Why Traditional Marketing Is Dead - And What's Really Working Now

Foreign. Welcome back to the big hitters. I'm Larry Wydell. Today we're diving headfirst into one of the most powerful levers in business today, digital marketing. And if you're not mastering this, if I'm not mastering this, we're just spinning our wheels. The Internet's not going to go away, folks. And the Internet doesn't care if we understand it. The Internet doesn't care if we use it or not. But everybody else is. So we better be in there. It's where the money is. It's where our next big wins are waiting. And so let's talk to each other. I'm talking to myself, I'm talking to you. Let's talk about how to stop messing around and start using digital marketing to build a seven figure business. You know, technology, you need to get your attitude right about technology because you're going to be dealing with it the rest of your life. AI or this, it doesn't matter if you're uncomfortable with it, doesn't matter if you're in business. Like John Lennon said to me 30 years ago, and this is John Lennon in business with me. Not John Lennon, the Beatles. But John said, he said it was like when the railroads came to town. He said you either use the railroads or it didn't matter if you liked the railroads. You know, understood the railroads were near, the railroads didn't matter. But if you didn't use the railroad, find a way to make the railroads work for you, you were going to get slaughtered in business by the companies that did. And that's how John Rockefeller used the railroads to drive down the price of oil and gasoline and everything. He kind of took over the industry with Standard Oil. So the thing, when technology comes, we're going to be confronted with many challenges in business, mainly getting a decent product, keeping it, you know, working, keeping it relevant, keeping our client base, but getting that out there in all aspects of it. Technology is a key and nothing more important to us than prospecting. Marketing is prospecting, marketing is sales. You know, you're in all these big terms but you got to sell your stuff. You know, it's no good sitting in your warehouse or you know, your service is no good unless you're helping somebody. You're only passing on this intellectual knowledge so, you know, let people know you exist. People are looking on social media and it's growing. That's the great thing about it, it's growing. It's like it's not a limited type thing. You know, you kind of open up the Whole universe to yourself. So if you're not online in today's world, you don't exist, I don't exist. And so digital marketing lets us scale faster, reach more people and dominate our niche for a whole lot less money than old school methods. That's the great thing about it, is that they don't charge you to post something on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or X. You know, YouTube. You know, the thing is, it's just, it's great, but you gotta know how to use it. You gotta be able to prepare. You gotta have something for people to listen to or read or whatever. But posting up there, you don't have to. We get the ad together. In the past, we'd get the ad together and then you had to pay. And so you can target exactly who you want, when you want. And the winners saw the wave early. They didn't wait around, they built. So many people just jumped on it. They built seven figure businesses while others were still passing out flyers. Remember those days of sticking flyers on cars at the mall or dropping leaflets out of plane is the joke. It's like you did anything you could to get people's attention. So you want to be relevant and you know, your face, you don't want to just go through the motions here, your face on there, your presentation. Look, I'm talking to you now in front of a setup that I've spent so much money on, so much time, so much figuring. It was 25 years ago that I wanted to do a podcast. We took courses on it. You know, we knew, you know, this is the way to go podcasting, you got to get on YouTube. I sent people away to learn how to do it. You know, we had them come in and talk to us. I can't tell you how frustrating it was to get to the point where we could do a, start a regular podcast and have episodes. But, you know, eventually you sort through and you find the right group of professionals to work with. Eventually. Even if it takes you decades of fighting through this stuff, even though the world's getting away and people are moving along, we're not going to run out of market. You're not going to run out of market. Keep fighting to figure it out. Keep fighting to figure out who's going to help you with it. There's lots of great people out there. Even though there's, you know, for every great person, you know, there's a lot of dumbbells, a lot of people who talk a good game but can't do it. It's just like in coaching, you know, a lot of people talk a good game, they've never done a God blessed thing, but there's still lots of people who have done things. And so you just gotta be smarter and dig harder. You gotta get a pipeline started. And you know, the digital marketing allows you to do that because that's where everybody is unfortunately, that's where everybody is almost impossible to try and get it done if you're not online. It's like trying to operate without a cell phone. And so when this topic came up, I asked myself, I'm not an expert on all this stuff, who am I to talk to people about, But I'm actually an expert at trying to the point that we have figured it out and do have a presence. And I've got, anyway, we won't get into all of that, but I've got pretty good presence, pretty good footprint out there. But it was just like one slog after another. And we're moving forward, we're still moving forward. We want to get in the community world, which I've told you before, we have to learn all that. We want to open up all kind of other things. And I was just listening to podcasts this morning at the gym, working out and got incredible ideas, things I thought about, but I wasn't sure. But then I was listening to some people talk and it's like, man, there's the answer I'm looking for. And so we gotta get better, we gotta improve. And I'm just like you. I am sick of learning new crap. 20 years ago I said to myself, I don't want to have to learn anything new. I want to use what I know. I've spent all my life learning new stuff. Can I please just spend the rest of my life learning and perfecting what I already know? And guess what? No, you can't. You know, as soon as you figure out this phone, they're going to come out with a new phone. And as soon as you figure out this operating system, they come up with a new operating system, all your update and your phone overnight, you're ready to strangle them, but you don't know who to strangle. I don't want to learn this kind of, you know, I'm so far behind on my mail right now because they've AI'd my mail. I'm gonna figure it out. You know, that's what winners do, winners figure it out. But you know, I would like to reach the point in my life where I could not have to be learning some new things. But guess What? The world is spinning. We're on a spinning planet. Things are improving, new products are coming out, new development. You know, why? Why are we going to do that? Because you grow or die. You grow or die. And what other companies, they grow or die and they grow by improving. And when they improve, they better products, better systems, better software to market. And one thing for them to figure it out now you got to figure out what do they do that's going to make my life easier. This is where the digital marketing and the social media comes in. There you've got to figure it out or you got to get somebody who can help you figure it out because that's exactly where you want to be. And it's worth all the time, energy and effort because we're not going to be slipping and sliding away from this, folks. We're just going to be moving on to this business. And the great thing is again, it doesn't cost you money. You don't have to spend your ad spend. You know that I always love talking to the corporate types. They have these. My ad spend? Yeah, you don't have to have any ad spend to get something on social media. You have to have help, you know, putting it together, the tech to support things like that. And then you have to have something to say worth people listening to. So the great thing is you don't have to have those kind of big budget for ads and everything. You can go to social media, but you got to learn it, got to learn how to use. And so you don't want to be as much as possible, you want to get in the gate. What has happened in the past doesn't matter. You know, we have to tell ourselves it doesn't matter. You know, it's like buying land. You know, if I'd seen that piece of land, that 200 acres, you know, I've got a friend over and near outside of Pensacola, you know, his dad bought this 200 piece, he got this acreage for nothing, you know, so many years ago, they've just sold it for a golf course and he made himself, you know, $50 million. You know, I was looking at a piece of land myself 25 years ago, 30 years ago, and you know, I just said, well, I could have got it for $40,000. This guy went in there and he got it for a song and now he's making all these zillions of dollars, you know, woulda, coulda, shoulda in same thing in, you know, real estate, houses, whatever. I live in Aspen, you know, you know, I know Guys that when they built their house in town, the right next to Main street was a potato field, was, you know, farms all through town. And he built his house, his first house right the middle of town in a, in the middle of a potato field. And of course he sold it for a zillion dollars, you know, X number of years later. And so we all have those kind of stories. There's stories about the, you know, if I'd gotten involved in the, you know, on the Internet and social media earlier, I could have been, you know, we could have been at 200 million. So what? It doesn't matter what's in the past. What matters is going forward because it's just going to keep getting bigger. It's just going to be accelerating. They're just going to be new tools. So when you go out there and you learn this stuff, it's, you can catch up. What I'm saying is you can catch up. It's not going to be like there's going to be a slump. We're going to go through. Like, you know, that happens in real estate and investments. You know, you go that the market goes up and it goes down and you got to wait for the next wave to come. And the market, social media is just getting bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. Going to go through a thing where, wow, there were so many trillion views last month on social media, but now we're in a slump on social media. There's about only 20% looking, but it should come back. No, it's just going to keep more and more and more. So get in the game. It's good news for us. More and more people are going to be looking, more and more people are going to be educated and there's more and more opportunity for you to stand out. If you're special, if your message is, is special, to get your eyeballs and get those ears listening and watching you. So the big four channels you go through, you got to have content marketing. That's how you build trust. You got to have something to say and that's blogs, videos, reels. This is how you become a go to name in your space. Because of what you're talking about. It's worth listening to. So you say something one time and you strike a with people the next time they see your face. And don't worry that I don't look good on media. Get over the fact panel. Oh, I'm just not, you know, I just don't have the face, you know. You know, they told Joe Jay Leno, they said he has a, from the time he got started. Jay Leno, they say you got a great face for radio. They said when he first started to get on tv, they said your chin is so God bless it big. You'll scare little children if we put you on tv. We can't have your face on television. And became one of the successful TV hosts of all time. And so folks, don't worry about your face, your appearance. You know, I look older now. You know, I wish when I was younger or I had more hair, you know, during it, you know, wear a cap. That's what I'm doing. You wear a cap, fix it, you know, get, make, you know, you know, I would say go, you know, do whatever you gotta do to make yourself as comfortable as possible. Get some cream, you know, on your face, get makeup if you have to have it, go get surgery. If that's what it's going to take to get your face out there, who cares? But get yourself in front of people talking about what you know, get over yourself. And so when you get out there, you can become a go to name in your space where people can associate you with what you can do now. You can do the paid ads. A few paid, you know, some of the paid money are very targeted right now and can pay off big. But it's not, you know, it's not the dollar volume that it used to be in the past. You know, so you can do this is the second channel, paid ads. Google, Facebook, Instagram. And you know, you can buy attention and so you can run ads. The thing is they don't cost that much. You can test ads and you can double down. You know, you find out what works and then you pour your money into that. But it's much easier to run the trial ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram and all of the other social media out there. Now let's talk about the next channel would be email marketing. The great thing about email marketing is it's your list. You know, they may shut down Twitter, they may shut down TikTok, they may shut down. You know, they won't but you know, they, they control these other platforms like Facebook and Instagram, all of that. But. Or they may make big changes where all of a sudden they change the algorithm and people are not coming to you. They may make those changes. But you know what, they won't touch your email list. So, you know, you have some giveaways. You do. You know, there's people that can tell you how to build your email list, but have a website, have a way have a chance for people to contact you and you know they want, they like your st and they'd like to hear from you on a more regular basis. Well get yourself an email list and then you can find people to help you to get that email list converting and you know some people look at their email list. I have had people say that your email list is your atm. I have people say to me that have been in business for a long time that say every, you know they get all this advice about don't email this, don't bother people with this, don't bother people with that. But they say every time. He said all I know is every time I run an email I make money, people buy stuff and so you find out for yourself what works for you. But there's some people make their entire living off the, you know they dabble in posting on other social media but they excel in their email campaign and posting how to articles. When you're good people will be interested in responding to your stuff, coming to your workshops, reading your articles. And he gives away a ton of stuff for free too. So he might be sending you an email and 90% of it is just free stuff he's just giving out and so you can make but he controls email and nobody could tell him what to do with email. And once you get your email list, nobody can tell you what to do with your email. So we talk about content marketing, that content that you put out there on social media. We talk about paid ads that you could do. We talk about building an email list and sending emails, newsletters, things like that out there and then in general social media because everybody lives on social media now and different channels have different emphasis, different audiences. LinkedIn is the business, TikTok is the kids or the younger you go for more entertainment. Instagram X, you can find a little of everything on all of the platforms. But you run these YouTube, Pinterest, you run your put their content out there and you see for yourself where you're getting the biggest response, where your audience lives. And you don't just go for numbers of followers or go, you go for people who actually are going to buy your stuff and so you can target it. So anyway those are the four type things. You know your content, your paid ads, email, social media and now don't let yourself get overwhelmed, simplify. What I've tried to take approach on this thing is to let you know you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to know in the beginning but you can learn it. Piece by piece, by piece. And you can find experts. The experts exist and the experts are getting better. They're more experts and they're better. Experts are coming along all the time because this is getting to be a bigger and bigger deal. And so this is not about doing everything. It's not about doing everything all at once. It's about getting in the game. So you want to get yourself in the game, then you want to start tracking. So you're not guessing, you're not just throwing stuff up against the wall. You put stuff up and then you see what happens and you fine tune it. Just like developing any product that you have. And so you don't guess, you try and keep your guessing, get your guessing done. When you get started, then it's about a refinement. And so know your numbers and you're going to get, as you get into it, you can find how you use it to develop all these other technical things that go into underpinning the real value of your business. You can figure out from this, your customer acquisition cost, you know, how much effort it takes, how much money it takes to get customers, what platforms, your return on ad spend. If you run the ads, they call it roas r o a s return on ad spend. You can track that stuff and you can track how one against the other, one platform against the other, and you can track how many people respond, how many send it on, how many people like how many people follow and then how much converts. And my great good friend with fame, my producers for these podcasts, Tom tells me that once he started on LinkedIn and his followers started going up, I mean, that was the end. He didn't have to worry about advertising or doing anything for business. Just, you know, his post on LinkedIn and the podcast that he did, you know, he was good enough. He found a style that worked, resonated with people and people started calling him up. And so, you know, obviously he's figured out this worked for him. Now he. And that's the way it goes. I mean, that's what people are doing out there and that's what can happen to you. You can get this thing down to where it's actually a business, It's a business outreach and a business income. And so, and that comes from the following, the numbers, testing, tweaking, adjusting. You know, you go step by step from getting people's attention, finding out, you know, getting the attention of your market, see who responds exactly to you, and then getting a product and a system and a method to where they're doing business with you on a regular basis. So here's the deal. Digital marketing is not just a thing you got to look at. Digital marketing is my weapon. It was created for me. But you've got to learn to swing it right. You got to focus on the results, not the trends. You got to simplify. You got to start. You got to track. You got to adjust. Why? So you can win. Look at that. All this has happened for my benefit. And so get in the game. Now, if this is little fire unto you, hit that subscribe button and share it with somebody who needs a wake up call. And I'll see you on the next episode of Big Hitters, where we we don't dabble, we dominate.