This HubSpot Academy masterclass ("What is Unicorn Marketing") features Larry Kim explaining his theory that a tiny fraction of marketing efforts — "unicorns" — produce outsized results while the vast majority — "donkeys" — fail to gain traction. Kim cites personal data (300 content campaigns in one year, 8 succeeded; ~2.6% success, ~97.4% failures) and argues platform algorithm changes (Google/Facebook) increasingly concentrate traffic and social shares toward a few top pieces of content. The session covers detection and tactics for producing more high-impact campaigns and references a downloadable slide deck (~150+ slides).
Chapters
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another HubSpot masterclass. My name is Kevin Dunn. I'm one of the inbound professors with HubSpot Academy. Today's masterclass is presented to you by HubSpot Academy, HubSpot's official learning resource and the worldwide leader in inbound marketing and sales education. HubSpot Academy offers free certifications and free courses to not only grow your business, but to grow your career. Today I'm with Larry Kim. He's the CEO of Mobile Monkey. He's the founder of Wordstream, one of the top colonists for inc.com and I think you were ranked number eight on most popular contributors to medium.com so there's also a rumor that there's a slight obsession for unicorns. Sounds like after today's session maybe that's an obsession we should all share. So I'll gladly hand it off to Larry. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Thank you, listeners. Thanks for tuning in for the session today. Thank you. Talking about a crazy topic. It's called Unicorn how to achieve Unusually great Remarkable Growth rates in Marketing. Basically every channel of marketing that you can think of. On today's agenda, it's mostly we'll be talking about unicorns, starting with my theory of unicorn marketing, followed by a discussion of donkeys versus unicorns. Next we'll talk a little bit about the latest technologies in unicorn and donkey detection, followed by introducing some new concepts around the unicorn alert and making a unicorn babies. And just in case you thought maybe you went into the wrong livestream, trust me, this is the correct live stream. We will be talking about some marketing content there and specifically some tips and tricks and hacks for getting unusually great results. Guys, all the slides today are available for download at bit ly bit ly unicorn marketing. And there's over 150 slides today, so definitely try to download those slides if you can. Before getting all the hacks and tips and tricks, I wanted to introduce myself briefly. My name is Larry as well. Kevin mentioned I'm slightly obsessed with unicorns. Having founded the International Unicorn Marketing association of the World. I live in Harvard Square in Cambridge. It's just a couple miles from here. It's a very famous area. It's where Facebook was founded. It's where Microsoft was founded. It's also where I started WordStream back in 2008. Maybe starting out like a lot of you guys as a kind of sole proprietor, Internet marketing guru, consultant, working out of a Panera Bread bakery because of the free wi fi and unlimited diet Coke refills. The company's gotten a lot bigger. We're over 200 people. We have an office in the Prumall and managing hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising spend for thousands and thousands of clients worldwide. It's the world's leading provider of online advertising software for small businesses. And as Kevin mentioned earlier, I recently took a new job as CEO of a new venture in the AI mobile chatbot space. Last thing I'll say about myself is I have a three year old. His name's ppckid and you can follow him on Twitter all. Enough about me. Back to our story. We're talking about unicorn marketing, starting with part one, my crazy unicorn theory of marketing. And basically, guys, here's the problem. When I look at marketing today, the sad story is that 98% of the marketing efforts that we're working so hard on are going nowhere. And I'm not criticizing you. I mean, this is the case for all of us. It's the case for me. Let me give you an example. Last year I published 300 content campaigns. That's a lot of content. And eight of them did well. And the remaining 292 went nowhere. So that's 2.6% did really well. And then 97.4 were donkeys. Okay, so why the heck is this? I think there's a couple reasons. First problem I see is that there's. Whenever I talk about this issue with experts and tell them, hey guys, most of my stuff goes nowhere, they say, they give me these dumb platitudes about, oh, Larry, you got to focus on the quality, not the quantity. And I'm like, barf, because this is just like these dumb cliches, basically. And basically, when I ask them, so what exactly is the quality in these marketing campaigns? Campaigns? They say, oh, well, it's campaigns that I worked on. Or it's basically a checklist approach. Basically content that has three images or 1500 words or et cetera, et cetera. And so they just make this kind of an argument for a technical definition of quality in terms of checking the box on ten or more things. And I'm like, well, guys, I actually checked the box on all those things on 100% of my content campaigns. And yet still 98% of these things went nowhere. And so, guys, I think there's more to it going on here. The success rate is actually getting worse and worse. And there's a reason for this. And the main reason, I think, has to do with the fact that Google and Facebook algorithms have been changing how they distribute traffic to your website and Google, Facebook, that's probably like 60, 70% of the typical company's website. They're driving all the clicks, right? So what they're doing is they've changed those algorithms to really reward unicorns and punish the donkeys. Let me give you an example. When I talk about Kevin. See that curve there? This is like the top posts of the month at Inc Magazine. So I'm a columnist at Inc. Magazine, as you mentioned. Every month, my editor, she says, here's the top posts and here's how many views they received. And look, if you go back, like time lapse photography here, go back to August of 2015. It was a flat line, that green line. It's like the number one story got around 200,000 views. The number two got slightly less, but more or less like everyone was a winner kind of flat. 2016, August, it's like started to become more competitive. The top three articles sort of got a lot more traffic than the other stories. And then fast forward to just this past August, just a couple months ago, you can see the top two stories are getting more traffic than all the rest of the stories combined. So there is something going on with the distribution here. It's not just traffic, it's also social shares. So again, look at 2015, the top 10 stories, most shares on.
