Why To Never Jump On "New" Marketing Channels

Dude, I constantly get people sending me more and more marketing channels. Like some of the other days—

Remember I told you to join Clubhouse?

Yeah. And I didn't want to. And then some of the other days it's like, uh, BeReal now has X amount of active monthly users. It's time to get on.

I still don't know what BeReal is.

Yeah. And I was like, no, it's okay. I don't need to read this TechCrunch article. I'm not joining BeReal. And the same thing with like ChatGPT when it first came out. I was getting so many people being like, dude, you need to market on ChatGPT. It's amazing. There's so much revenue to be had. We now at this point know there's ChatGPT is here to stay. But when you look at the reality is there's too many companies that release new platforms and most of them don't do much. And even the ones that get traction, let's call it like Reddit. I would say Reddit has gotten a lot of traction. It's a, I haven't checked their stock recently, but before all this swings in the market.

Yeah, I'll check for you.

Neil's about to bring his iPad. It was like a $9, $10 billion market cap. It was somewhere around there.

Yeah.

So I don't know what it is today, but call it $8 to $9 billion.

$18.

$18?

Yeah.

Oh wow. It's quite high, higher than I thought.

Yep.

I always thought it was like around $10 billion market cap, but that could have been when they went public.

Down 39% year to date.

All right. So when you look at Reddit, $18 is what you're saying?

$18 billion market cap.

Okay. So at $18 billion market cap, everyone's like, even Reddit, oh, it's amazing. It's a big channel. You don't need Reddit in the mix to build a successful business. You need Google, you need Facebook, which Meta, which includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, depending on the industry, sure. Pinterest, depending on the industry. Reddit can help, Snap can help, but it's really Google. If you look at the big ad players, it's Google, Meta, and Amazon in that order that drive volume. And Amazon's not just for people selling products. I'm also talking about Prime ads. You can do a lot of damage with Prime ads. Just, I don't know why a lot of people don't leverage Prime for advertising yet. And this is like, just stick to the basics, double down on them. And then if a channel like ChatGPT starts becoming more and more popular and you know it's here to stay, then double down on it, go after it, right? Enter into it. Because at that point, it's not like all your competitors are using it. Big companies take a long time to adapt. Small startups may be earlier than you on pushing on a channel, but they don't have the resources and the budget to really go hard on a channel.

I think a lot of marketers make a mistake where they try to do too many things at once, and they also include all the newest channels, and then they end up being average at everything, not even average, probably below average at everything. And so I like to dabble. Sure, I'll tell Neil, oh, check out Clubhouse. That didn't work out. I just, hey, hey, Neil, check out AirOps, right? But that in my face.

Air Ops.

Remember Air Ops? A little chat thing. It was like that even lasts for like a week or two. That was like Naval's app, remember?

Oh yeah.

And Brian, Brian from Norgaard. Yeah, yeah. I like trying these things and playing around with them. But how I typically am though is I'm not the first wave. Like if it's D-Day, I'm not the first boat that pulls up, right? I'm probably like the fourth or fifth wave that comes in, right? Maybe that's a crude analogy, but my point— that's a crude analogy, but my point is You don't want to generally be the first round, especially when it comes to stuff like this, because you don't know how it's going to turn out. So try to not necessarily be the early adopter, early, early adopter, just be the early adopter. And even then you should focus on what's already working well for you, because I guarantee you, you haven't saturated your channels, like your main channel. Most of the time people, before they saturate their main channel, they try to do 10 different things at once.

Yeah. And for me, I'm not the first wave. I'm not the fourth wave. I'm probably like the 15th.

Yeah. And Neil's coming out on a plane after.

Yeah, you're right. I'm not even coming on a boat. Once planes can start flying, I'll be there. But the key is when planes start flying, I take the first flight. Because at that point I know it's commercialized and I push hard and I just, I try to win by spending more time and money to make up for the lag.

My observation of Neil is he thinks like an investor here. And oftentimes— not oftentimes— what really matters in investing is slugging percentage, meaning that how often you hit grand slams, right? It's your bet sizing that matters, right? So that's why when Scott Bessent, our Treasury Secretary, got involved with the Bank of England, the— I think the pound, right? And Soros was like, oh, you're only going to bet 100% of the fund?

Like, no. He said, how much do you want to bet?

How much you want to bet? And they said 100%.

Yeah.

And he's like, why not 200%? Right? Why not lever up and do this? And I think they levered up. And so I, when Neil bets, he does bet hard. I'm not going to say on what, but he does bet hard on marketing in general. But that's, that's how you have to think about it. Like if you find something amazing, bet hard. So. Yeah.

Like when we're redoing our blog right now, and I don't know what my internal costs are, but let's call it like $30 grand a month. And I'm starting to see traction. And I was like, Huh, I got 2,000+ blog articles just in English. I don't know how many are in total on the blog between all the other languages. Let's call it like 8,000 or 10,000. I'm making up that number. I do know I have over 2,000+ in English. And I was just telling the team, I'm like, so what happens if I spend $500,000 in 3 months? I'm like, can we handle the volume of work that needs to be done for me to spend $500,000? And they look at me and they're just like, you're crazy. But the moment I know I can get something to work, it's pretty much, I just go all in and I spend the max amount of money I can.

Yeah. And the thing is, it's crazy to most people, but if you know the numbers, it's not crazy.

Correct. Because I'm just doing a calculation. How much is each visitor worth? How many visitors turn into leads? How many leads turn into calls? How many calls turn into pitches? How many pitches turn into revenue? And, you know, people will tell me, I'll get people playing the devil's advocate. Well, Google just did a massive change to the algorithm. If you look at their algorithm, there's more AI overviews. And they're like, well, what happens if they keep going in this direction? I'm like, yeah, I don't care. I'll get mentioned more in the AI overviews. It'll be branding, more top of funnel. I bet you it'll still work out. And they're like, why? And I'm like, if you look at what's happened since the last update, a lot of players in the B2B, because we have access to a lot of data, Their traffic has dropped, but their lead count has not dropped.

Yeah. Right?

So they're still getting brand recognition. They're losing some top of funnel brand awareness, but they are getting some brand awareness from the mentions in the AI overviews. But their middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel is still kicking in and they're still generating leads. And I was like, yeah, I'm okay. Let's place the bet. And they're like, you sure? I'm like, yeah, I'm ready to go. I don't care to have this discussion again. The next call we have, I want to know how much can I spend as quick as possible? And this was literally happening today. And like, oh cool, when do you want to schedule for? I'm like, Monday at the latest. Yeah, that's fine. You know, I was being nice.

Yeah.

Because I'm not going to tell people work on a Sunday.

Yeah.

Because there's too many people involved. They're like, Monday morning?

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They're like, cool, sounds good. Like, we'll gather the data and we should have it ready for you on Saturday or Sunday. Because when I do calls with my team, I don't like showing up to a call and then getting a presentation and then review it there. I want to review the data prior to the call. And then everyone comes and discuss, what do we see wrong with the plan? How do we need to adjust? What are some holes? So then that way we're spending time on execution, being productive versus wasting 30, 40 minutes on everyone going over a plan that they should have went on their own time and then having to do another call to go over the execution side.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.