Ryan Deiss - Trends To Watch In The Digital Marketing World

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my.

Boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back.

Bueno, Bueno.

Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. We're back. I'm Matt Wolf. I'm here with my co host, Joe Fear.

Correct.

I feel like we don't introduce each other enough.

That's a good point.

We kind of stop.

Is that not the profession, like, I guess we're just not professional podcasters.

We kind of stopped doing that.

Hmm. Did we ever do it?

Yeah, early on, we used to do it. I used to be like, hey, my name is Matt. And you'd go, and I'm Joe.

And I'm Joe.

You're listening, too.

Yeah, I guess it's cheesy. Yeah, it's a little cheesy. It's okay. You're cheesy. So we just go along with it. Yeah, it's fine. But today we're not going to feel too. Well, it's cheesy, but not too cheesy. With this intro, it seems like we're making it slightly cheesy. It's a good mix.

Yeah. We're being professional right now. This is our professional intro.

Professional look. Yes. All right, Today we got a very special guest, and a lot of y' all probably know him, his company or his name or his business partners who've been on here. It's Ryan Deiss, CEO and founder of Digital Marketer.

Yeah.

And, you know, we got Traffic and Conversion Summit. That happens every year now. It's going to be happening more often in other places is what they're basically announcing. So, you know, Roland has been on the show. He's a partner. So as Richard was on the show pretty recently.

Yeah. Haven't gotten Perry Belcher yet. Perry, we're coming for you.

No, it's really cool because every single one of the founders are the partners. There all have a different perspective. They all have a different angle and, you know, role in the business. And it's just really cool to get Ryan here to see. And he's always been, you know, like a trend spotter.

Yeah.

And we were talking about that. Let's see.

It's interesting. So. So we spoke at War Room a couple months ago. Um, Joe said it was last month, and Ryan corrected him and said it was a couple months ago.

I believe him.

But we spoke at War Room, and on stage, we were standing next to Ryan, and Ryan made a comment about how he doesn't like going on podcasts. And so Immediately after he got off stage, we went up to him and said, hey, I know you don't like going on podcasts, but come on ours.

And he graciously agreed. And at the end I asked him if he had a good time and he said yes. So successful. Thank you, Ryan.

But so one of the things that we really love about Ryan is every year at Traffic Conversion, his opening keynote is sort of the evolution of digital marketing. He kind of talks about where we came from and where we're going with digital marketing, and he kind of makes some predictions of where it's going. And that's actually always one of our favorite sessions in traffic and Conversion because we're always trying to look ahead at what's coming. And Ryan's doing the same thing. And so that's just the thing that really resonates with us. So we wanted to take this episode in that direction. We wanted to sort of look at the future of marketing. You know, Ryan tells an amazing sort of like history lesson of digital marketing and how it got to where it is today. And then we kind of dive deeper into where it's going and what the next steps are and what things you should be paying attention to and where to focus your digital marketing attention on next.

Yeah, and that was a mouthful. It was good. You summed up the whole freaking podcast pretty well.

Yeah, I mean, I just. It's one of my favorite things about Ryan is that he is kind of always looking into the future. And that's what I wanted to dive in on in this episode.

Yeah, yeah. He's a strategic mind. He's a planner and he runs the show at Digital Marketer and as do the other guys too. You know, Richard, you'll hear is also, you know, it's like the two of them are kind of the day to day guys driving this business forward. And to hear more of the, I guess the weeds of the operations and how structure works and all that stuff, Richard actually was on the show. He's also a co founder of Digital Marketer. And great episode if you want to dig into that aspect of it. And this is a great aspect of Ryan, who is that strategic planner. He's definitely the face, more so the face of the company than the other guys on the team there. And it's just fascinating to hear because they have a big team. They're constantly on the cusp of everything. They're growing in audience in all different fields. Like Ryan explains on here of how tnc, the event itself has morphed over the years. And yeah, it's just really cool. And then he also talks about the stuff they're focusing on right now to keep moving forward and be ahead of all the others that are maybe missing this. Maybe they're just not aware.

And we cover a lot with Ryan. There's a lot of ground where we're telling the story and we're looking at what's coming. And you may not be able to take notes on this right now. You might be driving in your car.

Why would you want to take notes?

Or washing your dishes? I used to listen to podcasts while washing my dishes.

I do that most mornings.

Yeah. So you probably may not. You probably may not be in a position that doesn't sound like proper grammar. You're probably not in a position to be taking notes. But we got you covered. We take the notes for you. Go to hustle and flowchart.com comp c o m P. That's where you can get the notes to this episode. They're live for like a week after the episode comes out. And then they come down and get locked away in our vault. You know, go get them before that happens. So go to hustle and flowchart.com computer.

And, you know, there is a way you can get keys to that vault, actually, and it's in the form of supporting this show to keep bringing on amazing guests of, you know, Ryan's caliber and all the other folks that we've had on. We got big plans for the show. I swear we're pumping some money into getting this thing in more hands, in more earbuds. But yeah, go to egplettter.com and you'll see where we actually distill basically all these notes and a lot of other goodies. Things like the behind the scenes, we have a whole community. You get access to a bunch of backlogs to interviews and other things that we've given out there to the whole members. It's really cool. So basically it's super low barrier to entry. Not much to it. And it's just our form of. It's basically an action guide. So if you want to just hit the ground running, stay up with the latest and everything that we're testing and who we're talking to. Egplettter.com is the place to get it.

Yep. And to get those notes for this episode again, hustleandflowchart.com comp let's go talk to Ryan Dice.

Let's do it.

Co founder and CEO of Digital marketer Bam.

Hey, Ryan. Welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. Glad we were finally able to connect and make this happen.

Yeah, yeah. No, it all. We connected out there at War Room. I think it was like a month ago out the montage in Beverly Hills and Amazing event.

I think it was like two months ago.

Was it now?

Thank you.

It's like a time warp.

This is like. This is how it works. Right? It's the time you get older and it starts moving faster. It's not there. I get gray hair. Times moving fast.

I'm yelling at clouds.

So one of the things we like to do with our podcast, too, is sometimes we'll crowdsource questions and ask people what they want us to ask. And one of them that came up, somebody suggested we ask. So, Ryan, the Internet thoughts.

The Internet in general, that is my favorite question. I think it's good. I think it's probably.

I'm pro.

I'm very much pro Internet. I think it's generally here to stay. Yeah, we'll see. I think. Yeah. But in general, go Internet. I'm very much in favor of it.

Bullish on the Internet. Okay.

Yeah. That was from our buddy, actually, Brad Costanzo asked us to ask. He said that was a war room kind of inside joke for a bit.

So. Yeah, no, it's healthy. I'll give you just a brief. There's more backstory to it, but it is always fun when I speak at conferences or people come. You know, people come up to me afterwards, and I can tell they have bad. Because I can tell they had a really good question.

Yeah.

And then, you know, they'll kind of get there and they'll just go blank. Yeah, it's like. So the autoresponder and the. And the, you know, just the Internet. Your thoughts, and it's basically what it turns into.

Well, you guys aren't chucking.

Yeah, yeah, it's happened a lot, so it's kind of become a running joke.

Yeah, man. So, yeah. So you guys. I mean, it's pretty known that you guys run amazing events and just everything you do out there. Where are you in Austin right now? Right. You're actually at the home base.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

In Austin. At the digital marketer headquarters. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah, we just see Roland and, you know, the whole crew just traveling the world. It seems like just doing. Doing deals everywhere, and it's just amazing, the growth and, you know, it just seems to be a lot at a higher, quicker pace now than it was in the past. So it's really fascinating to watch what you guys are doing. With TNC and War Room and all these other assets that you have. Yeah.

And I think, I'm not sure, but I think we've been to every Traffic and Conversion Summit since the beginning.

Let's just say we did.

I think literally TNC1, the first one was like 289 people in Austin, Texas.

Yeah, yeah.

We were in, I mean, we went to a few in Austin.

Uh huh.

I think there was two or three in Austin before it went to San Francisco and then San Diego is where it's been after that. I think we've been. Yeah, yeah.

Three and three in Austin, one in San Francisco and six in San Diego. If you, if you went to three in Austin and wow, that's. You should probably get a trophy or something like that. We'll see what we can do.

It's definitely quite a different event now than it was back in the first couple.

It is.

I mean, yeah, it's fundamentally Traffic Conversion Summit is a different event now. And it's because, you know, marketing as a whole is different now than it was 10 years ago. I remember telling people that I did Internet marketing or digital marketing and the assumption was that you either, best case scenario, they thought you sold something on ebay. Worst case scenario, they assumed that you were just a spammer. Now it's a thing, it's a profession. Whereas back then it was basically all entrepreneurs because they were the only ones who were doing digital marketing. Now it's large companies, it's Fortune 500s that are sending their people out to it.

It's a cool mix. I like that we haven't gone corporate, so to speak. Like a lot of events have. Like, we've always kind of wanted to sort of maintain that entrepreneurial spirit, that grittiness. And so it's been cool that to see folks like yourselves who have been coming out to the event for 10 years and still find reasons to come back. And then we also have marketing teams from like Costco and Southwest Airlines, companies like that coming out. So it's fun. I mean, it's neat. It's been fun to watch this industry as a whole evolve.

Yeah. I'm curious, was that like a methodical, like planned out thing? Did you, were you setting out to evolve that, that audience? Did you decide. Let me rephrase this. Was there a time where you decided, okay, this is who our audience is, let's, let's go after this audience instead? Or was that just kind of like an evolutionary thing and that's just how it played out?

I think it was a Little bit of both. You know, it's always nice when you, when you have the benefit of hindsight to then decide all the things that you intended to do. So this is probably a bit of revisionist history, but no, I mean, I absolutely do remember.

In, you know, thinking in about 2012, right when everybody and their dog was out there talking about this different marketing tactic and the strategy and you know, there was a different guru every day launching a different seeming like $2,000 training. And I just remember thinking like, this isn't going to last. This idea of.

That there's always going to be something new to talk about and that people are always going to be willing to pay for this. It's not going to be a thing. Digital marketing almost turned into this business opportunity kind of weird stuff. And I just knew, I was like, this isn't going to last. It doesn't feel good, it's not going to last. It's not a business model that I necessarily want to be a part of who is going to need this information.

In the future. And decided then that digital marketing was becoming a profession. And so we really wanted to be kind of the definitive source for digital marketing. So not for entrepreneurship, not for how to start a business on the Internet, which everything was. And so it was back in about 2012 when we first started talking about making that pivot. It became very real in 2014 when we said, we're no longer going to tell anybody how to start anything. We're not going to tell somebody, here's how you launch a business online, here's how you start a business online. We're going to tell people, here's how you market your product. The underlying, Starting in 2014, we made the decision, the underlying assumption is that the people we are serving already have a product or service to sell. They just want to know how to leverage digital to sell more of it. So that decision was absolutely made in 2014. We planted a flag. And I know, I mean, I'm sure there's still people who invest in our, in our products today who don't yet have a product service sell. They're still in that ideation phase. But if our message is resonating with them, then I believe they're the types of people who will build that, you know, they're getting training in advance of a launch, they're getting training in advance of, you know, finding product market fit or building that mdp. That's great. Those folks I want absolutely thousand percent not opposed to entrepreneurs by any stretch of the imagination. I just Want to make sure that it's real entrepreneurs and not merely entrepreneurs. I don't just want to make money and build a business or a brand around people who, you know, like the idea of maybe just possibly one day starting a business. I want to serve those who they're already serving other people and they just want to be able to expand that. And so, yeah, 2014, absolutely. That's when we launched the lab product. That's when the tone at Traffic and Conversion Summit changed. All those things. It was intentional.

It was intentional. Yeah. All the strategies. Just even talking about how you build out the customer journey. I know you have that chart. I think it's called the value journey worksheet. I believe I got that right. And just that knowledge alone, knowing how to walk someone through where they're at in this customer journey and the value and what you should, the messaging and the products, if there are products at that stage, that could be applied all over the place. And we kind of always thought that with all these tactics, think about the rest of the world. There's so much untapped potential out there. Like you said, Southwest and other large companies coming in there now, their teams are taking that into their organizations. And it's fascinating to see that evolution happen from just an attendee point of view because it's very apparent and it's actually working because it seems like the strategies are becoming more prolific all over the place.

So it's probably, yeah, what was amazing. It worked out. Yeah. I mean, to your point, when we said, okay, we're going to serve those who already have a product or service and we're not going to tell people how to start an online business. Now all of a sudden that's kind of when we realized we need to come up with strategies that will be universally applicable. And that's when we realized, gosh, digital marketing is not just for digital businesses. It's not just for digital. First brand, like every company today, needs to figure out how to market online. While I think Google put out this stat, still Today only like 6 or 7% of all retail transactions happen online. Realize that still over 90% of retail transactions, the point of sale actually occurs in the physical space. So yeah, there's been dramatic expansion in online retail, obviously. And will that grow? Yeah. But still the vast majority of discretionary income is spent within a 5 to 10 mile radius of the home. That's just still the reality that. But with that reality still being there, 96%, 96% of all purchasing decisions start online. So people will research online they go buy in store. And so even if you're brick and mortar, digital still applies to you. And obviously if you're a digital first company, it applies to you. So I think by changing our messaging, we benefited not only from larger companies who have more marketers on their team, so they're sending, yeah, multiple people to our events, buying multiple seat licenses to our subscription programs. There's just a lot more of them. There's just a whole, whole, whole lot more of them. There's 5.91 million businesses in the US alone with between 2 and 100 employees. That's a ton of companies. So that's, you know, the opportunity. We realized that digital marketing, you know, Internet marketing, that is not a business model. Right? It's just marketing. It's just business. It's how we do business today. It's how it happens. So now our audience is everybody. It's not just people who want to go online. Everybody made a huge difference. And I do think from entrepreneurs, if you're listening, like, don't paint yourself into a really small corner. You know, think about, like, have you, you know, have you positioned. I remember people who were, you know, they refer to themselves as information marketers. I remember hating that term. You know, one of my business idols, Dan Kennedy, kind of coined the term. I hated it. It's like, what's an information marketer? Like, I don't know any information marketers that are billion dollar companies. What about just saying, I'm in publishing. You know, there's billion dollar publishing companies, like, why can't it be a publishing company? You know, companies like, oh, I'm a blogger. Why can't you be a media publisher? Be a digital media. But like, that's a thing. So just words matter, language matters. Yes, it's strategy, but it's also mindset and what you call things matters. So just be careful about the category you're putting your business in.

Yeah, no, that's exactly a preacher they acquire. And that's why we've always had kind of a. Well, not always, but lately more and more is getting away from, you know, info products as being that's the source of our value. Whereas the podcast is how we choose to give our best stuff away for free to everyone who's out there. They do have the choice to go deeper down the rabbit hole if they wish to. But yeah, there's just, it's interesting, it's an evolution and the way that we look at our company, it's more of a media company, like you said. And there's all these different verticals, assets. And I know we learned a lot from you guys. Roland getting kind of mentored and just meeting up with him and just the way that you guys think there's a lot to learn from from there, just structure wise and how you kind of position yourself, that opens up so many other opportunities as well.

Yeah. I'm actually blown away by the fact that so much, so much sales still happen offline because I live so much in my own little bubble and I don't even go to the store to buy groceries anymore. I have those delivered. So, like, that's just crazy to me that there's still that many people going to stores. I need to get out of my own echo chamber.

Yeah. And that stat's a couple years old. Right. So maybe, you know, maybe, maybe at this point, you know, it's doubled. Right. And so. But still, that's 80%. Right. I mean, the reality is most human beings still get in their car and they go somewhere and they buy stuff. Even in B2B, if you're selling, you know, B2B and all your sales are over the phone, you gotta know that your customers on average are 50% of the way through the buying cycle before they ever talk to somebody at your company. That's all happening online. I know we're talking to a bunch of digital marketers. I'm preaching to the choir. But I just think it's important for everybody to remember that it doesn't matter what you're selling. Marketing today is digital, period. I mean, that's just digital one. It's there. It happened.

Yeah. And this is why we kind of brought it up with tnc. But that's your opening talk every year, I believe is kind of like the evolution of marketing or the evolution of what's happened in the last year or so. We thought that would be pretty fascinating to go over at least your perspective of where it's at right now. Because the last TNC was back in, earlier this year in San Diego. You talked a lot about just the history of the ad networks and all these trackable things and funnels are part of it as well. And they're all part of it as well. But you were saying there's a lot of untrackable type things that are out there. More branding and maybe slowing down and communicating more in different ways. I thought that was fascinating. Just to get your perspective, can you lay it out? A little bit of maybe it's a high level recap of some of the high points of where we've kind of moved on since just even last year. And what we should be focusing on now in terms of marketing online.

Yeah, well, I'll go back a little bit further than that. Kind of give maybe a very brief history lesson for those who are kind of new. I don't think people realize how young really this whole digital marketing concept is compared to other technology. And I do use that phrase technology very intentionally. But if you think about it, everything is technology until it gets figured out and then it kind of becomes a commodity, right? So there was a time when the telephone was technology. Now it's just sort of, you know, it's just a thing, right? Yeah, the wheel. The wheel with technology at one point, like fire with technology. Like everything is technology and then it's figured out and it's accepted and it's accessible. And now we no longer call that thing technology anymore. So I think it's important that we remember that digital marketing is technology and that it has been brand new for a couple of decades. So the very first banner ad click happened in 1994. I don't know if y' all knew that, but the very first banner ad click happened in. Happened in 1994. It was like a. I forget. And by the way, it had a 78% click through rate. I remember hearing falling off a little bit.

That's insane.

Yeah, like a 78% click through rate. It ran on like an early version of Wired magazine's first website. I think it's for some phone company. But anyway, so 1994 is really when I see digital marketing as, you know, as starting and all technology moves through five phases. They're discovery, proliferation, standardization, consolidation, and then innovation or disruption, right? So that discovery, like the technology gets discovered, it gets figured out. Proliferation, that's like the wild, wild west, right? It just. Everybody goes gold rush, right? Let's just, let's go, let's go crazy. And then because of standardization.

Things get going a little bit sideways. You get a lot of gypsies, tramps and thieves jumping in. That's when you have standardization. That's when the rules and the regulations happen. So just thinking back, right, going back to the very first traffic and conversion Summit was in 2009. You go back to 2009. So I kind of would put the discovery phase of digital marketing between 1994 and 2000. 2001 to 2009 is really when we saw proliferation. You had blogging become a big deal in the early 2000s. You had Twitter in 2006, YouTube in 2005. Facebook was 2004, 2007 is when Facebook ads were introduced and the iPhone really became a thing. So kind of that first decade of the 2000s, there was a new social channel, a new major digital channel emerging, seeming like every other month, it was anybody. That's why there were so many, like, gurus and experts popping out.

Anybody.

Yeah, yeah. And it was. It was crazy. And you had that kind of going into, you know, again, 2010, 2011. But really in 2010 is when 2009, 2010, when, you know, TNT was brand new. That is actually when we shifted from that proliferation phase into the standardization phase. Right. 2009 is when Google introduced their quality score.

That was the same year that the Google slap happened. Do you remember the Google slap, by any chance?

Oh, yeah. That was brutal.

I remember a handful of Google slaps, actually.

True.

Yeah. I mean, like, overnight, I lost my Google AdWords account. There was the Panda update, the promotions tab, the promotion tab in Gmail. That was introduced in 2013 because there was so much spam. In 2014, that was when Facebook said, you can't advertise weapons. No more dating sites, no more cleavage. Remember, prior to, like, 2014, every Facebook ad, they could have been selling Girl Scout cookies. And it was like, cleavage.

It's true.

With a. With a hot pink border around the thing. Right.

Yeah.

I'm sure people who are brand new to this are like, one of these old. Like, when I was a kid, I'll have to walk uphill, you know, both ways in the snow, to school.

Yeah.

But I mean, I think it's important to understand where we've come from like that for that time. Like, the 2001 to 2009 was when everybody looked really freaking smart. And then 2010 to 2014 is when things got really, really, really hard. And I watched a bunch of my buddies who bought a bunch of Lamborghinis trade them all back in for a freaking Honda. Right. Because in 2010-2014, that was when everybody collectively got. Got kicked in the junk. And I'll tell you, you got the discovery, you got the proliferation, you have the standardization. You know, that was when all the major channels came in and they standardized things. They booted people out. They said, these are the rules. You better follow them. What immediately falls after that is consolidation. And we see this time and time again with technology. There are a bunch of railroads, and then there were two. A bunch of phone companies, and then there's three.

Now what we see, we have seen an era of unprecedented consolidation where you have Google And Facebook combining to represent over 80% of digital ad spend. Like, 84% of all digital ad spend is split between Google and Facebook. And the only, you know, the only company that's eating into their profit margins, or, I'm sorry, eating into their market share.

Let me guess, Amazon. Potentially.

Bingo. Amazon. The only company even remotely nipping at their heels is Amazon. So, yay, you basically have Google, Facebook and, you know, Amazon. And on Amazon, they dominate, like, 50% of E commerce spend. Yeah, is all on Amazon. So this massive, massive consolidation begins. Anybody who understands how technology works and the phases and the cycles of technology.

Gets that this is not like new, this is not abnormal. This is how it works. It goes into consolidation. And so that's why everybody has been seeing their ad rates skyrocket. That's why, you know, even if you have decent conversion rates, I bet they were better two years ago. Definitely, right? I mean, everything just got harder now. The point that I make, you know, is you can see this as a bad thing. You can see this as, oh, woe is me. I guess I'm going to go crawl, you know, under a rock or something like that. All the, you know, or you can see that a whole lot of people are about to get squeezed out. And I can either be the beneficiary of consolidation or I can be the victim of consolidation. I believe that digital marketer and a lot of our other companies have been the beneficiary of this consolidation.

That is the stage that we're in right now. But now is not the time to figure out, how do I spend less, how do I invest less in my customer acquisition, how do I figure out how to get clicks cheaper? Now's the time to actually double down and invest in the things that, you know, most people won't. Yeah, the things that. The things that you can't track. Because I'll tell you, 2019, Ad Week, and this was a big thing. Ad Week, they reported that 2019 is the first year that digital ad spend will outpace traditional.

Oh, my God. I didn't know that.

Digital ad spend in 2019 is the first time in the history of humanity, the history of this planet, that digital ad spend will outpace traditional radio, TV and print ad spend. 2019 is the year when that will happen. So 2019, congratulations is the year that digital won. Now, Yay, we won. But it's also, you're the person on the top of the hill that everybody wants to knock off, and that's what consolidation looks like. So, you know, my advice to Everybody who's out there. And this is where I think you were going with the question was, yeah, I think you. We need to start. We need to shift our focus away from being hardcore, pure, direct response. We need to focus more on branding. We need to focus on doing things like, you know, like these, you know, dang podcasts that you can't track, you know, you can't track the results of. Just focus on, like, giving, you know, giving value and doing the hard work and the scary things that nobody else will do because the markets are efficient. If it's easy, people are doing it. And so you no longer. And I'm not saying you don't that do these things in lieu of the other thing, you still have to do all the stuff we were doing before. That's just table stakes. Like, everybody knows how to do that. Everybody is doing that. You still got to buy right on your advertising. You got to have high converting stuff. You just also have to do all the things that are untrackable. Right?

And that's why we chose podcasting over going big on, say, YouTube or doubling down on Facebook even more. It's like, okay, well, we can create the best content we possibly can, put it in audio form, interview amazing people like yourself, get your perspective, share you. And then there still is the element of all the advertising we do for this show. We're constantly trying to bridge the gap or at least if it's not fully bridged, we can at least feed the machine that's happening outside of this one platform. And that's just an example of how we're doing exactly what you said. There's probably a lot of people like yourself, Roland has said this many times, is, you know, you could purchase an audience or you can grow it yourself and, you know, or partner with them. It's like you have. It's like, why would you build it for yourself if maybe they're not so savvy on what's happening in marketing right now? So it's a prime opportunity. It looks like it is.

And that's why, you know, we've got now three podcasts. We just had one that we weren't really trying much for. Now we've got, you know, now we have three Facebook groups are a huge opportunity that a lot of people aren't investing in because they're saying, like, I don't know how I'm going to make money from it. Or they're saying, like, oh, but, you know, now they're, you know, Facebook is allowing ads and groups on sometimes so, you know, what if my competitor advertised there? Like, you can't worry about that. You can't think about that stuff. You got to be where your customers are. So we invest heavily in Facebook groups. We, you know, we have full time people on our team doing community management. You know, that's why our Facebook groups are really strong and we invest in those things. You know, we, we send out emails that don't even have links in them and just ask people to respond and we have conversations with them via email and drive those over the phone. I mean, these are things that we never would have imagined doing in the early days of the Internet because, you know, gosh, why would you ever want somebody to respond to your email? Then you have to talk to them. I want them to click on a link and buy from a form and just give me money so I can hang out on the beach. Like, no, you just don't get to do that anymore. Not if you want to win.

Right? Yeah. And we actually, we talked to Richard on your team just last week on the podcast. He was talking about how, you know, digital marketer is compared to a lifestyle business. He's like, well, we'll blow them out of the water any day because we're, we're doubling down our efforts on all this stuff. We have systems, we have, you're doing everything. Obviously it's your company too. But it's just amazing to hear the perspective and how, yeah, there's a lot of folks that are probably just rested on their laurels a little bit with Facebook ads, Google and just hoping, yeah, they're not going to change. Why would they change? Then here you guys are like, yeah.

Well, and even, even more than keeping up with trends, then I think this is an important pause point. Right. Because it isn't just because I agree with what Richard said, because we say it all the time, like, we'll win because we'll try harder. And trying harder looks like, yeah, we're going to stay on top of things and we're going to learn more and we're going to learn faster and we're going to test more. We've always kind of done that. But what we're actually willing to do, that the person who's just kicking on the beach isn't, is we're willing to love their customers more than they are. Right. So this comes down to like good old fashioned. Look, if, you know, if you're the dude and you know you got a girlfriend, you take her for granted. At some point she's going to start Hanging out with the dude that pays attention to her. So, I mean, our thing is, while you're kicking on the beach, you know, annoyed that your customers are talking to you, we're talking them up. We're saying, how you doing? We're buying flowers and candy and anything that we can to woo them. And so ultimately, I think we're going to win. Not because we're better marketers, because the reality is, man, like, again, consolidation, commoditization, like, it's here. I don't believe that. I believe that there was a time when, you know, when as a company, we were an order of magnitude better at marketing than just about anybody else out there today. I don't think that's necessarily the case today. It's just, you know, you can only be so great at Facebook ads. It costs what it costs. It's not like the angle, the hook, you know, the growth hack. Same with Google AdWords. Like, all the channels, they cost what they cost. There's none of the inefficiencies that there were that you can jump into. So we're going to win because we're going to care more, which means we're going to invest more, which means we're going to be willing to wait longer to generate a positive roi. We're not going to ask for so much right at the start. We're not put, you know, tactically, practically, that looks like we don't put our people through upsell hell to try to maximize extraction on day one. There's a time when we did that we realized we can't anymore. So we're going to woo them a little bit longer, wait a little bit longer, invest a little bit more in them, accept slightly lower margin, and with the goal of getting more of the business in the future.

Yeah, I remember. So. So we were at tnc. This is one that was way back in Austin. I don't remember which one. But you guys were talking about the consolidation of all of this stuff way back then. I remember you had these books that you were handing out about the consolidation of Amazon and the consolidation of YouTube and the consolidation of Google and all this stuff. At that time, you were talking a lot about instead of trying to go and compete with these big boys, don't try to compete to join them. And a big sort of topic theme of that year's TNC was jumping on board and leveraging these other platforms instead of trying to compete against them. Is that still kind of the philosophy?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, there's only real. There's Three things in business, right? You've got, there's media, there's channels and there's brands, okay? So.

Media is just, is what you have right now, right? Media is just aggregating.

Known attention in a known place at a known time, right? So if you can aggregate the same type of attention so you can identify what it is, it's generally these types of people and they're looking at this place and they're doing it generally at this time, then congratulations, you're a media company. Media is very, very, very powerful. Brand is also really, really, really powerful. So when you create a brand new, you know, you've created something that has meaning and it has value outside of just the intrinsic nature of the product, right? So I mean, you know, somebody, if there's brand association and brand value to buying an Apple product, that, that has meaning over and above just the intrinsic of what it does. And so the only thing that's more powerful than both of those really is when you have a true sales channel where, you know, and this is where somebody just, they own, you know, kind of all points of this. They have the toll booth and you know, obviously, you know, Facebook is not just an advertising medium. I mean, they're a full blown channel, right? You want to appear there, like you gotta, you gotta own it. The itunes store with, well, itunes is kind of hitting things out, but podcast, you know, that is, that's a channel now wherein you can place media, you know, so a channel is a place where you can place your media or you can place your brand. So you got retail channels where you can place your brand traditionally that look like a store and you could put your brand on their shelf, but they own the shelf. Channels generally cost billions of dollars to produce. There are very few of them and they typically hold a toll booth position. When you see a channel developing in your industry and you're not the one creating it, then the best thing in the world that you can do is to figure out how do I align with that channel. But yeah, the E commerce companies who, you know, who figured out how can I build a store on Amazon while at the same time having my own store? I'm going to leverage both. I want to leverage this channel and build my own brand. The two are not mutually exclusive. The mistake that a lot of people make is they feel like they have to beat the channel because they see the channel as a comp, as competition. It's not competition. It can be, it's a channel. It can be a great source for new customers and leads but understand, you're always hopefully building one of those three things. A lot of times people don't realize this. And what they actually wind up creating is an offer. They just have an offer. They just have a product and that offer, that product never actually turns into a brand. It never actually turns into media. And that's why, you know, it fizzles and fades out. Yeah, you know, that's when you get your one hit wonders. But if you're creating something of real, long lasting value, you're building one of those three things.

I like that.

If it's not taking you a decade or longer and costing you billions of dollars, I'm sorry you're not creating a channel, but that's okay. What you should seek to do is seek to align yourself with that channel. And channels get created during those phases of consolidation which follows the standardization. Usually the companies that are creating the standards are the ones building the channel. So Google is a channel, Facebook's a channel, Amazon is a channel, Apple is a channel. You better, you know, better to figure out how to join them because you ain't gonna beat them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a great example in the podcasting world is Spotify. Right Now, Spotify's invested $500 million into a whole bunch of podcasting companies and assets just this year alone. So we see that Spotify wants to be the channel in podcasting. They want to overtake Apple as the biggest platform to listen to podcasts on. So we're sitting around going, what is the best way to leverage Spotify before everybody else figures this out?

Yeah, and that's a good point. Right, because there's a lot of when these new channels come up, because you mentioned you're like, you've been talking about consolidation for a long time. You're right. I mean, this is the nice thing about making predictions. Eventually.

Eventually you become right. If you say it enough times. And yeah, I'll be totally transparent. I first started talking, talking about consolidation and commoditization. I think it found its way into One of my TNC opening keynotes back in 2011 was the year that you're referring, maybe 2012. I was really early. The reason that it didn't happen as quickly as I thought it would is because new channels kept emerging. Right. So just when you think everything's gonna consolidate in and around Google, Facebook happens. Right? And just when you think like, oh, Facebook's kind of getting, you know, getting over, you know, overrun in terms of, you know, advertising, like, people are starting to see really good results with YouTube ads and then Instagram comes out and even prior to that you had Kindle, Amazon, Kindle and then Amazon as a whole became this channel that kind of bought.

That created new life and this new gold rush and this new opportunity for new folks to come in.

Spotify as a podcast channel. Yes, you're right, I'll buy that. But the power of that channel compared to like Amazon opening up to third party sellers, or the power of that channel compared to Facebook launching its ad platform, Google, when Google opened its search platform to advertisers, we've never seen a bigger channel than that. That's insane. So I think that Spotify is a huge opportunity. I think you're wise to jump on it. But I also think we need to remember that, you know, as marketers and business leaders, there's not going to be, there likely will not be another Google, Facebook or Amazon or Apple App Store, podcast or even Spotify. There may not be another one in our working lives. These just don't come around very often. I hope there is. If you survey the space, there just isn't much that's out there. So when you see one God, jump on it with all that you got. Because they don't come around very often.

Yeah, that's actually really. I like that you said that because it does frame that. I mean, a, obviously we have a finite amount of time. We can actually put our working hours into this space. And yeah, these platforms don't just pop up overnight. These channels of distribution.

How do you guys approach something like that to make the most out of a channel that you want to have your presence in there? Like, is there a strategy or some way that you kind of attack that to make sure you have the presence, but obviously probably not rely on it specifically. Do you guys kind of have a move that you guys play when you see these channels pop up?

Yeah, it's a good question. I haven't really thought about it. So we don't have a specific playbook when one of these things pops up. But I can tell you what we've generally done is the first thing when it pops up is we do nothing for a while. Because usually when these channels pop up, you never know which ones are going to be real and which ones are going to fall by the wayside. And you can waste a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of energy jumping into the next latest and greatest channel. I've known a lot of marketing friends who do that and you know, they're, they're hyping up Like Google. I'm all in on Google, right? You know, I'm all in on Periscope. I'm all in on, you know, even, even there are people who went all in on Snapchat. I still don't think that for most businesses, Snapchat is yet a super viable channel that's worthy of a tremendous amount of time. It's really only been in the last couple of years that Instagram became, I think, really worthy of a tremendous amount of investment. So you've got to be careful because you want to be early, but you don't want to be first.

Right?

Right. And a lot of people think that they have to be first, that they have to be right there. I think that you want to get in. I think that you definitely want to make sure that you, to the extent that there's handles and stuff like that, you make sure that you claim your brand in them, because that's free and doesn't take a lot of work. But then I would wait, I would wait until you start to see who are the folks that are emerging as, you know, as the leaders in your space and also in totally unrelated space. Because every one of these channels is a little bit different. So if you tried to, for example, go into Facebook advertising with the exact same playbook that you had in Google, you're going to fail miserably. If you approached Instagram in the exact same way that you approached Facebook from an organic social, you're going to fail miserably. All of these channels are nuanced. They're all a little bit different. So you need to make sure that you can sit back long enough to see. And then what I like to do is I like to be the first, second. So once I kind of look around and see, okay, this is generally what's going. Then I'm going to formulate a theory which is, I believe that, you know, again, everybody's generally, everybody generally agrees that this is what you need to do. Okay, fine, we're going to do that. Everybody agrees on that. No opportunity there. Now, where do I see some disagreement? Where do I see some people achieving outsized gain? Where do I see some folks kind of winning when they really aren't worthy of winning? Like they don't have the chops really to be doing what they're doing. What are they doing? How can we reverse engineer that? Then you want to go in hard with a better brand. And when I say a better brand, what I mean is not a prettier logo or a better design. Again, all that's important. It's table stakes. You got to have it check the box. But it's not the difference maker. When I say a better brand, I mean you are going in, delivering way more relational equity than anybody else is. You go in, and if everybody else is, if it's clear that long form content is doing well, then you go double triple 10x the amount of content that they're doing. Right. You give so much more in the way that the people who are winning are doing just a little bit better. And that's kind of the thing. So it's identify, sit back, see what's working when you recognize what's working when you recognize the little things that are getting those outside size gains. Do that 10x if you can. Because I think branding at the end of the day is just deposits of relational equity. That's really what branding is. You've got to give, give, give. People like Gary Vaynerchuk, they went hard in a particular channel and they gave and they gave and they gave and they gave and they gave.

And then eventually, you know, it paid off and they did what worked way more than anybody else did. Everybody was doing the stuff that worked. They just did it way more, you know, way faster.

Yeah.

And I think the same would be true. You look at the folks who are winning at the podcast space, like one of the things that work in podcasts. You make sure you maximize your download. Right. So the people who are, who are winning, what do they do? I'm gonna do a show every single day.

That's right.

Yeah.

Frequency.

All the people, like. Exactly. All the people who won. It's like, oh, everybody's doing a weekly. I'm doing daily. Yeah. Oh, this person. You putting out a monthly video. That's adorable. I'm gonna do a video every single day for years. You got like Casey Neistat and Nas Daily and some of these other, like, YouTube folks. And what does it come down to? Yeah, frequency for sure. But if you look at the content marketing space, there was less about frequency and more about quality. Everybody's Putting out these two 300 word blog posts, when really the three to 500 word blog posts were the ones that were getting all the, all the love. So it's not always just frequency, but it is always quality. So I think you've got to sit back long enough to figure out what does quality look like in this channel and how do I get 10x more than everybody else?

I love that. That's cool because I'm just thinking of, like, how we're approaching podcasting as an example. We purposely went longer form because we kind of see about the 30 minute mark. That's typically where the flow kind of happens and the good stuff kind of starts to bubble up. And most business focused shows are about the 30 minute mark. And we're like, that's cool, but we're just getting the engines roaring up. The good stuff's yet to come. Yeah, that was our approach to. And then we just happened to do it two times a week. So it's a frequency thing is bumping up a little bit more. So that's. It's fascinating.

Need to switch to 10 times a day. I'm just kidding.

Don't do that.

Well, the funny thing is we do actually have a daily podcast as well, but the way the daily podcast works is we just break up these episodes into shorter episodes and release them daily.

Yeah, yeah.

And to your point, like, you've got. You do have to leverage. Right. When you take these things, you need to leverage and you need to get all of your different assets pointing at one another in their respective areas.

Correct?

Right. That's the high tide that rises. All ships. You want to create this virtuous cycle where, you know, your, you know, your brand and your media in this particular channel is pointing at your brand, your media, and this other one and this other one. It's all pointing back to the mothership that you do own so that you begin to create your. Your own brand and your own media that never, you know, probably never exceeds the. The different channels, but it definitely is valuable in its own. Right, Right.

Yeah.

I'm kind of curious about. About some spec. Like some specific things that, that you guys have experimented with over the years and talked about. And I'm curious where they stand today. Things like Minichat is a good example. I know a couple years ago at tnc, there was a lot of talk about Messenger Bot. Is that something that you guys are still seeing some great results from? And do you recommend people still do messenger bots and things like that?

Yeah, but we're not doing it the way that a lot of people are doing it. And I knew, I saw when this Messenger Bot thing came out. It's like, God marketers are ever going to obliterate and completely ruin something. It's going to be this. This is like email times 10. It took them longer than I thought it would to completely obliterate it. But, you know, at the most recent Facebook conference, they're like, hey, no more just broadcasting out these chat messages.

The way that we use, it is actual chat like to have, we use it to facilitate real one to one conversations. And everybody else just wanted to use it as another broadcast medium and that's just not it. So does it work? Yeah, but I think you have to realize it's chat.

That'S kind of one to one. So that's not going to be the advertising channel that a Facebook or a Google or an email list is going to be. But it is going to be a heck of an engagement channel, Right. For people who are in funnel, you know, it's a phenomenal opportunity for people who are, you know, who are middle of the funnel, who are in that consideration phase to be able to raise their hand and you know, kind of jump ahead. Marketers create these funnels where it's like I want you to get. And look, I mean I'm one of the biggest practitioners and popularizers and teachers of the funnel, so I accept some responsibility for it. But you know, the idea of a funnel of I'm going to force you down this path and you better not deviate, Mr. And Mrs. Customer, you know, slap you on the wrist, right? That's not how it works in real life. You wouldn't walk in be fricking weird if you walked into a store and they're like, name and email address, please. Can I just look at the next.

And I think that's the thing, right? Like everybody forgets that we're humans, that there's nothing new under the sun, right? So every single media channel, every single anything is just an analog for something that has already existed, right. Instagram kind of just replaces film frames and a mantle over the fireplace, right? Prior to that, if I wanted to show off my family photos, I took a picture with a camera, I got it developed. I, you know, put the camera in a frame, I put it. And a limited number of people who came in my home could bask at the glory of my book, my photography skills and the beauty of my family. Right. Instagram made it easier to do that, you know, Dropbox made it easier to kind of, you know, store things, you know, in the mattress, you know, under the mattress, right?

Yeah.

You know, those kind of valuable stuff, Right. And every single thing that's ever been produced is an analog for something that already exists. And you know, manychat is an analog for actual real life one to one conversation. And the bots make it possible to expedite that and to facilitate it. But if you try to turn a one, you know, something that is an analog to one to One conversation into a one to many platform. You can't wonder why it stopped working. Right. You're deviating from the original analog. So a long winded answer, which I'm prone to do anyway, apologize. I'm sure everybody listening is like, God, this guy will freaking monologue. But. But I just think context is important and people say like, oh, that didn't work for me. Like, ah, there's a good chance you screwed it up.

Yeah.

You know, own it.

Yeah, it's true. It's. How often do we really. And this is. And then you can go back, but it's like a group text message. Do you really want to be in a group text message that's just getting a new message every 10 minutes or something like that where. Or I. E. Broadcast. It's kind of the similar idea or is the one to one idea. Yes. People like communication, but not the mass thing.

And you generally like all those people. Right. So now I'm getting it in a different channel from people I don't even know. Brands I don't care that much about. Wonder why does everybody hate this? You hate it.

So, last little quick rabbit hole before we wrap up. I'm curious if there's any technologies or platforms, platforms or anything like that that you guys are pretty bullish on right now? I know you mentioned Facebook groups. Is there, is there anything else that you guys are kind of excited to experiment with or are experimenting with right now that is working pretty well for you?

So there's not a lot of experimentation going on right now with kind of new platforms. What we're doing is we're doubling down on the things that we've seen work really well. So. Yeah, you mentioned it. Facebook groups.

There. It's one of those things where everybody, you know, people like them. It's not one of these annoying kind of things like if you're in groups and those groups are vibrant, helpful, like there's Facebook groups that I'm in that I really enjoy. I enjoy being in those groups. I enjoy lurking, I enjoy being able to ask questions. You know, it's a. It's a great fun thing that everybody benefits from. And so when you see that, you're like, okay, kind of everybody likes this. I bet this sticks around for a while. It makes sense to me why Facebook is doubling down on those. So I think groups for sure. I do believe that chat and chatbots used responsibly. I think we're going to go through a bit of a backlash for probably the next year and then when things settle down. It'll be similar to email. Right. Everybody decided that email was dead for like a decade. Still isn't, but. Yeah, but I think you're going to see the same thing with chat and chatbot. And I think some of the chatbot folks like manychat and Drift, I think they're going to need to implement and because they're responsible for the proliferation of this new technology, they're going to need to introduce certain standards. That's what Facebook just did. Right. We saw that.

Cycles of technology, a bit of a microcosm right there in the Facebook messenger bot kind of space. They need to do that themselves so that the big channels don't come in and, and regulate them. But I still think that that's important. The main area that we're doubling down on is we're trying to figure out how do we reduce friction to get people into our funnel faster and easier. So I'll give you an example. Like a digital marketer in particular. It used to be that our funnel basically went something like this. You would buy a $7 report execution plan, then we would make you an offer to sign up for lab. And lab was 40, $50 a month. So it was give us $7 now, give us 40, $50 a month. And then afterwards we would have some kind of higher ticket offering to really try to offset our ad costs. Well, we switched it. The first thing we did is we dropped.

That last upsell. The revenue was good, but it wasn't a good customer experience. And so we wanted to reduce that initial friction. You know, people, we got really negative feedback about that and found that we did better after about 60 days. If we didn't have it there, people actually stuck longer. So the first thing we did is we got rid of that. That reduced some kind of, you know, during the sale friction. Then what we did is we switched from it's $7 to. And then give us, you know, 40, $50 to. It's $7 now you can join for a dollar trial. So basically just give us a dollar. So we took the friction down from, you know, $50 the first month to just a dollar. We watched our, you know, the number of folks coming in go, go way, way up. And we switched from a dollar to free. Hey, let's make completely free. Now what we've done is we actually have a free level at Digital Marketer. So if you go to digitalmarketer.com, we have a free level of Digital Marketer. And when you sign up for the free level, we let you try the premium level for free. So the first two steps of our funnel, we make no money, nothing. You know what I'm saying? So it is all about friction reduction. Now we buy advertising, six figures worth of advertising into funnels where we make nothing the first month. We're able to do that because we've been in business for long enough. The economics support it, but we're also willing to do that because we know that our competitors won't. So we're going to grow and we're going to have a better offer. So the main thing that we're always asking ourselves is how can we make it easier for people to buy? How can we make it easier for folks to get in to see what we have to offer? And then how do we make sure that we invest in such a way that when they get there, the experience is phenomenal? So I'm proud to say our product teams is the largest team in our organization. Say, well, no, it's the case. It's larger than sales, it's larger than marketing. The number of people who are just focused only on producing product, producing content is larger than anything else. So if we can reduce those barriers to entry and have an amazing product, then we'll build an amazing brand. And I believe, and this is me saying this as a hardcore direct response marketer, I believe that advertising is the price you pay for a low quality, low value brand. At the end of the day, if you got a high quality brand that everybody knows and they want to buy from, you don't really need to advertise that much. You don't got to advertise a lot in the beginning to build that brand. But at some point, the price that you pay for a low quality brand and for a lack of awareness is advertising. So we're trying to figure out how do we shift more of the investment that we're making to the product experience itself to build the brand value. So people just show up and want to give us money.

I love it, man. I remember in your talk is this whole evolution of the Internet and everything you're focused on, traffic's not going away. So you still need to know how to drive qualified traffic to your brand and offers. You're setting yourself up in a perfect position to do both. And you know, it's just, I could see why it's just leaps ahead of the next competitor over there or someone trying to be the next DM or whoever, something related out there. So. All right, let's wrap it up really quick. I know we got a few Minutes till we got to bounce. What's a podcast? Not even a podcast. I'm just framing that now. What's a good book or resource could be a podcast that you just find yourself just mentioning and recommending. Maybe it's your clients, guys on the team, gals on the team that work with you. Just top of mind, anything that pops up.

Yeah, I mean the book I probably recommend more than any other is the wizard of Ads by Roy Williams. And it's a trilogy of books. Roy is one of my mentors and.

What I love about Roy is he's a radio admin. And I think the offline media that is closest to online is actually radio. So it's not direct mail, it's not TV advertising, it's not print, it's actually radio. That short form, punchy, let's grab them, let's get them to take an action. Find somebody who really knows how to write great radio spots and you can have somebody who's going to be a great digital advertiser as well. And there's tons of great books. Actually there's on the Digital Marketer blog if you do a search for 100 books every marketer should read. Finally just put my entire book list up there. But the one that I would say if you, if there was only one on that list that you're going to read, I'd say the wizard of Ads would probably be it rad.

Cool. We'll link that up in the show notes as well. And where should people go check out? Obviously they should check out that blog post that gets you at Digital Marketer anywhere else you want them to go to.

Yeah, I mean digitalmarketer.com we're talking about this stuff and doing things. I'd encourage people go, you know, go sign up for a free account if nothing else, just to see kind of how we're building out that, how we're building out that funnel. Also Shameless Plug. I've got a new startup that we're about to launch that is in the knowledge management and really just team development, building space. That's@praxio.com, so p r a x I o praxio.com, really excited about that project. I look at what's happening out in, you know, in the area of work and I just, you know, I think we're shifting away from this credentials economy where it's go get a degree and there's going to be a job waiting for you and we're shifting back into a skills based economy. An apprenticeship economy. We're shifting back into an on the job training type thing. So we're trying to build a platform over there that will facilitate that shift. So it's still early. Haven't even gone to market with yet. It's probably the first place I'm talking about publicly, but I'm just super excited about that project. Really excited. That's where all my things are. I'm actually about to fire myself from digital marketers so I can focus on that full time. Should be fun.

I saw. Yeah, Richard mentioned that and we took a look at it and we're like, whoa, okay, this is cool.

Just.

Just go there. Praxio. So we'll link it up as well. Awesome. Ryan, this has been super cool, man. I appreciate your time so much.

Yeah, James, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for letting me ramble. Sorry for all the listeners.

Anytime, man. See you later.

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