A two-hour-47-minute marketing curriculum that runs from positioning theory to a live Meta Ads build, a Klaviyo flow, and a whiteboard of the lead funnel.
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
In the AI era marketing is won on positioning and distribution rather than tactics, and the marketers who get paid are the ones who sit closest to the measurable dollars.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A marketer one to five years in who can make things look good but freezes when someone asks what the ads returned.
A founder or solo operator who is the entire marketing team and needs one coherent order of operations instead of twenty tactics.
A designer or creative who wants the vocabulary to sit in a performance meeting and argue with numbers.
Someone running a services business (agency, construction, web design, consulting) who needs lead flow and has been told social media does not work for them.
A marketing lead trying to decide what AI adoption inside their team should actually look like beyond people pasting prompts into a chat window.
SKIP IF…
You already run paid media at scale and write your own creative briefs. The ad section stops well short of advanced scaling.
You want SEO, affiliate, or retail media. Those are named in passing and never taught.
You are looking for brand identity or visual design craft. This treats aesthetics as a given and spends its time on the money.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Building is cheap now, so the scarce things are taste, distribution, and attention. The course starts with positioning, which it treats as the one decision that makes every later decision cheaper, and offers a reusable taxonomy of roughly a dozen positions plus a shelf test for picking yours. From there it maps the brand world (characters, sets, events, plot), compresses messaging into a single statement and three copy styles, and teaches demand through a pillar system on one primary social network and ad-set-budget testing on Meta. The last third is where the money is: landing pages, lead speed, sales collateral, email flows, campaign staging, and a weekly note upward that makes your work visible.
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Why building got cheap and distribution got expensive, plus the four marketing disciplines and how they are blending together.
05:39 – 15:40
02 · Positioning and differentiation
The shelf test, then a dozen reusable positions from performance and category creation to niche, generational, and premium tiers.
15:40 – 24:43
03 · Mapping your brand world
A four-quadrant exercise: characters who can appear, sets you can film, events across company and culture and industry, and the plot connecting them.
24:43 – 38:22
04 · Messaging, copy styles, and AI workflows
One positioning sentence, three copy styles, and the five levels of AI adoption from chatting to a full marketing brain.
38:22 – 1:07:29
05 · Demand generation and organic social
Choosing a primary network, the content funnel, the pillar system for testing formats, and what you are really competing against in the feed.
1:07:29 – 1:18:40
06 · Paid advertising fundamentals
ROAS, CPA, CAC, and LTV explained with real arithmetic, then which ad platforms deserve budget and in what order.
1:18:40 – 1:30:58
07 · Meta Ads walkthrough and creative strategy
A live build inside Ads Manager: campaign objective, ABO versus CBO, audiences, budgets, and the weekly creative testing loop.
1:30:58 – 1:43:02
08 · Creators, influencers, and briefs
The difference between creators and influencers, four ways to work with each, where to source them, and a modular brief template.
1:43:02 – 1:53:33
09 · Turning attention into leads and sales
A whiteboard of the funnel: calls to action, landing pages, CRM records, automations, speed to touch, and close assets.
1:53:33 – 2:02:48
10 · Landing pages that convert
Teardown of product pages, the listicle page format, and how luxury pages justify price before they ever list features.
2:02:48 – 2:13:47
11 · Brand narrative, campaigns, and PR
Brand strategy versus creative strategy versus creative direction, how campaigns are constructed, and what PR is still good for.
2:13:47 – 2:28:22
12 · Email, SMS, and customer retention
Campaigns versus flows, a tour of Klaviyo automations, eight campaign types to rotate, segmentation, and the weekly email workflow.
2:28:22 – 2:39:02
13 · Sales support and marketing alignment
The collateral a sales team needs at each stage, triaging social leads, touch counts, and mining recorded calls for content.
2:39:02 – 2:42:35
14 · Building a marketing campaign
Whiteboarding the four campaign stages (teaser, campaign, unveil, sustain) across internal and external channels.
2:42:35 – 2:46:58
15 · Internal communication and proving value
The weekly note upward: wins, what is next, blockers, and reporting, plus how it rolls up through a team.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
AI collapsed the cost of building, so the remaining barriers are taste, distribution, and attention.
Positioning now has to be legible to machines, because a chatbot needs a stated reason to recommend you over anyone else.
You are not competing with other brands in your category, you are competing with everything else in your customer's feed.
Direct response is the highest-performing copy style and the one most marketers refuse to write.
One positioning sentence does more work than a mission statement, a vision statement, and a tagline combined.
Most teams using AI never leave level one, chatting, when the value starts at a shared project loaded with real product and customer context.
The actual AI unlock inside a marketing team is going from single player to multiplayer, where projects and skills have named owners.
A 2x ROAS on a $100 product that costs $25 leaves $25 of contribution, and that arithmetic is what makes advertising defensible in a budget meeting.
CPM, cost per click, and thumbstop do not matter if the ad hits its ROAS target.
Start on ad-set budgets rather than campaign budgets, because the algorithm cannot make good decisions on data you have not generated yet.
Three to ten ads per ad set at $50 a day, and spend three to five times your target cost per action before you judge it.
Ads whitelisted from a creator's own handle routinely beat the same creative running from the brand handle.
Seeding free product with no obligation attached works best when the item costs the brand $10 to $40.
A landing page converting at 11 percent instead of 4 percent cuts your cost per acquired customer more than any targeting change will.
Every minute between a lead arriving and a human responding lowers the odds of ever having the conversation.
In one high-ticket business averaging $9,000 orders, the eleventh touch was the most likely to convert.
One to three emails a week is sustainable, and daily discount sending buys revenue at the price of permanent list attrition.
Recorded sales calls are the most useful content brief a marketer has, because the objections arrive verbatim.
The closer you work to the dollars, the more you get paid, which is why creative strategy became a high-paying job.
Leadership will probably never read your weekly numbers, but they trust the person who publishes them.
Takeaway
Positioning first, then distribution, then proximity to the money.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every tactic in this course inherits from one decision about what you are known for, and the career advice underneath it is that the measurable work pays better than the beautiful work.
01Marketing in the AI era
Marketing splits into brand, product, content, and demand generation, and the boundaries between them are collapsing into blended roles.
The valuable person understands all four disciplines, specializes in two, and orchestrates the rest with a team or with tools.
02Positioning and differentiation
Positioning is what you are known for, and it now has to be concrete enough that an AI search result can state a reason to recommend you.
Use the shelf test: stand in the aisle you compete in and name the one reason your product earns its spot.
Roughly a dozen positions are reusable, and some require a real product advantage while others can be built with marketing alone.
03Mapping your brand world
Map four quadrants before planning content: who can appear on camera, where you can film, what events fill the calendar, and how they connect.
The empty quarters on that calendar are the real output, because they tell you which specials or collaborations you need to invent.
04Messaging, copy styles, and AI workflows
One positioning sentence covering target, need, category, benefit, and differentiator replaces the whole folder of mission and vision statements.
Three copy styles cover most brands: direct response, evidence-led, and human-driven. The confrontational one usually wins and is the one people avoid.
AI adoption has five levels, and the jump that matters is from individual chatting to shared projects and skills with named owners.
05Demand generation and organic social
Choose one primary social network based on who you actually have available, not on which platform has the most reach.
You compete with everything in your customer's feed, which is mostly people and entertainment, not the other brands in your category.
Run three to five repeatable formats, publish each three or four times a month, then compare them against each other monthly and retire losers.
06Paid advertising fundamentals
ROAS makes advertising defensible: at a 4x markup, a 2x return on a $100 sale leaves about $25 of contribution.
Cash-constrained brands need the first order profitable, while funded ones can pay more up front against measured lifetime value.
Treat CPM, cost per click, and thumbstop as diagnostics. An ad with ugly surface metrics and good ROAS is still a winner.
07Meta Ads walkthrough and creative strategy
Start on ad-set budgets rather than campaign budgets, because the algorithm cannot optimize across data you have not generated yet.
One ad set equals one concept with three to ten genuinely different executions, funded at about $50 a day.
Spend three to five times your target cost per action before judging a test, and read add-to-carts when sales do not come.
08Creators, influencers, and briefs
Creators supply volume and variety of ad creative, while influencers anchor a campaign and make smaller creators want to join it.
Four ways to work with creators: paid ad creative, seeding free product, affiliate commission, and hiring them as recurring account faces.
Ads whitelisted from a creator's own handle usually beat the same creative on the brand handle, which is why some accounts run half their spend that way.
09Turning attention into leads and sales
Attention is worthless until a specific call to action moves it onto a page you control and a record you own.
Landing page conversion rate and lead close rate are the two numbers that decide the economics of everything upstream.
Every minute between a lead arriving and a human responding lowers the odds of the conversation ever happening.
10Landing pages that convert
A product page should remove objections in order: hero proof, benefits, how it works, evidence, specs, testimonials, FAQ.
Content-led listicle pages educate first and sell second, and are worth testing against a straight product page.
Luxury pages invert the structure and spend their length justifying price through craft and process before listing any feature.
11Brand narrative, campaigns, and PR
Brand strategy sets position and tone, creative strategy ships weekly concepts, and creative direction owns campaign vision and can execute any part of it.
A campaign is a moment that pulls the whole brand world into one idea, which is why campaign-to-campaign brands look more alive.
Press coverage has lost most of its value, but rehearsing how messages will land during a crisis has gained it.
12Email, SMS, and customer retention
Separate campaigns from flows: campaigns are one-off sends, flows are automations triggered by signup, abandoned cart, browsing, and repeat purchase.
One to three emails a week is sustainable, while daily discount sending buys revenue at the cost of permanent list attrition.
Rotate eight campaign types so people open for different reasons, and let the week's social posts and sales calls fill the calendar.
13Sales support and marketing alignment
The closer your work sits to the dollars, the more you get paid, which makes sales support a better career bet than campaign work alone.
Arm the sales team at four moments: the first email, the thank-you page, the call itself, and the follow-up.
Recorded sales calls are the best content brief available, because the objections arrive in the customer's own words.
14Building a marketing campaign
Campaigns run in four stages, teaser, campaign, unveil, and sustain, each planned across both internal and external channels.
Every campaign resolves to an asset list with dates and named owners, worked backwards from the launch.
15Internal communication and proving value
Send a weekly note upward with wins, what is next, blockers, and reporting, because invisible work gets treated as no work.
Naming a blocker early converts a future failure into a documented decision that someone else owed you.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Positioning
What a brand is known for: the single idea it owns in a buyer's head. It is the reason the product earns a place on a crowded shelf, and every later marketing decision inherits from it.
Counter-positioning
Taking share from an established category by offering a markedly different and better experience for a specific group, rather than by beating the incumbent on its own measurable terms.
ROAS
Return on ad spend. If a dollar of advertising produces two dollars of revenue, that is a 2x ROAS. It is the headline number used to judge whether paid media is working.
CAC and LTV
Customer acquisition cost is what it costs to win a new buyer. Lifetime value is what that buyer spends over years. Cash-poor brands need the first order to be profitable; funded ones can pay more up front against LTV.
CBO and ABO
Campaign budget optimization lets the ad platform distribute money across all your ideas. Ad set budget optimization keeps the money split under your control, one budget per concept being tested.
Lookalike audience
An audience the ad platform builds by finding people statistically similar to a customer list you upload. A 1 percent lookalike is the tightest match, 10 percent the broadest.
Broad targeting
Handing audience selection entirely to the ad platform instead of specifying interests or lists. It works once the account has generated enough conversion data to learn from.
Thumbstop (hook rate)
The share of people who watch the opening seconds of a video instead of scrolling past. A useful early signal of whether creative is working, not a goal in itself.
Whitelisting
Running a paid ad from a creator's own account using a code they generate. The ad carries their handle and social proof, which usually lifts performance over the same creative on a brand handle.
Dark listing
Running an ad from someone else's account when the post never appeared on their public feed. It borrows the handle without the organic footprint.
Seeding
Sending free product to creators with no posting requirement, betting that enough of them post to make the giveaway profitable. Most viable on low-cost items.
Content funnel
Sorting content by job: top of funnel earns attention and raises the floor on everything else, middle educates about the brand, bottom exists purely to produce signups or sales.
Pillar system
Choosing three to five repeatable content formats, publishing each a set number of times per month, and comparing them against each other monthly so format decisions are made with data rather than opinion.
Flow (email automation)
A sequence of emails or texts triggered by a customer action such as signing up, abandoning a cart, or browsing a product. It runs on its own once built, unlike a campaign which is sent once.
Listicle landing page
A content-led page that educates on a problem or topic in a numbered format and converts readers into buyers at the end, rather than selling the product from the first screen.
Speed to touch
How fast a salesperson contacts a new lead. Response odds drop with every minute of delay, making this one of the highest-leverage things marketing can influence without owning sales.
Creative strategy
The weekly job of inventing new ad concepts, briefing them, and reading the results. Distinct from creative direction, which owns the overall campaign vision and look.
Collateral
The assets a sales team sends a lead between first contact and close: FAQ documents, case studies, testimonial reels, comparison charts, and short videos that answer objections before they are raised.
“In a world where you can build anything, distribution is king.”
the thesis in nine words, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
39:27
“Outbound is actually going out to your target customer, sending them messages, sending them emails, and from scratch, pulling business from the void.”
vivid phrase for the least glamorous channel→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
53:53
“You are not competing with other brands in their feed. It is individual people. It is skits. It is funny and relatable content. That is your competition.”
reframes the whole competitor-audit habit in one beat→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
56:45
“Until someone does it, it is always too boring or too much of an outlier.”
standalone aphorism about content in unglamorous niches→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:12:50
“Meta is amazing. It is a money printing machine.”
“If you are a graphic designer, a videographer, a creator, a social media manager, whatever you are, if you also have a basic knowledge of meta ads, you are a weapon.”
career advice with a hard edge, aimed at creatives→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:29:48
“It was just a game of sheer will and attrition.”
honest line about outbound, lands without context→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:38:00
“The best ten percent of creators do not use the brief. The bottom ninety really need it.”
clean rule for anyone managing freelancers→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
2:29:17
“The rule is the closer you are to the dollars, the more money you make.”
the career thesis of the whole second half→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:44:16
“Your bosses probably will not even look at it, probably will not even measure it, but they care that you are measuring it.”
counterintuitive and immediately usable→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphoranalogystory
In a world where you can build anything, distribution is king. Alibaba and the internet opened up the world of physical production. How goods are made and who makes them was democratized, and thousands of brands have emerged over the last few years from it.
Now AI has done the same thing for software. Just my team alone has shipped one major app and multiple smaller apps in the last few months. The barriers are now taste, distribution, and attention.
The business world is massively changing. marketing has become the end -all skill that is the most desired and the most hired right now so today we are going to talk about all of marketing this is a complete multi -hour course with companion downloads you can install and use if you know nothing i'm going to define every term and how they build on each other, you'll be able to savvily have a marketing conversation after this.
And if you're experienced, you're going to notice some real nuance. Because I'm talking about the new playbook for the AI and algorithmic era, which is markedly different from what we learned decades or even years ago. So if you want to integrate your ad accounts with ChatGPT, build your social media -based brand strategies, this is going to be the cutting edge.
And you'll see, we cover relevant brands from the giants of luxury to agencies and services -based businesses that rely on leads. I work on just both sides every day, both as a content creator, a brand owner, and as a partner in Darkroom, where we basically bring in our own lead flow and we help other brands with their performance marketing.
We are in the weeds of what is happening right now. we will cover all those businesses all the way to the new software and tech playbooks this is for everyone so after this intro there are four core sections here you can mainline all this or take them one a day we will start with lore communications messaging and positioning probably the most important thing in the modern day.
With tools to train LLMs to help, and we will do an actual exercise to build out your brand world that will bring the whiteboard out and we will work through it here. Then comes demand, social media, ads, and the characters related to demands, creators, influencers, and employees. This is the fun part, for me at least.
Then comes tactics, how marketing flows to sales, leads, and websites. We will teach you to make and deploy landing pages and chat GPT sites. This is the section if you want to make money in marketing.
Advocate for a high -paying job, this is it. And last, narrative. Communicating with customers and leads, putting together campaigns, PR, and the narrative internally of explaining marketing to get what you want done.
I am going to screen share and whiteboard throughout. We aren't just going to talk about it. I'm going to show you Meta Ads Manager.
I'm going to show you inside Klaviyo. We're going to build your ChatGPT project. I want this to enable you to start now.
And there will be dozens of examples from brands I've worked on to popular brands. You can actually see what's happening in the real world. As I mentioned, all the guides and skills and links from this will be in the big marketing .zip link that you will see in the description below.
And thanks to my friends at OpenAI, all of this is free. Let's lock in.
To start, let's define the four types of marketing that are most typically talked about. So first, you have the most well -known, brand marketing. This is all about perception and the untracked attention.
Positioning, a brand's feel and purpose. This is where brands like Patagonia and their mission or Loewe and their look and feel rode in their magnetic attention. Or in B2B, someone like Ramp who does these big stunts.
All comes under this brand umbrella. And then we have the tactical, product marketing. Product marketers own the identification of what makes the product special and how you communicate it.
They go through messaging. It's actual presentation. They're syncing with the packaging.
And how this overall product roadmap syncs to the greater brand goals. You see a lot of standout brands in this last era, whether it was Graza having their sizzle and drizzle and their form factor, relates a lot to product marketing. Same thing with brands like Saaz, who stand out on the shelf with these millennial flavors and the approach and the names that just want to make you put it in your cart.
All the way to the traditional, someone like De Beers, positioning diamonds overall. The ideas of their products and their cuts and what moves over time. And then we have content marketing, leveraging social media, but also dealing with collateral, bigger media, et cetera.
Content marketing often comes to what sales assets does a team have to send out? What decks are being prepared? It goes more than just social media.
But brands build huge notoriety for this. I think of brands like Merit and Beauty, where every single piece of content they put out just speaks so perfectly to their target demographic. All the way to the champions of this category, someone like Red Bull, whose content and media is as important as the product itself.
Then Demand Gen. actually buying media placing ads and generating sales and then working with the partners and agencies to do so this is where we see so many brands in this era hexclad comfort gruns the myriad of supplement brands and the explosion of new brands have blown up on tick tock shop or with meta advertising really use this new formula of demand gen really well we're going to actually walk through meta ads and creator and how that works later on and last not only it's hardly a core discipline but this idea of marketing ops i don't include the core four but there are a lot of roles just around how do you tie this all together with systems and process the back end of your shopify creating your llm projects whatever it is now previously while i was coming up as a marketer the cmo Chief marketing officer would orchestrate all of this.
But now that's changing because these roles are blended. You can do so much more with the tools you have. So younger marketing leaders are also increasingly individual contributors.
Someone leading teams who's also cracked at media buying or social media content. And the buckets are complicated. They don't necessarily fit into one.
Content marketing and demand gen are becoming one. The product marketing happens as the content's being developed live. The brand becomes a perception out there in the world that is so much less controllable.
That's what we're going to dig in here today with. Because this is where there's an opportunity to be someone who understands all this, specialize in the parts of it that you like, and orchestrate with a team and agents for the rest. And we'll get to all this later.
First, let's get into what the most important part is in the modern day. And it's not tactics. It's not social media.
This is about lore. And by lore, I mean positioning. How are brands and products set up to succeed from a marketing perspective before you even open a social media account or touch an ad?
Let's dive in. So what is positioning? In an increasingly saturated and chaotic world, with so many brands and so many things happening, positioning is simply what you're known for.
The association you have with an idea and the lens through which your brand sees the world and consumers see your brand. And most importantly, it cannot be generic. The number one goal here is to be remembered.
When someone learns about you, do they understand what you stand for and why would they consume it? And do they retain that? And importantly, in the new world, it needs to be AI legible.
You will note if you go search inside ChatGPT or you search in Google and have an automatic AI result shown to you, the way they recommend things is very practical. They need to have a reason to show you. a brand.
And that reason is going to show up inside how you position. And so I'm going to go through over a dozen examples of different positioning here. But the easiest way to think about this is with an exercise.
If you go to a store and you go to the shelf of whatever it is you're buying. toothpaste, toys, greens, energy drinks, you have what we call the shelf test. Energy drinks is a great example.
You go to an energy drink aisle and then you will see Monster Energy with their big kind of quasi -counterculture positioning. You will see Alani Nui with a more female -centric positioning. You'll see Celsius, which comes across almost like a health product.
You'll see Red Bull that's sold on its content and perception. Each of these brands has a position. It has a reason for it to exist on the shelf.
And so your job is to look at positioning in contact. of what's happening in the world in what you sell this goes for any brand if you are another ap app that does accounts payable for brands if you are another consumer software with a camera if you're another social network if you are an agency that sells freelance design services or does interior design what is your position so let's walk through a bunch of the common options so the first we're going to talk about is performance positioning this is the best positioning you can have but most brands don't have it so what do i mean by performance positioning you can call out what you You create.
is better than what existed before quantifiably so for instance this is the absorption company they have a unique mechanism through which their supplements are absorbed which gives them a higher efficacy so you can take less of it and have more of a result because of the proprietary science they've developed that is their marketing differentiator scientifically formulated for increased absorption david protein is another one david via virtue of science has better macros they can offer more protein and less calories than anybody else on the market they reinforce this with initiatives like this.
This is their cod where they're basically comparing the only thing that can hit their same objectives better is actual fish. They're selling that with the marketing of it, a reminder that they can succeed on performance. So if your brand, whatever it is you sell, is markedly better, you can actually show through data what you do has more efficacy.
Performance positioning is for you. You want to be able to repeat that story again and again. Do metaphors like what David did to show it.
Prove it in certain tests. Call it out with science. It's an excellent...
way to position your brand. Now, another interesting one that comes back to the product side of it is category creation. So I love to call it aura ring for this.
We all know about fitness trackers. People wear them on their wrist. They said, hey, what if we gave you that same potential, but we gave it a ring?
You don't want to wear something on your wrist. It's more subtle. It's more stylish.
They are basically taking a product -based position that moves a known thing into a new form factor. A somewhat related, but still very different position is what we call a counter position. This is when there's a big existing product category and you're able to provide something that has a better user experience in some way but is markedly different so perhaps one of my favorites of recent note is gruns versus ag1 everyone knows they need to get their greens no one wants to drink a bad drink how do you solve that gummies how do you really get that kickstarter inside households go for kids and then have it experience so good it transfers to the adults this is apple's i'm a mac compared to a pc this is drinking poppy and olipop versus drinking coke they are better experiences for a certain group of users it's not a complete completely quantifiable in the same way of a performance brand, you're getting this much more protein, but you can still experience it.
And you get to say, our job is just to take market share from this existing prior experience that isn't as good for our target demographic. And we call that counter -positioning. Another one you see a lot now is smart positioning.
How do you take a traditionally dumb category and add technology? Eight Sleep is a mattress with a technology component on top of it. Smart phones versus dumb phones.
Adding technology inherently makes whatever product you're selling against seem dumb. whereas yours seems preferable, the nest as a smart home. Again, this is chosen by the product.
Your product has to have that tech component, but if you do, you're able to use some of these nuances to correctly position your product. Now, getting into the more typical, we have value positioning. You are always able to sell your product based on cost.
Now, value positioning has lost some efficacy in the modern world we're in because a lot of that's been just dominated by China. Timu, Shein, your average Amazon reseller at the lowest price are all Chinese brands who are willing to take lower margin, who are closer to the supply. chain.
So it's become harder and harder to compete on price. But that said, if you are in a services business, if you are in a local business, if you are on an agency and you're just getting started, it's one of the best levers you have to be able to say everyone else is charging more than us. I will do the work for less and it will be close to as good is something that will basically always have its place inside the positioning matrix.
Then we have niche positioning. This is the for us, buy us label. You could do this through language.
It's the same brand, but offered in Spanish language. You can do this through background. You will find a certain brand that appeals more to the African American or Asian American or Latin American community and say, that's where we're focused.
Plus size versus petite. Brandy Melville is a niche position. This also happens in subcultures, gothic, whatever it is.
It's basically saying there is a large group that consumes a certain type of product, whether that is underwear to protein bars. How do we niche in on a one specific angle that we can tell a better story to? Ideally one that we're also from.
And this is interesting psychologically because the purchase of a brand like that becomes an act of support. But on the other side, it can often limit the amount of people that would actually be interested in engaging with the brand.
You have to say, maybe our total available market, our TAM available to us, we may never be able to reach. Very similar is generational positioning, the way you'll see someone like a Jones Road Beauty go for a slightly older, more refined consumer, or a Half Magic go to Gen Z. You could say, we're going to create a similar experience, we're going to zone in on the messaging for a specific generation.
This is where it starts to become less about the product and more about the marketing, right? You can't have a smart product, you can't have a performance product without an actual product. improvement, but you can have a niche positioning or a generational positioning purely through marketing.
Another very old school tactic of this is a single attribute positioning. So the way Volvo wants their brand to be synonymous with safety. You see, we're going to own one core word that matters in our consumer's mind, and we are going to build product and marketing to remind you that of all time.
Now let's talk a bit about premium positioning. So if you want to charge an extra amount of money and how a brand is purchased, which again gives you more room for marketing when you do so. So the first is a performance brand.
Very similar to how we talked about performance earlier, but you're basically saying, I'm going to provide a better experience for people who take a thing super seriously. It's a higher level of performance brand. We'll call it a true performance brand.
So you might say Satisfy Running, for example. They sell lifestyle, but they also have all these tips and tricks and expensive products built for a very specific type of runner who takes marathoning and long distance super serious. And what they get when you create a great product for them is you get all those aspirational customers that come behind it who are willing to pay the premium to look like that, to aspire to be it.
Arcteryx, solid. These are all these brands that you see that have this amazing experience that a lot of people purchase that don't really need. We'll call these lifestyle performance brands.
And to anchor this, you have to both have the experience, the background, the expertise, and the credibility to be able to sell that. Then we have a designer brand. The aesthetics of the brand are a differentiator.
T &H Engineering is a great example. They sell these Bluetooth speakers for more than your average because of the design, the background, the care, and the marketing they do. And for people with whom aesthetics is a real differentiator, who like their look and feel and methodology, They choose to spend more on it.
Corresponding version is a bespoke brand. How can you make something truly custom? A luxury one -of -one designed to fit you as a customer.
It was made exactly with your proposition in mind. It's much harder to execute. You can charge a premium for.
Another great position is a counter position to luxury. You see Italic and Queens use this all the time where they will say, we are giving you luxury quality without the markup. They're saying we can give you something close to something super expensive.
It's a new age spin on value positioning. It's not the cheapest option, but it's cheap. cheaper than what you would normally buy it at.
And there are all kinds of versions. You'll see whether you are launching a product, there's a brand, or you have a campaign, there are hundreds of different positions. I've put together this positioning tool you're going to be able to find in the Marketing Zip Toolkit, where you can actually chat with it and play with it here.
And it's going to give you all of these strategies and back and forth on this, because this is very nuanced and there's a lot of it. But once you understand the canon of what exists, what your options are to position, you get a lot more ways you can work through what you're going to do in marketing. Because there's oddball ones too.
One I love to call out is name positioning, right? Like Satoshi Nakamoto, the clothing brand. They're just adopting basically this entire crypto user base, all these people that are interested conceptually in that name and it appeals to them and know it.
They just made a brand and just took it. So there's oddball positioning types too. Why I give this as context before we get into any tactics or what you do is you need one of these for whatever brand you are working for or have.
The first thing you need to do is sit down and be like, how do we differentiate? What do we sell? Are we selling based on value?
Do we give a more bespoke experience? Do we have a higher performance? Are we selling better?
to a certain niche or lifestyle. Take all those ones I outlined or any other ones you find in the chat and be like, what is our differentiator? There, this is your North Star.
All your marketing, every ad we talk about, all the organic content that we talk about, your landing pages, your comm strategies, your email, your narrative, all comes back to knowing this position. And if you work for a company and you start in the company and they don't have that, it's your job to help bring that out. You build that strong position, everything else gets easier.
Your ads get cheaper. People remember it. They refer more.
It is such an important part and why I like to lead with it. So now we're going to go through an exercise you can do to actually map your brand world, all the characters, all the things we're talking about. How do you think about this?
And this is a great exercise to do if you are coming into a marketing team new or if you need a refresh and you want to reset your strategy to these modern methods or when you begin to take on a new freelance client. So we used to do this early on in my agency life. We would do this as a paid workshop for clients.
We actually map all of this stuff out. And then we'd reimburse that against whatever retainer came on the other side of it. So if they just did it and they just wanted the info, great.
But if they wanted to do that and then leverage it into a plan, we'd work on it that way. But to map out your brand role, you need to think of it this way. So first we want to list out your characters.
So that's gonna be this quadrant over here. So in there, I want you to list out who is actually representative of your brand. Do you have a founder that's on camera?
Do you have experts that you can get on? So for instance, you'll see stuff like Mango has some of their designers that actually come on camera for them. Do you have a social media team or a creator that you hire?
And do any of your customers make content? You can plug in stuff like Outer Signal and they'll show you all your influencer customers. And then you can expand this out even wider.
You can go to collaborators. Do other companies you work with make content? Does someone, does one of your executives have a podcast, someone at a different company?
Who are all the voices that could represent your brand? And the same thing with sets. Where do you have that you could film?
So for instance, if there's a warehouse, office, a factory, or just a sick place that you can go to, like some sort of studio, a lab, whatever it is. And so to talk through that. For a lot of companies, especially if you ship something out, actually being able to go to the warehouse and be like, hey, pack an order with us.
Be inside the factory while you're putting those things together. Or alternatively, we have put a lot of Osmos, like I have filming down here. We've just bought those for factory teams and asked them to get us specific types of footage or hired a local videographer.
in different countries actually go travel that. You'd be surprised how easy that is with Upwork and a little creativity. If you do have an office, how can you make a corner of it into a more aesthetic presentation?
And then also, even if you just get the psych wall, white background studio, and you're like, yeah, cool, we're gonna get this once a month and we know we have our shoot days to film that, those can be considered sets. So we have evergreen sets and then we have temporary. So things you can film at that are kind of coming up.
So for instance, if you build a really cool trade show booth, you're already investing a bunch of money inside a trade show booth. The night before when everything's set up, is that when you actually, You want to get in there and film a bunch of content.
It's a great way to look at sets. And now over here in this section, we are going to get into the events. This is the big one.
This is actually going to be a calendar. You can do this in quarters or you can do it by month. So you can actually have what events are, what is going on in these different areas.
There's a different couple types of events here. So first we have just company. That would be anything that you're doing.
Are you doing a product launch in Q1? Do you have a big corporate office? offsite in q2 every year do you go to the same big trade show in q3 whatever what are big things your company is doing you can list out as many or as few of these as you like now if you're releasing a lot of things one thing is i'm always encouraging kind of software companies to do is uh are you shipping new features like all the time like okay can you consider that to be a mini event can you roll six or eight of those into a new release and then have like a new release whether you're having key customers to your office or how do you turn that into like a little marketing moment do a big community call, whatever it is.
Obviously the clothing lines, you do new releases or capsules, but services businesses too. Like think about what your events are. Are you going to have a new offering?
Are you going to update your portfolio and hold a hackathon, have a competition? A lot of things there. So you have company and we have culture and we have industry.
So culture is what's just going on in and around the world, right? So Q1, we have like new year, new you, right? Everyone's kind of going back to the gym.
They're doing all these things. Q4, we have Black Friday and the holidays. Q2, you have Coachella.
festival season in this middle area here you've got the summertime how are you going to engage people if you are at all what from seasonality back to school valentine's day what do you have in there that actually makes sense for your customers or is going to distract or change from your buying habits where opportunity if you just want a map of these do just ask chat gbt and just be like what do my target consumers pay attention to what is going on in their lives i should map out and think about potentially having launches or planning my calendar around for marketing for the year and it'll just tell you same thing with industry so industry is a great one to map out because industry is a combination of what's happening just in general in the space and what's happening with your competitors we're going to get to this plot here in a second we'll talk about competitors so industry is gonna be like all right is there a big trade show everyone goes to every year also if you're in the you know
computing space and apple has wwdc every year at the same time okay note that now what do you want to do with those industry moments if your big competitors have launches do you want to launch at the same time and try to go head to head do you want to launch right before them to kind of steal their thunder do you want to watch right after to cut off the attention do you want to just have a completely different time of the year if there's a big trade show if you're in tech and electronics do you want to be at ces and have ces be part of your plan or you want to counter position to that but mapping all of this out gives you the opportunity to look at okay i have these characters i have these play system Maybe I can add on some of those here.
Now we want to come with our plot. So basically plot, we have events, we have enemies, we have friends, and we have specials. Think of this.
Like TV. Whether you want a TV network, TV show, all the analogies work. But basically, every one of these events can be plots for your characters to talk about.
For you to execute marketing on top of. Whether that's Back to School. Whether that's Black Friday.
Who is going to be talking? What characters? What sets are they going to be using?
And how are they going to be integrating these events or leveraging them? One great one I saw was a company showing off their technology. I believe it was for the Masters.
And they built like a whole interface showing off their tech for which you could view the Masters to hop onto some fandom from there. Gap. participating in Coachella, they're hopping on top of that moment, right?
But friends and enemies gets interesting here. So enemies, like, okay, how am I going to respond to, you know, obviously enemy is a strong word, but marketing and strategy in general are all... War simulation terms.
It's probably a separate video. But you gotta look at, okay, our competitors are launching when. We position or counter position.
That's a plot piece. You need to think about that. Okay, they're doing their launches.
Where are we in context of that? We wanna lead, we wanna support, we wanna counter position. And then same thing with friends.
If you have partners in your brand, like, hey, you'll see collabs between brands all the time, right? Or you'll see big influencers you work with regularly. Are they doing anything interesting?
Reach out to them, ask. I have brands I work with all the time. Be like, what are you working on for the next year?
Are you doing a tour? Are you doing an event series, et cetera? Where can we plug in or program in?
Well, their brands are having a big release. They're paying to do some big event. Can you piggyback that, make some content, make some collaboration?
And then start to identify the holes. Begin to look at, okay, summer's here. We don't have anything going on.
There's nothing planned. What can we do? This is where you have specials.
Be like, hey, do we want to hold our own event? Do we want to launch a marketing series in that time, right? Like Away recently launched a social show, right?
Social shows are very popular on social media where it's almost like a directed TV show is playing out on your Instagram. Like, okay, they debuted a bunch of episodes pretty close in a row. And it was in this, well, I thought the timing was interesting.
because in the summer, it's normally really dull, right? No one's buying luggage in that time period, but they're gearing up to buy it for like Black Friday, et cetera. Maybe they're looking at a little bit now for Labor Day.
And I was like, oh, all of having seven episodes late summer lead into that. They're entertaining. They're building some affinity to go convert on that in Q3 and Q4.
This is how world mapping works. So when you do this the first time, you can map this out. You have this kind of chart, put it on a big whiteboard in your office.
You can always be adding to it as you work. But then re -explore that. How can we add to the plot?
Every month, every quarter, let's sit down. What can we update here? Oh, we have new sets.
Oh, we have new people we found. We have new friends of the brand. We have new collaborators we're talking to.
We can begin to plot this around. And this calendar trickles down, right? At the end of this video, we're going to talk about email marketing.
And this is a whole thing where it's like, okay, what am I going to be promoting in my email? It's like, okay, well, now I get to look at, here's what's happening in culture. Here's what content we just made.
Here's what our friends are doing. You begin to have much more of an idea. You're not like, what are we going to do on social media?
You can decide. all from this and identify where you have holes and go to fix it if there's not a single person in your company that will talk on camera you probably need to hire somebody and advocate for that if there's 10 of those people but the content like just doesn't look up to your standards like how do we turn an area into a set again the holes of dates all right q3 we don't have anything going on now we need to actually come up with some specials or go identify from our network what's happening that we can act on but this is how to do brand world mapping it's an exercise i absolutely love to do and put together and i would highly encourage you to sit down and work on and this is a great one too if you're going for a job mapping this out ahead of time you're going for the interview and be like hey so i've actually mapped out your brand world all the things that are happening in the niche and in the industry the trade shows that are coming up all the people i've seen from you on social media i'd be really excited to like we're gonna work with the team with a like an exercise like this i feel like helps drive social media and marketing people are going to be shocked by how prepared you are i will say people do obviously like interviewing for jobs sucks i have come to basically every marketing job i've ever done with like a 60 90 day plan for my
role. Have a handful of those places like stolen that to work on their own? Probably.
Have a lot of them hired me at high paying jobs because I was the guy who came with a plan that was prepared that I left them with? Also, yes. And I will leave a template for this in the download file that comes with this as well.
So you can go use that and fill it in really easily inside some design software. So now that we've talked about positioning, we're going to talk about messaging. So every marketing job, whether you're creating content on social media, whether you are creating ads, whether you're working at events, you need to know how to talk talk about the products that you are marketing and to talk about the brand.
And so in the past, you would have all of these different statements used to write. We need a mission statement. We need a tagline.
We need a vision statement. We'd have all of these pieces of literature that would get created. And I'm here to argue that a lot of that in the modern age really doesn't matter.
You need to have a core idea of your position and what you know, and you need to be able to effectively write and write with LLMs to be actually able to describe that tactically, to be able to use it in scripts, to be able to use it in descriptions or in emails. So we're going to break down some formulas and some styles for that.
And then we're going to go into how to actually use that inside the demand section to make ads in social media. So you'll see, often when people talk about writing copy in the modern era, they talk about loading up an LLM with all these examples, loading in all this brand copy. I think you need one statement and one style.
And here's the statement you need to fill in. For our target. So I specialize that in there.
For distance runners. Who, and then fill in the need. So for distance runners who deal with side pain, brand is the category that gives a benefit.
You will have this exactly spelled out in the area below, and I'll put it on screen here too. So for distance runners who do. with side pain brand x is the electrolyte supplement that solves it permanently in seconds and you want to end this with unlike competitor we differentiator so let me explain that for a second unlike sugary electrolyte drinks we provide instant relief with no crash or whatever it is so this formula this formula is really important because this gives you the ability it gives any chat gpt reference the ability to understand all the different pieces of your positioning your target demographic and your offering and every brand can fill this in Because you think about clothing brands.
For millennial men who want to feel comfortable in their own skin and don't want to dress like their fathers, we provide a set of clothing you can mix and match without having to think about how things go together. And unlike X brand, we do this with the baggy fit possible or whatever it is. This all works no matter what category it's in.
And so I want you to really think about who your target is. That's the first thing you identify. What is the need of the target?
They need to want something, and that can be cerebral. They can want to look cool. They can want to attract the opposite sex.
sex. They can want to look good. They can want to make friends.
What is it they want? And then your brand is in the what category and what benefit do they give to solve that? And then call out, what are the other things that they might be shopping for?
And then why are you different? That statement is pretty easy. It's a spinoff of a really traditional framework by Geoffrey Moore, but it gives all the information that you need to begin to actually put together decisions and explain what your brand works around.
Now, once you have that statement, you need to think about what the copy style is that reflects your brand right. And there's three that I love to call out. I use them in almost every project.
You don't need just one for your brand. You can have multiple. And there's a fourth one I'll call out too.
It's a fun example after. So the first style to understand is direct response. There's an author called Diane Kennedy, who's one of the best references for this.
You can pick up some of his books. But direct response is urgent, confrontational, numbers -driven explanations for a brand. One of the best modern examples of this copy style is the HIMSS brand.
A lot of supplements brands use this, where you will see fuller hair by fall 2026. They're giving you an exact timeline saying you can act on it. 79 % customers wish they started sooner.
Finish this sentence. The worst part of going bald is blank. They are not afraid of being confrontational, of calling out the problem you have, numbers to do it.
They are in your face asking for a result. This is the copy style that most marketers shy away from. It's intimidating to them, but it's also by far the highest efficacy of any of the ones we're going to work through.
If you are willing to take that route, if we're going to call it right out and we're going to talk right to it, it is often the highest performing and is certainly worth a test. You will notice this ad, you know, thicker hair in three to six months, new low price. are not putting any ifs, ands, or buts around what they are selling.
Then we have what we call evidence -led. This is a more typical marketing approach. It's methodical.
It's evidence -driven. You do call out some specific numbers, but you use a lot more testimonials. You are using your users' results to tell your story.
You're doing that kind of same approach without that same level of confrontation of direct call out of the problem. You're doing it in a more calmer, explanatory way. There's a writer named Claude Hopkins who is an excellent example of this.
And why I call out those reasons is I would encourage any of these styles that you find and you like, read the books by these people. They will go into detail on the copy. And just by reading one of those and putting it into practice, you will be better than the majority of marketers at explaining.
what you want to do but also it's really useful to call out these styles to go into llms which we'll do in a second and the third i'm going to call out is human driven this is where you are telling stories in almost everything including your story one of my favorite brands who does this on social media and their website is bad hombres they're doing this in very casual terminology notoriously good bean and cheese burritos the internet's favorite frozen burrito why are burritos hit different word on the street they're using their customer testimonials talking about how they do things welcome to the bean dream pictures of their team sitting there.
They're building in public and they call it out and they show their content. Everything about it is about their story of what they're doing, how they're creating it, what people feel about it. Each one of their content starts with a human story.
This thing happened in our business as a very effective way to build a modern brand if you're willing to lean into the storytelling of it. And John Caples is an excellent example of a marketing copywriter who leaned into this as well. He was saying every kind of piece of copy he does starts with a person or a story or surrounding that human nature moment inside of it.
And the last one I want to call out is Reformation. Reformation is also often used as an example of great copy. So they're what we call a culturally savvy messaging brand who says they're able to show off that they're tapped in.
So you will see, we have some of the copy up on screen, what you see from Reformation. Niche interests. We have theories.
These are their email subject lines. Ring my bell. Time to serve.
They're basically taking things that will make their customer base smile and laugh that are rooted in pop culture and bringing it into all of their social media content, their emails, their copy, by being culturally savvy. only works if your brand and the people that represent it and your customer base are culturally fluent in a certain way.
Those are four awesome ways to think about copy for your brand. What is the messaging style that you want to embrace? And for many brands, you'll test your way into it.
You'll find you want to try a few and determine what works. And we'll talk about that when we get into ads. That's worth being aware of.
When people talk about messaging, they talk about copy, they mention direct response. That's what those terms mean. And this is how you need to think about actually creating written content for a brand.
And so my skill for this is in pack. So I have a skill that you will be able to put into ChatGPT.
And it will say, give me copy options in the styles of these people. And it will give you those options. It also has a full landing page generator where you put in all the information about your brand.
And it will give you in evidence -led, direct response, and story -driven options for those copy. They already have all of like the AI nomenclature stripped out. But the thing that I would encourage you to do that we'll also walk through on here that is extremely important inside this era is to create a project for your brand.
If you want to be able to actually write copy and work with a team, on it you need to create a project we're going to create one right here so a project is basically a shared environment inside of chat gpt your team can see and you can share with them or you can just use to assemble your own items as well if you create the project i'm going to say brand x i go and i create a project here i go to sources i you give it more context this is important this is where you can go and say i'm going to upload all of our product sheets basically every product we have then we'll learn about all the products you have you're going to upload your website copy you can do more you can connect your drive and your slack and have it just hunt everything down i like to actually be pretty certain surgical about this.
You want to basically take any product packs you have or product landing page information you have and drop it in there. I wouldn't even give it big brand guides and stuff because some of the stuff isn't really pertinent. I would give it that statement that we talked about at the beginning, the positioning statement you have.
I would give it all the details on your products. I would give it testimonials and things your customers say or review exports if you have those. And you add it all in there in the context.
And then what happens is whenever you are chatting back and forth with it and you say, hey, I want to be able to get some ad ideas for this or that, or I want to, using the copy style prompts we have, give me some direct response. copy for this new release we're doing or for an ad idea then you feedback and you say i like this and i don't like this show me results like x or y and the project remembers and then your team can tap into it so if you have a marketing team and people need to write more copy and you have a project that's pretty well trained they can go in and participate in it as well this becomes a really key resource if you're writing a lot of copy you're generating landing pages or emails that you're able to work through and the key thing to do on top of this is use it to start and then go back through and make sure you're adding in what are human case studies we can put on the top what are written things that happened in our company I can add in.
What are funnier, interesting, nuanced things I can get so I'm not just directly taking copyright out of it? That's what separates doing this mediocre versus doing it like all the big brands are doing it now. And this is a good time to talk about the biggest difference now from when I was a marketer.
And that is these levels of integrating AI. So the last time I was running a marketing team was when I was the SVP marketing at Gelblaster. We were a toy company in consumer electronics.
I've been the head of marketing at multiple consumer electronics companies. Now in my work at Darkroom, we do performance marketing for lots and lots of brands. So I look at the ad accounts and create concepts and work with teams on creator strategy, et cetera.
But it's different than running a team inside of a marketing org. And so what I end up talking about with my friends who run these orgs now and what happens when I go in doing workshops with brands is basically it's about what are the levels with which they've adopted AI or they're using new processes.
And I'm going to talk through the five levels here, because this is worth you understanding. If you're watching this as the new generation or you're the old generation trying to bring this in, this is crucial to understand. So the first level that's 90 % of teams that have adopted AI is just chatting.
They're going into ChatGPT and they're just asking questions or asking it to do stuff. That's level one. That is fun and useful, but not super, you're basically not taking advantage of a super intelligence you have on your side.
So number two is what I just shared. Instead of just chatting and just asking randomly on the internet, you create a project.
Now you are applying context to that intelligence. It has all your product info, has your testimonials. It can actually give you stuff that's more rooted in what you're trying to achieve.
Now, the third level is called skills and making skills. So what happens is if you do a process frequently, several times, inside your marketing flow. So for instance, if you are always saying, hey, every time we do a new product release, we generate a super thorough Q &A landing page with a quiz.
That's just a thing you do inside your marketing team. If you do that again, and again, and you're using your project for it, or you're using AI to help create it, you can turn that into a skill where it repeats it, where you say, hey, this is our quiz maker skill.
We put in all this information, it gives us a quiz back, and it actually gives us a format that allows us to drop it directly into whatever we use to make our website. Or if you're coming up with ad styles, and you go, hey, we always do category comparison ads, and we have built this big matrix, and we want to do this every time, we just want to be able to upload a new product, and then get all these ideas for category comparison ads, that could be a skill.
What I'm going to give you for the copy styles is a skill. You can just drop it in, you can call the skill anytime inside ChatGPT, and it will give you those three copy references for whatever you're writing.
Whatever you just wrote, it will give you evidence -led, direct response, and human -led versions of it. So repeatable things become skills. Now those last two are really important because the biggest change that most people need to do is moving from single player to multiplayer for AI.
When you bring your team in and your team is involved in sharing those, multiplayer gets crazy. It's where you actually get real results within a brand. If everyone's all siloed and working on separate stuff, it doesn't matter.
But if your team is making skills and sharing them so other people can do it. If they're making projects and maintaining them so other people can use them, all of a sudden you're all getting the benefit of people using technology.
Let me break down a bit of how this works. The way to integrate AI into marketing teams is to give people responsibilities. One person on your team maintains the project.
They're responsible for uploading new copy. They're responsible for workshopping that copy and telling the project how to do it better. It becomes a responsibility they have that other people can then tap into.
If there's a skill that can get created, someone is in charge of creating it and keeping it updated. Because then we get to level four, which is agents. An agent is someone that does something on your behalf.
So basically in ChatGPT work, it can use your browser, right? So I have a ChatGPT agent that goes and it checks my meta ads. It has read permission for meta ads.
We'll get to that in the meta group and can actually give me summaries. So every week I used to go into meta ads, look at everything going on and then make a summary that I would send to the team. Now that gets generated for me by an agent that goes and pulls that information and then also diagnoses it based on what I wanna know for the specific brand and gives me ideas based on the type of ideas was providing i fed it all the reports that i used to do i said what permissions do you need to make this process i was able to make an agent now i have a time that acts every friday when i wanted to so your team has a combination of project for the brand skills for repeatable things agents for tasks that can be done regularly on their own now you're at level four and you can accomplish all of that inside of a chat gpt level five is when you have a true brain for your marketing so a good example of this is uh there's a program called runneth that's run by the motion team it basically has all of your meta
It has ads connected, has all of your creative strategy connected, has skills and related items. It is a central repository for all marketing information that pushes out ideas and back and forth very dynamically. It's basically, think of a project that's really updated to include way more data sources.
They have reason to it to exist. It exists for creative strategy, for ad strategy, for social strategy. It knows costs.
It knows the bombs of your products, which is basically your burden of manufacturing, how much things cost, your cost of your goods sold. It can make business decisions with you. And most brands are, they need to go through the first stages.
they even think about that. But that's where the future is headed, right? When you see these, oh, we have a three -person brand that's doing $50 million in revenue.
They're functioning from these kinds of things where they've built these central repositories. They're able to query and work back and forth with them. So those are the levels to consider.
And for you sitting there watching this, all you need to be able to think about is, hey, let me start the project. Let me maintain that. That is a skill that is worth money.
Let me be able to do skills for repeatable things and ask ChatGPT to make those for me and share it with the team and maintain that. It's another worthwhile thing. It saves everyone time.
If you're taking those two, chunks of it not even thinking about creating agents or beginning to run a brand you are immensely valuable and i would focus your resources there all right let's break the whiteboard out and let's actually map through now we know all this about positioning about messaging let's build a brand world now that we talked about positioning and a bit about building your brand world we're going to talk about demand.
So when I break down what is a marketing team's real job, it starts with defining what differentiates the company and the products. That's what we covered above. And then mapping out the toolkit you have.
And then how do you generate attention? How do you bring people in to actually buy as the most important part of it? But if you don't do the first part we outlined, it's not gonna go well.
It's why they go hand in hand. And from there, we can go into tactics and like other supporting functions. But at the end of the day, the core of the marketing function is generating demand.
Whenever anyone talks about brand strategy or campaigns or art direction, it's said at the end of the day, it is there to convince people to buy. So there are three core ways with which marketers capture demand that we're gonna talk through in this video. The first is social media.
And this is a new one and a big impetus as to why channels like mine exist is that there is not a lot of people from the old guard of marketing who understand how to leverage social in marketing. They still use really antiquated tactics. So I'm gonna work at this out by social network and we're gonna get some really thorough plan.
and examples here. The second is advertising, spending money to people to place things for attention. And we're also gonna roll through that here.
I am going to, from scratch, show you how to set up meta ads, talk about ad strategies on different platforms, and get you a toolkit there and define all the terms you need to know to be dangerous. And then the third is outbound sales. That is actually going out to your target customer, sending them messages, sending them emails, and from scratch, pulling business from the void.
Now, there are other ways to get demand, right? Setting up a big retail location that has foot traffic going by that people are gonna show up to, throwing events and experiences, but it all starts, it all hinges on the alpha that you have. By alpha, what do I mean by that?
Advantage. The advantage we have in the modern era as marketers is that social media gives you free attention. To put this into context, this opportunity simply didn't exist when I was starting as a marketer.
You could not merely start posting and get 100, 400, 1 ,000, 10 ,000, 100 ,000 million views from your first post. That was not an option. To be able to get those views and have them translate into sales on e -commerce or visits to your store or people that want to retain you for a service was not there.
And it is still underutilized. Is it more utilized than prior years? Absolutely.
But are you still competing against people that are afraid to do it or don't know how or are using antiquated? methods? Yes.
And that is your advantage. If you are here watching this video, you can win sheerly off of activating there. Now the same thing applies to advertise.
If you want to advertise prior, you used to have to do big campaigns. Like maybe you could take a small ad out in your local newspaper or like advertise on Craigslist, get some banner ads on a website, but now you can. Put your advertisement in front of the exact people who are ready to buy at relatively low cost, spending $50 a day.
We'll talk about some thresholds in the ad section and actually test those messages. And if they work, spend more and get that money right back. It is an incredible time to be a marketer if you lean in and do this.
And before I get into the social and the ad section, I just want to highly encourage you. If you've wanted to get into marketing because it's cool, because you're into brand campaigns, you're into visuals, you're into aesthetics, that is amazing. This is a great niche for you, but do not.
Be afraid of analytics, of advertising, of putting yourself close to the money. If you've watched my content, you hear me say this a lot. The most valuable marketers are people that aren't afraid of those things.
You have your toolkit, you have your knowledge, you have your tastes and your aesthetics, but you absolutely aren't afraid to use those to make a landing page better, to make an excellent ad, to tie your social media statistics to KPIs for a business. That is how you end up getting raises, getting promoted, and building the toolkit to be an entrepreneur for yourself one day.
Let's dive in. So the first aspect of how you get attention is is organic social media.
Now organic social media and demand in general here is a function of narrative, the story you're telling, taste. how you make that story look and come across, focus, actually getting good at some of these techniques we're gonna talk about, and credibility. Do people actually believe you?
First, I'm gonna walk through the different social networks and who they're good for and how you decide what to go to. Because up to the focus opportunity, that factor I mentioned before, it's crucial to decide on a few of these versus kind of being mid at all of them. Let's start with TikTok.
TikTok is an incredible social network because it will give you attention right away based on the efficacy of your videos. But what I like to call out to businesses that are trying to decide, should we be on TikTok? What's our TikTok strategy?
Do you have someone internally who understands TikTok well enough, not just to build an account, but to build an army? What do I mean by that? To succeed on TikTok, your own branded account listed as a business is going to have a hard time.
It'll have a way easier time on Instagram. Can you just cross post from Instagram? Yes, we'll get there in a minute.
But the best TikTok campaigns for marketing have multiple accounts or they'll have creators or they'll have slideshows. They have all of these tactics that they put together to actually put messages out in wide arrays. There's a website called Social Growth Engineers.
It's like 20 or 30 bucks a month. They have case studies of a lot of people using TikTok and scale TikTok like this. It's a great place to check out.
But if you do not have someone who understands TikTok well enough to tell you, hey, your core business account probably won't do that good. If you have an expert or a great - person to put on camera, we probably have a start.
But if we really want to build out TikTok, we're going to need multiple accounts and strategies. TikTok is probably not worth pursuing beyond cross -posting what you're already doing for Instagram. Instagram is an amazing network to build your brand on social media.
Much like TikTok, it will give you views right from the start. And at any point in time, you can change your account's trajectory by simply posting better content. But to succeed on Instagram, you can't just be posting a handful of things or pictures of your business.
I'll always see brands, even still today, that are like, I post pictures. my product and no one cares. Instagram doesn't work for me.
You need a strategy. That's what we're going to get into here. So three of the strategies that most appeal to marketers, you can wrap your head around and execute.
I'm going to walk through here. The first is having an expert either on your account. or on another account, but promoting your business.
What do we mean by that? Someone, a singular person, talking on camera about the business to promote it. This is the number one most effective and easiest way to promote your business on Instagram.
This could be the founder of your business. It could be someone hired for it. It could be a team member, but someone is on camera talking about things relative to the business.
So a few examples of this. So one is this girl, Olivia Unplugged. She is on her own handle.
She's not even on the main handle for an app called Opal, a mental health app. So she's a creator. that was hired to do whiteboard videos about mental health opal is a kind of mental health and not using your phone app and she creates all this really great content in different formulas just her talking about these things that then help promote the app that's an example of expert content another great example here is ken sakata he has a brand called front office where he is the founder is the face of it and he's doing deep dives into everything around clothing right not just the stuff that he designs but information in general to build him up as expertise and then whenever the brand releases something, you know the level of thought and craft that goes into it.
So that's approach number one, the expert approach. We'll get a little bit more into it later. Approach number two is the storytelling approach.
Do you have a really interesting business in a way that people will get into? So when you have expert content, you've got to be posting a lot. That is a three times a week kind of minimum proposition to be gaining traction on social media.
But with these more narrative accounts, you put more time into releasing maybe a vlog and a carousel, like two posts a week. So Bad Hombres, I always like to call out as a great example of this, they make frozen bean and cheese burritos.
And they're doing the story of, hey, we quit our jobs to take over this old Taco Bell to start making frozen bean and cheese burritos. And today we have a problem. They do what's called hero's journey content.
But they don't necessarily have to be talking on camera. They're just telling their story of what happened in their business that week. It's narrative driven content.
To do this, your business actually has to be interesting. So it's not necessarily for everybody. The third approach is extremely art directed content, a little more traditional, but you need like singular creative talent.
So Meshki is a great example of this. They're a women's fashion brand, but they are making art in every post everything is conceptual and thought through and really interesting and they've invested a lot of time and energy into it over time to make it stand out on the feed and unique but it is conceptual and it is time consuming those are the key three strategies there are other strategies that work but those are the three i'd say 90 of brands should focus on one of those and for most of them it's going to be expert but what i like about focusing on instagram as the primary network here is that the content you make there is easily reusable on tick tock is actually cross -posted a lot on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on X, on all these other social networks with Instagram as the primary is an excellent strategy for most brands.
So now let's talk about YouTube. If you have a services -based business, YouTube is an excellent one. But again, you need somebody who's gonna be talking on camera.
But if you decide for your services -based business, You do construction, you do sales, you have an agency, anything of that kind. It works for other businesses too.
I think primarily it's a great magnet here. You can answer common questions. You can present your expertise.
And even if you get a small amount of views, you end up getting quality leads. I know a lot of people with businesses on YouTube will only get 1 ,000, 2 ,000 views on a YouTube video, but get enough leads to sustain their business. And they start getting more, their business start doing really well.
But to do this and to make YouTube as a primary focus or even a secondary focus, you have to have someone that understands YouTube behind you. If you do not care about thumbnails, about the actual titles and positioning, you don't know how the social network works, it's gonna be basically wasted energy. And the last one I'm gonna talk about in this video is LinkedIn.
And now I've actually defined all these. We're gonna start getting into terminology and tactics. So LinkedIn is a team sport is the way I like to describe it.
It is great if you have multiple people that are active on LinkedIn or willing to become active on LinkedIn. So let me look at an example of that. My friends at Air are a good example of this, where they have multiple active people on LinkedIn.
So their CEO is active on LinkedIn. He is posting all the time. about their new updates and the things that they are doing.
But then you will notice there are multiple other people you have there. Their brand emotion designer is posting. Their head of content is posting.
Multiple team members, they're commenting, they're interacting, they're doing their own versions of the narrative. They have at least five to 10 people at the company who are regularly all active on LinkedIn promoting together. LinkedIn like this.
It recognizes this. It encourages when people at a company are interacting with other posts at a company, it boosts it out there. It shows it to more people.
So it's worth thinking that through as a team sport. And there's companies like Buffer, the social media app, who have big programs for their companies. So they have a program that, or something like 80 % plus of their actual employees are active on LinkedIn and participating in basically like paid and bounty programs around that.
And you can see a constant stream of them reposting. people from Buffer and around who are basically pushing the conversation forward. And so this is great.
Again, if you have a lead focused business or a B2B focused business, you're having trouble with some of the other social networks. or you just want a continual lead flow, activating on LinkedIn, but doing it as a team, doing it as one person is a lot harder than doing five plus, is an excellent strategy to think through.
And so what I would do for your business is I would look and I would say, look, of these options, which should I focus on? There are other social networks, there's X, there's Snapchat, there's a few others, but I think for most marketers, we're doing a marketing -informed position on this. You're picking from one of these as the primary, and that's really likely gonna be Instagram or LinkedIn.
And you're gonna be like, this is our number one focus. And you can add on, reuse a lot of your other social content and then develop separate strategies as time goes on. So before we go further, let's talk about the goals and the terms you need to know about demand gen or organic social.
So the first thing is, what are your goals? Why are you doing social media? So the first you can consider is brand awareness.
We want people to know who we are. And you should probably have some metrics around that. That's when you look at, okay, how many views did our account get?
That's brand awareness. Number two is sales. At the end of the day, this is here to make sales.
So how do you measure for this? So when you're measuring your content, you wanna measure hook rate, which is whether people chose to watch your video. It shows this in your analytics on Instagram and TikTok.
You wanna measure views, you wanna measure saves, and you wanna measure shares. When you're looking at individual pieces of content, those are the right metrics to look at. But then when you're actually quantifying your account, you wanna have your brand awareness metric, which is most often gonna be your total reach, how many views your account got for that month, et cetera.
But then it's gonna be how many leads that you got, how many people signed up. And even if you're a D2C brand, basically how many people are adding to your email list or getting something from you? If you're a B2B or services business, how many people are becoming leads?
And you want to encourage that. You want to track that. And then overall, can you attribute actual sales from social media and people clicking through?
Basically judging a combination of those metrics. Other key terms for you to know. The first is the content funnel.
These are important if you want to explain to people organic social and how it works. So first is whenever you're making a plan, you say, hey, these are the metrics we're going to measure. We're going to measure awareness through views.
We're going to measure signups and leads. Then we're going to see what we can attribute from sales. Then when people are trying to get you to be good at social media or have opinions, breaking down the content funnel is really important.
So the content funnel general idea is you have top of funnel content, content that comes in at the top. This gets attention. It may not be content selling your product, may not be promoting it.
Like when we looked at Ken earlier, he makes content just about fashion in general. It doesn't even mention he has a brand or his products. Now it can, but the idea is that's there to get views.
It's there to raise the floor of all your content. If you're on social media, you'll notice you get a lot of views on some videos. It raises the floor of your other videos, even if they're not as viral.
The middle of funnel content is educating and letting people know about your brand, your experience, the things that are going on. It's obviously brand related. And it's your core content, but it's probably not going to do huge views because it's either going to be educational or a little more product focused, campaign focused.
Then you have your bottom funnel content, content that's only there to achieve your goals. And it doesn't necessarily mean it has to get super low views, although often it does, but it is there specifically for you to sell or achieve signups, et cetera.
So some examples of this, if I was a fashion brand, so I could be doing really cool like viral stunts and campaigns at the top. In the middle, I could be breaking down the actual fits in the collections and how to style it. And at the bottom, you could be like, hey, I'm the founder.
We just launched this collection. These are my four or five favorite pieces. You should get them now before they sell out.
I have extensive videos on content pillars on the content funnel that I will put inside the download link if you want to dive really deep on this. I just want to explain we need to know here.
Now we're going to go into the levels. But why I want to talk about the levels is you actually need to be able to make a plan. What do I do first?
What do I do second? How do I explain this to people? And that's the goal of what I'm going to go through in this content.
We can get tactical on exact videos and stuff to make. I have plenty of videos on that. So when you start thinking about making a plan, it's important that you have context and you can provide whoever you're working for with context.
So the first piece is that now, today, for social media businesses, different than what I would have told you last year, the world is more important than the brand accounts. So what do I mean by that?
Your Instagram account for whatever business you have, if you're a local business, it's one of the more important things you have. For most other businesses, and even for local in some cases, all the other people, all the experts, your founders, hiring creators, bringing in influencers, all the people around social media are just going to drive more impact and be more effective.
And spending a ton of time on your base organic social is often not as important as the enabling content and characters we're going to talk about in another section here. So it's always something to think about. You're only going to be able to put up so many views on a brand account, especially if you don't have an expert on camera.
But people gravitate towards personalities. You can multiply personalities, have more of them, put them on retainer, and we'll get you somewhere. Second is your brand content is competing with other contents.
What people will normally do when they start social media or your boss is trying to get social media plans, they'll look at competitors in their niche. What are they doing? You are not competing with them.
You are competing with everything else that shows up when your ICP, your ideal customer profile, opens their phone. So something you've seen me recommend in a number of videos is actually creating an account and following people who people in your ICP follow.
You can do this really easily if you use something like Outer Signal that gets your customer list, actually gives you social media profiles. You can Google some of your customers even easier, be like, who do they actually follow? Let me build an account and follow that, interact with some of the content, like it.
And over the course of checking that every day for 10 or 15 minutes, after a couple of weeks, you're gonna have a very accurate picture of what they're actually seeing. This is what you're competing with. And you'll notice you're not competing with, oh, It's not a bunch of other brands in their feed.
It is individual people. It is skits. It is hot guys and hot girls.
It's funny and relatable content. Maybe it's some information, but that is your competition, not these other brands. You have to be making content that will compete with that.
This is why I always go back to expert on camera. Someone talking about something someone's passionate about is gonna go way better than posting some pictures of your product or basically just making ads in your account. Same thing if you are actually making something funny or interesting or that has a narrative or has real art direction.
That's your toolkit to help stand out here. You need to explain that to whoever you're working for. You can be like, hey, we need to make content that competes with this or no one's ever gonna see it.
It can't be about just what does the other companies in our niches do. And the most important factor for that is it has to be shareable. What is the reason someone would share it with someone else?
And so when you make an ad for a product where you're just describing whatever it is that you do, unless it's amazing, it's probably not gonna be shareable. But what is shareable? Relatable experiences, expertise, driving value, tutorials, things that are funny or interesting or aesthetically beautiful.
Your job is to be able to create those things and then measure, is it shared? And so quick starter, I want to call out a few businesses that either I know or have worked on. To give you some examples of kind of what I'm talking about here.
Company Kyoko Beauty. I met the woman who I believe is the founder and is also on a lot of this content. I met her at the Klaviyo event at Shop Talk the other year.
And I checked out their social media and they have a K -beauty retailer. I believe they are curating and selling like other K -beauty brands in Canada. And she is on camera and she has a handful of other people that are on camera and they are doing a lot of...
videos just educating if you're a certain type of person what of these beauty products would you like why should you use x or y let's actually compare this product versus this product they are active on camera the founder and the top team actually walking through basically informational rankings ratings comparisons why you'd use this like who would use that as the core of the business expert on camera like we mentioned and built into the business this is something that the founder is spending as much time on as operations likely um so another one one i worked with for a long time is they're actually the manufacturer for when i was doing clothing and their creator uh yah went through cut 30 and i worked with them kind of extensively on their strategy over time we made content together but they had a creator so he was kind of a core creator on the account again not the founder and he's talking about doing quest content hey i want to make the best leather jacket in china here's you know how i'd go about doing that they're showcasing crazy materials that they have access to they're going to events but you can see the funnel in action here they'll show something like a really cool technique as a real big visual aesthetic
They'll have a collaborator with someone like me driving a lot of top of funnel attention, talking about like an event that's coming up. All the way down to, here's a recap of what we're doing at this particular event. All the way to straight up bottom of funnel, how to work with us videos with the founder, right?
So they have a cast of characters. They have top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel content. And it's funny because people will look at this and be like, oh, well, it's so visual X or Y.
Before this account, there were not manufacturers doing this, like maybe a handful. But everyone who worked in factory manufacturing thought that was too boring to make content. Until someone does it, it's always too boring or too much of an outlier.
But I think they are a great example here. And then another one that I worked on when I was running marketing at Jailblaster, we had a variety of TikTok accounts. We were using the different account strategies.
We had accounts by region and our Mexico one blew up 800 ,000. It was Spanish speaking content, right? We were using our US speaking content translated, but this was all POV content.
So basically we only showed the hands. The creator was very rarely in it. with voiceovers on top of that, skits and things of that nature.
But it just goes to show you that you don't necessarily have to have someone on camera, but you have to have a concept. If you are like, oh, we don't have an expert to talk, it's like, okay, we can still do voiceovers, et cetera, but it has to be visually interesting. It has to have an angle.
And so we did that with these POV videos and we used them in a number of ways. We had our Spanish speaking account or German account or US account, all doing variations of the same stuff. But for smaller business and services, business works, too.
I want to call my friend Blaze, who has a web design studio that drives the majority of all their leads from social media. And they're following that exact same format. Right.
Like, let me talk about let me compare brands, websites at a high level. So people see, oh, this person has an understanding of it. They're using big brands to capture attention.
all the way down to here is a design that we're doing for like these emails is there to kind of drive them clients. And they're doing that with him at the forefront. They have a combination of carousels and videos in their own kind of unique design style.
That's an awesome way to look at a services business, whether it's construction or web design is following that funnel strategy. So what's level one here? How do you get started?
So the first one I've used like kind of the minimum team here is some sort of social media manager and someone that gets on camera. Ideally, that's two people in some businesses, it may only be one, but you need to have that person who almost all those businesses had it again doesn't have to be the founder is it was in many cases there wasn't you're making X amount of assets a month.
And the second thing you want to have is you want to have formats testing those assets. When we looked at blazes business, they had carousels, and they had green screen videos, right? They had two core formats.
When you looked at the crease group videos, they had vlogs and going out about no world and they had kind of explainers where someone's on cam explaining something and they had carousels they're kind of those three or three formats and every business should have in my opinion between three and five formats you're testing so if you want to plan to walk out here today you walk into your social media say we're going to do social media we're going to do it better come up with a list of three to four formats you can start hey we're going to do carousels we're going to do vlogs and we're going to do sit down explainers there's three formats those formats become your pillars you are going to basically do x of those each month so if you picked your four formats you're going to run each of those videos three to four times a month all of a sudden that's 12 to 16 videos you have for your social media presence and you're going to measure it you're going to run analytics and you are going to say great at the end of the month i wouldn't be overdoing your analytics the end of every month look at the videos you did for that month do it a couple days after so they have room to fill out actually compare the views the saves the shares the hook rate new followers versus old followers and compare them compare how your pillars are doing against each other and then compare them month over month are these pillars getting better or are they getting worse and then decide how you're going to change them i will link inside the marketing
zip folder that you'll have down here is I have a whole pillar system. I have a spreadsheet for how to run it and you'll have a whole like balance of detail there. But that's your social media plan.
Get formats, test them, and then do reporting. Send at the end of the month to whoever your stakeholders are. Here's what our social media did.
Here's what our formats were. Here's our top performers. Some are getting better.
Some are getting worse. I'm going to make these changes. You start communicating like that.
People are going to trust you a lot more. There's a system. There's a process.
And it also gives you the ability. Why I love this system is to be able to validate and invalidate bad ideas because inevitably you're going to get your boss or your boss's cousin who knows social media.
We should do videos like this. Great. That's one of our pillars.
We're going to do four of them. I'm going to get the analytics. I'm going to compare it to the other content we do.
And then next month. We're going to continue doing it and see if it does better or worse. But if it does worse twice for like two months in a row, we're going to swap it out for something else because that's the system we use.
And this is a system that hundreds, if not thousands of brands use. It also gives you the ability to test things. Hey, just like you suggested that I want to try this other thing.
That's going to be one of our pillars. We're going to make four videos of it. We're going to compare it.
And it gives you the ability to quantifiably work through it. You know what good social managers do? They don't rely on their instinct to say, oh, that doesn't work or this works.
They validate it with numbers. And a pillar system is the ultimate way to do that. And if you've run this at a business, You run four or five months of this.
You have that data. You're like, this is what works or not. And you go to your next job or to pick up your next client.
You get to pull up that spreadsheet and be like, this is how I measure social media. This is the plan we have. This is how we test it into winning formats.
This is how I validate ideas. That job is going to be like, oh, this person has a system they're going to run. They're going to trust you from the start.
And you're most more likely to land that client because you actually have data -driven results. And it all comes down to spending about an hour once a month going through it. So with that reporting, you're also going to have your goals.
How do we get leads? How do we get signups? How do we get sales?
How do we get views? And you're going to look at, okay, for our core network. we have LinkedIn or Instagram, whatever core is, how do we then put our content in as many places as possible?
Putting it on YouTube Shorts, putting it on LinkedIn, putting it on TikTok, putting it on X is worth the time. It's only a couple minutes to post across all of these because it compounds over time. Even if it does really mediocre to start, it begins to really add up.
But level one is picking one of those networks, adapting a system like this, beginning to run analytics. And then level two is beginning to build a buy network strategy, right? So for instance, if you are doing really well, Instagram, your content you make for Instagram also does really well on TikTok.
You don't need this. necessarily a separate strategy. But if it doesn't, you have to look at, OK, now that we've established something, I need a separate strategy.
We're going to add YouTube on. That's a new strategy. We're going to add on TikTok.
We actually have to shift our content. It has to be a bit more personal, a bit more candid. We're going to shoot it on iPhone.
We're going to get two creators to do X on the account. And maybe we're bringing that back over to Instagram. You're basically adding on additional strategies.
But I would not. focus on this until you are good at one thing. I'd be letting whoever you work for know, hey, we're going to get good at the network.
If we run a pillar system, you should start to get some traction in three to five months. Even if you're bad, you're going to be improving your way into making good social content six months latest. And you'd be like, all right, now that we have this, we have some trust, some baselines.
How do we add in new networks and get good at those? One of the pillars people often add in here too is a collaborator pillar. You'll see a lot of food accounts and restaurant accounts.
We'll get a regular creator that makes four videos a month for them as a collab post. We do this on our darkroom agency all the time. I actually started.
before I was a partner there, I was a collaborator. I would make a video kind of roughly every month. It was in the mix there.
But now there's other kind of up and coming creatives that we'll just have as a continual pipeline of collaborative content that brings in a new audience from the collab posts. So for taking the time to walk through this, I have a couple tools for you, including this one that is free, thanks to ChatGPT. So if you need some help with this, I put together this content oracle.
It basically has all of my strategy and all of the data from my strategy for the thousands of people I've worked with in Cut30, for all the brands we've done social strategy with, for all the content i've made around that and we've workshopped the results here so it helps generate ideas for brands so if you go in here into the content oracle and you describe your business what are you selling who buys it who can be on camera give a basic brief of like what you have for your business you can have it think a little you can have to think a lot and it's going to generate ideas for you and those ideas are going to be based on my principles and you'll start digging through them they'll be pretty good so we can dive through let's do personal finance for uh startup employees in sf we have an accountant that can be on camera.
We also have a great graphic designer. I think a little. And it's going to generate, it'll take a second, but it's going to generate ideas and you can continue to generate ideas and workshop.
And this is helpful because I know for a lot of people, you may watch even the videos I have. I have a great video that I'll link inside the folder as well about ideas for boring businesses. Some people just have a hard time thinking through it.
That's fine. I built this so you can basically leverage my brain for that. So it's like, hey.
expert personality content, and a light episodic series. Get the accountant on camera, the 300K salary trap. You make 300 a year and still feel broke.
And so an accountant's whiteboarding out where your money goes at this. Again, actual, that's a great video. Your equity is not cash, explaining the mistakes employees make with RSU and options.
What I'd do with 10K right now, here's how I'd use it. The SF rent test, here's what your rent costs. and startup freedom.
These are good, actually. I don't like to be proud of my own work necessarily, but this shit's hot. But you have this.
This is access for free. Thanks to ChachiBT. So you can workshop as much as you want inside that and continue to come with ideas or just get ideas to start your week and we will actually send them to you.
But if you are in odd niches, so if you are in stuff where you think this doesn't apply, you're like, I have an accounting app or we're B2B or we're X. I love this website, Social Growth Engineers. I have no relationship with them.
It does cost money, but they've been... basically break out all of the. oddball winners who are doing like the real fringe tactics like finance and investments niche dating and relationships religion and faith kind of what's happening with these different um different hooks or different styles or different fringe ideas and so if you're like hey i need to have a big win i need to do something interesting and different and i'm in a kind of an oddball niche they are a great site to be a part of but that's what i want to show is a video database so this is another one that we we built this as an internal tool at cut 30 that now we have released to the public we sell as an app this entire thing is built on codex is extremely thorough is it actually has all videos in different niches you can go by topics you basically sort formats so when i talked about formats like what are formats just go in video database and go down okay 10 shots of format an interview q a one shot a single photo actually show you examples of any of these it's like street interviews is a great format for a lot of brands it'll actually go pull you top performing street interviews and there's topics you want to go agriculture athletics beverages we have tons of topics in here so if you're like yeah i want to look at what people are doing in real
estate. Now, I'd highly recommend looking outside your niche. Don't just look at your niche.
Then we have all these concepts. We have elements of, okay, is it a 3D animation? Are they doing this or that?
App accounts, brand accounts, local businesses. You can search it. And you can actually go by outliers.
Be like, okay, cool. What is performing above normal for those brands? What's at least a kind of 2X outlier there?
Let me sort by views. Let me look at just Instagram or TikTok. Let me look at only videos, but look at videos with the most recent post dates, whatever it is.
And you actually get a wide variety of video examples. Again, these are all street interviews. Then when you open it, it up we are then giving you hook analysis what was their title hook their verbal hook and their visual hook what's the narrative framework they have there's a transcript you can grab so if you are beginning to brief or put together ideas for your own content you have all these working starts you have simple outlines you have all you know the simple outline here i use all the time it's a controversial question rapid fire opinions justifications punchline yeah okay that now becomes you're starting to script or work through these for a brand you can use video database as the core of this to get a bunch of your inspiration there's also on the side here this creator panel where you can actually go and add context around you or your brand.
So you can give those some of those relevant, you can set up a voice profile. So it's relevant to you. So we have this entirely built as a piece of software that we have thousands of users on that we have built tailor -made for assisting you with organic strategy and for briefing ads, which we're about to get to.
So with that toolkit, you are well equipped to conquer organic social to drive demand. So in the download folder below, you're going to find, I will have linked to the content Oracle. You'll have my pillar sheet for how you track monthly and run analytics with a descriptor.
And also you're gonna have an archetypes cheat sheet. i have so archetypes are basically taking examples of different brands and like how they do it like styles and giving you a bunch of templates and examples for how your brand could function i have a dedicated video on that and a cheat sheet so all that will be in the zip but enough organic let's get into ads all right next up in demand is advertising and i'm excited to walk through this one because i get a lot of creatives that watch my channel you want to be an art director a creative director but we start talking about ads people's eyes glaze over but i am here to tell you this is such an amazing skill set to have it is so much easier than people people make it.
And we're going to break it all down here in this next section. So first, let's talk about terms you need to know. Then we're going to talk about the different core advertising platforms.
And I'm actually going to get into meta ads in particular. I'm just going to open it up and walk through a bit of how to set something up and begin running something if you haven't experienced it before. So first terminology, ROAS, you may have heard this.
It's called return on ad spend. This is a number. Basically, it means if you spend $1, how much do you get back?
So if you had a 0 .5 ROAS, you would spend $1, but you only got $0 .50. back. If you got a two row ass means when you spend $1, you get two back.
This is the most important number arguably of all these because it says for how much money you spend on ads, how much money gets back to the brand. Now, why is this important? Because you can basically build a model off of that.
So for most products or fashion products, for instance, a lot of brands have a 4x markup is kind of typical. And this varies wildly. Some have way more, some have less.
But what that means is if you pay $25, a $25 cost for a product, you're selling it for $100. Makes it easy math. Sale price of $100, cost of $25.
So then if you run an ad and the ad has a 2X ROAS on that $100 product, that means you spent $50 to get that $100 sale. Now you can actually look and say, okay, $25 is the cost of the product. $50 was the ad.
$100 is the money I made. 100 minus 50 minus 25. I made $25 for the business on that ad.
That is the math that basically makes all of online advertising go round and round. And why this gets relatively controversial. which is ridiculous, but for marketers and agencies in general, is that it's very measurable, right?
And because it's measurable, it means that you can say, hey, we did this thing, we generated X amount of dollars. And if you're doing a lot of other advertising, some crazy programmatic spend or whatever, and you don't get that kind of visibility or it's an estimate, things begin to get antsy because why are we spending that money if we have a quantifiable one over here?
And so I like to lean into the idea that marketing is a combination of things. You need social media to be able to drive awareness and initial levels of sales and leads. You need ads to bring it home.
And you need, as you grow, other. key initiatives. But to start, you really only need those first two things.
And the more quantifiable you can make it, the more justifiable it is. You're going to do better things, more interesting stuff, and get more budgets. Building your world around justifiable marketing is really useful.
CPA is a cost per action. How much does it cost to make a sale? It's a little bit different than ROAS in that if you are getting a cost per action, average cost per action for an ad, so basically it costs you $30 on average to get a sale.
Well, that's very different if you're selling a $35 product versus if you're selling a $100 product. of a mix of products. It's cost per action.
CAC, C -A -C, is customer acquisition cost. How much does it cost you to get a new customer? Now, these all kind of might sound similar, but there's a big difference in whether you have a customer come back, make a second purchase versus the first time.
So a lot of brands, as they grow, will really focus on getting new customers and that customer acquisition cost. This is often compared to LTV, the lifetime value of a customer, how much they're going to buy over the course of years. So for instance, if I buy regularly from Brunello Cucinello, for instance, my lifetime value with that brand, maybe like two or $3 ,000, maybe $10 ,000.
It's a huge difference, right? But measuring that's really important because when a brand's starting out and cash is a constraint, they only have so much they can spend on marketing, et cetera. They want what's called first order profitability.
If I'm gonna buy a shirt and that shirt is $200, they wanna make sure that they're making money on it so they can put cash back into the business. But if they have the data later on in the business where they have more cash, they're able to plan, they're able to bring on capital, they can begin looking at, that first customer cost as more compared to LTV.
They're like, well, when we get that customer, we know they're gonna spend an average of $2 ,000 over time. That means that we don't care if that first order's profitable. We care if they're profitable over time.
We can adjust the economics around that. If your eyes are glazing over, stick with me. This is crucial stuff to how businesses and marketing function, and it's really worth understanding.
So knowing those stats, lifetime value, your customer acquisition costs, the ROAS on any given campaign or ad, are kind of the core metrics worth understanding for media buying. I won't get super deep into things like contribution margin. stuff here.
We will often see people compare customer acquisition costs to lifetime value. There's another stat that's controversial and shouldn't be that a lot of brands are shooting for a three to one cack to LTV. Believe that concept was popularized by the common thread guys, the grooms people talk about it a lot.
We use it as a North Star with clients that we work with to say, hey, if we have measured over the course of a year or two of the business that most people spend $100 with us, doesn't matter what their first purchase is, $33 is the customer acquisition cost for shooting for. And what we found is you can get extremely rapid growth if you can make those economics work.
So then on your individual ads, whatever platform you're running them on, there's some other metrics. Click -through rate. So how many people who viewed the ad actually click it to go to your landing page?
Then you have add to carts. How many people actually added it to cart? Whether or not they bought.
Similar to checkouts initiated. So they actually went to cart and they started the checkout. Maybe they stopped there.
Email signups from your pop -up, also worth getting. Those will have value. Your actual cost per click.
How much does it cost when people actually click your ad? CPM, which is how much it costs for a thousand people to view your ad. Thumbstop, aka hook rate.
how many people actually watch the first few seconds of your ad. So CPM, CPC, Thumbstop, those don't really matter, in my opinion. Thumbstop is a great indicator for if your ad is performing or not.
But at the end of the day, if it has ROAS, even if it has a bad Thumbstop, it doesn't really matter. Your CPM, same thing. You may have a super high CPM.
You may have a super high cost per click or maybe super low. Does not matter if you are not achieving your goals. So it's worth knowing what those are, but I would not be ultra focused on them.
So those are a bunch of key terms that are worth knowing. Now let's actually get into what networks should you be spending money on? When and why?
So meta. Meta basically shows ads on Facebook and Instagram. Meta is amazing.
It is a money printing machine. Obviously, I am a partner at Darkroom. We run performance marketing for brands.
We run every single one of these. We run ads on Amazon. We're on ads on Meta.
We're on ads on TikTok. We're on ads on Snapchat. Meta makes an absolute ton of money for so many of our clients.
And I'm gonna show down below, actually gonna walk through setting up a campaign. But the number one focus for 90 % of brands who wanna start advertising will be running ads on Meta. We'll go through that a bit later.
Then we have Google ads. So ads that show up in search on Google and sponsored result listings. Google display ads.
This is another, this is a great category, especially if you are doing something that there's a lot of search on. It's an excellent place to be spending some money. and there are direct, you can connect with Windsor and other connectors AI with your Google account.
I would actually read that data back. One thing I don't like is that it's a harder interface. I feel like I can sit down in an hour with basically anybody and teach them meta ads manager.
I cannot do that with Google. It's a hard thing to do. So you either have to hire an ad agency or you can be deploying that kind of stuff with connectors.
So I will link, there's some prompts you can use. There's some connector apps that will connect that all properly to your chat GPT that I'll link inside the description. TikTok ads.
You're running well on meta ads. You're running stuff on TikTok shop. It functions very similarly.
There isn't the same amount of kind of scale and return there, but it's pretty close. And it ends up being a great compliment if you're running meta ads. We usually say, hey, if you're in certain categories, you can probably get about 30%, in some cases, 50 % of the scale with that, especially for medium brands.
There are LinkedIn ads that are expensive, but they work, that are great. If you are B2B or you have a super high ticket thing, I'd be looking at, again, far after meta. And then we have what we call incremental stuff.
So if you're running e -commerce in particular and you are spending a lot on meta, you're starting to get into six figures a month, seven figures a month in spend, and you want to be able to spend more, make more money, we have Applovin, which does ads inside of like online gaming and like mobile games. ShopApp, which is Shopify's kind of app where people can just browse and get your notifications.
This is actually a really solid platform. And Snapchat. All of those are incremental, right?
3%, 5%, 7 % of your spend on another platform, you might be able to spend there and get a similar return. But all that adds up over time as you begin looking at marketing. But those should not be primaries that you're focused on for any of these.
YouTube ads, also excellent, requires some of its own creative. If I view that as actually kind of underpriced, you have a lot of opportunity on there. That's a great second to meta.
So our usual recommendation is you start on meta ads, you get up there. You repurpose some of those ads to TikTok. It's an easy ads manager to like just run very similar stuff.
You begin building out the whole. Horizontal versions of that stuff on YouTube is the first like real secondary thing you do. Your Google usually ramps up around the same time as this because you're using the same ads platform for it.
And then once you're really spending a lot on all those, you begin adding the incremental. TV, we're not going to talk about and consider here. There are platforms like Tatari and a bunch of these that you can use if you want to get into that, but that's kind of more advanced.
But one of the underrated ones, in my opinion, is newsletter sponsorship is another good one. I did a lot of this early on in my career with some high ticket products. But this is an easy win where you actually buy a placement inside a newsletter for people specifically talking about a product.
If you have a really strange niche or a really particular set of customers, getting newsletter sponsorships is an interesting one to do. And there's two ways to think about this. First is Beehive, which is a newsletter platform, has a really easy network for basically putting up sponsorships that people can claim and put in their newsletter.
And they make it kind of easy to find people and monetize within that. It's a great one to act on. And also you can ask ChatGPT for popular newsletters in your niche.
Something we do all the time. Like, hey, what are popular subsectors or popular newsletters like within this category in accounting and whatever. And you'll get a bunch and they'll usually have rate cards and do sponsorships.
placements. And you can gauge that the same way. Hey, I want to get a certain amount of leads.
I'm paying a certain amount for this newsletter. I have a segment in there and it has a call to action. What can we do there?
It's another kind of underrated one. I think a lot of more obscure brands and services and stuff should consider. So let's actually get into what does it look like to run ads on meta?
And this is one of the most useful skills you can have as a marketer. If you have anything, if you are a graphic designer, videographer, a creator, a social media manager, whatever you are, if you also have a basic knowledge of meta ads, you are a weapon. You are worth money.
So let's dive into what actually makes it work. So for First, there's no one size fits all solution for meta and strategy.
I'm going to describe strategies that work for me. I've run meta ads for my own businesses. And obviously I'm a partner in an agency where we're working on creative every day for meta ads for huge brands.
Tatem, Alipop, Amazon, Adobe, Fanatics, Necessaire. You look at our client list, you know how seriously we take meta ads. But the core ideas that are the same across everything is that media buying is simply directing money.
to things that are working and testing new things to continue to have things that work. It is not like you turn on a couple of ads and you wait. It is a continual process every single week of testing new things and then spending more money on the stuff that works and stopping the things that don't.
The biggest needle movers for this is who is your customer? And are you making the right messages for them? What we talked about in positioning.
The actual products you are choosing to pitch. What is the price point? And so for instance, if you have a really low price product and you can't.
quite make the economics work okay could we sell a bundle there's sweet spots we found in the fashion brand that i have run ads on now for years and years we really need the products in our meta ads account to be like 180 to 200 that's the sweet spot we found anything cheaper than that we can make some sales but the economics don't work with 180 to 200 all the way up to like 350 is just a sweet spot for us to be able to do all the numbers that we want to do is we make a lot of products specifically in that price point that the user looks at and justify they're like yeah that looks like it's worth that money they're visual in the right way and it crushes on meta ads for us you'll find that it's different for every brand everything you have to find that kind of right product price combo then offers where are you actually putting out there what is the what is the angle what is the deal and then the actual creative itself what are the different designs and videos and hooks and things we're putting out there so now let's actually go into meta and so when you go in for the first time and you hit create you're going to create a new campaign
You have these options here. You select auction and you have your choices of what you want to do. Your biggest focus should be on sales.
Occasionally you may want to look at leads, but the majority of people are going to be working on sales. So now you're going to see you have a campaign. I'd be naming the campaign.
And this is the biggest choice you have here. Campaign budget or ad set budget. This is CBO and ABO.
You will hear these terms all the time and they mean two very different things. And basically this is about how much trust you have in meta. Do you trust their algorithm?
So a campaign budget means that Meta is basically responsible for all your dollars, all your ideas. It's gonna compare them to one another and it's gonna push that out there. If your brand has a lot of data and you've run a lot of ads, you have really thorough customer lists and Meta has an excellent picture of what you're trying to achieve and you know what you're doing, CBO is a consideration to have.
But for the majority of brands starting out, I recommend ABO. So ABO is basically an ad set budget. This means that you have control over what you spend by ad sets.
And so the way that we look at ad sets is a different concept. So anytime you have a different concept, say you're like, hey, we're going to test a founder ad. You would create an ad set and you'd put a couple variations of founder ads in there.
And that is an ad set to test. Same thing if you were like, OK, now we're going to test carousels of beautiful art directed photos of our product. OK, let's do an ad set.
that concept, and we have four to 10 variations inside there. Every time you have a new idea, you create a new ad set and you put a variety of ads related to that concept in it and you test it. If it does well, you spend more money and more money on that ad set and has no impact on your other ads.
That is the way that most people should be starting and beginning to scale on Meta. I usually turn off budget sharing, but you create your campaign and you select your budget type in there. And then you have your ad sets.
You can select if you wanna get conversions from everybody or you only want new customers. When you're getting started, I'd go for all. When your business has a lot of customers and you're really focused on new, you can look at it, but it's actually worth having both at play and understanding the economics of each.
But for most people to start out, you will be just run ads regardless of who they go to or focus on new customers. And you can say, what are we trying to achieve? We wanna maximize the number of conversions on our website.
Bid strategy at highest volume. or you can set certain goals on this. When you know what you're doing and you have ROAS goals and you scaled ads, you can set ROAS goals or bid caps.
That comes kind of later. But to begin, I would be looking for highest volume and just starting there. Standard attribution.
And you have your budget, your daily budget there. I would recommend you're starting to go on meta ads. $50 a day is what I'd be testing on any given ad.
So you could go as low as 10. It's going to be slow. But 50 is a great place to start, $1 ,500 a month.
100 a day is even better. You'll get some of your results and learning faster, but understand sometimes it's based on the budget your business has. And then audiences.
You are able to create audiences based on your website, based on your social media traffic, et cetera. So if you click over in this tab into audiences, you're able to actually set up some of these. You can upload leads.
So for instance, this is like a trial account I have for me. I have my email list. uploaded in there as a qualified lead list i have my instagram connected so you can connect your actual account of who's actually engaged with you on x or y and all of these help meta build the profile for your account so in this campaign in this ad set we can actually create ads so name this ad add one and you have the option of a partnership ad here so basically any time that you want to run create it from another account.
We'll talk about this in the character section. They can give you what's called an ad code they get in their account. You can just paste that code here and it will use a video from their account and it'll just pull it up right there and then you can choose where you want to go.
So that's the partnership ad option. Or you can just upload your creative here. You'll type in the website that you want to send people.
You can select image ad or video ad, and then you're actually going to be able to upload your creative inside of there and you are going to be able to publish it. You also notice within that ad set that we had, you had options of placements. You can decide if you only want to show it to Instagram or on Instagram stories or on Facebook or if you want everything inside of that ad set set up.
But then when you are running ads, you will have this list that shows up here. And you have all of these columns that tell you all of the data there that you can go edit inside of this customized column section to show you all the data that you would want to see. So let's talk through some of the strategy there that you've kind of seen inside of it.
So first is who are you targeting? Who are you sending traffic to? So the first option is lookalike.
If you have some data, you have website data, you have social media data, and you like, okay, this represents our customers. You go into audiences, you create a custom audience, you upload your customer list, you select your audience actions, create lookalike, and you can choose countries, and you can choose how tight the match is.
So 1 % people need to be exactly like this, 3%, 10%. I usually start at 3 % there, then expand to 10 % over time. And so basically, if you have your existing customers, data set, you can do that.
If you don't, you have interest targeting is a great place to start. So if there's no initial data, you can actually go in there and say, hey, what are I want people in the US ages 21 to 25 who are male or female who are interested in this software or this thing, and you can actually choose them from a list.
It's not the most robust thing, but it's a place to start if you have no data. And then the more data you get, or if you have no list and interests don't really achieve the goal you want to have, you can do what's called broad targeting, where basically Meta is going to figure out a lot of your targeting for you. I would 100 % start on lookalikes and then expand into broad once Meta has a bunch of data from you.
So then how do you run this? What actually happens? So every single week you do what's called creative strategy.
And if we actually break this down into its result, what do we do? do we buy ads how does this all work someone actually comes up with their creative strategy what ads are we putting in the account someone actually buys the media someone reports on the analytics and then someone goes back and starts the new creative strategy based on the results that someone may be the same person these may be segmented but that's a worthwhile way of looking at the process creative buying the media getting the results making new decisions on creative repeat forever so how every business should do this is every week put in new ads whether that's just one new ad set whether it's a bunch you'll find brands at different scales, right?
A lot of the brands we work with are putting in, trying to get 50 to 100 new ads a month, some of them more like 200 to 400 new ads a month. But for brands starting out, like we run ads for Cut30, for instance. And we are trying to have two new ad sets, maybe three in each week with like three ads inside those.
We're trying to get like nine or 10 ads each week. But your job is basically group ads into ad sets logically by a customer profile, by a creative type. Hey, so we're trying to target moms now.
Or hey, I'm trying to run green screen ads. Start at that base budget. Hey, we're gonna run this at $50 a day for each of those new ad sets.
Three to 10 ads per set is a good rule. I wouldn't do more than that. I wouldn't do less.
So you basically have a couple of versions. I wouldn't be making like light tweaks. I'd make like completely different creative following the same theme, whether it's.
a different creator, or it's just a different take on the video or slightly different style. And you want to look at the results. I would have a goal cost per action.
What do I want a sale to be? Or what do I want to lead to cost? And to test something, I'd be spending three to five X what that target is to basically see if you begin to hit it if it's close, and if not what the downstream effects are.
So for instance, if you spend, if you have a cost per action, it's you want sales for 50 bucks, you run a test for five days, you spent $250. If you got three sales in that, you're like, okay, I'm gonna keep testing a bit. If you got five sales in that, you're like, cool, I'm gonna spend more money.
five or more sales, right? And you're hitting your target cost. If you've got no sales, but you're seeing a lot of add to carts, initiated checkouts, email signups, then you may want to keep it running, but actually adjust, okay, can our landing page be better?
What's our message? What do we adjust downstream? And if it just got like terrible results, you turn it off, right?
But every single week you should be testing new things. If they do good, you spend more. If it continues to do well, you spend even more.
It's called scaling. And you're adding in new ideas based on success or based on new things you have there. And this is an infinite process that you run.
Now, looking at this data in Ads Manager is pretty painful. It's a hard interface to use. So I would highly recommend using the ChatGPT MCP to look at it within ChatGPT.
I would just go into ChatGPT work and just ask, how do I set this up? And it's gonna have you go to workspace settings. It's gonna have you go to apps.
It's gonna ask you to paste the meta MCP link, which you can easily Google. You ask Codex what to do next. It's gonna have you log in and give access.
Here to create a user. It's likely going to make you sign up for a developer account in Meta and then create an app with the Meta API and the Meta Ads API. This, again, starts to sound annoying, but if you just ask Codex, like, what do I do next?
It's going to literally link you to the stuff in Meta to do. This process is going to take you about 15 minutes. You add the app to the user that you have in Meta and all of a sudden you have access.
What this access means is you can just get a data readout. So every Monday you sit down and review your ads from last week. You can basically ask ChatGPT, what ads are working?
What's the results? What are ad sets? And it's going to give you a read report of what's happening there.
You can also... send requests back in there you can be like update the budget on this turn these ad sets off that is the maximum i would do of pushing i basically think it's great to read but meta will kind of shut accounts down they're automating it i wouldn't be having it publish or post a bunch of ads directly from there i would still publish ads and ads manager but getting your data back or making light changes is typically how we approach it but now you have a command center you have okay here's all my ad information if you label those ad sets well so basically whenever you put a new ad set in there you're literally testing you're like naming your customer profile you're naming the creative type now you're giving codex a lot of information and you start to combine it with a project that has all your customer information like all your key value propositions all your of your customer profile and stuff we've talked about now you can begin asking you can say hey based on this data then based on our customer profile what new ad ideas should we run okay let's come up with hook ideas let's come up with ad angles and this is how a lot of people are running these accounts now where you actually generate a lot more creative then you can ask it to mock it up hey give me a mock -up static for this so that i can send to a designer as a reference you begin to have a good set of skills for a brand guy but we have a cut 30 you can actually just cut creative
there depending on the brand and so a few final terms before we start going into characters because characters is the extension of this who creates your content how does it work is you have a couple types of assets you can use as ads you have static ads you're just running an image you have video ads where you're running basically like a tick tock or a video just a piece of short form video you put in the account You have carousel ads, you have multiple in a row.
You have catalog ads if you have e -commerce. So basically just take the photos you have in your e -commerce account, or you can use services like Marpipe that like spice them up and they just run automatic stuff in retargeting. So it's worth kind of testing a group of those.
And then you can get into whitelisting, which is using other accounts and other creative. We talk about that in characters. I know this section was dense, but I hope you now know some of the metrics you have.
You know that, hey, I should start and I should use an ABO campaign. I should be adding new ad sets every week. I want you to get the basics of how this works.
There's all kinds more nuance on top. of this our goal here is we have a basic understanding now i can do demand i can do demand from the organic side i can do demand from the ad side i know where to start i know what to look at i know how to sound somewhat dangerous when i'm doing it now we're going to go into the character section but the last demand piece this is only gonna be like a minute or two but it's worth noting is okay if i'm not doing any of that i just need to drive sales i need to be like getting aggressive with it we have what's called outbound so what you'll see is if you start getting a bunch of emails if you work at a company and there's people trying to pitch you software and stuff that's outbound marketing same thing with LinkedIn DMs, people trying to set up a meeting or a call.
It's outbound. Outbound is a hard game, but the first agency I had was a contract engineering agency. We built that shit off outbound.
It was hard. It was aggressive. We were sending hundreds of emails a day, dozens of LinkedIn messages.
We have all these strategies to set up meetings, to get new clients. And it was a core of our strategy because we just didn't have anything else. It was our first project and it was kind of do or die.
I remember at the time I had a couple months worth of rent in the account. We were all moving over to this. We had to make it work.
And I didn't care what the other results are. Yeah, we were doing organic. Yeah, we were running ads, but the outbound.
was like we could rely on. It was just a game of sheer will and attrition. So to do that, just so you have an understanding of it, there's a piece of software called ListKit, which is like the platform.
Basically, you have ListKit and you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you pay for it, it lets you send messages and find leads. So if your business you're working on, your marketing, you're like, man, we've got to drive leads.
We've got to get outbound. Don't be afraid of it. Lean into it and be like, all right, we have to set up LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Our team is about to send a lot of outbound LinkedIn messages and you're going to work on crafting good copy and ideas and presentations for that. Talk about sales support later in the video. And if you want to do it through email, like ListKit is the answer here.
It's a competitor to a service called Apollo. But I firmly look at it. We've looked at all of them.
And this is like a lot of these things you look at, okay, you could use this software or that software. This is kind of the software. So it does domains, inboxes, warmup, all the stuff we actually have to set up to be like, hey, how do I send those emails?
How do I do it in a compliant way? You have to worry about all these technicalities and stuff. They handle all of that.
And then they have the databases where you can actually go find your target leads and like tools to automate a bunch of this. So if you are going to do that, I'm not going to go hugely in depth in here. because I know it'll probably be a rare case.
But in case that has to be part of your toolkit, LinkedIn Sales Navigator list kit, go down the rabbit hole there and Godspeed.
Now that we've talked about demand, let's talk about characters. This is an important way to think about influencers and creators and how they play a role in your brand. Because when we did that brand world exercise, remember when we mapped that out?
That is an expansive universe you can create that can be as big as you want it to as your brand grows into. So we are going to talk about creators, how to find them, the role they play. We're going to talk about influencers and the difference between the two.
And now I'm going to talk about briefs, how you create a brief or an instruction manual that you give influencers and creators. creators, and designers to actually enable creating awesome assets that actually perform for your brand. So first, let's talk about creators.
How do I define a creator? So in particular, and in context of influencers that we'll talk about next, these are people that are up and coming who are making content from zero to let's say maybe a couple hundred thousand followers max who don't have like big celebrity or acclaim in their niche, but who make content and can make content for your brand.
This is a crucial part of modern marketing. One of the biggest chances you have to get ahead and do better than the next generation who's been doing this for a while, who may not understand this, is to be in on the creator side.
So what are creators good for? A couple things. The first thing is when you are putting creative into your ad account, when you are running advertising on meta, on TikTok, etc., having it come from a creator or a person that makes content is going to often be some of the top performers in your ad accounts.
And you're going to want to have a myriad of voices, people that have different styles of creating, like vlogs versus yapping videos, people have different looks, whether that's gender or race or this type of content that they make, you'll find that certain people appeal to other types of people. And you want to be able to perpetuate that inside your ad account.
It's a concept worth knowing called creative diversity. So there's the idea that you can create content just specifically for advertising. The second thing they're good for is to create content around your brand for their accounts.
There's a concept called seeding, which is when you give free product away to creators by asking nothing in return, but hoping that they will post, it becomes a very successful strategy for a lot of brands. So you will see people, especially if you have a low average order value, say that you're giving away something that only costs your brand $10 to $30 or $40, it will be doing a lot of seeding.
Then the third thing is actually creating content for you for a percentage. So these are called affiliates, and this works on TikTok shop. This also works with people doing things like ShopMy and LTK, which give people a specific link if they recommend a product that they can put in their bio or their stories or on their sub stack they are generating sales for a brand and making content that they would likely be making anyway or they are building a entire account around monetizing in this fashion and the fourth way is just getting them to actually create content whether it's on your organic account or on a separate account so you will notice there are a lot of brands that just have a creator on the core account my friend yaw was a creator on an account for a fashion production group called crease group for a long time they had other content with other people from the company they had carousels etc but he was the face of the company where he would actually
put out a lot of videos explaining what they did. It became a character in their universe. Same thing has happened for brands that use multiple of these.
Gymshark is another example. They have lots of creators making content for them. And then it goes out beyond the account.
There's a brand called Opal. They're kind of like a mental health brand where they actually had a creator on a separate account who was doing whiteboard breakdowns around mental health and screen time limiting and the psychology behind it on a separate account but was promoting the company. And then there are companies that take this really wide.
They will have multiple creators. There is an app called Be Freed that's a good example of this where it's like a literary app. And they have dozens of creators of all looks and backgrounds making very similar videos promoting the books you can read to achieve X or Y or habits that you can do.
people to get the app. These are all creator strategies that happen in the modern world that are worth you being aware of. So how do you source and find these?
So the first place to start is on your own customer list. There's an application called Outer Signal that will actually go and go through your customer list or your email list and find people that are existing influencers. I would start there.
It's a layup win that you can have as a marketer. The second place that you can find if you want people who will run advertisements for you, the ads in your ad account, they will get paid on a commission, a percent of what is spent on that ad. There is an app called Tribe.
I'm going to link all of these inside the actual download that we have. But you can source creators on there who will do ads specifically for you. There's another service called Sideshift to actually find creators if you want them to be on your account or representing you.
And then there are agencies that do this. This is one of the things we do at Darkroom. We set up creator campaigns for all kinds of brands for both ads and regular.
There's also platforms that you can search that often have managed services. Later is an awesome platform for that that I've worked with before. That's the kind of basic toolkit of how do you work with those creators.
and then where do you find them? Next up is influencers. Influencers are people that have an outsized result with their audience.
They're not necessarily up and coming. They are established. When they say something, it can shift your campaign.
They can be a facer of voice. So for instance, in the marketing world, I started as a creator and was coming up there, but now I'm fully an influencer. I can be a part of a launch campaign in the marketing world.
I help debut Shopify's additions every time that they do that as part of the rollout. So I would look at these like anchors when you do. So we'll have micro creators at the bottom, new creators, people that are putting out a lot of creative that goes in the ad account.
We're experimenting. We do a lot of it, a lot of style. In the mid -tier, we have a lot of creators, people that are successful in a niche.
Maybe they have 30 ,000, maybe they have 100 ,000 followers who form the core of it. And then we have a couple big influencers at the top who are anchors, who are making amazing creative, who are getting the other creators below them excited about participating in the campaign. And all three of those work in concert to make amazing marketing.
That is a modern strategy. So how do you actually find these? So there's lots of software and systems.
them but this is one of the best use cases if you do want to build an agent you can be searching through a number of the platforms that have enabled search on them meta has its own feature that allows you to find creators inside of it there are softwares like social snowball that even give you access to that and a platform that does outreach but doing those repetitive tasks like going in and searching for people mentioning a word on tick tock or instagram or then running those platforms and then making a list vetting the list to see if they're active and then doing an initial email outreach is a great use case for something that you could build with something like ChatGPT if you want to experiment with making your own agent in that flow of how you use AI and marketing we mentioned before.
But the key to doing all this is the brief, right? You can identify people, you can reach out to them. That is a numbers game.
You have to reach out to a lot. You want to constantly be searching. You want to be engaging in content in your niche to learn it.
A lot of that involves just being online, searching, being active, utilizing these software platforms. But if you want to make good content with them, that comes down to the brief. Let's break down how a brief works.
And I've included a template for this, my brief. template that you can use i am a big fan of what's called a modular brief so brief is really a bunch of information that you provide a creator a designer a videographer whoever's working on an asset for you to help guide them in the process and so people always have some end all this is our brief format or not but it really varies varies on who the creator is what you're trying to get across and so i have what i call a modular brief which is a long checklist of things to include of different items and i will basically constrict or expand this based on the actual campaigns we will just remove of these items and i star in the template the ones that are the most easiest to remove if you don't want to do too much and what you'll notice is the best 10 of creators and influencers you work with people that really know what they're doing they don't use the brief you probably need to give them any information they act alone but the bottom 90 really need the brief and so i wouldn't be afraid if you have a great creator to let them abandon this entirely i also would make sure if you're doing a lot of work with a lot of people you give them this guidance and don't let them just cook on their own so the core things to include in the brief the first is the two
most important messages? What do you want to make sure they get across or learn about the product or the service? I would just make sure you call that out.
Don't put five or 10 points. What are the most important ones they need to mention that work? Then I would have a quick pitch on the target demographic.
Who are you trying to reach? Millennial moms, young up and coming students. Give a quick split of info on that that you have.
You can basically take your persona and put that into ChatGPT and get a quick overview for that. It's a good use case for it. Then the content type.
Do you want to vlog? Do you want to yap? Getting a static asset.
What is it there? asked to create and is there flexibility on it. Then I'd be giving them hook inspiration based on what works either accounts that you've pulled from things like video database or from existing creative you know it's good I'd recommend sharing and reusing hooks amongst your creators if things start to work and then the hook there is broken down into what text on screen inspiration what visuals might work on there and what do you want them to say.
Now I would assume a lot of them aren't going to follow this but you can at least give them a framework. This really works well for object hooks if you're like we want you to actually unbox the object we want you to start with this really compelling visual that we've been doing on a bunch of these.
Give that inspiration. Don't make them stick to it, but it's helpful to put in there. Then references.
If you have any high -performing content from the campaign or from previous things you want to be able to reference, include it. You have any stuff you're basing the brief on from stuff you pulled from video database, you have in your bookmarks, link it in there so they can see the things you like and pull ideas from it.
And then I'd go through the mechanism. This is the one that's stark. You may not have a mechanism or not, but what do I mean by mechanism?
Like one is a blitz. So the blitz content is very popular right now. be like 10 out of 10 niche habits, guys who want to be high performers.
Then there's this list, like 10 things we call blitz content, at least in my world. And so you can basically say, hey, we want you to do this kind of intense rapid fire content. Storytime content is doing well now too.
Seven minute TikToks where you're actually breaking down some crazy interaction between people. That could be the mechanism you're using. And I would include that if you are running around a tactic like this.
And again, it's an easy one to eliminate if you don't have that identified and want to rely on the creator. Then I would do a simple outline. We include this in video database.
every video reference, we actually do an automatic breakdown to a simple outline. And again, they don't have to follow, but gives them some idea of like, we want you to hook, they want you to go into a scenario, they want you to get into point one of the product, then we want you to get into a joke and then do X. That's a good way to give people, especially new creators, some level of outline so they're not winging it.
And then any assets, you can give them any video, any B -roll, any graphics they can pull up. The more of this, the better, especially if you're doing green screen, it makes their lives easier and ensures they have a library. And then last, the variance needed.
Do you want to have a call to action? It's a comment call to action. You need to have a separate call to action for a version you're going to run as an ad, and they want to do a couple versions of the ending.
You want them to do two or three hooks. Call that out in the brief, and so you can get a pack of those assets back to you. So again, we have a template for this in the description, and it is the cornerstone of putting this together.
A lot of marketing teams are doing briefs for assets all the time. Becoming good at this is a really great skill. Now, I'm going to get into a screen share here as well about how you use video database to explore some of that here in a moment before we get into the tactics section.
thing i will leave you with is that for creators and influencers is this term white listing now also do the term dark listing so white listing is when you take an asset that someone puts on their account an influencer puts on their feed they can give you what's called an ad code you can plug it right into meta that we talked about and it will run that ad from their account this is a very common thing to do they often perform way higher than regular ads you will find a lot of great accounts we had a panel about this at can are running like 30 50 of the ads in their account white listed from other account.
Dark listed is when that ad is actually put out from their account, but it was never put on their main feed. This is an option that TikTok gives you. It's also an option you can do in meta that allows you to actually just run ads from someone else's account without any of that organic traffic, which is kind of somewhat less useful, but some people who are getting into more robust tactics use it.
I want to make sure you know all of the availability, the different things you can have in your toolkit. So whenever you want to do this, you ask for an ad code. When you create the ad in meta, you can see the use partnership code.
You can actually just paste that in there and it goes live. And I would be running as much of this as you can if you are using creators and influencers. And if you want to get into the really advanced version of this, you want to have a brain that actually pulls in all of these different stats and tactics and what works and does it and should we be whitelisting more or what are our good briefs?
If you want to look at advanced AI like that, there's a service called Runneth from Motion that I will also link inside and down this description. That's like the extremely advanced creative strategist version of it that you'll find a lot of companies doing high performing whitelisting use. And there's a lot.
more to go through i have in some of my other content but i want to make sure you have the basics of how this works for your brand in this section before we start going into the important part here the part that's going to make you money tactics all right in this section we are going to talk about the flow all that attention the organic social the ads we talked about before how do you convert that into sales this is also known as the funnel i do have an entire video on funnels but we're going to walk through the attention part of this here so first i want to call out that your goal as marketing is not to do cool campaigns it is not to avoid being quantified it is to drive leads and sales for whatever business you work for that is the end goal at the end of the day and there are generations of marketers who try to avoid this, I want to tell you that you need to lean into that.
If you are the person who is good at being able to measure it, who understands that's your goal, who can prove it, that's how you get paid what you're worth. That's how you move up within companies. That's how you begin an entrepreneurial journey.
It is worth it to embrace this. I am just like you. I fought this forever.
I want to be a designer. And then I began to realize all the success and all the things I want to design or make was on the other side of understanding the flow. So let's start over here.
We have attention. It's what we just talked about. You are going to get attention.
that is coming in to your brand. And you are gonna get that from what we just talked about. Ads, organic social, referral, search.
So defining referral and search real quick, referral will be if someone recommends your company, whether you have a program for it or they do it organically. And then search is whether someone is on Google or they're searching on ChatGPT, does your product show up? And you also get in some nuance here of things like traffic.
So if you have a retail store, are people actually walking by? If you are on someone else's, if you are being sold in Costco, does someone walk by? your aisle how do you stop them there's a lot of attention that happens over here but then your job is to get them over here to becoming a lead or a sale so why this is important is if you have a services business you are have an agency you sell construction roofing architecture whatever it is leads are important right people don't just buy right away they need to get on a phone call they need collateral we're going to get into all that in a second but it's really important to understand but then if you are an e -commerce company you're selling a product you may get leads you'll get people on your email list that function as leads but end of the day you want people to buy and you want them to buy quickly so a couple key terms that i want to define here the first is a cta or call to action so to be able to get attention you need a cta you need to basically ask people for it so on your ad it could say buy now take advantage of the 70 off sale get it before it's gone get on the wait list whatever that is a call to action same thing if you are
getting leads and you're like, download our free cheat sheet, sign up for a free consultation, get a phone call to learn more. All those things are a call to action. It's important to think about what that call to action is and then how it's supported.
So one of the big ways that call to actions need to be thought about is your bio on your social media account. So if you are a business and you have a bio on social media, how do you get people with a call to action? So usually what I like to do in the bio structure is you list what the actual company does the second line is what you're going to learn from or why you should follow them on social media then the third line is a call to action it can be as simple as sign up for the next release get the free cheat sheet see our latest collection with whoever there's a call to action there that encourages people when they go to the profile to then become a lead and you will see on all of my social media as a personal brand it is join my brand strategy newsletter i get people on my hyper newsletter then they become an email sign up for me that i can do all kinds of stuff with if i choose to over time now After the bio, the other key thing to understand about CTA is that it takes them to a landing page.
So your CTA ends up on a page. And I'm going to screen share some landing page stuff here once we're done with this whiteboard. But that page that people are on is a huge part of the marketing process because basically you took all this time, money, and attention to get them here.
You got them to this landing page. Now, are they going to do what you want? If you are making a sale, that is a product page.
So most often... There's some exceptions. That will be your product page or your product detail page or a derivative.
We're actually explaining what the product is and why someone should buy it. Now, what do I mean by that or a derivative? So often you have your default page on your site, your e -commerce page, but then you can also have variations of that.
based on your campaign. So for instance, if you are testing a campaign with a bunch of TikTok influencers, you may have a page that has videos from those TikTok influencers. If you have a different campaign for people 50 plus versus 30 plus, your product page may have all pictures of people 30 plus or 50 plus.
This becomes a nuance of the marketing funnel. And generally what I recommend looking at this with is if you're just getting started, you're testing ads like we talked about, you're on that $50, $100 a day, focus on your default pages. When you're starting to spend more and you start to realize we have different targets, we have different campaigns.
spending thousands to tens of thousands, you begin to realize I need different messages for different people. I have multiple landing pages. We'll talk about how to make those in a minute.
Now, the same thing goes for leads, except your goal for there is to get an email or a phone number, and ideally both. But as a marketer, this landing page is your property is one of the most important things. Because here's what happens.
Say that you get 100 people from your ads, you paid $1 for each one of them. So you paid $100 to get people to this landing page, that landing page converts 4%. So you have four people from it, those now cost $25 for people that converted on that landing page, getting their email or their phone number, or going into that sale, right?
And that math varies significantly, that goes up to 11 or 12 people. That's extremely better math. That's down to one person.
The math is way worse. And a lot of that is controlled by what you put on here and the messages you used. I've built a custom tool for this.
You will get access to in the marketing .zip downloads. But then now, once you get them into a lead, what happens then? so now we have a crm they're going to go into a crm as a customer relationship manager so a great example of a crm hubspot is probably one of the most known crms they store leads for businesses that are services -based businesses technology -based businesses emails and phone numbers go in the crm so you have records of them also if you're looking at that for for email that would go into something like klaviyo and you will have two types of records inside your crm you will have your leads and you will have your customers So a lead has not converted yet.
Once they're in your CRM, you now have the ability to talk to them. They opted in to give you information. So now if you are a services business, you want to be able to reach out and schedule a call.
You want to send them collateral. Same thing if you're in e -commerce. That's when your abandoned cart emails come into play.
And there's some tools that we're going to talk about here. So we have, basically, we have touches and we have automation. So automation is something that happens automatically.
And we'll go through this in the narrative section of this video in depth. But for instance, if you leave something in a cart, you put your email in, you receive an abandoned cart email, it's an automation.
Now a smart automation will have more than one email. They'll have a reminder, offer you another deal. That becomes an advanced automation.
But also if you just start getting a series of emails based on the product you chose with more content info, more testimonials, and those emails or those text messages come over time and they're not campaign based, which gets sent one at a time. They're sent in an automated fashion based on when you sign up. That is an automation flow.
And so now your job as a marketer is to enable this. So we're going to go into. So what do you send to these leads to get them to convert and these customers to then go and buy more?
I'm not going to touch that as much here. We'll focus on leads. So if someone hasn't bought from your e -commerce business or hasn't gotten your service, what happens next?
So first is this idea of a touch. If you are selling something that requires someone to get on a phone or a salesperson to talk to them, speed to touch is super crucial. This is how marketing interfaces with sales.
You bring a lead in, you have generated that lead, you put all this work into it, you want sales to touch it as fast as possible. I mean a minute, five minutes. As fast as humanly possible, a ping goes into the system, a salesperson is picking up the phone or sending an introductory email, whether that is an automated or whether they're doing that in the system.
You need to be ruthlessly dedicated to how fast people respond to those leads because you will find for every even minute that it goes by, the chance of response goes down. So speed to touch, that's a coordination effort. And then we're gonna have what we call our close assets and our thank you.
After they become a lead, they get taken to a thank you page. After they made a sale, they get taken to a thank you page. What is on there?
This is extremely underrated and really crucial. If you sign up to be a lead and then you get a thank you, that actually goes and goes, hey, cool, here's a video. explaining what the process is to buy from us and what that looks like.
And that video is actually made by the person that's about to call you. And here's the things you can expect to see next. Now you feel really educated and enabled.
And the call isn't a mystery. You know what's going to happen. Maybe you're excited about it.
Maybe you really want to meet Maria or John or Jose or whoever's going to call you next because you saw them on that page. So that thank you is a great thing to optimize. Then the close assets.
When that person reaches out or when you send an automated email, what are you providing them that will help you close? So one of my favorites is most popular videos. If you have really good content you spent time making, reuse it.
it make sure the sales people send it over hey before we get on the call check out these top things that break down how the product works you just sign up for an email hey have you seen our popular piece of content with this influencer whatever it is so you have videos you have testimonials do the work for them that's what they're going to do anyway the customer is going to go and say what do people say about this product online solve that be like hey great here's 50 examples of people that have a win with us here's all of our top reviews here's what people are saying solve that in an email or a deck and then faq What are those questions and objections that come up?
How can you preemptively answer them in written content, in a PDF, in a video, et cetera? Give those to your salespeople or send them automatically. That becomes this flow.
And this attention -based flow that then goes into a similar flow when you have people buy one and you want them to buy more over time, this is where the money is made. You are a master of this. Attention comes in and you're like, I turn that attention into dollars.
I make sure the sales team is on their touches. I give them banger assets. Our thank you page is optimized.
I am listening to the phone calls and stuff they have. I'm using stuff like. granola and i'm summarizing those notes i have them right back in the chat gpt i'm summarizing the objections every single week and those objections i turn into updates i provide inside this content you are worth a lot of money and this flow is all done within here it's the more technical part of marketing but this is the part that if you're good at one of these other things and you add this you become a killer and if you're going to obsess about things in here obsess about the conversion rate here this is your north star metrics conversion rate on the landing page and then the close rate on the leads if you want to get into some more nuance there you can start getting into qualified rate so basically are the people that sign up for those calls or get in the email list are they actually good enough to be customers again it gets them into more advanced stuff i really care about these two right here you can kind of live and die by what are you doing to improve those and then obviously the volume
of leads and if you want to impact that close rate thing like that speed of touch reminders of when the call is what they send right before and after the thank you you optimize that there's a full funnels video you can tap into some of that with that i will put in the marketing .zip Thank you for whiteboarding that with me.
Whiteboard this out. This is a great exercise to do with your sales team. You want sales to love marketing?
You want to feel like you're working together and it's not some hate relationship? Sit down and map this out. Here's how we're bringing in attention.
Here's the landing pages. Here's what we're going to give them after the landing page. Okay, you're on the call.
What are you sending them? Here's what you should send them that we have. What are you looking for?
What are the objections? Hey, I'll work that into this. You're mapping that funnel out with them.
You're a godsend. We're going to swap from this into screen share for landing pages. Let's talk about landing pages.
What do we mean by... landing page a landing page is where people land when you've given your attention right when you get their attention from an ad organic social media a click on the website, etc.
You don't want them to just go to your homepage. You want them to go to a page designed to help them convert. So a big part of marketing work is actually writing and designing these landing pages.
And I'm going to walk through exactly what makes them great. So first, let's start with an example. This is actually my friend Ashland's brand.
He does an amazing job on his landing pages, so I want to call them out. So you will notice up top, this is an e -commerce product. And I'm going to walk through some other examples, including luxury here in a second.
You have the ability to scroll through all your top e -commerce photos, which immediately aren't just pictures of the product, right? It's not just glam photos.
You have one good photo of it. Then we have immediately the three benefits. Backed by science.
Here's the results that you get, et cetera. And when you scroll down the page, you get backed up. It explains to you how the product works.
It shows you the clinical booths. It has graphs about its efficacy. It shows you the timeline with which the product works.
It goes into testimonials. It shows you the background of the people that actually put it together. Then goes through all the different ingredients that are inside it with full information.
And then it goes into tons and tons of... testimonials from real people. And then last, they end with frequently asked questions.
So the entire role of this entire page is to remove any questions or objections that someone may have about buying the product. And I'm going to walk through two important types of landing pages here today. The first is going to be This more product -based landing page.
How does when someone land on it, they actually get all the information they need? How do you put that together? And the second that we're going to talk about is what's called a listicle landing page or a more content -heavy landing page.
And I'll start with that one first. So you may find as you test in marketing over time that just giving all the benefits and selling your product and using testimonials is the best way to go. But if you begin to test content that's more educational or more informative, you can take them to more information as well.
So we will often call this a listicle landing page. It's one of the most common types. And it's based on what you used to see back in the day from people like BuzzFeed, etc.
And they'd be like the 20 things you need to know or whatever that looks like. So what you will do on a listicle landing page is you'll actually list out common things someone might be dealing with. So instead of going right to your cosmetic brand, you would be, this is how you put together, that's 14 steps to put together this specific look.
A styling page for a fashion brand or information on the craft. We begin to educate and then take people into the sales process. Those are the two types of core.
landing pages worth being aware of. What I've done here is I know that there's a lot of information out there around this. There's a lot of people who are like, how do I even begin to write one?
So we've put together a tool. I built in ChatGPT Codex a specific tool where you can see here, you can fill in your brief of what your product is, who your audience is, what your promise is, any copy you have, any proof points, your CTA, your price. You can upload material.
And it is going to give you three different landing page copy templates in my structure. I'm going to walk through here in three different voices.
Also, in addition to this, if you want to make your own and have one that's custom built just for your brand, I have a prompt included that I use to build this that you can use as well. So it's all going to be in the download pack. But why do I put it like this?
Voices are really important in describing your product. We talked a bit about this in positioning, and we'll talk a bit about it in narrative. But on landing pages in particular, you'll find that different audiences like to hear different things from the marketers.
And also that your brand may want to communicate things in different ways from other brands. So three that I always go with are direct response, evidence -led, and story -driven. If I had to choose between those for my brand, and you've heard about this earlier in the video, I would choose from one of those three.
So let's actually go here and do this as an example, and you'll see the copy I create and why. So you're going to go here and you're going to enter all of this down there. And I'm going to do this for an example with Cut30.
So I have some generated results here for the 30 -day program we saw on content. So you will see up top, it's going to give you a headline and a sub -headline. Stop guessing.
Start building a system that works. You're going to have a problem. You're going to have three points of proof.
You're going to have objection solving. You're going to have some claims. You're going to have an offer.
It's going to give you a bunch of different... things that you can use in different copy sections on your landing page. There's a more evidence -driven one, and there is a more story -driven one that you're going to be able to use as well.
So you have the options to generate copy in all three of those styles. Let's look at the average structure. What do you need to know about this?
So if you're doing this for any e -commerce product, we did a ton of these when I worked as the creative in residence at Vangroup. We made the Road website, the Wear Beauty website, the Kai website, Hexclad, Ridge Wallet, Lola Blankets. We specialize in super high -performing PDPs.
We are locked in on this. So you will see. They start with lifestyle photo.
There's also video inside of this carousel as well. The ability to buy the entire routine up top. And then direct examples on people.
We basically, every single option you have to buy, we are showing you those examples here so you can see real results in real life is the next step. Then we have all of our... benefits of the product, but look, we reframe it to the user.
It's good for what? What does it feel like? What does it look like?
And we have the actual value props of what it looks like. We have how to use it as the next section. Then there's a breakdown on what all the different ingredients are for people that want to know.
Then there's the data points. So you can actually get into clinical. studies and consumer results, and then FAQ for the common objections.
This is the formula that I would recommend using for 90 % of your PDP landing pages. If you want to look at this for another product that I really like, 10 ,000, another van website, and great pair of athletic shorts, you will see they dump you all the text on top, why you'll love it, who it's for, the features, the materials, again, the ability to complete it right up top, gives you the overview.
But then gets into each one of these features has a little video. You want to talk about the liner. You want to talk about the shell.
You want to look at the pockets. It's actually showing you a video of all of these to be able to see it, not just view it. So an excellent landing page there.
They explain the design process. Then they get into being able to see the real reviews, what it pairs well with, et cetera. Those are great formats to follow.
Now, luxury, if you're selling luxury, Jacob & Co is another website that was done by Vangroup. So when you're going to a $50 ,000 watch, it's a very different set of questions you're being asked. Really, it's about why is this worth it?
this money so your job is to is to impress so here it shows the design inspiration what went into the behind it there's glam shots or the primary it actually animates in the design of the watch again you can actually watch this people will sit there you have the data like dwell on the actual page itself you'll see this is all the stuff that goes into even just a sketch of what that looks like Then here's the info on the actual development process.
Here's shots of all the interiors of how this works. Again, super high quality video of what that looks like. If you're selling luxury, take the time to do these macro shots to show people the level of craft that goes in to justify the price point.
By the time I've scrolled down to this and started seeing this, I'm like, okay, I understand why this watch costs so much. Before we even get into the features and the high quality of it. And again, we're still going.
it's now starting to go through multiple of the features, right? The job is basically to overwhelm you with how incredible it is and then goes into the lifestyle and how that looks as well and getting into specs and you have the ability to go navigate through this as well with a call to action to inquire. So if you are doing luxury content, you really need to use the high quality of your content to tell the story on the website.
And a good practice I would get into is anytime you click an ad or anytime you're doing research, just list the sections people do. AG1 is another great example of people that built their business off a landing page. They're doing comparison charts on the different products that they have.
They're talking about your goals. They have testimonials of their consumers on there. All of those are recipes you can have to test for a landing page.
Like, yeah, I do have a bunch of consumer videos. I'm going to have a section of it. Oh, I could do a comparison chart.
And you can build up and down your landing pages based on that and test whether they work. And so not only... Am I going to give you the landing page text generator we had there?
You should be looking at how do you actually generate your landing pages in Codex. So we have a prompt that shows you how to actually put together a skill for your business's branding. That's what we did with the Cut30 branding.
And if you want to be able to write and deploy those landing pages on your sites from this, you can do all that within the Codex app that I have open here. So I did that for that content oracle that you've seen that we've walked through as well was built inside Codex. So I'm able to say, here's the text.
Here's what I wanted to accomplish. Use this brand skill. Let's show you.
do in a prompt. The skill is a collection of the colors, the backgrounds, the images to actually generate something there. So you'll see we have this content Oracle page here.
I uploaded this imagery to use. I uploaded the text we wanted. It has my brand guide in the skill of how we do these buttons and the colors we use.
And you can generate pages from there and then just critique it. You will see we did the back and forth inside Codex here where I'm saying, hey, I want this to be a little bit lighter. Can you place these buttons a little bit differently?
How does this look on mobile? And then deploy it. So how do you really invite deploy?
So what this will do is it will build a ChatGPT site. But what also is great about Codex is it will actually connect to wherever your sites and things are hosted and give you the ability to push things in and out. So there's an entire video on funnels I have.
I will include a marketing .zip if you want to dive. in deep but i want to give you the entry -level toolkit to understand landing pages to understand the parts of them you can use the text generator that we built and you can also put together a skill file which i will have a complete prompt for as well and upload a design skill into your chat gpt and codex to be able to actually create landing pages using your design system we'll get into that separately Let's keep moving.
So once you capture all this attention, you get all this demand, you understand the flow of what happens going into sales, marketing becomes about narrative. I mean, it's good advice. So what do we mean by that?
How do you communicate with leads and customers and the market over time? And you will find for most businesses who are trying to find their footing, they need to master that demand flow first. How do we use ads or organic social to drive leads and sales that work?
But eventually you begin to realize now that you have that handled, you need to add these other things into your toolkit. So in this section, we are going to talk about campaigns, basically putting your marketing ideas together into these moments that create more attention. And we're going to talk about email and retention.
So when you are communicating with the lead, and customers and signups that you get? How do you have an ongoing conversation with them?
How do you understand how that works and how can you put it together? And we're going to talk a bit about PR, the idea of getting journalists and people to talk about you and also to understand and have planning around crises and things that come up and about communicating narrative internally, which matters a lot too. What do people in your company say?
How do you explain what marketing does? So to start, I want to break down, there's three types of strategy that people talk about and creative and these overall kind of big thinking narratives and basically strategic strategic roles inside of marketing.
And these words are used interchangeably and they shouldn't be, and I want to break them down. So those words are brand strategy, creative strategy, and creative direction. Let's talk about them.
So brand strategy are these big conceptual ideas, like we talked about in positioning. We need to say, how is our brand thinking about this product release or this next quarter or next year or our story overall? How do we position?
What are these messages we should test? What is our tone of voice? How are we going to do these big overall ideas?
to go focus in on creator versus influencer, or we need to start spending more time justifying our money in retail support versus online. Those are brand strategy questions. Those are macro, they're at a high level, and they're meant to actually give direction for the rest of the company to be able to move on for a specific campaign, a quarter.
or a period of time, like a product launch or an upcoming year or two. Now, creative strategy is one of the most talked about. And creative strategy is a very popular role.
It's ultra useful right now. So creative strategies focus very specifically on the ad account and or the organic social account. I'd say most of the jobs that are looking for this now are very focused on the ad account.
And so those people... who are creative strategists are every single week coming up with new concepts to be put into ads. So they come up with new hook angles, they come up with new ideas, new messages, and they brief those angles similar to the brief process we call that.
So they are responsible for coming up with those angles, writing them out into briefs and distributing them, whether that's to creators, graphic designers, team members, whoever is actually executing the creative and then feedback in that as it comes in. How do we do it better? No, that's wrong.
So it is extremely tactical. It is ongoing. It is informed by the brand strategy.
And you may have a creative strategist that works quarter to quarter on some overall brand strategy work and then dials in. But it's an extremely tactical job to basically help your ad account perform better or also to help your organic social account or your creator world perform better.
Some creative strategists will just work on influence or external creators or with teams. Creative strategy work that I've done a lot of is working direct with an actual team where they have multiple people on their team who are making content like founders or they have an influencer or two that works for them. We actually workshop the strategy of those groups and do new ideas every week or every month.
tactical. And then we have creative direction. The Holy Grail, per se.
While a lot of people want to aspire to be in their careers, there's this big perception of the elusive creative director. So if you have a creative strategist that's relentlessly breathing, they're maintaining the ChatGPT project with all the data, scripts, personas, and angles, they're feeding in unique ideas, and they're gas -pedaling what works, the creative director drives the brand vision that enables creative strategy.
So they work on the campaigns, the build -outs, and the intangibles that build something special. So for instance, you may have a theme for your quarter. of creative strategy work or for a product launch.
You may have a big campaign, like we're about to talk about in campaigns, that has a singular theme and idea and visual ideas. You may have merchandising in all your stores and packaging refreshes. A lot of this ends up getting led by creative direction.
It may be informed by a brand strategy working hand -in -hand. Sometimes there's some overlap. But they use raw ideation and then tap into a network to basically build these moments and these visions.
And importantly, that creative director is someone who can step in. They can do videography. They can shoot the photo.
They can do the style. They can do some of the design. They can deploy anything around one of these campaigns and one of these ideas if they don't have someone they can tap in or someone doesn't show up.
They often are multifaceted creatives, but their ability is to bring in all these people and all these things together to execute on an idea. And then strategists will then go, they can disseminate that on down, right? They can actually take some of those cool strategies.
They can take some of what works and apply that to the day -to -day tactics. But to get to be a creative director requires you have to know how to do all these things and be decent enough at it. Then also be able to have a network you can call on and be like, we can use this.
photographer. We can use this influencer. We can get these people.
They'll drop everything in a week. They'll do this at a lower than budget to be able to execute this idea that I have that everyone's going to love and be excited about. So those are very, you know, there's obviously some overlap between those three topics, but it's very different on what are we going to do from a brand perspective?
How do we position? How do we think about this launch overall to how do we create ideas that move inside creative direction to how do we tactically every week make sure that there's assets that are creative that perform under creative strategy? And there's a lot of definitions for these terms, but to be frank, all the other ones are antiquated.
In this world we're operating in right now where people are hiring, these are how these jobs are put together. That's a perfect segue into this idea of campaigns, and we'll talk about PR, and we'll talk about email and retention. So we're going to talk about campaigns, and we'll talk about a few different types of campaigns.
So the easiest example to give with this is we're going to look at SetActive. So you will notice that SetActive basically has thematic content on their social media feeds all the time. So let's look at this here.
There's a collab here for a giveaway for their State Fair giveaway, where they did a shoot at the State Fair. They got all these, they called out their winners. They have influencers involved, including their founder in promoting it.
And then, you know, Ferris wheels, people hanging out at the fair, all this content around this theme of the State Fair. That then goes right into this theme of out of office. They're showing content in Italy.
They're tying into their Paradiso collection. They're showing behind the scenes. They're putting all these pieces together, right?
You go right from someone showing behind the scenes on what they're launching to the actual campaign to this kind of through line they have and this more candid content, lifestyle incorporated in it. All of this is a campaign. And you will see, I love to show their account because they just move campaign to campaign.
There's very little in between it. It goes right from state fair campaign for the summertime to out of office Italy campaign that comes right after that. They are extremely campaign oriented and it plays out really well on their social media as an example.
And so when you think of a campaign, how do you create something for a brand? It is in a moment in time, what is an idea that we are trying to get across? And how do we bring our world into that idea?
Let's break that down. So for instance, you are launching a summer collection. You are a brand like Set Active.
Or even here, the spring collection we have. Okay, we want to be able to show off some of the aesthetics of it. So they have posts that are actually describing the colors and the looks like you see here.
We want to set a tone for the visuals and who would consume this. So we've actually created these kind of graphics. We're doing a shoot in this area, people that are going hiking and engaging in the springtime.
We're bringing in ambassadors, our founders making content, our designers are making content, our influencers are making content, and they're all talking about the same thing and the same launch. It propels that moment forward bigger than any of these individuals. So a campaign ties together, we'll whiteboard this in a second, all the different things that you have as a brand and in your world, your own channels, your founders, your email.
your external channels, partners that are going to promote it, your retail partners, your influencers, etc. And there's levels to this, right? When you start out, it may just be you're putting out a couple videos on your page with your people.
But there are what we call anchors to campaigns to think about. So another brand I love who does incredible campaigns is Sunny's Face. They're in the Philippines.
So they just did a fragrance campaign. They're announcing fragrance. They had an entire visual campaign around it.
They're showing the inspiration in the background to what inspired the designs. They had a big anchor influencer involved in the launch. And she's the front of the campaign.
It's where it's worth kind of investing. If you have these big moments, you can spend a little more money on a big person to help get that message out there further and then back that up with amazing creative. And you see this kind of really interesting campaign they put together around it.
So there's levels to that. As you grow bigger, you're saying, we're entering a new category. Great, let's get a good big face to make sure that content goes farther than it did before.
We call that an anchor. Now this happens in software too. One of the easiest examples is additions from Shopify.
You see me, I promote the new Shopify additions. I just did a recap video of the last one and the one before where I promote it to my audience as an influencer in their campaign. They also host a big event.
They have all of their people online talking about it. They invite all their customers. They stream a big thing around it.
They have a website, a microsite they make where they detail all the new features. They make explanation videos for all of these. They have content rollouts.
They have workshops. They're using this to debut their features. This is what the software world looks like.
like doing this. And I would highly recommend anyone to do. Your customers become used to the once a year or twice a year new big feature dump, right?
And another type of campaign that's worth mentioning is kind of like a seasonal campaign or like a yearly campaign. So Equinox is known for these and they've gotten some flack on them recently, but they're always a good one to call out where they will basically announce a theme for the year. with a signature campaign to go around it.
So they have one called Make Yourself a Gift to the World that we see here. It's a theme that kind of is supposed to appeal to their customers. They create art.
They put it on the sides of their retail locations. They put it on their main feed. They bridge together these big thematic arcs that are supposed to appeal to their customer.
That is the core of a campaign for them. So tied into campaigns is this idea of public relations, right? Getting journalists and people to write about your product.
I used to work in this niche. My wife used to work inside this niche. And it's not what it was, right?
Getting people to write about your product and these publications has a fraction of the efficacy. used to is generally is not worth the time or the money. But again, it's part of this world that we're going to whiteboard out of all the things you could do to tell that story.
But where it is still really useful is it's basically the art of workshopping. If someone comes after your product for some reason or comes after your founder or someone's canceling you, like we just talked about Equinox, they're getting come after for the AI campaign they did because of how it portrays Asian women in its context.
Now, a PR team there, it's very important to be like, okay, are we going to fight back at that? Say that's not what we meant. These people are being crazy.
Are they going to be like, oh my God, we're sorry. What are the fallouts of that? What are the repercussions?
It's still a very important art in the internet era more than anything because you have to be in this constant communications flow. And so if you are in the marketing world now and you have that PR background, you being able to get a journalist to write about the product is likely never going to provide the amount of value versus what you're being paid for it.
But you being able to workshop the messages of what do we do in these scenarios? How is it going to come across online is a bit of a dark art, right? The natural starting point for a lot of it is to basically tell ChatGPT, hey, if you're a crisis PR person and you're dealing with this fallout?
And this is what our persona is like, and this is what they're saying about us online. What are our options? And then be actually able to look at that through a human lens and be like, how is this going to be responded to?
What are they going to say? Do that scenario role -playing. What could you call out about this?
What could people get mad about? How can we create a counterbalance to that? That narrative construction is actually harder and more important than ever.
And it's one of those things that you are the kind of person who can live within that and spin that and work with it, or you are not.
All right, in this section, we are going to talk about email and SMS marketing. I love to talk about this topic. And it's funny because if I made like an entire video about email and SMS marketing, no one will click it, right?
It's unglamorous. But the reason that I'm so fond of it is I had advice from a mentor early in my career when I was like, hey, what can I do to get better? I was a designer who was getting into marketing.
I had the creative side, the content side down, but I was trying to improve. And the advice they gave was, hey, get certified in marketing automation. And so I took all these courses that the software that we use.
which is Eloqua at the time, provided. And I just learned an absolute ton. And I remember the mentor was like, hey, if you learn how to do this, you're never gonna.
lack for a six -figure job ever again, right? You could just be an automation specialist. And automation sounded so boring at the time.
Once I realized what it was and how it works inside businesses, I was like, oh, this is actually a really useful skill. And you can still flex your creative muscles, especially as a designer inside of the framework. So I'm excited to share everything I know about email marketing here with you today.
And I would encourage you to get involved with this at whatever company you're working on, because it is actually pretty straightforward, especially in the AI era, and it is high value. So first, let's define some term.
So we have marketing campaigns, email and SMS campaigns. So I'm in, I'm here, I'm in a piece of software called Mild here. So Mild is great.
It is a directory. I'm just on the free account. There is like a paid version, but it will basically give you recent emails from different companies.
So I'm in Reformations emails here. So I can go click on Reformation and it's like, here's all the emails they've sent out, which is awesome to see. So for instance, in August, they have sent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, Then you can also look and be like, oh, what's an A -B test?
You're like, oh, this is, these two emails have like the same top with slightly different fonts. Those are all A -B tests. So of that, okay, maybe they sent like 12.
They're actually testing different versions of their emails or they're segmenting it. And you can begin to get a look at any brand's email strategy, which is an awesome thing to do to just understand the volume and velocity they're working at. I'm a huge fan for most brands of being at a velocity of like one to three emails a week.
I think it's a good velocity for most brands. If you're in that everyday discount email life, it's brutal. Obviously, you can put up some numbers doing it, but you are in constant list attrition, whatever.
Let me get ahead of myself. Let's get back to defining terms. So an email campaign is when you send one of these, right?
So this campaign, I won't even try to pronounce the French here, is them sending out, oh, it's because it's to their French list. They are sending out basically a lookbook and some different looks that you can achieve with their clothing, right? That is an email campaign.
We'll talk about types of campaigns later. Later. But then there's what we call flows.
So here I am inside Klaviyo. Klaviyo is probably the most popular software for e -commerce. I will talk about e -commerce and I will talk about standard brands that don't sell a product like Shopify.
But Klaviyo is a most common software. So I'm gonna give some tutorials so you can actually see it here. And they have what's called flows.
And so flows are automated sets of emails. So for instance, here, you will see someone gets added to the profile. They get an email right away.
They get this email. And look at these stats. 35 % of people are opening it.
7 .3 % of people are placing that order. I will take those numbers. This is for a small brand.
But then two days later, they're getting an email with the best sellers that we have. A couple of days later, they're getting some proof, right? Celebrities that wear this brand's clothing.
A couple of days later, there's an offer. So that's automation, right? Based on an action someone takes, a number of things happen.
Those are two key concepts to think about here. whenever you're talking about email or SMS. So back to campaigns.
What are types of campaigns here? And I want to show some brands. I think Rode does a great job with email, especially more art -directed email.
And you will notice here, they do these little lifestyle vignette campaigns. So they'll basically have a photo shoot with a creator. So this email right here, Bikini to Mini, Carla Janolis, that's an influencer they're working with, Essentials from Day to Night.
So it has her, they're following her throughout her day. She's taking a couple photos. She's showing using the product.
They call out the product very... lightly on some of those photos and then you can click and shop it's a good example of a creative campaign right someone's just out about in the world they're probably also doing an influencer video with her but they're like hey can we get a photo dump that we can use inside our email as well it's an awesome way to think about your influencer creator program being able to get a couple more assets or make the most out of assets you're already getting then they have spotted out this is an example of uh from the community email where you're just curating stuff that people have been doing people who are seen with your product on social media are using it putting all that together in there they have a pretty sophisticated strategy because they're doing everything like those customer vignettes to showcasing their community to more tactical stuff.
That's timely to using their obviously celebrity founder to just general product focused email, but always having like a clever visual approach. And so the reason I like to scroll through this is for instance, like I don't work much in beauty anymore. I worked a lot in beauty last year, but like this approach here where it's like, Oh, it's the product.
It has like a fun addition to it. It's on the white background. So it's really catchy.
I was like, we we're going to use that. Easy thing for me to forward, right? Same thing with layouts.
We're like, oh, cool. This is just a couple of testimonials like over a product detail shot. Like, awesome, cool layout to try and do.
That's a great way to work through these. So let's run through your toolkit of what you actually have to use for your campaigns if you're sending them out every week. And again, just scrolling to popular here is an awesome way to begin looking at a bunch of different emails from different brands.
So first is shop the content. Show off content you're already making. Videos that happen, things that were on carousels.
Actually put some of that detail in there and just provide more information about where they can get it. You'll notice that I also do this in my personal email list. I will take a carousel.
I do an Instagram and I'll put the slides of the carousel in the email with more details. You're already spending time and investing on content, bring it into email easiest when you have. People have not seen them both.
And if they are, provide them with just a little more information, a little more written information there. New release emails. Obviously, if you're launching something or have a new feature for software, great opportunity to send.
Software brands are always like how we do email marketing. It's like, cool, you added something new. It's like, explain why and showcase it, right?
Like it doesn't have to be game changing. From the community, like we saw. from road what is happening what is the chatter online about your brand business updates like what's actually happening in the business you move offices is there like a founder or someone who can be one of the voices on email and you know be like hey julie here this is stuff that was happening this week at blanks we prepare for this launch where we work on x or y here's what the mood boards look like here's some summer pics from our stylist whatever it is i don't have what we call better together email internally and just for some context right so darkroom where i'm one of the partners at the agency runs a lot of attention for a lot of brands so in addition to having my own brands i'm a partner and i've been working on email marketing as a marketing leader.
Now we're just in retention all the time, right? So we're constantly talking about and referring to and briefing email and SMS. But a better together email is basically giving context, right?
So for instance, if you sell something technical, say you were selling a kitchen accoutrement, you're selling a pan. It's like, hey, here's recipes that you can make with that. And you can also use the spatula.
And here's how it works with this range. Like how can you highlight other things in the world around it that are worth calling out? Whether it's your own product line, whether it's overall.
Even little things like when Rode had the packing list there. It's like, hey, you're going on a vacation. What are the best things?
put inside your suitcase. That's a good example of just a better together email. How can you build some world around it with some other items either in your lineup or outside of it or even conceptually?
Then we have a category history or curation email. This is how you just give some context around your space, right? Vacation Sunscreen came out of an email called Pool Suite where they would just send out like basically cool retro stuff that they found from the 1980s and around the internet that eventually like sparked an entire brand.
There's brands that will just send out every week kind of things that their founders are into or found around the internet. One we have when I worked at a consumer drone company, we had a curation of all the things happening in the niche.
We knew a lot of people were hobbyists and enthusiasts about drones overall. And so we used to just curate all the things happening in regulation and the world around it. And we had that sent out to a more engaged segment of our list was more educational.
Then we have what we call an FAQ email. Things are coming up a lot inside your sales calls or on your social. Just actually answer those questions, whether it's in video or in text or in graphics.
And you'll notice a lot of layouts like we see here from AG1. It's basically cards. You're like, okay, cool.
I have three cards to put together an email. Start your day with the ABCs. Let me show a testimonial.
a customer you give a key reason why you would buy this product hey it's easy to take on the road right you can begin to think about hey i really need two or three cars to make an email you don't need much more than that people overthink it you can build more interesting things if you'd like to but clicking through you can walk through it again this is an email speaking to a customer pain point right toiletry bags cause problems for our consumers here's how our product helps solve it if you're traveling right good email for summer and then of course the deals limited time offer etc and so i would highly encourage you to build a mix everyone's going to notice your deal emails are going to sell more but then people aren't going to buy unless they see a deal so i would highly encourage you to use deals if you have a wide swath of email people are used to opening for different reasons oh they're curating oh there's updates about the business new lookbook it's a new creator they have reasons to open and kind of consume more casually anyway and one pro tip here is that you can send it from the business right but i was considering if you're a small business or a services -based business send it from a person when i was working with van group one of the immediate changes we made and we're selling premium websites there was to start sending it from the founder right and have it be more conversational the plain text versus these big design graphics so people felt immediately like they could
or ask a question and we'd encourage that. What project are you working on? Are you interested in a website?
What did you like from the download that we put out? And all of a sudden, they're in a conversation quickly with the CEO and that's part of the sales process. So a tool to have in your toolkit.
But now let's talk about flows and putting together flows. In Klaviyo, you click create, go to flows, click create flow, and they're gonna have a bunch of templates for this. It's the same thing in Kit or Beehive or any of these.
They're all gonna have flow sections where you can create these automations. They'll have a bunch of templates. A welcome series, build customer loyalty.
that kind of thing. There's a whole bunch of inspiration you can get here by just filling some of these out. Let's look at browse abandonment.
When we go through flows, some of the ones that are most important are gonna be welcome when someone signs up, what emails do they get over time, over a few week period, abandoned cart when someone leaves something in their cart, how are you sending them reminders to actually check out. Same thing with browse abandonment.
Once you have them in a pixel, anytime they're browsing the website, even if they don't add something to a cart, but they're signed up to your email list, you can automatically trigger a browse abandonment email or multiple. And same thing with other actions, repeat customers, their second purchase, their hundredth purchase, their year with.
you, whatever it is, there's a good automation triggers to have. And we'll get advanced to talk about segmentation in a second. But basically, you can say, hey, I want to use this template, you can click in, you can do it, you can name it.
And then you'll see there's an action when someone does something. So someone views a product, and you can add a filter, like, hey, they bought in the last two days, don't include them here. How long do you want to wait?
And then what do you want to do? And then you have conditions. And this condition basically says, cool, I'm either going to text them if I have their number, or I'm going to email them if I don't have their number.
And then what's it going to contain? What's the email look like? And you actually build out the segment from there.
And so one of the best things you can do as a marketer, if you want to do some work that is going to be able to help drive results over time and you're just completing it once it would be to set up those automations i just remember with really basic stuff in here just use the templates to start and we'll talk about getting advanced here next so what's your actual workflow for this i'd be looking at like every week early in the week monday what happened last week or what's going to happen this week we can get in the email rotation what content got posted what came out from the community what happened in our business what objections or things came up in sales calls or meetings ideally you're putting this at the end of the week recap you already have some misinformation made for yourself okay let's actually get that into email then i'd be asking what can be a plain text email what could we just write something ideally have it come from somebody and send what would need design so you can send it to a designer if you have one you can have some graphics put together with chat gpt i'm going to include a set of skills and information that i've copied from somebody on x who did a great job at saying how do you make more almost like ui looking graphics for this to have the right gutters and edges to make your emails better that's something that's actually included in the zip pack you can get from this clavio also has inside of it has their composer agent that doesn't
Excellent job by making like basic graphics of this stuff. But you want to basically identify the topics, get them in production. Who's producing them?
Are you doing it or is someone else doing it? And then set time on the calendar to actually get it done. And you want to have subject lines for those emails and have it be a flywheel.
Again, the other assets you're doing should help inform this. You put out good video the week before. You got good things from a sales call.
Get that in the email. You shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel for this. Now, a couple advanced flows here.
One is outer signal. Outer signal attaches to your email list and will break your customers into different segments. So you'll be able to say, hey, if I have my customer list or my whole email, list do people fit in these big buckets for an instance we did this for a beauty brand i was working with it was like hey we actually have we have a younger gen z customer we have this kind of almost random middle -aged latina customer it's very different we actually have a decent we have a seven percent non -english as a first language based on here how are we going to change our list oh we should be sending spanish emails to that segment we should have different styles and messages to the gen z segment versus the middle -aged segment you don't need to have 50 segments but beginning to identify what are big changes we can make that will likely increase our open rate and our conversion rate is how you begin to think about this idea of segmentation and what to do to create a segment in Klaviyo is you can basically, you can connect it to something like Outer Signal, or you can do it based on actions or things you see.
Multiple viewers, people who click the link, all of those are things you're enabled to use to basically create a subgroup you can email or text. And if you want help with this, the Klaviyo MCP connects to ChatGPT. So when you can literally connect the two of those, you can just install the MCP and you can call on it anytime.
This is an awesome thing to do in that weekly meeting that you're doing. Call on the MCP and be like, how could our email flows be performing better? What email content if we put out, we should consider adding to any of these.
automations we have this new persona data should we consider creating a segment or not and you can actually chat with it and that becomes an actual good use of being able to have a conversation partner who will look at the data for use you're not actually having to bend through the data for hours be able to recommend some of those things that you can try and you can put that on your objectives now so what if you're not selling a product so while klaviyo is kind of the default for e -commerce email convertkit and beehive are great tools for just regular email i'm more partial to convertkit but it doesn't really matter and so what they'll do is they those pieces of software help you create landing pages so easy places for people to opt in with a form and they have the same email They're just more heavily weighted towards more text -based email than designed email.
And that's a good thing. I'm a huge favor. Even if you have a big brand of more text -based email, people reading something and clicking something feels more natural.
But it's the same exact thing, right? In your agency, what were your new clients? In your services business, you just finished a new construction project.
What content did you put up? It's the same communications cadence. People always think that the big D2C marketing is because it has glamorous stuff is so different, but it's really not.
Maybe you have less lookbooks, maybe you have less products, but it's the same thing for a construction firm. Like look at the progress in this new thing we're doing. this new piece of equipment that we've added to the list.
Meet this person from our team. We just got this new certification on agencies. Hey, these are the ads that we have working this week.
A big new account we became the agency of record on. So there's all things you can think of, even if you're a freelancer or someone small, is approaching these lists and just sending out those updates and those texts and looking at the same thing every week. And look, one a week, totally fine starting point.
One a month is better than none. But it's your job as a marketer to come in with a plan for that. If you start looking at your weeks like this, hey, beginning of every week, what is our communications cadence?
How am I basing that off what I did on social last week? so I don't have to start from scratch. And you'll see how all these things that we've talked about here, because we're about to get into supporting sales in a second, which ties really well into it.
It sounds all fragmented and complicated when you look at it from an outside perspective. When you begin looking at it as a flow, or like every week you're checking in, you're actually reusing a lot of these things. Your great social piece became also a great email, became a great tool for your sales team, became an idea for another piece of content.
It's how you begin to get into a flow as a marketer. If you are working on a modern marketing or trying to understand marketing, I would not be looking at PR as a fundamental thing to spend. time on.
But what I would be looking at is sales support. The second section of this. portion of the video.
How can marketing support a sales team? And so what I mean by sales team, right? So a couple scenarios, right?
If you work at a company that sells products, you probably have a sales team that's selling into retail at some point. This is a big part of my career in consumer electronics and beauty. As a marketing team, we need to be able to provide support for the sales team to encourage retailers to bring in more product, or how are we going to support them to move units off of the shelf and tell those compelling stories.
Now that's a few degrees removed in a lot of cases. It's not as tactical, but then in other companies, you're in any services business, if you're in any business that has lead flow and salespeople that are on the phone, I've worked on quite a bit of this too.
Now this is super direct. The marketing team can have a profound impact on how that team performs. And doing this, when I talk about, you know, there's getting into marketing, there's getting into marketing you're excited about, there's working on cool stuff like social media or ads, and then there's the stuff that's going to make you a lot of money.
So we look at things like... you know, retention and email automation, stuff we talked about there. But sales support is a surefire way to get yourself made money.
Basically, the rule is the closer you are to the dollars, the more money you make. It's why creative strategist has ended up a high paying role because they're close to the money being made from ads. So if you start to scale on ads and a person is responsible for a lot of that, you can end up getting paid a lot.
It's the same thing with sales support. And I would highly encourage you, especially if you're analytical or numbers driven, but even if you're not and you just want to say, how can I progress in my marketing career to get into the sales portion of this? So let's break that down.
Define some key terms to start with. First is a lead. A lead is a person that has signed up for information from your company that a salesperson is trying to converse.
That could be a retailer who's mentioned on a website or made a demo order on a website like FAIR who's considering bringing your product on. It could also be someone on your website who's signed up to get a consultation call or filled out the form, etc. Whenever anyone fills out the form on Darkroom, To become a client of our agency, they are a lead.
And the lead becomes a customer once salespeople close them. And they are tracked in what's called a CRM. HubSpot's a great example of a CRM that most people know and use.
So that has a log of all of those leads, what their status is, when they came in, what sales rep is responsible for them, how many times have they been emailed, what's their likelihood of closing, what's the size of their business and detail. That gets housed in a CRM. So what can the marketing team do here?
The most important things are collateral. What is your sales team armed with for the closing process? signs up and says hey i'm interested all the way to them becoming a customer so i'm going to walk through what the types of collateral that are helpful are now i'm going to walk through what to actually use to make those so really important collateral for the first email someone signs up someone opts in and says i want information about your business i want to buy from you tell me more what is the sales person sending them it's first email collateral first touch point take it a step back after they sign up they probably get served a thank you page what's on that thank you page does that prepare them for that call those are important moments then we have collateral for the call itself What decks are they walking through?
What examples are they showing? Same thing with after the call. Once they're on a sales call, what do you follow up with?
What actually gets sent by the sales rep to the person for them to convert? And this is important because you start thinking about if someone's buying, you know, if I'm buying a piece of software for my company and I get on a sales call, I'm probably gonna have to go to my boss and say, I wanna buy this piece of software, it costs X a month, here's the justification.
So if the marketing and sales team makes it really easy for me to say, hey, here's the numbers, here's the comparison, here's all the reasons, here's other successful companies in my niche that have done it. When I forward, package to my boss is more likely to get approved and i'm more likely to want to stand behind it and go make that sale and then an underrated one over time collateral for the upsell right because often say you sign a client onto an agency you'll close the deal but in 90 days they're evaluating their business is it good or is it bad or do you want to sell them more stuff what are you equipped with as a sales rep to be able to do that and so why is marketing involved in this well marketing is a better line of sight on what assets you have what videos you've made what social media performs what customers are saying often has creative talent so for instance when i ran marketing at gel blaster i had the creative team and the design team reported to me as the head of marketing as well as the e -commerce team as well as the events team but if sales want to have really good looking assets it's coming through the design team and we had a flow for that they would request assets that they wanted to use there's a form and click up it got assigned to designers we review it in regular calls and i think we have to get eyes on what is the sales team sending over hey can we make this better so what to use for this what do you want what kind of collateral we make so first a lot of this collateral is just stuff that gets pasted inside an email
or it is a PDF that is easily sendable, or perhaps it's a video or a designed graphic. That's really the toolkit. And so I would consider your common FAQs, what you hear on social media, what you hear from the support team, give a way to answer those, either it's a PDF or they're including some of those top questions or objections with answers already in the email that are messaged, or a video from the CEO that actually walks through those.
questions in a really personable way testimonials and case studies anytime anyone's giving you a positive review aggregate those any case studies you've done with customers is how they succeeded this was the results we have that in a nice little one -page pdf that shows their results the best content you have high performing or viral content is great to send hey check out this recent video from us we're going viral over there this is especially important in retail because they want to see you're generating attention it will lead people to want to get it on the shelf something i do all the time i would always equip the sales reps with here's the hottest stuff we have every week every conversation where you're touching a new lead send them this cool new influencer campaign we did, send them this piece of organic content that's banging, make them feel like they're part of a movement.
Infographics and data. So actual information on what's happening in the industry. What are trends like?
What's this result we're seeing with this client or that client? Hey, this type of ad is getting X or Y or our approach to construction has this savings. What are stats that you can quickly rattle off?
And then comparisons. We were going to go compare against the field. How do you compare to other CRMs if you're selling a piece of software?
How do you compare to other services firms, SEO? What is your difference in promise? And can you outlie that in a simple graphic or an easy stat someone can paste and send?
But overall, sales collateral is an opportunity to show off your marketing and put together really useful things. And a lot of the things you create, all this is a flywheel, right?
You make a great testimonial video or PDF. Well, that's probably also something you should include in your email automation. It also might make a good walkthrough video for an ad, right?
All of this ties together. If you start to think like that, you start to have your toolkit of all the different styles and things you do, and you have all your references for the brand of all the testimonials and things you've saved. You have this amazing, like little functional box as a marketer that makes you really invaluable.
Now, the other thing marketers should think about is making the most of leads. is something that isn't technically marketing's responsibility in a lot of cases. There's lines as to where responsibilities go inside of different organizations of lead management and sales.
But it's really important if you're generating email subscribers or you are generating people that have signed up for a sales call as marketing, that's one of your stats. What sales done with that and how well they close those is going to basically determine how much value comes from your work. And so I'd be very invested in the sales process.
And so a few things worth knowing about to consider there. The first is speed of response. Anyone who's been a part of sales, knows that the faster that your sales team touches a marketing lead after they come in, the higher the chance of close there is.
So for instance, if you were on a webinar about whatever and you signed up for an informational call, if a sales rep calls you right away, you're called within 60 seconds of, wow, I just signed up for that. And you're having a combo, you're already warm. If that's two days later and they call and you're like, what webinar was that again on Sunday?
Okay, what was the topic? Speed is huge. And so you should be pushing for that for the sales team.
Like how fast can they touch new leads and monitoring that and encouraging it to be. like basically moving as quick as possible. Then the number of touches and equipping them for this, like how many times they actually talked to these leads.
We found when I was selling high ticket stuff in outdoors, it was like our 11th touch. And this is a sale with an average order value of like nine grand. The 11th touch is most likely to convert.
This is just me being an insane person measuring this because I really cared. It was bonus on the back end off of it. But when we had that stat.
and be able to equip the sales team to be like, hey, actually, like there's these jumps. So people either convert right away in the first or second touch, or it takes like 11 times of emailing or calling them to convert. And you're like, oh, okay, well, now they know I'm going to make my money.
I'm going to get my commission, whatever. If I get to that amount of times and equipping them to do that, what's email three? What's email five?
Why is this reason to call? And those can be timely things like you have some sort of special or it's Labor Day or hunting season came and whatever's important to your niche. And it can be just like new content and new awareness.
So amount of touch points. And then triage is big too. So when we talk about social, media what you can do in different social media that makes a difference identifying those leads is huge so for instance if you're doing one of those linkedin campaigns we talked about where all your employees are posting on linkedin the smart companies that act on that are triaging it if people comment or if anyone on the team is getting a new follower if they are qualified if they look like the kind of prospect that's the right person to buy from the company right, ICP, right, business size, having a Slack channel, you just send those to sales, send the link to that.
So those people can also add them as a follower and be like, hey, say I connected with my colleague blank, or you can do a handoff. You can message that person once they add you and be like, awesome, so cool to hear you're interested. Mind if I connect you to Corey who could tell you more about it, right?
Triageing and working through that sales basically takes it from, hey, we're generating this interest, we're helping convert that interest. Same thing in the Instagram DMs. Everyone always talks about, oh, I wanna go viral, I wanna get views.
Like, okay, do you have 2000 followers? Say you're a roofing company in the Northwest, How many of those people that are following you, you can go see where they live.
All right, they're in the Northwest. We're sending them a DM like, hey, saw you follow, thinking about a new roof. All of a sudden, those sales trade -offs and working together on that help your companies grow.
And a lot of times marketers are afraid of it. I'm here to tell you, if you want to make money, you want to be successful in your career, lean into it. If you're the kind of person that's into that, you'll notice that the leaders and the sales leaders are way more supportive of you real quick.
Their tone about marketing changes completely when you're helping them move revenue, which also means all your other initiatives and things you want to do get. easier to approve. And also when you're asking for money and you're being like, yeah, look, I'm helping drive the sales process.
It's the easiest way to get more money. And if the org you're working with, the salespeople don't understand it, look for the hungriest salesperson. Get one salesperson on your team as a marketer that you can work closely with.
And usually it doesn't have to be the best one. The best salespeople tend to be kind of complicated to deal with. It means getting the hungriest salesperson, the person that wants to do the work, that will dig through this stuff with you and work with you, who's like just hungry for the commission because they're having a baby or whatever it is.
Think through those dynamics and work closely together on it. And the last thing I'll note here, a great workflow for you is sales call notes. If your brand is doing sales calls, first make sure that they're recording it.
Granola is obviously really popular for this, Fathom. There's a bunch of different softwares that will actually record sales calls and basically make notes from them. But this is your best friend as a marketer is take those notes.
Granola has an MCP right in the chat GPT. Take those notes, pop them right over, and literally ask for what content should we be making to handle objections? How could marketing do better to prepare sales for this sales call?
What kind of feedback could we give them? What customer pain points should we be reinforcing versus the copy that's already on our website? You now have a queryable tool based on real sales information.
This is like shockingly enabling compared to the world we were in, right? Everyone talks about like the AI era marketing. People were all equipped to do all these crazy things.
You could hook all these things together and auto -generate this or that. Awesome. Those opportunities totally exist, but you know what's also extremely powerful?
Having access to every piece of data from every sales call, not having to parse through it, being able to get summaries of that, being able to use that to inform what marketing choices you made, just is the kind of thing we would spend hundreds of hours having to do manually if we did it all before. And that's now all at your fingertips very easily.
Well, thanks for bearing with me through the tactics. Now we're gonna get to the part that everyone's excited about, putting together marketing campaigns and thinking holistically about this. So actually whiteboard out a marketing campaign.
This is the same exercise you should do when you're doing campaign planning. I do have a 30 minute complete campaign video as well that I will include in the collateral if you wanna dive deeper into this, but let's do the quick version. So first we have stages of a campaign.
So we're gonna go stages over here. So what do we mean by that? So first it's your teaser.
Before the campaign announces, how do you get people excited about it? Then you have the actual campaign asset itself. So we have what we'll call the campaign.
So this will be your big videos and release and all the core assets. You have your unveil. Unveil is the first time that you actually see the product or walk through the product and what it does.
And then we have sustain, which is what happens with the campaign over time. So let's actually break these down. So for every one of these stages, you have internal.
So basically you are going to, for each one of these, map to what am I going to do on my social account? via our email and SMS, our website, our stores, our physical retail. Let's put physical.
If you own anything, you operate inside of it. What are we going to do inside of our ads? And each one of these stages will have a different one.
You may put a social media teaser out. You may be putting an ad out to get people to join the wait list to go towards it. You may be having signs that go up inside physical retail saying blank is launching soon.
Website may have a section or a pop -up that says, you know, something big is coming. Email and SMS is being like, hey, come tune into the launch event that we do on the campaign day. And same thing on these other ones too, right?
When you actually do the campaign, you send it, you put it on your website, send it out to your email list. mean by this is the first time anyone walks through the product or actually sees the whole product for the first time this is a really important asset because those walkthrough assets are the best ones to live on the product page on your website often as a high performer on ads especially to your existing kind of targeting group and sustain is important because sustain kind of happens over time you may create a lot of assets around this but you realize hey it's a long summer we're doing this big summer campaign we're going to keep adding stuff onto it and we're going to base that off of feedback From everything that happens here, we're going to get feedback, questions, ideas, things that come.
You feed those into the sustain section of how you keep it going over time. And sometimes we'll even get what we call a refresh here too, where you're like, man, this product's been out for six months. We still got to keep selling it.
We need to actually do another stage of this campaign as well. Just something that doesn't always happen, but worth calling out. But with internal, you also have external.
This is the biggest thing. If I can encourage you to do anything, you have to think about this too. Everyone always kind of focuses on their internal for campaigns.
External is partners. Okay, can we get a company? that we're involved with to also promote it at the same time.
Do you have retailers or VARs or anyone that actually helps sell your product? How are they promoting it? Influencers and creators.
If you are, how are you working with people with their own audiences to anchor into that? Are you seeding product? Any of the things we talked about inside those strategies.
PR, magazines talking about it, trade stuff talking about it. Are we on podcasts? What does all that look like?
And you have your combination of internal plus external at all these stages. It's going to equal. your campaign.
And the more you do on all of these, and the more power of the assets you have, the more efficacy you have. But it's worth, this is the map. This is what you do.
You sit down and go, hey, we have these four stages. What are we activating for each of them, internal and external? And then what are our ideas?
What assets are we creating? And you do the same exact thing we talked about before. You need an asset list.
First, before anything, you need your position. What are we doing for this campaign and why? So your position and idea, that goes into your asset list, all the things that you want to create here.
The asset lists need dates and... stakeholders who actually is in charge of getting it done. And then, so we talked about before, you need your work back.
When do you need to do it? Who needs to review it? When do you start to actually put this together well?
Tie that back into that world brief we built. You're going to have all these campaigns that go throughout the year. Now you are doing real marketing.
That's that. So I want to talk about last narrative is internal narrative, how you actually create consensus in your company around your marketing. Now, I believe that marketing people need to be proactive communicators because it's so hard to justify what's happening on the fringe of marketing to people that don't understand.
understand it. But what people really want from their marketing team and their marketing people is they want to feel comfort that they know what they're doing, that they're creating measurable ROI and that they care, right? And so my number one recommendation for this, no matter what role you are in, is to communicate up on a weekly basis.
What do I mean by that? So if you're an individual contributor, emailing your boss every week and being like, here's the wins we had this week. Here's the things I did.
And here's where like the outsized results were. Here's what I have going in the next week. Here's what my priorities list are.
I'm going to work on this, this, this, and this. And then here's what my blockers are. Here's things that I can't do because I'm waiting on somebody or we don't have a consensus on or an agreement or a budget I need a decision on.
Let me break down why this is important. First, you need to call out things that go well in marketing or no one's going to notice. Hey, this post outperformed what we thought.
Hey, we got more revenue online than we thought. If you're not calling out and cheerleading your wins, no one will. And I would highly recommend doing that.
And if someone feels like it's not worth calling out, then you're in the conversation about it. You need to be working through those things with people. The actual what's next is important too, is people know what your priorities are, know what you're working on.
If someone else has asked you from a different department to do something or you're doing something you don't agree with or they have a priority to add, you can do it. And the blockers is also important because people need to know if something's not done, why.
If you're ahead of that, it begins to prevent all these things happening at the last second and is able to actually get you the messaging of this thing didn't happen because of X. Yes, I communicated that. I told you two weeks ago we didn't have X and Y.
And you begin to get expectations out of other people. And then below that, I would put whatever reporting you can. So we talked about pulling that from meta ads.
You're actually recapping the ROAS and what's performing and how it is week over week. Talked about doing the same thing with Klaviyo and ConvertKit. and the MCPs there, basically put in the summaries of the data of what you've done, how many leads came in, how many views, what are those KPIs?
Put them in every week. I guarantee you, your bosses probably won't even look at it, probably won't even measure it, but they care that you're measuring it, that you care, that you're putting the data into those analytics. And then this rolls up.
When I was still leading marketing teams, I would assemble these from my team leaders. I had a design team lead, I had a content team lead, I had a e -commerce team lead, and I had a media buying team lead, and they were sending me their recaps and events we had a field team to. They're sending me, what are your wins?
What's up next? week what are your blockers what are your stats and then i'm cherry picking from that here's the team's biggest wins here's the team's biggest blockers here's the team stats that matter and recapping that to the executive team so they know what the marketing team is focused on and guess what they rarely if ever had any questions because they could go check exactly what is going on what we're measuring and why and if i'm calling out a blocker to the executive team that hey this woman needs this to get the events job done it hasn't gotten it from sales i'm able to actually advocate for my team and then the people know hey this person is going to hold everyone accountable to get what they're going to All right, if you have made it all the way to here, you are one of the real ones.
We have covered. all of the core of marketing in the modern era. So what do you do now?
Now you have all this information. What are you going to do to act on it? So I want to end with encouraging you to do the exercises.
Put this stuff here into action with your brand, with a client, with a friend. Workshop it and make content about it. But the brand world whiteboard we did, the attention to sales pipeline exercise that you saw.
picking an archetype for social media, making a landing page for your product, making a project in ChatGPT for the brand that you work for. These are crucial things that if you just start acting on it, you become the person that does it. It will transform your career no matter where you are at.
And so what's next? First, get the downloads. There is so much in there.
You get the content oracle, you get the landing page generator, you get the skills. We put so much work into these. I want you to use them.
I'm doing a community call soon where I will answer any questions you have from the comments. If you're dealing with a specific brand, brand problem or career problem or a messaging or positioning issue, I might be able to help with.
I will dive into as many as I can in the comments, and I will also rip through a bunch in the community call and post that. If you want to work with me and the team on things like this, at Darkroom, we work with growing brands. It's not for small brands.
It is for... eight -figure brands plus. But if you are in that category and you want to crush growth marketing and retention with us, our info is below.
And a huge thank you to OpenAI and ChatGPT because without them, this could not be free. I am thinking about doing this for Creative Direction next. We'll see what happens.
Thank you all so much, as always, for watching.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Alibaba democratized making physical things. AI just did the same for software. What is left to compete on, the argument goes, is taste, distribution, and attention, which is why marketing became the most hired skill in the room. This is the full curriculum that follows from that claim.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
06:51concept
The shelf test
Stand in front of the aisle you compete in and name why your product earns its spot next to the others. Energy drinks are the worked example: counterculture, female-centric, health-adjacent, and content-driven brands all sitting side by side with different reasons to exist.
Steal forany positioning exercise where the brand keeps describing itself in isolation
07:35list
The positioning taxonomy
Performance
Category creation
Counter-position
Smart
Value
Niche
Generational
Single attribute
True performance premium
Designer
Bespoke
Counter-luxury
Name
Roughly a dozen reusable positions with a named brand example for each. Product-based positions (performance, category creation, smart) require an actual product advantage. Marketing-based ones (niche, generational, single attribute) do not.
Steal forchoosing a position in an afternoon instead of a quarter
16:07model
Brand world map
Characters
Sets
Events
Plot
Four quadrants on a whiteboard. Characters are everyone who could represent the brand on camera. Sets are every place you could film. Events is a calendar split across company, culture, and industry. Plot connects characters to events, and includes enemies, friends, and specials for the empty stretches.
Steal fora content plan that survives past the first month
25:32concept
The positioning statement formula
For [target]
who [need]
[brand] is the [category]
that [benefit]
unlike [competitor] we [differentiator]
A spinoff of Geoffrey Moore's framework, compressed into one sentence that carries target, need, category, benefit, and differentiator. Designed to be the single piece of context you hand an LLM so everything it writes stays on position.
Steal forthe first line of every brand project file
27:29list
Three copy styles
Direct response
Evidence-led
Human-driven
Direct response is urgent, confrontational, and numbers-driven. Evidence-led is methodical and testimonial-heavy. Human-driven leads with a person or a story. A fourth, culturally savvy, only works if the brand and its audience share a reference pool.
Steal forgenerating three variants of any page or email and testing into one
33:42list
Five levels of AI adoption
Chatting
Projects with context
Skills for repeatable work
Agents that run tasks
A central marketing brain
Ninety percent of teams stop at level one. Level two loads product sheets, testimonials, and the positioning statement into a shared project. Level three turns repeated processes into callable skills. Level four schedules agents against live accounts. Level five wires in cost data and makes business decisions with you.
Steal foran honest audit of where a team actually sits before buying more tools
50:38model
Content funnel
Top of funnel
Middle of funnel
Bottom of funnel
Top of funnel earns attention and raises the floor on everything else the account posts. Middle educates about the brand. Bottom exists only to convert and is allowed to underperform on views.
Steal forexplaining to a stakeholder why the best-performing video does not mention the product
58:38model
The pillar system
Pick three to five repeatable formats. Run each three or four times a month, which produces twelve to sixteen posts. At month end compare views, saves, shares, hook rate, and new followers across pillars and month over month, then swap out anything that loses twice.
Steal forturning a stakeholder's pet idea into a testable pillar with a scheduled verdict
1:19:40concept
Ad set as concept container
One ad set equals one creative concept, holding three to ten genuinely different executions of that concept rather than light tweaks. Fund each at around $50 a day, spend three to five times your target cost per action, then scale winners and kill the rest.
Steal forany new Meta account without enough history to trust campaign-level optimization
1:24:06model
Creative strategy loop
Creative strategy
Media buying
Reporting
New decisions
Four jobs that may belong to one person: decide what goes in the account, buy the media, read the analytics, brief the next round from those results. It never ends, which is the point.
Steal fordescribing the ad process to a team that thinks ads are something you switch on
1:38:29list
The modular brief
Two key messages
Target demographic
Content type
Hook inspiration
References
Mechanism
Simple outline
Assets
Variants needed
A checklist you expand or strip depending on who is executing. The best creators work better without it. The other ninety percent need all of it, especially the outline and the hook references.
Steal forany handoff to a freelancer, designer, or creator
1:44:00model
Attention to sale flow
Attention
CTA
Landing page
Lead or sale
CRM
Touch and automation
Close assets
The whiteboard spine of the course. Attention arrives from ads, organic, referral, search, and foot traffic. A call to action moves it to a page you control. The page converts into a lead or a sale, which lands in a CRM, which triggers a human touch and an automation sequence backed by close assets.
Steal fora shared map to walk through with the sales team
1:58:09list
Product page structure
Lifestyle hero with video
Buy the full routine
Real people using it
Benefits reframed to the user
How to use
Ingredients or specs
Clinical data
FAQ
The recommended skeleton for about ninety percent of product detail pages. Every section exists to remove one class of objection, and the FAQ cleans up whatever is left.
Steal forauditing an existing page section by section
2:03:59concept
Three strategy roles
Brand strategy
Creative strategy
Creative direction
Brand strategy sets position, tone, and the macro bets. Creative strategy ships new ad and social concepts every week and briefs them out. Creative direction owns the campaign vision, and can personally shoot, design, or style any piece of it when someone does not show up.
Steal forreading a job description and knowing which job it actually is
2:18:32list
Email campaign types
Shop the content
New release
From the community
Business update
Better together
Category history or curation
FAQ
Deal
A rotation that gives subscribers different reasons to open. Deal emails always sell the most, which is exactly why they cannot be the only thing in the mix.
Steal forfilling a weekly email calendar without inventing anything new
2:39:28list
Campaign stages
Teaser
Campaign
Unveil
Sustain
Each stage gets planned twice: across internal channels (social, email and SMS, website, physical retail, ads) and external ones (partners, retailers, influencers, press). The unveil, the first full walkthrough of the product, tends to become both the product page asset and a top ad.
Steal forturning a launch date into an asset list with owners
2:42:48list
The weekly note upward
Wins
What is next
Blockers
Reporting
Sent every week regardless of role. Wins get noticed only if you name them. What is next sets priorities before someone else does. Blockers document who owes you what. Reporting rarely gets read, but publishing it is what buys trust.
Steal forany role where the work is hard for outsiders to evaluate
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
2:45:55link
“First, get the downloads. There is so much in there. You get the content oracle, you get the landing page generator, you get the skills. I am doing a community call soon where I will answer questions from the comments.”
The ask is held to the final sixty seconds after a 2h47m runtime, and it is stacked: free download pack, a community call keyed to comments (which doubles as an engagement driver), then a qualified agency pitch that openly screens out anyone under eight figures. Soft references to the download pack are seeded roughly every fifteen minutes throughout, so the final ask lands as a reminder rather than a pivot.
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Oren and Sir Kensington's founder Scott Norton break down how brands turn customers into characters, using Vacation, Wes Anderson, Ralph Lauren, and Anduril as case studies.
A 25-minute content operations playbook covering team structure, brand examples, and the pod system for turning any marketing org into a media company.
A 35-minute A-to-Z playbook from beginner to advanced: levels, archetypes, formats, positioning, monetization, and the timing framework most people get wrong.
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