35 Minutes of Marketing Strategy You Can Start to Use Today | Sage Summit 2021

Contemporary Marketing

What I would call contemporary marketing, I see it as the thing that everybody in this room should spend the majority of their time on.

Rethinking Team Building and Leadership

I think we need to start having an advanced, dramatically different conversation on what team building and leadership actually is.

Marketing vs. Sales

Marketing is incredibly confused with sales. We call VaynerMedia, the honey empire, but the word empire is not a soft word. We’re trying to build the biggest company of all time.

LinkedIn Ads Strategy

Three to four LinkedIn ads a day, all different videos, pictures, or words, all run as ads. Disproportionally, this has been the thing that I’ve been most emailed about as a substantial game changer for B2B companies.

Marketing as Ambition

To me, marketing is a conversation of ambition. With all due respect, I just want you to know one thing, we are the best marketing company in the world, which means the only thing that’s about to happen is we’re gonna speed up the world knowing that your product’s a piece of crap. You cannot hire your 23-year-old niece to do it.

Becoming the Publisher

Meaning actually starting a podcast or YouTube show around the expertise of the business that you’re in. The idea of becoming the publisher, not the marketer, right?

Sales vs. Marketing

Most people are in sales. We are sales organizations and that’s great, I love sales, but marketing is the second framework, much stronger than sales in the medium and long term.

Becoming the Media Company

The third thing that I’m talking to you about right now is the concept of becoming the media company, what I’ve done with my career. This last tactic, because I’ve thrown this out in my content, different interviews and such has been a major win for some small B2B midsize B2B companies. And I would highly, highly recommend the people in this room that have a little gift of gab, feel like they can do this. Please push yourself. It really works.

Embracing Technological Changes

Remember when you promised you would never get a Facebook account in 2012, humans say no. Many of you, when you heard about Bitcoin, no, the blockchain is here. Every contract in the world in 15 years is gonna be on the blockchain. It’s how you’re gonna do business. So what are you gonna do? The same thing you did with the internet, which is fight it until you succumb to it and left all that opportunity on the table? You don’t like money. You don’t want your family to be more stable. You don’t want your business to grow.

The Importance of the Internet

You may not wanna dance on TikTok, but I’m not asking you to dance. The internet is where the real world is. We spend everyone’s like the Metaverse and the VR and all this crazy stuff we’re living there now. Do you know how many hours are spent looking at this? And that’s the point of this talk today, which is a lot’s happening. It’s nice to be back on stage.

Focus on Contemporary Marketing

There’s two core things that I’m spending a ton of time on right now and they’re pretty opposite. One is incredibly in the wits and very tactical and very in the dirt, which is what I would call contemporary marketing. Whether you’re in this room as B2B or B2C, including things that wouldn’t make maybe sense to a lot of people within the industry of what they should be doing on LinkedIn or TikTok or things of that nature, they fascinate me mainly because I’m a businessman, right? Since I was 14 years old, I’ve been involved in a family business my whole life. So everything comes from the standpoint of oxygen to pay the bills. I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in a very immigrant family. My dad had a liquor store and from May 18th, 1998 until this second that I’m standing, I’ve had the responsibility to make the payroll every two weeks of every day of my life. So my framework, when it comes to marketing is actually extremely grounded in the practicality of actually building a business. And as I’m getting the gray hairs and getting a little more mature, I’m realizing how many people don’t see marketing the way I see it. I see it as oxygen. I see it as the thing that everybody in this room should spend the majority of their time on.

Prioritizing Marketing

And most people, when I give this talk or have a meeting or have navigated the last 25 years, are trying to find time to get to marketing. I’d rather be great at contemporary marketing than know how to balance my P&L, that’s how my brain thinks about it. And so as I’m gonna go into this right now, there’s only one thing that I know that can double a person’s business without them making a significant change in their product or service or having some fortune like their local competitor decided to retire. Like there’s only one thing, and that is marketing. And marketing is incredibly confused with sales. And I see it every day.

Transition to Digital Marketing

And I think people have incredible comfort with sales ’cause they know what the ROI is in the very immediate, the conversations and the keynotes and the books that I wrote seven, 10 years ago about, hey, print and radio and television. The things that I use to build my wine business, they’re declining in value. You’ve gotta look at Google AdWords or email or YouTube, that’s becoming a non-conversation. I think I struggle to think that people don’t realize that digital is a real serious form of marketing. What is happening though, is as people have gone through that transition, the land of navigating digital marketing is incredibly vast and ridiculously up and down. You can waste an ungodly amount of money doing digital marketing and get nothing in return or you could spend a stunningly low amount of dollars and get very high upside. And it just comes down to the tactics and just understanding it. And I wanna spend some time on that.

Kindness and Leadership

The other thing that I wanna spend time on is, is today is today’s 16th, Tuesday, yeah. So today was supposed to be the day my new book came out. If you guys can flash my screen one more time. So today was supposed to be the day that my new book came out “Twelve And a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients for Business Success”. I did an NFT promotion in August that if you bought 12 copies, I would airdrop you an NFT and sold 1.2 million copies, which for context makes it the most successful book of all time, or at least one of the top 10. And so they had to push it by two weeks, and it’ll be coming out in two weeks, but it’s just really fun timing that today was supposed to be the day because it’s really the other thing I desperately want to talk to you about.

The Importance of Kindness and Empathy in Business

Something has really become very clear to me again in this older state, which is in business, we don’t really talk about kindness or empathy or compassion or accountability. We don’t talk about soft skills as a core. We talk about it as like a side dish, as a nice to have. And I think if you’re very thoughtful about what’s going on in the world right now, and I don’t mean the overcoding and entitlement and that stuff, I mean, people having options as employees, creating continuity and actually building something very big instead of kind of okay, or solid. I think we need to start having an advanced dramatically different conversation on what team building and leadership actually is. And again, I don’t come from a foofy place. The way this book was built was how I’ve built my company. Internally, we call VaynerMedia, the honey empire, honey over vinegar, but the word empire is not a soft word. We’re trying to build the biggest company of all time. And I think to do that, you need continuity based on optimism and growth, not based on fear. And so those are two things I really want to double click on.

Marketing Focus

Let’s start with the marketing thing ’cause it’s incredibly practical for this room. How many people by show of hands, ’cause I’m gonna navigate. ‘Cause I have a feel in the mix. How many people by show of hands, please raise them, are in the B2B business. Raise your hands, please. Hi, please. Thank you. And B2C. Great. So predominantly B2B I’ll jump on both. So B2B. How many people here are running LinkedIn ads for their B2B business, and I mean ads in the feed,

Importance of LinkedIn Ads for B2B

Just curious. Great. Thank you. So let’s talk about LinkedIn ads. This room is majority B2B. If nothing from this talk, nothing from this talk you remember except this one part, I hope this lands. Every company, hence person in this room needs to be running three to four original pieces of creative as ads on LinkedIn a day three to four LinkedIn ads a day, all different, videos, pictures or words, all run as ads, not your page and you post and you organically just get whatever LinkedIn puts it into the ethos. I mean you actually target employees of companies or people’s titles and you pay LinkedIn money in ad form to convert the business goal that you want. Disproportionately, in the last 18 months, the number one thing that I get emails about with the content that I put out around this, disproportionately, this has been the thing that I’ve been most emailed about as a substantial game changer for B2B companies.

Hiring for LinkedIn Ads

Couple things that are important about this. Number one, as we go through this conversation, or if we get into Q&A and go deeper and you sit there and say, you know what, screw it. I’m gonna file. I’m gonna do it actually. First and foremost, you cannot hire your 23-year-old niece to do it. You can’t hire a small agency, one person that you find you, the human in this room, must, if you want the success from it, you don’t need to do anything like just to really create the context.

Evolution of LinkedIn Ads

But if you would like your business to grow through an arbitrage, that is incredibly obvious that will close. LinkedIn ads are not as good right now as they were 24 months ago when I started this conversation because more people have come in and I’m sure everybody here is gonna understand the simple concept of supply and demand. It’s the same rodeo since MySpace. Thing happens, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, it’s all the same game, thing gets established, people come on board, the early movers, no different than real estate development, just with content, make content, they extract the biggest audiences, the big companies that I work with, the Pepsi, the Budweisers, the Fords, they wait, they gotta get their laws down, they gotta figure it out. They’re scared of it. They wait. Eventually three years in, they get comfortable. They start throwing money at it. It starts working. They start throwing real money at it. All of a sudden SMBs mid-market companies like ourselves don’t get as much real estate for free organically or the ads cost too much against what we used to spend for it. It’s the same show every single time.

Attention is Key

The number one advertiser on television in the first 10 years of television was Proctor and Gamble. That’s why it’s the biggest consumer brands company in the world. The number one advertiser on Google AdWords from 2001 to 2005 was Amazon. It’s why it’s who it is. When there is an arbitrage of attention, the world changes. The only thing that connects every one of our businesses here is the attempt to get attention, to tell somebody what we want or what we have, and then hope the thing happens. It’s how the world works. All the things that are happening geopolitically and politically in our country and the world, it’s just ’cause attention has gone from mainstream media to social and new dynamics happen. The reason back to being a Soviet boy. The reason when there’s a coup in a country that at the same time they go after the palace, they go to the newspaper and radio and television station is because communication and the ability to talk to somebody and get their attention and make the thing that you want to happen is literally the only thing that matters. And so the thought that so many people in this room don’t think about that as the first thing you do, even in parallel with the quality of your product though, I did have a meeting last week where I was very, very, very, very underwhelmed with the product. And the person was very aggressive that they needed my agency to be hired probably ’cause he subconsciously knew how bad the product was. And it finally pushed me into the corner and I said, “Sir, with all due respect, I just want you to know one thing.

The Importance of Marketing and Quality

I think we should fix it first and then we’ll market.” So look when I say it’s the only thing that matters, of course the quality of your product, of course, when I look around this room, there’s a ton of you that have substantial long-term relationships and reputation in a B2B environment that is absolutely driving your core business. My question is why people like to leave upside on the table. When I get into these combos one on one or in stage, they’re like, “Gary, I’m good. I don’t need LinkedIn. I’m like the king of Dayton, Ohio.” I’m like, “That’s nice, Carl.” I’m like, “How much do you business do you do?” “7 million.” I’m like, “What’s wrong with 16?” To me, marketing is a conversation of ambition. I understand that people don’t wanna learn this. I understand that you don’t wanna spend 11 hours running on LinkedIn, tasting it, watching a bunch of videos, reading a bunch of stuff so that you can then hire the person internally and know how to judge if they’re good at it. The biggest reason most companies don’t continue to do social media is ’cause they hired somebody that sucks at it and they don’t know how to judge it. And then they decide it doesn’t work. You know what else doesn’t work. A basketball. A basketball does not work for me. The ROI of a basketball for me has been about negative $10,000 ’cause I’ve torn both my meniscus. The ROI of a basketball for LeBron James is a billion dollars. Social marketing works at scale to trillions of dollars. We just might have not figured out how to make it work for ourselves.

LinkedIn as a Marketing Tool

So for me, for this room, there are two core things that really stand out. One is LinkedIn and you need to go pot committed because again, what I’ve seen with the way ads are being spent and the way the organic reach is going down, how many people here use LinkedIn and know what I’m talking about, how it went from just a recruiting tool to now there’s information content in there. Just raise your hands. I’m just curious. So you have a sense if you even sit for a second, think about if you’ve even transacted or been affected by a piece of content in LinkedIn, just reverse engineer yourself. It’s there at scale for this room.

Becoming the Media Platform

The other thing that I think a lot of people need to debate, and this is for the more ambitious and hungry, the more on the offense, the concept of becoming the media platform instead of just an advertiser, meaning actually starting a podcast or YouTube show around the expertise of the business that you’re in. Now, this gets really foofy for a lot of people, but it is absolutely in my opinion, the place that creates the most guaranteed stability and growth of a business. The idea of becoming the publisher, not the marketer, right? There’s I was just with several people in the back room and I was like, look, here’s the framework I live in. I think most people in this room, and when I say this room, I mean America and I mean the 8 billion people on earth and whatever percentage of those people are in business, most people are in sales, they’re sales, they’re sales organizer, I’m sure if we’re being honest, I could just see what you see by some of this light head nods. We are sales organizations and that’s great. I love sales. When I was five years old, sales was my first business. I walked around Edison, New Jersey. I went into people’s yards, ripped their flowers out of the yard, ringed their doorbell and tried to sell them back the flowers. I love sales. That’s me at five. I love sales. There’s remarkable sales. It’s called marketing. It’s super hard ’cause spending money on something that just branding doesn’t feel natural to an SMB mid-market company and even big companies don’t love it, even though they allocate for it ’cause Wall Street makes them. Branding, super important marketing, it’s the whole actual game. It’s the thing that I want you to get advanced at in LinkedIn, it will completely change your business for real 20, 40, 80% growth, it will, it can, it does, if you get good at it. The problem is most people, a lot of hands went up. I feel like if this was a class where we went through all the ads without even knowing and a lot of hands went up just because I know 98% of what I say on LinkedIn is this. So I’m making the assumption that the math scales in this room, the marketing is actually just sales videos or a sales flyer. Most people wanna go to marketing are really just doing sales. None of you wanna see that nobody wants an infomercial in their newsfeed. It’s not value ad, period, but marketing is the second framework, much stronger than sales in the medium and long term, harder to judge for people in the short term, which is why almost nobody does it. Definitely not in the size companies that are in this room, for real. Who I love LinkedIn so much. When I forced my dad to do it and buy newspaper ads or radio or direct mail, it was expensive. You can do LinkedIn for 6,000 bucks and get a real taste, not make a $30,000 commitment to a full page ad.

Embracing Change and Technology

To really push themselves. I’m aware, very aware, I have a very introverted dad well actually he’s not. He’s come out of a shell. But my mom’s introverted in a lot of ways. I know that that last thing isn’t for everybody. I know that you don’t wanna put yourself on camera, feels uncomfortable, doesn’t come natural. But please, if you happen to be one of the several dozens of people in here, that the thought of what I just said is intriguing, please push yourself. It really works. The world is changing. I don’t have to tell a single person here. What I’m trying to get everybody to understand is take your real life and put it into your business life. Here’s what I mean by that. Remember how many of you promised me that you would never get an iPhone, ’cause your Blackberry was so awesome and you needed to feel the buttons? Just curious, how many people here have a Blackberry right now? Remember when you promised you would never get a Facebook account in 2012, 11, 10. We promised even for some of the old school and there’s some old school cats in here, I see you, my favorite one was when the cell phone started getting traction in the late ’90s, all of my I’ve got a beeper, I don’t need a cell phone people in this room. This is what we do. Even people that are progressive. I spent the last three years trying to convince people that made real money and changed their life on Instagram to get TikTok accounts. They’re 26 and they said, no. Humans say no. Many of you, when you heard about Bitcoin, no. Many of you when you’re hearing about NFTs right now, no, it’s just all no. It’s exhausting and it makes no sense if you’re a business person. No is poison in business. Quick question. How many people here are retiring in the next 10 years? And before you raise your hand, I don’t mean you’re gonna have a huge year next year and buy an island. I mean you’re old and you’re finished. Raise your hands, raise it high. All right. Four. And you’re definitely not in that. You just wanted to raise your hand. Four. My friends, almost everything that dominates our society right now, Netflix, most of the social networks, none of them existed 10 years ago. What I’m really trying to tell you in this talk , and by the way, we’re starting to get that place. So if you have any question of every anywhere I’m going or anything you know about me that you wanna ask question, please line up now, ’cause I wanna get into the Q&A, please do that while I’m wrapping up here, my friends, I’m trying to prepare you for what’s coming. You guys hear about NFTs and people selling for $69 million and you’re like scam, beanie babies, this and that. The blockchain is here. Every contract in the world in 15 years is gonna be on the blockchain. It’s how you’re gonna do business. So what are you gonna do? The same thing you did with the internet, which is fight it until you succumb to it and left all that opportunity on the table. Like how do we not see the patterns? It was one thing when the internet came and we didn’t have that and so the world was one way. And so I was very empathetic in ’96, ’97, ’98, ’99. Do you understand 1996? 90% of my conversations was trying to convince somebody somebody would buy anything on the internet. 50% of my conversations were trying to convince people that the internet wasn’t a fad. Do you remember some of you, if you paid attention to this, when the stock market crashed in 2000 with internet stocks and every article was see the Internet’s a fad. People don’t like change. They don’t like it. We don’t like it. The problem is you can do anything you want in your personal life. I like when people are like Gary, I just don’t get Facebook. I go, that’s nice stand. I understand that you don’t get it. How about the fact that 5 trillion people do? Like I love when people make decisions that are ideological on their human level and then deploy them If you would like me to continue transcribing the rest of the video or if you have any specific requests, please let me know.

Introduction

In their business life. You don’t like money. You don’t want your family to be more stable. You don’t want your business to grow. You don’t want somebody to come along and use this stuff and put you outta business. All of those things, I have a funny feeling, you are interested in. You may not wanna dance on TikTok, but I’m not asking you to dance. I’m asking you to pay attention to what’s actually happening here. And we’re just starting. Technology doesn’t care about your feelings or how hard you worked to build your little moat locally on reputation.

Uber Example

It just comes along and destroys. I spoke at a conference ironically in Orlando, seven years ago, I was an early investor in Uber and ironically got booked. They didn’t know for the Limo and Taxi Conference Convention Center to speak. (audience laughs) But it was early Uber. It hadn’t really done its thing yet. And I stood there and I said, my friends, I don’t know if you know about this. And it started, it was happening in San Francisco. It just opened in New York. It was early. And I was like, “My friends, I don’t know if you’re paying attention, but there’s this thing called Uber. I really think you might want to. I think it’s gonna be pretty disruptive. I compared it to Amazon and bookstores.” This room laughed me off the stage. First guy on the mic goes, “Gary, do you know what politics is?” I’m like, “I sure do.” He goes, we’ve got the audacious. We’ve got these local authorities by the balls. We have our medallions. We contribute. I’m like, “That’s nice.” I’m like, “Do you know what venture capital is?” I’m like, “Uber’s gonna raise a billion dollars in cash. And I have a funny feeling that’s more than you have, John.” And I don’t have to explain to all of you what happened there. No matter what you think your moat is and why not, I promise you there’s one incredibly important thing that I wanna leave with. And then please, please line up because I want questions, otherwise I’m gonna have D rock run around with the mic. Your business has a target on it. Every entrepreneur is looking at every localized business and trying to think about scale. And they’re going to use modern marketing to create a moat. Just like Zillow did just like Amazon did just like I did with Resi, the restaurant app, an open table, it’s all gonna be the same game. The internet is where the real world is. We spend everyone’s like the Metaverse and the VR and all this crazy stuff we’re living there now. Do you know how many hours are spent looking at this? Do you understand? We live there now. This has happened whether you like it or not, you’ve decided to be an entrepreneur and a business owner or a senior executive, you decided. So that means you have to play on the field. In sports, it’s obvious when the greats… I will never forget, even though I hated ’cause I’m a kn fan, but Paul Pierce said something in some interview and I loved it. He said something like they asked him when he knew it was over, when he had to retire. And he said something like, it was interesting. It was just one random game. And this scrub got by me and I realized this guy would’ve never gotten by me ever, ever, ever before. And I can’t believe he dominated me like that. And I knew it was over. And it stuck with me. In sports it’s obvious, in business, it’s not. It’s like, whatever that gas is that is coming outta your car and then you just die in the garage ’cause you didn’t know, that thing. That’s business. It’s happening to you right now. But you just don’t realize it.

Technology Lever

And that’s because the technology lever, especially now with what’s going on with the blockchain, you have a blockchain and internet happening at the same time. And what makes me sad is you can harness it or you can put your head in the sand. It’s just a very binary game. And I just don’t know why you wouldn’t.

The Importance of Managing

And so that’s that. I didn’t really get to the culture part as much as I want to, but I’m gonna sneak a little bit of it in. All of that is fine and dandy. If you land three awesome people to run your LinkedIn or one, it’s all fine and dandy. If you don’t know how to manage in 2021, you’re gonna lose. The options are ridiculous. Every 17 year old that I know, and I know a drilling of them, I have 10 million followers on TikTok, every one of them have no interest in going to college or working for anyone ’cause they can make $100,000 a year on TikTok. This isn’t about these genZers and millennials being spoiled. This is called options. They’re not lazy. They just don’t wanna work for you. (chuckles) Like it’s very important, this is probably more important than what I spent the most of my time on. If you don’t realize that kindness and empathy and compassion and all those things, your grandma tried to teach you are actually becoming the core things you’re gonna need in your business to succeed. I love this new thing going on the great resignation, right? And everyone’s blaming the government, rightfully so, like if you pay people to stay home, they’re gonna stay home, we understand that game, but let there be no confusion. There’s a much more dangerous thing going on in there. ‘Cause that check is gonna stop. What’s underneath there is options.

TikTok and Changing Landscape

And I see a lot of head shaking and I’ll tell you why. Many of you have been baffled by your kid or your kid’s friend making real money on TikTok and they’re 14 and you’re like, what the hell is going on? This is happening. And so look, when I talk like this, I always laugh ’cause I can always hear my dad or other people’s voices in the crowd. Like I’m very empathetic to somebody sitting, listening to me right now and saying, you know what, I’m retire. I get it. ‘Cause it’s changing so fast and hard. It’s like, I’ve gone hard for 50 years. Do I really want a 30 year? Do I really? That’s on you but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And that’s the point of this talk today, which is a lot’s happening and I’d love to get into details. So I’ll leave a lot more for Q&A but thank you for having me. Thank you. (audience clapping)

Podcasting and Persistence

[Man] So I think a lot of people are very, very motivated to start their own podcast is probably gonna be a handful of people that try it. There’s gonna be a handful of people that are really, really good at it. And then there’s gonna be a bunch of people that probably struggle. – That’s right. – [Man] Figuring out how good content. At what point do you have to realize that you’re approaching it wrong? How do you have that develop that spider sense to figure out I need to change my message ’cause you need to keep doing it. It’s just that bad. – It’s a really tough ques… Stick here, we’ll go back and forth. It’s a really tough question for me. People always ask like, ’cause I’m so infatuated with tenacity and patience, infatuated for all my high energy patience has been the foundation of my career. So I’m always scared to give a general answer to this question because I know that there are many people that gave up on their podcast and YouTube show one month before they were destined to click. It’s happened. And so I think the question is results and time allocation, right? There’s gonna be people here, if I’m looking at this crowd, I think I’m gonna get four people to give it in that bat. One of those four people is just gonna genuinely like it. And by the way, on the podcast front, think about your interests. I went very narrow. Think about something like a podcast called “Golf and Business”, ’cause you just love golf. And the show is just interviewing people about how they do business in golf, golf business. So like you could like we’re gonna play here a little bit and go a little more detailed ,but like if somebody heard that and go, I love that’s actually perfect for me. And they do golf and business with Sally Thompson. She might just like it so much that it’s almost doesn’t matter. It’s my entrepreneurial career. When I was making $48,000 a year at 29, or what I’m doing now, it all is the same, ’cause I

Podcasting and Persistence (Continued)

but that’s gonna be based on the variable of how good you are at it. I know it works. I have too many examples of it. Just so you know with the way my career works from investing in operating a marketing company, I’m talking about hundreds and thousands, not like three people. There’s no focus group of one. I would never tarnish my reputation or my personal brand by pontificating thesis on the focus group of one or six. This is scaled results.