Revealing the 2024 Marketing Strategy of a $200M Founder

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain: Revealing the 2024 Marketing Strategy of a $200M Founder

Hosted by Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan from the HubSpot Podcast Network, this episode features Ryan Deiss, a renowned marketer and entrepreneur, sharing his insights into effective copywriting and modern marketing strategies. Released on November 7, 2024, this episode delves deep into the evolution of marketing tactics, the enduring importance of copywriting, and the transformative role of AI in shaping contemporary marketing approaches.

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1. Introduction to the Masterclass on Copywriting

The episode kicks off with Kieran Flanagan introducing Ryan Deiss as the special guest for a masterclass focused on copywriting. Kieran sets the stage by promising listeners that the insights shared will immediately enhance their product sales and advertising efficiency.

Quote:

Kieran Flanagan [00:01]: "After this episode, you're instantly going to sell more product. Your ads are going to be cheaper. It is going to transform how your business is growing."

2. The Evolution of Copywriting in Marketing

Ryan Deiss reflects on his early experiences in direct response marketing, emphasizing the foundational skills of copywriting and offer creation that have stood the test of time. He contrasts the old-school tactics, such as keyword stuffing for SEO in the late '90s, with the sophisticated targeting capabilities introduced by platforms like Facebook Ads around 2007.

Key Points:

• Early Days: Focused on fundamental copywriting skills and offer creation.
• Shift to Media Buying: With the advent of Facebook Ads, the emphasis shifted to precise audience targeting and media buying skills.
• Decline of Copywriting: The rise of targeting led to a neglect of quality copywriting, resulting in clickbait and less persuasive messaging.

Quotes:

Ryan Deiss [01:54]: "Well, I think in the early days it was copywriting and offer creation... Tactics come and go, but there are some things that absolutely persist."

Ryan Deiss [07:51]: "When you can no longer target as a marketer, all media is mass media again. And so what is the option that we have as marketers again? What's the only card that we have to play? It's messaging, it's copy."

3. The Decline and Resurgence of Copywriting

The discussion highlights how the superiority of media buyers over copywriters emerged between 2007 and 2018 due to enhanced targeting options. However, following privacy changes like the iOS 14 update and scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, marketers lost granular targeting capabilities, reverting focus back to messaging and copy.

Key Points:

• Media Buying Dominance: From 2007-2018, effective targeting overshadowed the importance of copywriting.
• Privacy Constraints: Events like Cambridge Analytica and iOS 14 updates drastically reduced targeting precision.
• Return to Messaging: With limited targeting, compelling copy and clear messaging regained their paramount importance.

Quotes:

Ryan Deiss [09:41]: "You just have to really nail the message in...copywriting is more important than it was before."

Ryan Deiss [12:42]: "It's a balance... copywriting it just got rebranded as everything was clickbait."

4. The Role of AI in Modern Copywriting

Ryan Deiss elaborates on how AI has revolutionized the copywriting process by automating research and generating problem statements. He explains how AI tools like ChatGPT can swiftly produce authentic problem statements based on customer language, drastically reducing the time needed for market research.

Key Points:

• AI-Powered Research: Utilizing AI to generate and test problem statements expedites the discovery of compelling copy hooks.
• Automated Style Guides: AI can create style guides from unstructured data, ensuring messaging aligns with customer language.
• Enhanced Testing: AI facilitates large-scale ad testing, identifying high-performing copy variations quickly.

Quotes:

Ryan Deiss [17:06]: "AI is the reason that right now, today... is better today than it was in 2021 after all these shifts and changes were made."

Ryan Deiss [21:30]: "It's like, here's some variations of the language from this back and forth dialogue with the AI representation of my customer."

5. Practical Applications and Case Studies

Ryan shares a practical example from his company, Scalable Company, illustrating the effectiveness of problem statement ads. Instead of leading with their expertise in marketing, they identified a core problem their target audience faced: "No one in my business knows the metrics that matter but me." By addressing this specific pain point, they successfully created a lead magnet that resonated deeply with their audience.

Key Points:

• Problem-Centric Ads: Focusing on the client's specific problems rather than the company's offerings leads to higher engagement.
• AI Augmentation: Using AI to generate and test problem statements ensures the messaging is both relevant and effective.
• Integrated Marketing Efforts: The insights from problem statement tests inform broader marketing strategies, including content creation and landing page development.

Quotes:

Ryan Deiss [35:08]: "Sometimes it can even inform your product improvement and enhancement."

Ryan Deiss [35:43]: "They're just there serving us up with idea after idea after idea. So you don't have to be a genius anymore and you don't have to be lucky."

6. Key Marketing Fundamentals: Levels of Awareness

Ryan emphasizes the importance of understanding Eugene Schwartz's "Levels of Awareness" in crafting effective marketing messages. He outlines the five levels:

1. Unaware: No knowledge of the problem or the solution.
2. Problem Aware: Recognizes the problem but not the solutions.
3. Solution Aware: Knows there are solutions but hasn't chosen one.
4. Product Aware: Aware of specific products but hasn't decided on one.
5. Most Aware: Ready to purchase a specific product.

Key Points:

• Targeting the Right Level: Many marketing failures stem from targeting messages to the wrong level of customer awareness.
• Opportunity in Problem Awareness: The most significant opportunities lie in addressing individuals who recognize their problem but aren't yet seeking solutions.

Quotes:

Ryan Deiss [28:20]: "At the end of the day, I think so much of great marketing is just walking prospects through the levels of awareness."

Ryan Deiss [30:03]: "You sell a CRM, what keyword should we target? I don't know. CRM."

7. Conclusion: The Timeless Art of Copywriting Enhanced by Modern Tools

Kieran Flanagan wraps up the discussion by highlighting that the essence of copywriting remains unchanged, even as tools and methodologies evolve. The integration of AI and advanced testing platforms like Meta Ads empowers marketers to apply classic copywriting principles more efficiently and effectively.

Key Points:

• Enduring Importance of Messaging: Despite technological advancements, clear and persuasive messaging remains the cornerstone of successful marketing.
• Empowerment through AI: Modern tools amplify the capabilities of marketers, allowing them to generate, test, and refine copy with unprecedented speed.
• Continuous Innovation: The marketing landscape continuously adapts, but foundational skills like copywriting remain indispensable.

Quotes:

Ryan Deiss [38:41]: "Copy is still one of the core skills you can learn, but the approach to it should be modernized."

Kieran Flanagan [41:20]: "Marketer's job is to guess what the customer wants and positioning it in the way they want... thank you so much for joining us on today's show."

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Key Takeaways:

1. Foundational Skills Remain Crucial: Core copywriting and offer creation skills are timeless and remain essential despite evolving marketing platforms.
2. AI as a Game-Changer: Leveraging AI can dramatically streamline the process of generating and testing effective copy, making marketing more efficient.
3. Focus on the Customer's Problem: Identifying and addressing specific pain points of the target audience is more effective than leading with product-centric messages.
4. Understanding Customer Awareness: Tailoring messages to the appropriate level of customer awareness enhances engagement and conversion rates.
5. Integration of Classic and Modern Techniques: Combining traditional copywriting principles with modern tools like AI and advanced ad platforms leads to superior marketing outcomes.

This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for marketers seeking to balance timeless copywriting techniques with innovative strategies enabled by AI and modern advertising platforms. Ryan Deiss's insights provide actionable strategies to navigate the contemporary marketing landscape, ensuring that messaging remains compelling and effective in driving business growth.

Transcript

[Kieran Flanagan]

Hey everyone, we have a master class. Today. We're joined by Ryan Deiss. We're going to break down everything you need to know about copywriting. After this episode, you're instantly going to sell more product. Your ads are going to be cheaper. It is going to transform how your business is growing. Let's get to today's show.

[Kip Bodnar]

Hey guys, real quick. You know we love building custom GPTs on the show and we love sharing it with all of you. Well, we wanted to kick that up a notch. We just developed this free guide that teaches you how to build your own custom GPT on on chatgpt. We've taken the guesswork out of it. We've got templates, we've got a step by step guide to design and implement custom models. So you can focus on the, the part that's actually fun, the part we love actually building it. And if you want it, you can grab a link in the description below and go check it out now. Now back to today.

[Ryan Deiss]

This is a good place to start at our starting point, actually, Ryan, which is we wanted to start all the way back on the Warrior Forum days because I was a old school Warrior Forum lurker and you were like one of the really incredible direct response marketers. I know you used to sell product over there and things like that, like you, Frank Kern, some of these other, you know, legit marketers. But you know, I've always been curious, like, what are the kind of just core skills you've brought with you from those days that have stood the test of time as you've gone on to be an incredible marketer, to be a CEO, to be an entrepreneur? Because there was a little group in that Warrior forum like Russell Brunson, Frank Kearns, you, a bunch of others who actually went on to become really entrepreneurial had huge businesses. And I'm kind of curious, what were the things you learned in those early days?

Well, I think in the early days it was copywriting and offer creation.

Yeah.

And that really was the core. And I think that there were some people who got lucky and what they figured out was a singular trick or hack. I remember because I made my first sale online in 1999 when Google was a science fair project. Right. And the trick or hack back then was you could keyword stuff. You know, you could just repeat the same keyword at the bottom of your webpage over and over again. And if you made that keyword the same color as the background, they couldn't see it. But you know, Dogpile and altavista Could. And so you would rank really high. And like, that was the growth hack back in the day. Right. And I was able to rank because of that. And there were some people where, like, their entire career was based on stupid crap like that. And that was enough. But that was all they knew. And they never really understood the fundamentals of what actually caused somebody to buy, what actually caused them to click, what actually created persuasion. And then there were some that did. There were some that actually became students of marketing, students of persuasion. And I think some of us who really dove in and wanted to kind of understand and learn the craft of that, we were able to stay in business and learn as the tactics changed and as the trends changed. And then some of us eventually actually managed to figure out what, you know, business, which is a totally different animal completely. But, yeah, I think that really is the difference. Tactics come and go, but there are some things that absolutely persist. And that ability to craft messaging that persuades messaging that converts, crafting offers, I think that was the difference between those of us who had one offer out there and those who had multiple and ultimately built companies.

Yeah, I think the category of people that I used to look at and dissect offers and just was always fascinated by the way you all sold and had always kind of, you were perfecting the art of the landing page, perfecting the art of the persuasive techniques and how you could get people to opt in and purchase. And there was, like, really well thought out. This was before, really. There were like, inbound marketing funnels. Right. You guys were building, like, pretty incredible direct response funnels. And I'm a nerd. I'm a dork. So I studied these things when I used to hang out on the warrior forum. And I was living in the gray of marketing, which is how can I just hack stuff and just get there really fast? And then at some point, you have to learn real marketing. I was like, oh, God, do I really have to learn real marketing? And then you have to, because, like, the hacks don't work anymore. But the place I would love to maybe dig into is the category of people that I thought were world class and are the people who've gone on to do incredible things were the people who were incredible at copywriting. And maybe could you talk about how you found copywriting as a skill set to learn and maybe how that's developed and stayed with you as you've gone on to be a CEO and entrepreneur? Like, what are the core things you would want to teach an audience about the craft of copywriting.

So funny enough, I learned copywriting. I had a job, I had an internship when I was in college, and I worked for a financial planner. And this financial planner, he built his business by hosting these free dinners for wealthy people. And so he would host these little seminars, and he'd serve everybody, you know, crappy chicken lunch. And he would teach them some investing strategy and then say, you know, if you want me to do this, like, let's meet. And he would send out these postcards to get people to sign up for these. And so all I did was I would help manage his CRM. This was obviously pre HubSpot, so I don't remember what CRM he used. I think it was something akin to, you know, Microsoft Excel. And I would print out his postcards and I would fix stamps and send them out. And he basically said, hey, you know, I want to see if we can do a little bit better with this. I want you to read this book. And he got me a book, and it was some stuff that was written by Gary Halbert, some things are written by Jay Abraham. And he essentially just started giving me these books. I remember there were some Dan Kennedy books. So he was my first source of education because he just wanted me to learn this stuff. And so I got a lot of great old school direct response, you know, tactics and strategies taught to me by this person who was in financial planning, who just wanted me to learn so that I could help drive more business into his practice. And I just ate it up. I was like, this is amazing. And I remember thinking, the. At that time, the Internet's new. I was also at the same time starting to build businesses online. And I was like, what if I applied some of these strategies on this new medium called the Internet? You know, at the time, websites back then, everybody wanted to build these pretty sites. And flash, you know, you go to a webpage and it was, you remember this? Like, there'd be this flash intro, all this twirly, twirly stuff. I was like, what if I just had a webpage where there was a headline at the top and copy down below? And sure enough, it actually worked. It actually performed better. And so I discovered, you know, largely through accident, through chance, through luck, call it what you will, that these old school direct response strategies, these direct mail strategies that I was learning through this old school direct mail method that they applied just as well in this new medium called the Internet. And so that's where it all began. That really was my early education, just realizing that, yeah, opening up with A, you know, a strong headline that just called out to exactly who it is that you want to talk to. It spoke to a specific problem, a specific benefit, and it made a compelling argument. And it didn't worry about, you know, having too much copy. It wanted to have just enough. All of those practices were just drilled into me at a very early age, literally from the age of 19.

[Kieran Flanagan]

And so I guess, how do you juxtapose that with the world we live in today? Right. Like, you hear generative AI, you hear that everything's moving to video, all these things. I firmly believe writing is still very important, whether it be in a text form or in video or some other format. But, like, all those things seem to be still true. Like, what's the parts of marketing that haven't changed, I guess, is what I'm trying to get at.

[Ryan Deiss]

Yeah, I would argue they're more true now than they have been for the past 10 years.

[Kip Bodnar]

Interesting.

[Ryan Deiss]

So when I first got started, the best marketers in the world were the best copywriters.

Yeah.

You know, and Karen, that's what you're saying. Like, those of us who were kind of around in the quote, unquote, early days, you know, of the Internet, the people that got the most respect were the best copywriters. And then something changed. Right about around 2007, you had this new advertising medium emerge called Facebook ads. And when Facebook ads came about and prior to that, you had Google Ads. And they were really cool because for the first time there, you could do really precise targeting. But when Facebook ads emerged, that was a game changer because now you could get ultra precise. It wasn't just targeting based on keywords. You could say to Facebook now, meta. Okay, this is exactly who I want. Give me this specific person who likes these specific pages, has this specific criteria. Thousands and thousands and thousands. I mean, as recent as 2018, there were like 6,000 plus different areas that you could target in the meta ads platform, and they would serve up exactly who you wanted. And so now the best marketers weren't necessarily the best copywriters. It was the best media buyers. It was the people who were the best at targeting. And that was a remarkably new phenomenon. I would say. It was the first time that really it was kind of more the quant people who are the best. And so it was who could be the best at finding the niche audiences, who could be the best at tracking and at testing, and they were the ones who won the day. And that really started from about 2007 until about 2018. 2019. And you kind of started to see then copywriting it wasn't just less cool, it kind of got hated on. Now copywriting it just got rebranded as everything was clickbait.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, that's just scammy or, oh, that's just clickbait. Oh, that's just this. And it's just like if you tried to write anything that was even reasonably persuasive, it's just like, oh, gross, icky. And in fairness, a lot of it was pretty gross and icky. I look back at a lot of the stuff that I wrote early on in my career and it's pretty gross and icky. I will never forget one time, I think the best thing that I ever did for my career. I put my mom on my email list and I remember my mom responding to one of my emails one time and going, what is this? Because one of the things that you can do as a direct response marketer is if all you're doing is optimize, optimize, optimize, and it's just split, test, split, test number, which one, which one, which? And you never take a step back and you never qualitatively look and say, okay, but am I kind of being an asshole? Like, is this, like, good for the customer? Is this good for the brand? Like, at some point you need to ask that question because you can optimize yourself into a really dark place as a marketer if you're only ever looking for what is converting the best right now in the short term. And I do think that a lot of marketers did that. And I think a lot of marketers, by making short term choices, made really, really poor decisions from a brand perspective. And it is a balance. It is absolutely a balance. At the same time, I think that a lot of us swung the pendulum way too far away from just good, solid direct response copywriting strategies that we know just work and it's good and it's not bad, you know, and so that went away and it was okay. You could put kind of boiled chicken, cruddy copy out there because we were able just to lay these kind of Met offers in front of the perfect audience. Meta made that possible and it was possible for the first time in marketing human history. And then it all went away. It all went away. In 2018. You had the Cambridge Analytica thing overnight. Facebook is like for freaking get about all of that nonsense. Then I think in 2019, they come out and they say, we're getting rid of, like, they basically removed over 5,000 different targeting options. Then you got the iOS 14 update. Toodles. Forget about all that. And now as marketers, what can we target based on today? At this point, kind of nothing. You basically have no targeting options as a marketer anymore. And when you can no longer target as a marketer, we're sort of back to where we were before. When you can no longer target as a marketer, all media is mass media again. And so what is the option that we have as marketers again? What's the only cards that we have to play? It's messaging, it's copy. So really long winded, you know, old man yelling at Cloud's argument of saying, like, I think right now, again, copywriting is more important than it was before. And what we really had before then was the weird time. Where we are right now is kind of the normal time again.

We made that point on the show actually, that we've kind of come all the way back to where we started, which is more so the craft of marketing versus the science of marketing. Not that we don't have a lot of data and things like that, but it has the got worse than or because of security or privacy or all these different things. It's got worse over time. But if you're talking to a marketer today and they're like, well, what is the core skills I should learn around copywriting? Because the Kip's point, back then when you were doing copywriting, it was for the most part just a text based Internet, right? That's the kind of world we lived in. And now it's a multimedia, you know, there's video, text, audio, they're creators. And now you have like, you were, I guess like that crew were kind of creators because you were the face of the businesses, but now you actually have all of these channels kind of being owned by creators, right? YouTube is better for, for individuals and brands. Podcast is better for individual and brands. Social is better for individual and brands. And so all of those actually favor individuals versus brands. So if you're a marketer today, what is the craft of copywriting you should learn? Like, is it how to craft a YouTube script? Is it how to craft an incredible podcast, or is it still how to craft an incredible landing page? Like, what would you actually teach a marketer to go learn?

It is still, at the end of the day, what is the message? Because whether the message is delivered in print, in audio, in video, we're still talking about messaging. And so yeah, what its ultimate form becomes, it still is a message. And I think at the End of the day, the best messages in the world and the best messengers. What they're really great at is they're really great at articulating their ideal clients problems better than they can.

Yes.

You know, if you think about why do we like, even if we don't like them, why do we respect doctors so much? It's because they name our pain. That's what they do. And they can say it better than we can. And so I think what so much of marketing is, when it's done really, really well and what so much of persuasion is, I mean, if you think.

About political candidates, great time to think about political.

Right. They're really good at articulating, hey, this is what you're feeling. And they're good at saying it in such a way where you're going like, yeah, you're right, that is what I'm feeling. And I didn't necessarily think about it that way, but you're right. And so, so many of us are just looking for somebody to say the quiet thing out loud either because we're too afraid to say it or we just don't know how to say it. And I think we would be fine with brands saying it on our behalf. Just most brands don't have the courage to do that. And so I think that's why it falls on creators and influencers to do it more than brands. And I think it's safer for there to be creators and influencers to do that. And I think that's why today, if you have a brand, just about every brand is going to need to have some type of a spokesperson, a key person of influence, somebody who's out forward facing, who's going to be doing that on behalf of the brand. And then as the spotlight is shining on them, what they need to do is be that mirror that shines it back onto the brand. That's the key that makes it work. That's always my goal, you know, is like, yep, I'm happy for the spotlight shine of me, but then I just want to redirect it to whichever brand I'm associated with that's going to be the most appropriate to then receive that attention. I don't ultimately want to receive it all on me because, you know, I don't want to be the racehorse, I don't want to be owned. I want to send it over to one of the companies that ultimately can better monetize it than I can over the long haul.

[Kieran Flanagan]

So what you're really saying is like, in that Facebook era, people got a Little lazy. They didn't name the pain, they just kind of were like, hey, this is what I'm selling versus what you're feeling. And I can tell you what I'm selling because I could find the perfect small subset of people who deeply cared about that thing I'm selling. And now we can't do that anymore. And so it's gotta. We have to move to this era of really naming the unnamed pain and unnamed feelings for the buyer. How do you think AI is gonna help that? Because, you know, you just talked about targeting, right? And ad targeting has kind of gone away. But AI allows us to do mass messaging at a one to one level and lets us really deliver and maybe at least guess that pain on an individual level, even if it's not as granular as maybe the ad targeting used to be. Like, what's your take there? Are you guys doing a lot there and seeing good results? Like, would love your insight there.

[Ryan Deiss]

Yeah, tons. I want to go back to something you said before. I think it's really, really important because you talked about laziness. We found that at any given time, about 3 to 6% of our list is ready to buy. Now, it's amazing. And it doesn't matter. The industry, if we put out a message about 3 to 6%, is kind of able and willing to move forward. Now, that's just kind of the numbers and how things shake out. The problem is we don't know who those 3 to 6% are. And they change every day. So the people who are ready now, tomorrow, they may not be ready. Maybe they found a different solution. What? The reason I think people were allowed to be lazy is because the targeting was so good that Facebook Meta would essentially serve up those 3 to 6% to you every single day on a silver platter. Right? So you didn't have to be that great at plucking them out of the crowd. You didn't have to be that great at even nurturing them over time. That's the thing that we've all had to get better at. Now what I'll say is, you know, you brought up AI. AI is the reason that right now, today, from a paid advertising perspective, our ads are performing better today than they were in 2021 after all these shifts and changes were made. So we're post iOS 14. We don't have the targeting options, we don't have all the things that we used to have. But Meta and Google haven't implemented all the AI stuff that they now have. Man, it sucks. And so where we are right now is we're getting to a point where they're able to start serving up for us sort of like they were in the past. But we don't have to do the requesting. They're actually getting pretty good at doing that because of AI and we don't have to know how to do it. So you asked like, are we using AI everybody? Right now, if you're in marketing, you're using AI whether you realize it because it's baked into every tool you're using. As far as from a tools perspective though, when we're writing copy 1000%, let me give you a really tactical example. So I said before, I think one of the core aspects of copy is just speaking to the problem. So one of the things, anytime we go into any new market, one of the first tests that we're going to run is we're going to do a series of ad tests that we call problem statement ads. So we're going to research 30 problem statements. And these are, as the name would suggest, problems that are stated in the verbatim words of our ideal client. Right. So if we're targeting marketers, then it might be something like, I just can't get Facebook ads to scale for my business. Lead costs are too expensive. Like what are the verbatim phrases that our ideal clients are stating in their own words? And so what we want to do is know of these different problem statements which are the most potent. Now we can guess at this or we can run these statements as actual ads. And so we will put these statements in an ad just verbatim the quote in the ad with just that's the only thing in there. No image, no nothing, just the quote in the ad. We run an impression based campaign and all we're just trying to see is which ones get the most clicks. We'll run it for a couple of days, which ones get the most clicks. Let's let data tell us. Now what we used to do is do research, we do polling, we do customer interviews to figure out what are these problem statements. What we're now able to do is just ask Claude in ChatGPT. Hey, you are this ideal client dealing with this particular issue, challenge or problem that we solve. What are 10 common problems that you're dealing with in your own words? And it will give us a phenomenal list of problem statements that are every bit as good, if not better than the ones that we'd find in our own research. Right. And so what would take weeks of research and analysis? We can now just get. Now we will still do the research because it's not perfect, but man, if it's in a hurry, if we kind of just need to go, go, go, we'll just use AI, of course. And you know what? It's good enough. And so our ability to just kind of crank on this stuff that never would have been possible before. And so in terms of being able to figure out what are the big problems, how do we speak to them? If you don't know, you don't have to know. If it's a brand new, if it's a startup, you know, the customer research, it's probably sitting in your AI tool right now.

[Kip Bodnar]

I want to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called Created. It's hosted by John Ushaik. It's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Created gives an inside look at how to build businesses as a creator, improve your creative process, and stay ahead of the latest content trends. John, an ex YouTuber and Instagram employee, breaks down the creator economy with guests Logan Paul, Paris Hilton, Jason Derues, Rulo Jake Paul, George Lopez, and more. In a not so recent episode I loved was with Liza Koshay. Remember her? She was one of the fastest growing YouTubers and Viners, growing a fan base well beyond 25 million subscribers. But then she stopped uploading. So what happened? That's a smart woman who made a drastic career decision. You'd want to tune into that one. If you're looking for insights on entrepreneurship and creating a powerhouse business, then this is the episode you won't want to miss. Listen to Created wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Kip. If you listen to this podcast, you know how much I love keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology. But very few podcasts actually give you a dose of the future. The A16Z podcast is the exception. It's hosted by our friend and frequent guest Steph Smith. The chart topping show brings on movers with a track record of being both early and right. Like Apple co founder Steve Wozniak, or the CISOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind. Even the very first CTO of the CIA. From the science and the supply of GLP1s to drone delivery to the economics of deepfakes. Go ahead and eavesdrop on the future. Check out the a16z podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ryan Deiss]

This is actually an incredible use case. I'm actually glad you brought this up. This is an incredible use Case for AI, which is like, AI is incredible to take an unstructured data and creating structure from it. The other thing it's really great at, especially Claude's latest model. I was using the previous model for this as well, but their latest model, I've talked about it a lot of times on the pod, is creating these style guides. And so I want to step through this because you actually provided something else I had not thought of, which is testing the style guides on Facebook for impressions. And so what I mean here is AI can take all of your unstructured data, whether that's your customer calls, your customer emails, your support tickets, all of these different things, and actually compose style guides from your customer's language. So it can actually say like, okay, here's a style guide and this is a representation of your customer. And you can basically upload that style guide to get a back and forth dialogue as if that's your customer, which is what you're kind of describing. And it's like, hey, we're going to launch this product. Here's the style guide for our customer. Tell me how you think about the pain points. Tell me how you think you're going to solve that. And so we've kind of started to do some things around that and have been playing around the thing I hadn't thought about, which is, well, then I'll just take the language and ask AI to craft that into language ads, which is basically like, here's some variations of the language from this back and forth dialogue with the AI representation of my customer. I can just go then test that language for my target audience based upon impressions. That's actually a really cool workflow. There's probably actually a really cool product in there. If someone wanted to build that and automate that entire process, because you could just automate the unstructured to structured data. You can automate the creation of the style guide. You can provide someone with an interface to go back and forth and have that conversation, and then you can capture the information and actually craft the ads and then just integrate it with Facebook. So that's actually a pretty good tool. But I think that's a great use case. Because the reason I brought that up is because coming all of the way back to what you said is we're getting back to a place where you have to really nail the message in. And to me, the way you describe that is like the way I think about the art of that, which is you can say something that is in someone else's head, but they are not able to articulate it in that way. There was a really good example recently. Paul Graham wrote an article called Founder Mode and it's gone all over the place. Right. But that's because founders, I think were. Yeah, we have been right in the COVID wave. We've got way too far removed from our business and we actually want to be in the weeds and doing the work. And there's a lot of people felt that way and that gravitated towards that. And this kind of workflow can help you get the insights you need to figure out how to say the unsaid. Like, I was going to follow up to you with like, how do you even teach someone to do that? And I think this is like one of the tools you give someone maybe to get better at it.

We used to spend so much time in research, brainstorming, and that was the gold. Right. How do you discover the hook?

Right.

This was the big aspect of marketing, Right. Like, what's the big idea? Like, this was the whole thing of David Ogilvy. Yeah, right. The whole idea of like you're every marketing. If it's going to succeed, it needs the big idea. What is the big idea? And ultimately what I realized is the big idea can not always. But if you go and look at some of the most compelling and successful advertising hooks, they really do come down to a clear articulation of the prospect's problem. Right. A clear summation, a clear articulation of the problem in their own words. And it can be hard to come up with. But now we have AI doing it for us and then we can leverage meta and other tools to then test it and have the customers, our ideal clients say, like, yep, that was the one before we roll out with it. And still to this day, some of our highest converting Facebook and Instagram ads are literally just ads with a quote, a problem statement in it. We haven't been able to beat it. We tried to pretty them up, we tried to add different images and still the thing that works the best is somebody scrolling down and seeing words on a screen that they go, huh, that's exactly what I was thinking. Yeah, couldn't have said it better myself. It's like they were reading my mind. I think that that ultimately sums up great copy. And I think today what that means is you can be a great copy and a list copywriter, even if you're not a David Ogilvy.

So I read a lot of old school copywriters and there's a guy called Rosser Reeves and he wrote the Eminem ad. And I always think that's like one of the best examples of copywriting, which is they melt in your mouth, not on your hands, because it's just such a great articulation of the value proposal. And that has actually been their strap line since 1956. And it's such a great example of like David Ogarthy's famous one is like the Rolls Royce, right? Like, the only thing you hear, the.

Only thing that you hear is the clock ticking.

Yeah. And if you actually read how he came up with that ad, he read through the technical specifications, and that line was in one of the technical specifications he obviously reworded a little bit, but it was like one of the exact, like, technical specifications that the team put in. So the ability there wasn't to write the line. The ability was to know that was the line. You know what I mean? So, like, being able to, like, pick out the thing that would truly resonate with the audience, I think that is such a hard skill to have or to learn.

Let's linger there for just one second, because I think that this is another important aspect of copywriting, and this really goes back to Eugene Schwartz, who wrote Breakthrough Advertising. I think this is one of the most important aspects, copywriting fundamentals, and that is the levels of awareness. Because at the end of the day, I think so much of great marketing is just walking prospects through the levels of awareness. We talk about the customer journey, which is important, but really the customer journey is just walking people through the levels of awareness. So the first level is unaware. They have no idea that you exist because they don't even know that they have a problem. Then you have problem aware. So they know they have a problem, but they're not yet aware of different solutions. Right. This is somebody like, I got this problem, but I don't know what to do about it. Then you have somebody who's solution aware. So I know there's different solutions solved, but I haven't yet settled on one. Now you got product aware. Right. So I know that there are different products, but I haven't yet settled on a particular product. Now you got most aware. I pretty much know what product I'm going to go with, but I don't know which one. So those are the levels of awareness. So unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware. Understanding as a marketer which level of awareness you're marketing to is really important. The mistake that a lot of marketers make is they market to the wrong level of awareness because they look at big brand advertising and all the examples that you mentioned, they're marketing very often to a product aware, most aware, or very often a solution aware. If you're doing Google advertising and you're doing keyword, that's solution aware, man, Solution aware is a trap. Because it's obvious, Right. I'm willing to bet that some of the highest keywords that you pay for is CRM or marketing automation. Right?

[Kieran Flanagan]

Totally.

[Ryan Deiss]

Because it's freaking obvious.

Yeah.

You sell a CRM, what keyword should we target? I don't know. CRM. Like, that's hard, it's obvious. And so it's expensive. The big open area, the big blue ocean is to go problem aware. People who know they have a problem, but they haven't yet begun to look for solutions. That's why I think if you can connect with people at the problem awareness stage, speak to the problem they have, that's the big opportunity. So all those other examples, they're beautiful and they're glorious and they're sexy, but they're at a level of awareness that most brands don't have the benefit of marketing to yet. And that's why I think a lot of our advertising fails.

It's a great point.

[Kieran Flanagan]

I think most sadly, especially in the startup world, I think they're on the far end of that spectrum. They're either way too vague or they're like, I am just going to assume everybody knows everything and they just need like speeds and feeds and feature function kind of stuff. And the reality is that's not the case. You know, the vast majority of the time, unless you are an extremely established company. Right. That you can live in those later stages a lot of the time.

[Ryan Deiss]

Oh, yeah. You look at homepages for like, it's like a project management tool and they're like, helping humanity thrive. What the hell does that even mean? Like, stop it. Stop it. We have a Google Sheet plugin.

[Kieran Flanagan]

We always had this funny thing internally when we were doing copywriting or we were thinking about positioning or whatever, our founders came up with it. It's hilarious. It's like, could a yoga studio say this? If a yoga studio could say it, it's bad. It's real bad. It's like, just go ahead and cut those right off the top.

[Ryan Deiss]

That is so beautiful.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Like, if this could be a strap line for a yoga studio, it's not good. And that you're copywriting on the project management software made me think of it.

[Ryan Deiss]

Was that Halligan or Dharmesh?

[Kieran Flanagan]

That is a Halliganism right there. I think they're both in the room. I think they were just like frustrated one day and they're like, we're not saying anything a yoga studio could say. And it's because I'm going to say.

[Ryan Deiss]

That again and I want to make sure I can give credit because that is genius.

[Kieran Flanagan]

And it has served us incredibly well. And like so simple maxims like that at the end of the day do work like exceptionally well.

[Ryan Deiss]

Yeah.

[Kieran Flanagan]

And you can go read all the books you talked about, Ryan, and you'll learn a lot. But you need some day to day operating things to just like keep in your head. And I think like those problem statements, working with AI to get them, the yoga studio, those are things that like anybody can easily keep in mind. I think my kind of next question around this is I want to make sure we finish the story around those problem statement ads because our audience loves the details. And so if somebody's scrolling through Instagram, they get one of those product statement ads, how are you delivering the value and like finishing that story on the landing page? Because I imagine a lot of people are like, oh cool, I'll go do all of that. And then they'll get to the landing page part and be like, oh, well, what do I tell them now all they know about me is this problem statement.

[Ryan Deiss]

Yeah. So during the test, during the problem statement test, which is only going to run for a couple of days, we will just send it to a piece of content. Yeah, we're not trying to monetize it. I'm just looking for data. And so I do want to make sure that if somebody clicks on it that we value their time. They took the time to read it, they took the time to click on it. We want to make sure that if they click on it, wherever they go, it's, you know, it's valuable. So we'll send it to a blog post even if it's not on our own site. Because I truly don't care at that point about monetizing it. I just want the click data. So we're running impression based tests. It's going to run for two to four days. We're going to spend tens of dollars on this. Okay. It is just, it's not that much money. You don't need to let it go that long to reach some degree of statistical significance. We're typically going to run 20 to 30 variations and you're going to have one or two that will be just head and shoulders above the others, just every time we've done it. And so you're going to get statistical significance fairly quickly. Now, once you know which problem is the strongest. Now, okay, what do we do with this? So we've got the problem statement. Now this can absolutely inform top of funnel content that we should be producing. It can inform middle of funnel lead magnets. Do we have anything around this? That problem statement? It's become the headline on the landing page verbatim. So we've kind of spruced up the ad to where that has become the copy in the ad and then it's let's carry that same copy over to the landing page and make sure that we deliver on it. But the question we ask is, okay, if somebody has this problem, what do we offer on our end that would solve this problem? And if we don't offer it, if we don't have a solution to somebody who has this problem within our suite of products and services, boy, we better make sure that we get that. Because clearly for our ideal client, this is their core problem and yet we're not solving it. Well, maybe that's why we're not growing as fast as we should. So sometimes it can even inform your product improvement and enhancement what happens there. So that is the tip of the spear where everything else downflow is going to come from that. So landing page, copy, content, top of funnel, middle of funnel, everything down the road.

I just want to be really clear about what you're doing there because I think it's super interesting. So a lot of marketers and businesses will start with a solution that they then try to advertise, which is I have an offer or I have something and now I'm going to go advertise it. But what you do is you run ads to begin with to actually figure out the problems that are applicable to your audience and then you use those problems to go and actually create things for them. And then do you just go re advertise to them again using the same ads or like a spruced up version of that ad, but now you actually have something to drive them towards.

Yeah, and I'll give you an example. So one of our companies is the scalable company. And so we help businesses systemize, operationalize. And it's for kind of small to medium sized companies. That's what we do. And what we thought was that we really should lead with growth. Like let's lead talking about marketing because we're pretty good at marketing. That's kind of our history. People who know us, know us from like the digital marketer world. So let's lead talking about marketing and we Were really struggling. The people who were coming in wanting to hear about marketing, we were struggling to ascend them into anything on systems. And so we were testing things that were related to, okay, let us help you optimize your expenses. And so just nothing we were doing was working, candidly. It just wasn't working, it was sucking. And we were like, had been doing this for 12 months. So we were like, let's run one of these problem statement tests. The one that won was no one in my business knows the metrics that matter but me. And I was like, that's weird. But that's what our ideal client, you know, CEO running a four to $20 million business was most. Frustrated at the fact that no one else in the company knew the metrics that actually mattered. So we're like, well, do we have anything that we offer our clients that would solve for this? Yeah, we've got this company scorecard. It's literally just a Google sheet that we teach them like how to figure out the metrics to go on there. It's like, okay, let's offer this as a lead magnet overnight. The lowest cost per leads and the highest post opt in conversion rates of anything else that we saw. That has been our control lead generator now for the last 18 months and we've not been able to beat it running that same thing. Frustrated that nobody in your company understands the metrics that matter. You know, and it's just speaking like, yes, I am. Because what we found is that that for our ideal person, that's the problem that matters the most to them. And what is it at the end? It is a spreadsheet where they're just figuring out their metrics. It's as boring as I'll get out. I never in a million years of all the stuff that we did, I would have had it somewhere near the bottom in terms of sexiness factor. And yet the only marketing genius is the customer. And so we're just going to let them decide Because I fashion myself as a pretty good marketer who's usually pretty good at coming up with the hook. Did not see that one coming. And so fortunately we had it. But it's not one that I would have picked. And it came as a result of running a problem statement test. That one, by the way, came out of. ChatGPT recommended that one that wasn't even in our research. And I remember thinking, this is stupid. Okay, we'll throw it in the desk. It won. Okay, let's try it. It continued to win and to this day it has Persisted. So yeah, it begins to inform everything else. And look, it makes sense we all say this, right? Don't start from your product and then figure out how to sell it. Start from the customer and work backwards. That's exactly what we're doing with this type of testing.

Yeah, it's kind of to come full circle of that because I know we're going to start to need to wrap. But it sounds like we started with copyright and copyright and we're back to copyright. And copyright is an essential tool, but maybe the copywriter today has just way more tools at their disposable to be much better at their art. Like you're describing, the ability to use AI, the ability to use meta as a testing platform. Like you have access to the world to be able to like target and test things before you ever have to even start to craft the copy. So would your kind of summary for a marketer lesson be like, copy is still one of the core skills you can learn, but the approach to it should be modernized. Right. Like you can use the age old, timeless lessons from the people we've mentioned, but there's a whole skill set in how you actually do that. In terms of the research, in terms of the testing that has kind of been modernized.

You still have to have a big idea, you still have to have a hook that works. Copy still reign supreme. Right. When you can no longer target through the traditional targeting means that we had from the back end, then the only way that you have to target is through messaging. Right? And yet the tool that we now have that we didn't have before is advertising, testing and AI. And so now I don't have to be a genius. And what I think is also important is to say is I don't have to get lucky. When I go back and look, there are some campaigns that I ran, there's some ads that I did that I got lucky. They worked the first time. And if it hadn't worked the first time, I don't know that I had another plan B. I don't know that I had another idea in my back pocket. And so if it hadn't worked, I don't know that I would have kept going. And I think that there are a lot of businesses out there, a lot of entrepreneurs out there, a lot of marketers out there who they run out of ideas. You know, the product isn't done yet, they're just out of ideas. And yet now we have these tools that they've got way more ideas than we do. And so we can just keep going to them again and again and again. And they're just there serving us up with idea after idea after idea. So you don't have to be a genius anymore and you don't have to be lucky. You just have to know how to use these tools, go out there and roll them out, and eventually they're going to get lucky for you. And I think that that's a pretty, pretty cool new world that we get to live in.

It's a great time to be a marketer, except for AI displacing all of the ways we used to acquire demand.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Kieran. Kieran. Kieran. I gotta end on a positive note, but because what I think the whole theme of today's show is that it's never been easier to take a lot of the guesswork out of marketing.

[Kip Bodnar]

Right?

[Kieran Flanagan]

Marketer's job is to guess what the customer wants and positioning it in the way they want. And I think we just heard a masterclass from Ryan around how to do that that is going to be super applicable to any business that you're running or you're starting, if you're listening or watching today's show. And, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us on today's show. It was an awesome episode and we can't wait to have you back on again in the future.

[Ryan Deiss]

Yeah, it was fun, guys. Thanks so much.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Thank you.