Q&A w/ Mark and Trevor.
Ever wondered how competitor research can fuel your creative strategy? Or how the e-commerce boom of the past two years has squeezed businesses? Roll up your sleeves as we explore these topics in-depth, unravel the law of averages, and share a sprinkle of personal anecdotes about our creative grandparents. Also, we answer some intriguing questions from our listeners.
Finally, we maneuver into investing with a limited budget, the art of expanding a startup apparel brand's reach, and the significance of budgeting in Q4. As Apple gears up for its new iOS privacy update, we put our thinking hats on and discuss its potential impact on brands and their marketing strategies. Be ready for some insightful advice on creating content that connects with consumers without relying on conventional tracking tools. All this and more - for the entrepreneur in you.
Please connect with Trevor on social media. You can find him anywhere @thetrevorcrump
Q&A w/ Mark and Trevor.
Ever wondered how competitor research can fuel your creative strategy? Or how the e-commerce boom of the past two years has squeezed businesses? Roll up your sleeves as we explore these topics in-depth, unravel the law of averages, and share a sprinkle of personal anecdotes about our creative grandparents. Also, we answer some intriguing questions from our listeners.
Finally, we maneuver into investing with a limited budget, the art of expanding a startup apparel brand's reach, and the significance of budgeting in Q4. As Apple gears up for its new iOS privacy update, we put our thinking hats on and discuss its potential impact on brands and their marketing strategies. Be ready for some insightful advice on creating content that connects with consumers without relying on conventional tracking tools. All this and more - for the entrepreneur in you.
Please connect with Trevor on social media. You can find him anywhere @thetrevorcrump
Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the Unstoppable Marketer podcast, with me, as always, my cohost, mark Goldhart. Mark Goldhart, how are you? Oh, I'm doing good. Doing well.
Speaker 2:It's Halloween season, it's fall time. I think there's a lot of good things going on Right. I know it's a little scary out there in the e-com world. For some people it's kind of spooky season.
Speaker 1:This is spooky season for e-com right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I saw a stat that's really interesting. Yeah, the stat was for the first time in United States history.
Speaker 1:I saw the same stat. I know exactly what you're going to say. I think it has nothing to do with Halloween.
Speaker 2:I know Dogs. Oh, I don't know Outnumber kids. What.
Speaker 1:Yeah, In the world or in the United States. In the United States that's even crazier. I would have thought in the world, maybe because you got bigger countries that just have dogs.
Speaker 2:Dogs are just rabid. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Dogs just running around like mice.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the United.
Speaker 2:States. In the United States, yes, no, I'll double check. It might be pets, so I'll say it again as pets we can have the cut. Yeah, for the first time in United States history, pets outnumber kids.
Speaker 1:That's insane.
Speaker 2:And that's been the trajectory for a long time. We know that. Remember, in 2017, we were working together and what did I tell the company we worked for to do? And everyone thought I was dumb.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, it was a pet subscription Pharmacy, is that what?
Speaker 2:it was for the pharmacy.
Speaker 1:For those of you who don't know, mark and I worked. Where we actually met each other was back in 2015. And we worked for a company that sold diabetic testing supplies to people with diabetes. So it was like a subscription service for people with diabetes, so they didn't have to go get their testing strips and their testing supplies. And I do remember that you came to me and said we should start a business that does this, but for people who have pets, just for pets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, because the regulation on pets is different, right, right, and now you still have some like controlled substances that you can't. Just, you know there's still regulations around the substances themselves, but not to the patients. Yeah, it's a little easier to break into that market. Yeah, and at the time that company ran out of real estate, they were bumping into big insurance companies. People were breathing down their necks, right. So where do you go? At that point it's like, well, you either try to expand your offering to people or you become a pet brand, and they should have done the pet brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, another out of business Because the pet industry is on an exponential growth curve. I mean it's going to flatten out, but at that time it was just hitting its growth. It was growing, I think, like 30, 40, 50% year over year.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Well, you hear Elon Musk like every now and then Pet expenditures like people spending money on their pets. The pet, yeah the pet business is gnarly.
Speaker 2:I think, if I remember right, people are spending $8,000 a year On their pets. Yeah, wild, something crazy.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, Elon Musk does talk all about like hey, sure, global warming could be a problem and there's all these things that are problems, but the biggest problem to society is the fact that people aren't having kids, and that's going to ruin the world far before anything else does. And the stat seems to be playing right into what he says, which is people are getting pets over having babies. Yeah, they are.
Speaker 2:So I have it right here. Yep, so pets outnumber kids four to one, oh my gosh. And 84.6 million US households have a dog, cat or another pet, while only 35 million have kids.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, we have a pet fish and we have an ant farm and we have an ant farm Dangerous we have an ant farm Dangerous and we have three hermit crabs. Love me, some hermits in our house. Yeah, yeah, four of those are my son's pets, but we had a beta fish that has lived for two and a half years, nice, and it's a pet fish.
Speaker 2:Which is like two and a half years longer than beta fish usually live. Growing up in the nineties, remember how you always have two so you could watch them get all flared up in the house.
Speaker 1:Did you guys do that Apparently? It's really mean, but I guess Wait, not in this. No, yeah, next to it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we did that, with my brothers and I all had our own beta fish, and we'd always like put them next to each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, alpha mode. We got three kids. There's five of us, three kids, five pets.
Speaker 2:So so the pets I guess technically outnumber your kids, yeah, yeah. But the more surprising fact is that there's more US households, like it's just right 84 million households have pets. So I do think that other I'll try to find the other stat. I do think that's right. I think it's dogs Like, just dogs. Period Outnumber.
Speaker 1:That's crazy Kids.
Speaker 2:Because only 35 million households have kids. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think that's the best thing, which is Incredible. But that brings up my rant, which is I have a dog, we have pets. I've grown up with pets, I love animals, I am a animal lover, I love them. We have. I grew up with dogs my whole life. I always had a lizard or a snake, we had rabbits, we had I mean, you name it, we had that kind of animal at our house at some point, sure, growing up, and so I'm a pet person. I shed a tear when my dog dies. You know like I'm not a person that doesn't Like dogs. You have established this.
Speaker 1:However, there we go, but you have to establish it. Yes, I understand, you get people who are going to come after us.
Speaker 2:However, can we go back to the nineties level of owning a dog, meaning the standard is so high for owning a dog right now? It's very true, it's like if you don't spend three grand on training and they're like the best dog in the world all the time, people think you are the worst dog owner. Oh yeah, we're in the nineties. It was like oh, you have a dog and it's in the backyard, cool yeah.
Speaker 2:We in the 90s job for rescuing a dog, but now it's like, are you taking that out on a 10 mile hike every day? It's like, no, no, I got three kids, sorry, but I do take them on a walk every day. Yeah, and he's kind of a. He's like the world's most okay dog. Yeah, we love him, but he's a herding dog. He just barks at like every other animal with four legs. Right, we've tried to train him, but at some point it's just like I mean, I just try to take him on walks early and avoid it, right, but a lady. So Chewy is his name. He's a cute dog. We'll show you guys a picture. He's a handsome dog.
Speaker 1:He's a handsome dog. He's a handsome dog and I'm not a dog person, sorry. That's okay, not everyone is I used to be, though.
Speaker 2:But he's a handsome dog, kind of annoying, yeah, and he yelped a little bit because he like pulled against the leash and then like so I got in front of him and like I'm trying to train him, like hey, sit, like look at me, and he's like kind of barking. Well, anyways, the lady that was walking her dog starts yelling, and so I'm thinking, crap, this lady's yelling at me or my dog. But no, she was yelling at me, she was screaming at me. She said I was going to go to hell for abusing my dog and I was so taken back. I'm not even a yeller, you know, but she's screaming at me, saying I'm like abusing my dog because I had pulled him back and he yelped when he like crossed my path and then he's like there, I'm like what is this world Like?
Speaker 2:this is the craziest thing ever Like at least, I don't understand if you're yelling at my dog because he, like maybe, spooked your dog. But like the fact that you like turned all the way around to start yelling at me about my dog.
Speaker 1:Did you say anything to her, or did you just like walk away?
Speaker 2:Oh no, I said some words. Yeah, yeah, I said some words in a nice sort of nice one, not in a nice way. No, no, it was ridiculous. It was crazy, but I was like dude, interesting the level of expectation out here for owning a dog. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It's like I'm sorry for saving this dog from getting killed in a shelter.
Speaker 3:Like I don't know, like come on, give me a break.
Speaker 1:He's got a loving home.
Speaker 2:He gets everything he wants. He's got kids all day.
Speaker 1:When we had a dog grown up, we let him in our house twice a year, and one of those days was on Christmas morning, it's a bone. Yeah, he'd get like a bone on Christmas and we'd let him in and that was it. But he just loved it. He loved being outside and we loved it too, like we'd play with them outside and we had a big backyard, so he had like he's got a way better than that. He goes inside all the time. Yeah, spoiled.
Speaker 2:Spoiled inside outside. He's got two boys to run play with all day.
Speaker 1:What do you think of people who put sweaters on their pets and their dogs?
Speaker 2:Um, I struggle with it.
Speaker 1:I think it's a big pet. It's a huge pet peeve of mine. I can't even stand it Like there's some dogs.
Speaker 2:It makes little sense, Like if you see a Chihuahua in the winter of Utah, like maybe that makes sense, Like I'm not judging there. A Chihuahua was never meant to be in a winter climate. Yeah, he's not meant to be here, but there's some dogs out there. It's like dude, you got a golden retriever. Yeah. Like I think he's fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think he needs a sweater oh man All right Well that's crazy, that's a crazy stat.
Speaker 2:I love dogs, but yeah, like let's just tone it down a little bit out there, you know. Yeah. Like, as long as my dog's not like causing problems, he's going to bark though. I'm sorry, but dogs like they're dogs. Yeah, I don't know. I just think we should let dogs off leash. Let them establish who the alpha is in the neighborhood, let them work it out amongst themselves.
Speaker 1:There's just like one homeowner who's got like 10 dogs who just like stay over at his house because they go to the neighborhood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like let's just let all the neighborhood dogs just establish who the alpha is and then, and then just go from there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm not a dog guy. Kids are begging me for a dog and it just won't ever happen, until it does you know? It won't I really don't think it will.
Speaker 2:Tell Kansy to go behind your back one day and bring some of puppy.
Speaker 1:She could do that. I don't think she would. That's how it always happens.
Speaker 2:The mom will just kind of take some liberties, get the dog, and then the dad's mad and then the dad ends up taking care of the dog.
Speaker 1:Well, and then the dad ends up like loving it more than anybody yeah, like the dad ends up doing anything. That's how my father-in-law was with their dog.
Speaker 2:I feed my dog, I'm the one who takes them on walks. I'm the one who spends probably the most time with the dog. Oh, I guess that's like the adults of the house. Sure. My wife is just like I don't have the capacity to love another creature, so that makes sense. I understand she's got a newborn.
Speaker 1:I think that that's a decent, like a fair priority, you know on her part.
Speaker 2:Yeah, more important than the dog, for sure.
Speaker 1:I would think so.
Speaker 2:I think it's interesting to talk about those kinds of trends is because, going into quarter four, I think the market is starting to change. I think e-commerce the nature of e-commerce is starting to change and so, as the landscape starts shifting, we're seeing like some tectonic plates start to diverge at the moment and a lot of companies, I think, are going to be left in no man's land, which is you have markets that are shrinking right now. You have markets that are expanding right now. I don't think a lot of small businesses really understand where they are in those demographic shifts and the shifting nature of what's happening in the country.
Speaker 1:Well, and you?
Speaker 2:all platforms.
Speaker 1:Well, and the third thing is you have markets that are beginning more saturated to, so the market might not be growing or shrinking, but it's overpopulating, right? It's like those three things are huge at stake and, in fact, I think that I read that this is what I thought you were going to say when you were talking stats. I had no idea it was going to happen Anything to do with dogs, but I think I read a stat that this is the first year that e-commerce as a whole will be a down year, meaning every year all online sales has grown.
Speaker 2:Wow, so all online will not grow this year? Yes, from last year.
Speaker 1:Yep, I believe I read that.
Speaker 2:Which makes sense because you had. This is a return to the mean.
Speaker 1:Explain what you mean.
Speaker 2:So the law of averages always play out right. So, going back in our from our last episode or two episodes ago, we talked about the gambler's fallacy, which is hey, if you flip a coin three times and you get heads three times in a row, what are the chances that the next one is tails? The gambler's fallacy is oh, it's going to be, I have a higher chance of it being tails.
Speaker 2:Because I've gotten heads three times when in reality, the chance of getting tails is still 50%. It's 50% every single time, it does not matter what happened right before you. So the law of averages is if you flip a coin 100 times, right your tally of heads and tails becomes more average becomes more average 50, 50 split yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so if you, let's imagine this in this experiment, let's take you flip a coin 100 times in four different tests, right? So you have four groups of 100 flips. In your first group you had 75 heads. In your second group, you had 70 heads. Well, the chances are is that you end up getting 30, 30, and the more you do the experiment, the more the average will come back to 50. Sure, so the larger the sample, the more you return to the actual average. So, yes, there is a chance that you get 75 heads in 100 flips. Yeah, unlikely, but there's a chance.
Speaker 1:But that chance becomes a lot crazier if you did it 1,000 times to have 750 heads.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, unless you're cheating.
Speaker 1:But good, I guess technically it could, yeah, or you have a two-faced coin. That's right, two-faced Right.
Speaker 2:Isn't it heads, heads.
Speaker 1:RIP Harvey Dent. Rip yeah.
Speaker 2:Poor guy. You live long enough to become the villain, I guess.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:So yeah, the averages will play out. So what happened in e-commerce is 2020, 2021 were balloon years, so the trend was going up, but they outgrew the trend, but that's because of a black swan event, so now we're just seeing a return to the mean yeah. So it's a down year from maybe the year prior, but it's an up year from probably three or four years prior.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I didn't look at that piece, but what you're saying makes sense.
Speaker 2:I didn't look at it either, but I could almost guarantee it's still going to be higher than 2018.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, I was a little wrong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's down from last year's growth.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right, so last year's growth, that's a little red okay, like every year, the growth has been better.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it's not down. It's just it's down in terms of comparing year over year growth. Yeah, Nice. So, yeah, it's the law of averages, but again, I think you had such a gold rush moment with 2020, 2021, 2022 that now that you're returning back to the mean it's squeezing a lot of businesses. So I think nature will take its course and, unfortunately, some people will, or some businesses will, no longer be around. But yeah, I think it's not doomsday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2:This is just hey, you had a huge up year, it's down. And now I think people are trying to figure out where do they see themselves in this picture and how do they prepare for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, I agree with that. Yeah, because I think the best place to be in these kinds of moments is like you're either a termite, right, or you're a sycamore. You're either just so small and just eating away and like you can't it's like hard to kill you, yeah, but like you're not big enough to care about, or you're a giant right. It's harder when you're playing in the middle. Sure, in these moments where you're kind of like oh shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we have. I mean, today, one of the things that we want to talk about is we wanted to. I posted a question on social media just saying like, what do you want to hear from us? Like, we're going to answer questions, that's what we're going to do. Like, so questions from listeners of the podcast we're going to answer on the podcast. And as I was looking through the questions, I saw a Q4 question or two in there. So we're going to have some time to talk about and answer some Q4 questions. I have not prepped Mark for these questions. I've looked at them, but it's like a game show. Yeah, you want to. We can start reading some of them.
Speaker 2:Do I have to do that? Do I have to call a friend?
Speaker 1:You have Talmage. You have Talmage who's on the mic, okay, and he might be able to look stuff up. He might be able to look stuff up for you. Call a Talmage.
Speaker 2:Call a Tal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, call a Tal. Okay, Should we look at him? Should we bust him out?
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Okay, yes, all right, I'm just going to take things. I'm just going to take them one by one here, you know, can I just necessarily in a specific order? Did your grandma send in one? I wish she did. I don't know if she follows, I don't know if she's like always looking at me on social media. She listens, but she listens. So she downloads the podcast and she gets notified when there's a new one and she texts me when she likes it, she doesn't when she doesn't.
Speaker 2:She thinking about opening up a Snickerdoodle online store?
Speaker 1:No, she's quilting. Quilting, yeah yeah, she's a well and she's an artist, Like she's an incredible artist. Oil no water. Water, I think, watercolors, okay, yeah, watercolors. She's just, she's super creative. Anytime we she is going to be over the moon, by the way that, as she listens to this, as we're like dedicating this little piece. So, grandma, I love you. She anytime we go out of town and like it's like a family trip, she always brings crafts and everything and, like my kids, just like all the grandkids, just eat it up.
Speaker 2:Like they're so stoked when grandma, grandma Peggy's gonna be there. Grandma Peggy's got the goods.
Speaker 1:Yep, she's quilter, she's painter, all right, she's, she's all about it. Traveler. Big bees fan. Solid bees fan. Big bees fan.
Speaker 2:That's like the most Salt Lake Valley grandma thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, big bees fan, so AAA baseball fan. Aaa baseball fan right there. Okay, let's answer this quote. Let's let's get some questions. Okay, I'm not going to say who asked these, because I don't know if they want me to do that, but I'm just going to just going to throw them out there, all right. How important is content slash competitor research when creating a content strategy? Oh, that's a really good question. That is a good question.
Speaker 2:That is a really good question. Competitor research yeah.
Speaker 1:Content slash competitor research when creating. So when I when she says content competitor research, I'm guessing she's saying how important is it for me to look at competitors content strategy when creating my own strategy. She or he. She or he? Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:Want to protect people's identities here.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess.
Speaker 1:I guess you're right. So I have some thoughts around this. Yeah, I think that it's. It's more important. It depends on. It depends on who you. It depends on who you are individually, whether you're a brand or it's. This is, this is a conversation for an individual.
Speaker 1:So if you are naturally not that creative, meaning like storytelling is something that you've never really invested time and attention into, or creating content on social media or writing, but you but you know you need to get into it. If you, if that is just naturally something you have done in your life, but you maybe haven't created your own content, I actually don't think the competitive research is as important. Sometimes I think the competitive research could get in your head and make you want to act like them. But so if you're just naturally good at storytelling and creating content and you're good at the camera, you're good at scripting or whatever, I love the idea for people to be a little bit more raw with it, because we tend to when we do. Oftentimes, when we do competitive research, we get caught up in thinking that this is how our competition does it. Therefore, this is how I should do it and that can work.
Speaker 1:There are definitely things that you can learn from your competitors that are table stakes of things you should do, and they may have invested a lot of time and figured things out that you don't have to go figuring out on your own. However, you don't want to be like your competitors. You want to find ways to stand out. So I think it becomes a little bit more important if you're less creative, if you haven't done stuff like this For example, me, when I started creating content, I did a ton of competitive research because I just I didn't know what to do, so for me it was very important. Now I very rarely ever consume content of other marketers like myself who are creating content because I don't want to. I've just found myself naturally being like oh, that's so sick, I want to do that, and then I do it and I'm like that's not me yeah.
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Speaker 2:Competitor research can be an incredible asset for you in your creative strategy and whatever you're doing, but the way you conduct that research can impact your results profoundly, and so what I mean by that is you have to be able to contextualize what you're looking at and separate your emotion from it. So what I mean by that is, if you are doing competitor research, don't fall into the trap of what Trevor's saying is. It's easy to fall into the trap where you get kind of emotionally pulled into things where now you just want a copycat but you don't understand why that thing is even working in the first place. So you have to come up with a mental framework and structure of how you're analyzing your competitors, which is hey, this competitor seems to get a lot of traffic on TikTok. Why are they getting so much engagement in TikTok?
Speaker 2:Oh, I really like that TikTok. Well it's. Why do you like it? Doesn't matter. Why you like it, right, why do people like it? So now break it down. What hook do they have? What's the intro? Yeah, right, what are the principles that now you can take and then use your own voice with? Right.
Speaker 2:Where I think too many times people see something. So I think I know we talked about this a while ago, but it's like if you take a modern art piece, a lot of people think that's easy, like, oh, that's done, like Picasso is not that good or whatever. It's just squares and it doesn't look like a real artist, like you know, that's kind of a critique of some art, yep, but it's hard. It's hard to do what they do because they know the principles behind what they're doing. Totally.
Speaker 2:So you see, those like art, that's like the paint splatters and people just think there's no thought, or I mean, that's not my art that I love, but it's not as easy as just throwing paint at a wall and I think some people think it is Like oh, like, I can do that, I'll just copy what they did, and then it doesn't turn out, because they don't understand that there's some elements to this that this person has worked on for a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you got to learn how to analyze it from the principles, which is a. Why do people relate and enjoy this content?
Speaker 1:Totally. Was it a good hook? Was it a good story? Was it funny? How valuable was it? What is the call to action? Like? That's what Mark's saying is like find the principles, analyze those and take that research and plug it into how you would do things, and then the second thing I'd say is you have to contextualize where you are as a company versus where they are. Super important.
Speaker 2:Now Brett Swenson from Kizzik and I know Sean from Ridge, the CEO of Ridge Wallets, talks about it on Twitter. You can't copy what a hundred million dollar brand is doing. Yeah. You know you can't even the principles from it. Yeah, Like it's just different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year, you can't go doing what a hundred million dollar brands do and expect to win.
Speaker 2:No, you have to be the little guy like, accept where you are and embrace where you are as a company and say, hey, yeah, we're not a big brand, but you know what we are, we're relatable. Yeah. So how do we take these principles and make them relatable? And how do I look at people in my space? So maybe not competitors, but other brands in e-commerce that are doing things similar to me and growing at my stage, yeah, yeah. For sure. So those are my two cents.
Speaker 1:I like that. That's good. Let's move on. That's a good one. I like this question a lot. With a limited budget, what should a startup apparel brand focus on to expand their reach? That's a good one. Good question you know who you are, if you're listening to that.
Speaker 2:Define budget, budget Limited. I mean, that could be a hundred, what are they saying? Like a thousand? I just think like.
Speaker 1:My guess is, if they're asking that question is my guess is it's and they're saying they're a startup with a limited budget. I'm guessing that means that they don't have much money. Okay. Right. My guess, if I had to, is that, like they're putting their money into the product right Versus like, hey, I don't have the money for the marketing, but I've put all my money into POs to product development, so now how do I get some reach and start making some sales? Makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yes, that makes sense Now. So here, I guess this is my answer to that question. It's going back to the last thing I just said embrace where you are and recognize that this is not a quick, this isn't a get rich quick scheme. If you're trying to build a company, it's going to take longer than you think. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's always harder than you think and it's going to take longer than you think and I hope it is not as long as it takes most companies to become what they are. But you're going to look out there and think everyone did it in a year. And it's just rarely the case that someone does Like. We just witnessed a men's apparel brand that has been around for what? Four or five years, yep, okay, and then they needed some consulting and some help and then they just jumped in 4X their monthly sales one month over the next. But they had an entire foundation in place. So it's not like they came out of nowhere. They had a big foundation. They just needed a few things to get pushed into the right spots. So if you're just starting out, I think the best place you can start money is really forming your brand through content creation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I mean, that's where I'll like jump in, like I just went out to. I was just actually out to lunch the other day. Well, I take that back.
Speaker 1:I was golfing the other day with a hundred million dollar CMO and he asked me the question what do I need to focus on? Like, what, what? If there's one thing that you think I need to focus on, what is it? And I told him find the person who can create content that can drive people organically to your website and invest as much money and time and failure as humanly possible to finding that person, who that person or persons can be. And I do think that that is a page, because there's a lot of like. A lot of these hundred million dollar brands have not figured this out. Speaking of Sean from Ridge Wallets, so they're a nine figure brand. He tweeted something I want to say in September and I think it's still pinned to the top of his page. In fact, I'm going to go to it right now for a frame of reference. It is Okay Eight, nine, twenty three and this is at Sean Ecom.
Speaker 1:Yep, sean, with an S? E, I'm offering a hundred. I'm offering a million dollar contract to a content creator to come in house at Ridge. What does this mean? What's the catch and how do I apply? Here's the scope. And then he's got a big thing. He's literally offering somebody a million dollars to be a content creator. This is how much is it brands?
Speaker 2:Okay, so I think it's a million dollar, necessarily salary, but I think that's the contract size. Yeah, I mean because I think, yeah, down here he says salary or not. Well, look the second offer. He says two hundred and fifty thousand a year plus benefits for your contract, so that's a million dollar offer.
Speaker 1:That's huge for a content creator. Two hundred and fifty thousand a year to be a content creator, I mean, that's amazing equity on the table as well, which turns that into something completely different. Oh, incredible, right. So this is one thing that you can take that out of. A page of. Like billion dollar brands and hundred and hundred million dollar brands still haven't figured this content creation piece out yet. There are small, itty bitty brands right now who are winning and scaling like crazy brand new apparel brands, brand new hat brands, brand new shoe brands, whatever and they're finding a way to tell their story, to call out why their product is different than anything else out there, and they're using platforms like Tiktok or Instagram to share those stories and they're winning Right. They're winning big time. Right now. There's a little thing called Tiktok shop that, if you can really hone in, you can be a very, very tiny organization and have little to no budget, and if you can articulate, it's like it's like Kickstarter videos. Now, that's what I'm seeing, like, yeah, that's what I'm seeing like Tiktok shop.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be a little bit of a fad right now. It's huge and it's helping a ton of people blow up. Eventually it's going to kind of pan out and maybe not be bringing the same caliber of value that it is right now, but what was happening is the, the, the kick starters that would work the best back in the day, where the people who could articulate what problem they were solving, well, it was the ones who had the best videos and had the best video right, and they would raise all this money. This is what's happening.
Speaker 2:They've perfected it. Yeah, Um Koala tree here locally had some really great kick starters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's and Kickstarter is not as great as it used to be, like as you know it's it's a little more saturated, but Tiktok shop right, like that's a way you could go about doing things. So, if you can articulate your story, I think content creation is huge. But I'm going to give that same exact advice to advice to a billion dollar brand too. To be honest with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would. I would totally agree. I think we're big believers of this and we've always said this. But having run a marketing agency that does performance, which is paid ads, um, the paid ad landscape has changed so drastically. You know, you can't just throw certain things up and expect it to work anymore. No, but branding is forever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's. You might not see the fruits immediately because it takes a little longer to get there, and you also have to have a good product Like. You can't just sell crap. Yeah so, but branding is forever. If you establish a brand, then right, you can bank on that brand for a long time, even if other things go haywire.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I once heard somebody say paid ads get you sales today while you're working. A brand gets you sales tomorrow when you're asleep.
Speaker 2:Yes, right, yeah, paid ads is just a cog in the machine, like we talk about that all the time and but people think it's the silver bullet for growth. Yeah, and it used to be, it could be. Yeah, and I mean it still can today. Well, it can be when things are already in place.
Speaker 1:Yes, when, when the other metrics are set up right yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, when it's a good company, when they've done the right things, when they've built it the right way. If it's a unique product, yeah, that has a unique value proposition.
Speaker 1:You know, there's just pouring gas on the fire.
Speaker 2:Right, there's things for sure, yeah, but ultimately that's not going to be what you should invest in from the beginning, like you need to get your house in order and your foundation set before you try to just throw money at. Everyone wants to jump to advertising.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you should jump to the harder thing, which is just make sure you have a good brand and good content, because then you can always turn that content into ads if it's actually selling, if you can sell organically, that's the proof you need to sell. It wins, paid, yeah All right, let's keep moving on.
Speaker 1:This one's a Q4 one. Okay, I'm going to focus on one thing for my brand in Q4. One piece of advice. What would it be?
Speaker 2:For Q4. Q4. What's the one thing?
Speaker 1:they should focus on One piece of advice. Well, I had to, kind of. It was the person who wrote that was a little bit, I didn't quite understand it, but that's how I translated it. Okay, one piece of advice for Q4.
Speaker 2:I'm going to have to go on a journey of storytelling in order to answer this. Okay. Go ahead. So bear with me, we're going to go down the journey of data through storytelling right now. So in the last 100 years maybe it's 150, the human life expectancy has grown 3x With the advancement of modern medicine. Humans now live, on average, 3x higher than they did 150 years ago, which? Is crazy to think Worldwide.
Speaker 2:Okay, crazy to think. Except, that's kind of a lie. And why is it a lie? Well, it's not technically a lie, but it is, and this is how we're going to explain it. It's a false perception of what the actual story is. And what the actual story is is what we've done an amazing job at is making sure children don't die in the first eight years of life from stupid things like the flu, because child mortality has dropped. That's really the biggest story.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So it's not that people weren't living until they were 70 years old. Of course they were. It's that the younger population was dying so quickly, so quickly, and so it drops the mean down significantly.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting. And the reason why it's interesting is because you know anecdotally in my family tree my great great grandmother lived to be 105 years old, so she was born in the 1880s and she lived to 1993. It's a long life. She was a premature twin. When she was born she was actually incubated in a breadwarming oven in the Old West. The doctors said that you should leave these babies out to die in the cold winter night because they're not going to live. But my great, great great grandmother said no, and so she did what she needed to do to incubate her twins. Well, both of them lived to be over 100. So not only did my great great grandmother but her twin did.
Speaker 2:And so when you think about how crazy that is, it's like, well, well, they're just lucky. Yes, they were part of kind of this trend going up, right, but you look at her parents like 70, 80, 70, 70, 80. So people were living that long. So the other factor isn't just child mortality, it's violent deaths, so wars we're also bringing the mean down. So now, if you exclude child mortality and violent deaths across, like you can go back to like ancient Greece, the one study that I read people were living till their 60s to 70s. So now, yes, has life gone up from there? It has.
Speaker 2:So we have made improvements, but not 3x. Yeah, 50%, 25% doesn't sound as great as 3x. So the reason why this is an important topic of discussion is because, as businesses, sometimes you are focusing on the wrong numbers that don't tell you the story that will actually help you in these moments. So oftentimes you don't know what's actually helping you. So if you were to say, hey, modern medicine has increased life expectancy 3x in the last 100, 150 years, most people's minds aren't thinking about child mortality, they're thinking their quality of life outside of child mortality has gone so far up, that's like, oh man, everyone was dying in their 30s, right, right, well, not really, yeah, like yeah, if you were in a war or if you died when you were your kid. But so how does that help you make better decisions as a business? And in quarter four, you are now situated in these events that are very seasonal, and so you have to start saying how and what am I looking at to help me in quarter four.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So in quarter four it's the opposite, right? So we just explained how looking at an average doesn't really tell you the right story. Well, over quarter four, I would actually say the average is the story you want to tell. So the number one thing you want to focus on is saying how do I spend and expect lower returns and then average it out with my sale, because it's going to get harder and harder as CPMs go up?
Speaker 1:Yeah, can I dive into that just a little bit real quick to explain like further explain this. So what Mark's saying is like right now, what's going to happen is you might be spending the same amount of money on ads but you're going to see your cost per goes up, potentially pretty significant Cost per acquisition, cost per link, you know, cost per clicks, those kinds of things. So you might be tempted to say, oh my gosh, I need to decrease my spend, I can't. Oh, things, I'm not winning because you're looking at things. We're so used to looking at things day by day, week by week, even month to month sometimes. But you could look at October and say, oh my gosh, this is a failure.
Speaker 2:Yes, you can, but what's going to happen is, come your sale season for Friday you might make the wrong decision on that which is cut spend, cut back on everything. You get scared.
Speaker 1:And explain why that might be bad to cut.
Speaker 2:The reason why it's bad is because CPMs are only going to get higher, so your reach is only going to get harder. So by cutting spend now, you're cutting retargeting, you're cutting people coming and seeing you and getting ready to buy in November, so you're limiting your pool if you sit there and cut it now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because people oftentimes don't buy the very first time they ever hear about you.
Speaker 2:Like, if you're actually going to cut budget, there's a better argument just to cut budget during Black Friday.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that's what you do, I just think that's actually better.
Speaker 2:There's a better argument to be said about doing that than cutting it before.
Speaker 1:Right. The other thing that to add onto that is like not only does it help you build your retargeting pools, but if you can get somebody to buy in October and they like your product, the likelihood of them coming back and buying a second time in November when you have a really cool offer, will significantly increase. And we know that if you can get your customer to come back and buy a second time within 30 to 60 days, their lifetime value doubles in one year versus like it being like five years if they don't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a good argument just to say it's worth paying more in October for a customer 100%, Because if you have a sale, get them to come back. So yeah, I love thinking about it in those stories because it's all about understanding what you're trying to focus on. You're trying to focus and solve a problem. Well, if you were trying to increase human mortality or the average age, a lot of people would have been thinking about oh well, we got to increase health in the people's 30s which I'm not saying you don't do, Of course but the biggest impact that it's had in the world is just fixing kids.
Speaker 2:Making sure kids don't die from things like the flu or polio, whatever it was right. So it's really interesting to think about it in that context. So just always remember, know what you're trying to look at. And in quarter four, it's not a game of day over day or month over month, it's a quarter that you look generally, you want to look at year over year and you want to look at it also Like what's the average over the time and understanding how those things correspond to each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, I agree 100%. The other thing I'll add to that I think it can be kind of like deduced into what you're saying is I see a ton of people talking about these big Black Friday playbooks and game plans and to me I think, like the more you simplify things, the better. That's what I'll offer. Don't get crazy with like, oh my gosh, I got a decrease spend here. You increase like, just simplify it. Just simplify everything that you're doing. I think you're getting a lot of people out there who are trying to over complicate how to win over Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think. I think that's a really solid piece of advice and like going back to this example because I'm stretching it too far anyway, so I'm going to keep doing it is think about how simple of a solution that is to increase the amount of, increase human lifespan is. Just. Oh. All we have to do is just make sure kids have the right vaccines.
Speaker 2:That's a lot more simple than trying to solve for alcohol and tobacco and every other piece of cancer that was happening at that time, all of which they were getting wrong anyways, right Sure Back in the 1800s and early 19th, like there was no real good health advice. But the best thing you could have done is just let's solve the most simple thing, which is do the things that we know we have the resources to do now with modern technology, and that's make sure people don't die from diseases. We have cures for Love it, and I think businesses get too focused on these big grand things that they don't actually have control over. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like there's a million things impacting your business, right, but what's the one thing that you actually have resources for and can impact and focus on?
Speaker 1:that I agree. Okay, let's move on. Maybe let's do one more question, maybe one or two more. What should, what should brands be doing to prepare for upcoming privacy updates, aka iOS 17?
Speaker 2:Well, right now I think it's mostly rumors. I think I think Apple has announced their intentions of certain things with iOS 17. I know they postponed a few of these privacy updates, but this is where I think it's going anyway. So let's just talk about where the trend is and where the trend is going. So the trend is, we know iOS 14 kind of blew up people's pixels, kind of ruin the way you can track people's behaviors. A lot of companies went to third parties to get server side tracking on events to help solve for that, and a lot of that was solved to one degree or another. Yep, so iOS 17 in the future. It didn't happen immediately, but it's going to start stripping UTM parameters. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're saying kind of like early next year.
Speaker 2:Early next year, so even UTMs won't be usable. There's a few other potentials, like in iCloud plus subscription, you have the opportunity to use what Apple is calling private relay, which is just another way of saying they have a VPN built into Safari. Yeah, so you can turn that on. I have turned mine on and it's yeah, I'm a ghost Right. I've been testing it out for the last two weeks and I don't get any retargeting ads from websites that I visit. So what are the ads that I'm seeing and this is the reason I'm bringing this up is this is where it's going. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The ads that I see are what I engage with On social media. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In platform, in platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not seeing retargeting though. Yeah, and I've been testing this because I've been visiting like very specific industries on websites, so I've been doing like on my test on websites. I saw men's shoes like men's boots, like outerwear, right, but I'm not looking at any of that on my social feed and I don't see any retargeting ads from Danner or North Face or Patagonia on my feed at all. Yeah, because. I have not, I've been made. I'm making sure not to engage with any of that on my feed. Totally.
Speaker 2:So what can you do? It is investing into content. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that goes back to every other. I mean like it's funny, the content piece is almost like the answer to every question. I feel like because it's the foundation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what happened? The other thing, like I think this is what you're leading into is you invest in content and if you find ways to organically get people to come to either one to watch a video, because you can retarget off of that. You can retarget off of people who follow you, you can retarget off of people who spend time on your profile right, these are all in platform retargeting options and if you can crack the code to organic content creation, you get an aspect of that somewhere and it is essentially building a retargeting pool for free when you figure that out, and then you now on the paid ad side, can start retargeting the people who don't convert.
Speaker 2:Well, and the algorithm can say these are the people who are interested in you.
Speaker 1:It trains the algorithm more.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the answer is brand and like just business fundamentals, Like you've got to have a brand, you got to have a product and as you can get that reach organically, that's how you'll be able to succeed with iOS. Because at the end of the day, maybe everyone will hate me, but my hot take is I like these privacy updates. I'm not mad about them as a marketer. Yes, it's making things difficult right now, but I think this is going to help us go back to more creative advertising. I think it's going to help people get back to basics about how to engage with their customer and consumer base. It's going to help, I think, unleash a lot of potential out there with creatives. That has been overlooked. For hot take Like just, I know UGC can be somewhat of a creative, I guess, but we don't have beautiful ads anymore and what I mean by beautiful is people think advertising is a nuisance. There's this idea in people's minds that advertising is like oh, you're kind of sneaking in there right.
Speaker 2:And that is true when it's bad. But millions of people tune into the Super Bowl just to watch advertising. They want to see advertising, they want to be entertained, they want to see what people have come up with and the fact is, most people want to be sold on something. Totally. It's not bad to sell to people. People want to be sold on things.
Speaker 1:Well, people wouldn't be doing it if people weren't buying. Exactly Right.
Speaker 2:We'd stop advertising if people weren't buying, and so I think it'll help us get back into a mindset of let's sell to people and give them an experience, not just try to get them to do a quick buy or an impulse buy or something. Let's sell people on brand and on vision, let's humor them, let's give them moments of enjoyment. And I know there's companies doing that now, so I don't want to say it's not happening, but we know that Harman's Raindrop, there's a bunch of agencies that are making this really funny, well thought, produced content and I bet that content is standing the test of time right now. As these trends are changing, those pieces are probably proving to be worth it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's because oftentimes those people are so focused on what you talked about at the very beginning, which is what are the principles of the pieces of content that work really well, and they've built these formulas and they put their creative expertise around crafting the perfect hook right. And we had Jacques Spitzer, the CEO of Raindrop, on our podcast, probably last year, a year and a half ago, I don't know if you remember this, but he said anytime they work on a project, they crafted like 20 hours worth of hooks before they start a project. Do you remember that line? And I remember you're shocked and he kind of like, explained that a little bit. He said listen, I'm not saying that for 20 hours straight we're working on a hook. What I'm saying is we get 10 people who spend two hours each focusing on hooks.
Speaker 2:And just rapid fire it. Yeah, come up with the best ones, exactly.
Speaker 1:And it's like oh, that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of his lines that he said that has always stuck out to me is he says people don't have short attention spans, they have short consideration yeah, spans. Yep, you've got to catch them and make them, give them a reason to care about paying attention for more than two seconds, especially in social, because people they're trying to get to like your friends or whatever they're looking at.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, going back, I think that's what you're going to do with privacy updates is you're not going to change it. There's not going to be a silver bullet, like I hate to break it to you. I know companies like Northbeam are working on some pretty cool modeling that will help brands adjust as more privacy updates come along.
Speaker 2:I know they just released like an MMM model. I know that they do the tracking and the whole history of consumers, so those are always going to be options for you going forward, too, with privacy updates. Maybe you don't have the resources in-house to do maybe advanced modeling, but a Northbeam it will be able to provide you with things that can help you in the future determine at least, like attribution and customer journeys and stuff, but also, like you just can't forget, like you still have to have a fundamentally sound business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's made the best product and content when it comes to iOS. It's not even the best marketing anymore. It's content.
Speaker 2:Well, content is marketing. It's true, but it's an aspect of it.
Speaker 1:Right, it's not. Or is it advertising? Yeah, yeah, that's a good question right, Should we? Go into the difference between advertising and marketing Such an overplayed conversation.
Speaker 2:Any other questions on there?
Speaker 1:No, I think that's perfect. I think that's a good amount of questions, Guys, I want to do. We want to everyone who's listening. We want to do more stuff like this. So make sure to be following me on social media, because I put the it's hard to. You can't really get questions Like there's nothing I can really do on Apple podcasts or there is a new thing that we heard about on Spotify, so you can jump in and if you are a Spotify listener which I did a poll and I want to say that only like 30% of our audience are Spotify listeners, so I'm talking to you 30% you can go to a, to an episode and actually tell us what you think of that episode.
Speaker 1:So, like you can, there's now like a feedback link. It's pretty, it's pretty cool. Yeah, so go do that, but follow me, because I'm going in our stories to start doing this and Mark and I want to start answering questions more often. Maybe do a podcast episode that's like this once a month and we can really really start to call things out and and engage with you guys and really understand what you want to know. So we appreciate everybody and look forward to hearing from you guys next week. Thank you so much for listening to the Unstoppable Marketer podcast. Please go rate and subscribe to the podcast, Whether it's good or bad. We want to hear from you because we always want to make this podcast better. If you want to get in touch with me or give me any direct feedback, please go follow me and get in touch with me. I am at the Trevor Crump on both Instagram and Tik Tok. Thank you, and we will see you next week.