Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to the Sunday edition of the Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE) Newsletter!
First off, congratulations to all 22 subscribers who participated in the Big Bad Plan Challenge beta cohort that concluded last week. 8/22 completed the course on time. 6 more plan to complete it soon. I’m carrying out one-to-ones with all the participants in the coming weeks to get feedback and figure out where to go from here. Will report back once that process is done.
Second, Gary Vee’s new book Day Trading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World has blown my mind so thoroughly over the last couple of weeks that I decided to dedicate this entire newsletter to a few of the critical takeaways.
Here are three ideas on the future (and present) of world-class marketing for you to ponder in the coming week.
TIWIKE #1: World-class marketers of the future will build communities around core offers
For years, I hid behind the stock cliché of “hating social media” to avoid the hard work of getting good at it.
But I didn’t hate it enough to delete my accounts. I didn’t hate it enough to stop scrolling either. What I hated about social media was how it shed light on my own fear of failure.
I hated seeing other normal people like me building huge audiences, and every viral video forced me to look at the consequences of sitting on the sidelines.
As 2024 comes to a close, content creation on social media is officially an essential skill for world-class marketers of the future.
But you can’t just go about making social media content all willy nilly.
Not if you want to approach it like a world-class marketer. If you want to get some likes and keep it moving, then the willy nilly approach is fine. If you want to sell more products, if you want to use social media to drive revenue into your personal accounts, then you need to change your perspective.
What you need is to commit to doing the hard work of learning how to use social media like a world-class marketer.
According to Gary Vee, this hard work comes in two forms:
- Creating a core offer
- Building a growing community who needs your core offer
The core offer is just the central product, service, or experience that people can buy when they learn about your work.
This is what I am working to sort out in the wake of the beta cohort for my Big Bad Plan Challenge. For now, my core offer is based around helping people buy, sell, and invest in real estate. But I want to learn how to develop digital products so I can help people on a much larger scale.
Try not to overcomplicate this.
- If you are an electrician, your core offer is to fix people’s electrical problems.
- If you are a plumber, your core offer is to fix people’s plumbing problems.
- If you are a ghost writer, your core offer is to write content on behalf of established professionals who don’t have the time.
- If you are a musician, your core offer is to entertain people with your musical talent (which leads to gigs, merch purchases, and more).
If you don’t have a core offer, this is where to start.
Once you have a core offer in place, the game is to figure out how to get as many people as possible who need your core offer to subscribe to your email lists, follow you on social platforms, and engage with your content. The larger the community, the more people consistently buying your stuff.
World-class marketers of the future will build communities around core offers.
TIWIKE #2: World-class marketers of the future will fearlessly post A LOT of content to learn what works
How do you build a growing audience who needs your offer?
This is where the rubber meets the road. It all comes down to posting A LOT of content. If you are new to this, as I am, then whatever you think is a lot is not nearly enough.
Gary Vee recommends you post 5-7 times per day PER PLATFORM. That means 5 posts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, LinkedIn…you get the point. Posting once per day, even if the content is really good, is simply not enough. But I bet the reason why this is true isn’t what you think.
You don’t post a lot just to get as many eyeballs as possible on your offers (although that’s a pretty sweet side benefit).
You post a lot in order to collect data.
He believes that being a world-class marketer in the future means quantity AND quality. In fact, one of the central insights of the book is that quantity is the only way to create quality. The only way to know what quality content looks like is to analyze the data.
And the only way to have data to analyze is to post a lot consistently.
According to Gary Vee, the process for doing this well looks like this:
- Break your target market into cohorts. He recommends 30-40 of these. Be as specific as possible. Women ages 18-49 is not particular enough. 28-35 year-old moms who want a side hustle is better.
- Spend some time researching what kinds of content is working inside each of those cohorts.
- Post a lot of content targeting the various cohorts over a period of a few weeks.
- Identify the handful of content pieces that wildly outperformed the rest. (You don’t need a big audience with a lot of reach to play this game. If your average videos get 50-100 views and three or four of the videos get 400-500 views, that’s the kind of differentiation you are looking for.)
- Double down on what worked. Create a hypothesis about why the content that worked performed so well. Was it the hook? The format? The audio? Use the hypothesis to create your next batch of content.
- Rinse and repeat.
In short, post…listen…pay attention…alter your approach relative to what you learn.
World-class marketers of the future will fearlessly post A LOT of content to learn what works.
TIWIKE #3: World-class marketers will use data to guarantee high rates of return on advertising dollars
This is where so many entrepreneurs go wrong.
They use their hard-earned cash to purchase advertisements for content that hasn’t been validated. Another primary insight from the book is that world-class marketing in the future will be made of content that people WANT to watch. This is one of the biggest opportunities for new and small founders of our time.
Huge, multi-million and billion-dollar brands haven’t figured this out yet.
They are still living in the advertising model that rose to prominence in the 20th century. They spend tons of money to create advertisements that aren’t validated and then spend more money to buy TV commercials…all with the hope that people buy their stuff as a result.
Meanwhile, solopreneurs, digital marketers, and online creators around the world are making hyper-relevant content that their customers want to watch, and those customers are leaving the big brands in droves.
World-class marketers don’t spend money and hope for the best.
World-class marketers use the data from all the content they post as a guide to tell them what to stop doing and what to do more. They post, validate, and double down on what works. And they use their marketing budget to amplify content that has already proven itself without amplification.
By turning their social accounts into laboratories for figuring out what does and doesn’t work, they are virtually guaranteed to never waste marketing dollars.
World-class marketers will use data to guarantee high rates of return on advertising dollars.
Question for the Week
I am certainly not yet one of these world-class marketers.
All of these ideas are straight out of Day Trading Attention, so if you want to learn more, check that out. But I am committed to learning this vital skillset in the coming year. Join me, if you dare.
Will you do the hard work of learning how to become a world-class marketer or will you allow this incredible opportunity to pass you by?