commerce site and you're selling t-shirts. Typically you may send out an email blast selling t-shirts and then you're saying, hey, click here to go to the website and buy it. But now within the email you can say, here are all the color variations and assume like you can pick from dropdowns. And then you can also say what size and you can purchase right then and there in the email and pay and get it shipped to you without actually leaving Outlook or Gmail or whatever you're using. And we've seen a big hit or miss right now in which we're doing a lot of tests with AMP-based emails. And the struggle that we're facing is we are seeing the deliverability not be as good, but for the people that are getting the emails versus it going into like the other inbox or promotions tab, we're seeing the conversions better. But the downside is we're seeing the deliverability just not as great or the— deliverability is the wrong word. the placement, like in the inbox versus like the promotions tab, not as good as text-based emails. So it's just trying to find the right balance and we haven't cracked it yet, but we know we can get the AMP emails to convert better if we can get the placement in the inbox and making sure that the deliverability is great compared to text-based emails.

We should talk about LinkedIn for a second too, because what we're doing with LinkedIn, we're using the influencer ads, you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

So whatever's performing, whatever's relevant, where I might be talking about new marketing secrets, where there's good engagement, We'll just run ads towards that, and we will run ads targeting. We'll be retargeting visitors from our website, maybe people that have stayed for over a minute or so, or people that are visiting our services pages because we're an agency. So that's that's cool. Like there are these new ad formats for LinkedIn, but LinkedIn just announced something recently. I don't know if you saw it, but it's basically like hey, just put in a URL and we will figure out the targeting for you. We'll create the creatives for you, and we'll basically just start creating the ads for you. And I think a lot of these ad platforms. are going to start to move in that direction more, where it's more like, just put in the URL and we'll try to do 90% of the work for you.

Yeah, but what they'll find is it doesn't do an efficient job of optimizing their spend.

We'll see. I mean, maybe it's optimizing to get them to spend, but it's called AI LinkedIn ads. That's what it's called.

Yeah, look, I can see a lot of companies using it. I don't see the ROI being as good as having humans go in there and just test a lot of different ads.

I don't know though, because I've heard— you might have heard the same thing, but I've heard from people that When they're running like Google Performance Max as an example, they just leave it on for a while. And then now the new paradigm shift, which we've talked about, is it's not about optimizing all the time. It's just kind of letting the AI do its work. And I think, I don't think it's quite there yet to your point, but I think in the next couple years it might start to trend more towards that.

Hopefully it would make life a lot easier, but I just don't see it there because the incentives are a lot, are misaligned. If you look at, So like I've met up with—

Accelerate, that's what it's called, by the way, everybody.

I've met up with Google, Bing, Facebook, a lot of the people that work at these companies, and they'll meet with a lot of their large spenders. So I've been at those lunches or dinners, and their job is to just try to convince you to spend more so that way it can help them hit their numbers. And a lot of times it's just the incentives aren't aligned. It's not a win-win. Their goal is to get you to spend more. Your goal is to, Spend less and generate more sales. And I'm not saying that their campaigns using Performance Max or anything don't help. They're great. We just find a combination of that with humans performs better than just letting them have free rein.

Yeah, I think, you know, with, with the AI stuff, it's— there's been these case studies where it shows that an AI alone is not going to outperform a human, but a human plus AI, if you already know how to use it, it's going to be better. And I think there should be, the human should be verifying. They should be trusting, but they should also be verifying as well.

Yeah. So try out some of the stuff that Eric and I were talking about. Another thing that we're trying to do right now is, this is kind of marketing, this is kind of like biz dev, in which a lot of companies speak at conferences. It's a great way to get your brand out there. You know, I told you this in the past, I used to charge an arm and a leg for speaking. Sometimes I still charge, but typically what we've been doing is barter deals. We say, we don't want to charge to speak. We want you to set us up with meetings for your ideal, your best attendees that would be ideal customers for us. And we've been finding that to be a super effective marketing strategy because A, they hear us speak, and then B, we get a one-on-one meeting with them and we try to close them.

So what do you talk about? With them in those one-on-one meetings? You've told me about this, but I just want the audience to know.

Yeah, so we try to figure out what their problems are, and where they're struggling, and where they see opportunities. And we discuss where we see opportunities. We do our homework before the meeting. And then we try to figure out ways to expand or start the relationship, typically start off small, and then expand from there.

And there are situations where— I spoke at a SaaS conference last year where they'll give us the leads, and then you just have your salespeople reach out to all of them and say, hey, Oh, by the way, I don't know if you missed Neil's talk or Eric's talk or whatever. Here are the slides. And by the way, if you need help with this— it actually helps with booking meetings. And I'm surprised at how many bookings it leads to.

It generates a lot of bookings. And we find it to generate a lot of revenue as long as you're patient and you're willing to do the follow-up. Most people aren't willing to do the follow-up.

Yep. So OK, what else is there before we go? By the way, we're trying to do these longer episodes. Let us know if you like these longer ones because we're in person right now, for those of you that aren't watching. What is old? So we're talking about secrets here, right, for 2024, but let's talk about the old secrets that people don't really use. Like for example, webinars still work really well. Depends if you're B2B or not, but they crush it still.

Even B2C, we see that work really well. What we also found too is in marketing, people were selling like a lot of high-ticket offers. We're finding it to perform much better if you sell lower-ticket offers in quantity. Through webinars at least, because you brought that up, versus selling higher ticket. Like everyone was like, oh, let me sell a $1,000 course, a $3,000 course, or $5,000 or $10,000. We're finding it that people are performing better when they're like, let me give away a lot more for free or make it dirt cheap. Kind of like what Alex Hormozi did with his book launch. I forgot what the book was.

$100 Million Leads.

$100 Million Leads, yeah. So that worked out really well for him. I don't know how many people he had live, but it was something ridiculous.

Yeah. And that's the other thing. It's like, how do you go— going back to, I mean, his first book, right? $100 Million Offers. At the end of the day, marketing 101 is how good is your offer? Because that's going to decrease your CPA. That's going to make things good across the board. And by the way, if your offer is so good, people are going to talk about it too. So it kind of helps from a word of mouth slash branding standpoint as well.

Yeah. And the other thing that we're doing on an SEO standpoint, I know you talked a little about this, about creating like the HubSpot versus Salesforce pages. We still see the biggest traffic gains in SEO for at least businesses that are established being updating content versus writing new content. And AI writing new content, it just doesn't perform that well. But AI updating old content, we're finding it to work really well and we're seeing some nice traffic lifts. Not anything crazy like 20, 30% gains on the pages that we're writing, but we're seeing single-digit lifts like 6, 7, 8%. Across the board.

What of— OK, let's say you produce 1,000 new articles a month, right? What percent of those would be updates?

Like 98%.

OK, yeah. So that's a lot, right? And I do think we're actually trying to reallocate our new content budget just strictly to updating, because we're already doing the programmatic piece already. The new content comes from this stuff that we talk about or my YouTube videos. And so we don't need full, in-depth writers anymore.

It's a Wikipedia model. Wikipedia is out there just trying to create a ton of new pages. Wikipedia ranks for everything because they keep updating their old pages.

Yeah. So look, those are a couple of things that you can do. Um, that just for starters, your offer matters a lot. Updating your content matters a lot too. And what else are we missing? I mean, look, we've talked about how like email newsletters are like this, this best thing since sliced bread. I talked to a guy recently, he spends like $800,000 a month just buying ads to get more emails. And his business does about $20 million a year. And, um, it's just a newsletter business and I'm oversimplifying it, but like— I think we have another mutual friend.

What kind of newsletter?

It's like The Hustle, or Morning Brew, that type. And then I have another friend, his newsletter, $30 million a year, right? And so it's like, these are great businesses, but for us, what we would do— Neil's actually got a pretty good newsletter. Our newsletter's gotten pretty good with our NPS scores. That's our way of building relationships. And then down the road, we can have ads in there saying, hey, book a call with us, or whatever. Neil does a lot of webinars. He'd book a call. For us, we just put ads inside of our Leveling Up newsletter. And, um, that works out well. So what's old becomes new again.

Cool.

Alright, so that's it for today. Let us know if you like this longer version. Uh, we worked very hard on it. So, uh, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And if you're watching on YouTube, check out this next video over here, and we'll see you tomorrow.