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- [00:00]
A
It's been a minute.
- [00:01]
B
Welcome back.
- [00:01]
A
It's such a miss for Indeed honestly or LinkedIn to not go to this guy and try to buy this and it be a LinkedIn show.
- [00:07]
B
Content has eaten the marketing department.
- [00:10]
A
I want to be the resource of information because usually the person that has the resource has the answers and those answers are your products. Right. That's a bar clip that.
- [00:17]
B
If there was one thing that turned me off about people's perception of organic content the most, it's that organic content never lies.
- [00:24]
A
The follow along journey has changed a lot in the last year, but I still actually think it's one of the best, best ways to grow on Social.
- [00:30]
B
You're social growth engine should be probably one of the highest paid people on your team.
- [00:35]
A
One of the larger predictions for 2026 to win on social is it's been a me.
- [00:41]
B
Welcome back.
- [00:42]
A
Welcome back. I mean you. We both did our own and had our own crazy summer and. Very different though.
- [00:50]
B
Yeah, much different.
- [00:51]
A
I was on a production.
- [00:53]
B
You brought your kid producing. Yeah. You know, look, it's, it's important to unwind a little bit every now and then. But yeah, I mean, it's good to be back in Austin, I think. You know, for the audience at least. Like we're trying to turn this podcast up 20 times.
- [01:10]
A
Yeah.
- [01:11]
B
So finally we can actually do that. Lock in. It's a lot easier when, you know, we're talking to each other rather than scrambling to hit like a solo pod. Like two days before.
- [01:21]
A
The solar pod is not fun to record.
- [01:23]
B
It's not fun.
- [01:23]
A
It's not fun to record at all.
- [01:25]
B
I'll be trying to make jokes and you know, there's no reaction.
- [01:28]
A
Right.
- [01:29]
B
There's nothing there.
- [01:30]
A
Moving on, next topic. Yeah.
- [01:31]
B
And it's actually like, it's such a risk because if you make a joke on a solo, like you don't know until someone's like, yo, that commented like 13 minutes. It was kind of funny. And if you don't get one of those, which, you know, last episode, I'm gonna come. I'm come clean. No one said anything. No, no, no, love.
- [01:48]
A
One minute, Mark.
- [01:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, I'll get you.
- [01:50]
A
I'll go from the burner account.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, I, I got several. All right. What are you talking about, Seth?
- [01:54]
A
Cool. So we're gonna start talking about how to win on social in before that. A lot of the calls that I'm having currently are already. They're already looking at Q1 of next year. You know, they obviously want to Finish strong in Q4. But they're thinking of Q4 as the testing grounds to then go all in on Organic in 2026. And so it's, it's a very interesting lens to kind of see everything through. So the main things I'm going to be talking about is, hey, how can you use Q4 to position you in, into a good place for Q1 of 2026? And then three predictions and not even predictions. It's. Look, there's. We work with a good amount of brands. The brands that are absolutely crushing are looking at social through this lens and we're helping them understand it through this lens and they're preparing to operate like this. Yeah, the brands that aren't, they're still following and trying to follow and catch up to the brands that are doing things well and they're always going to play from behind. And so looking, the main three things that I'm going to be talking about are, is one brand as TV channels. Not anymore. Thinking about social shows. Yes, social shows are still very relevant to this conversation, but it's actually thinking of about it as a TV channel, a TV network, et cetera. The second is how the content funnel now replaces the marketing funnel. And what the marketing funnel is 2.0.
- [03:16]
B
I hit that tweet the other day. You saw that? No, I was like content has eaten the marketing department.
- [03:21]
A
Oh, maybe we talked about that on an episode.
- [03:23]
B
I think it's unbelievable how the brands that understand this feel modern and then the ones that don't, they. It like doesn't even compute. You know what I'm saying? But ultimately, like, I think what needs to shift in people's heads is the understanding of like where attention is being spent. Like it's, it's either on phones or, or on YouTube. On TV there the amount of people that are on linear TV looking at billboards like out of office activations, like the magnitude that you can reach when you are actually investing in social inorganic is probably like 10x what you can do elsewhere. And that's probably been a post Covid shift, I think. And it's just, it's crazy to me because people are so obsessed with like a 2.5x ROAS or you know, whatever it may be, right? And it's like bro, your roas I guarantee will continue to increase either every year or every next level of scale, right? There's always going to be diminishing returns to your ad spend on the other side of things. Imagine if you put that money into brand inorganic. There's not diminishing returns when you're investing into your relationship with your customers and your audience, so.
- [04:34]
A
And everything else performs better, which we'll get into. But like legitimately, everything else performs better. The last one that I'm. I don't know which one I want to talk about either. A, it's the evolution of like the Come along this Journey With Me series. Right. So it's like, hey, this is day one of doing X until Y. There's a lot it used. You used to just be able to say, hey, this is day one of doing X and succeed. Now there's actual frameworks for what, for how you should position that series. And you have to make it so much more specific.
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B
Right.
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A
You and I talked about this actually probably eight months ago because we were brainstorming a series for me right in we were talking about day one of building an agency. It's like, oh, that's not good enough. Like it would have to be day one of doing X as a dad of a newborn or depending on time. And this is a smaller segment but like brands owning PR distribution. And I think you're going to see more brands that will look at something like Outlander magazine and go build a small robust team that's like, hey, a few graphic designers and like someone just publishing content and they could build their own, you know, Outlander magazine that any drop that they have, they can make relevant through pr. And I think that's.
- [05:47]
B
Well, it's funny you call it Outlander magazine. Right. Because is it. But, but it's replaced like a complex. Yeah. You know, and so like, I don't know. I don't know. Does Outlander have a print extension that I don't know. I don't think they do. And so like there's literally nothing keeping, you know, a brand from building their own industry specific entity. You know, like all you gotta do is just invest in it and the cost benefit of that, maybe like 5, 10k a month, but all of a sudden you have more distribution. Yeah.
- [06:18]
A
So what you got though?
- [06:21]
B
The only thing that I want to cover is just how to like use social to activate in retail. So I. The biggest trend that I've seen over the last like two, two years of building an agency is that the healthiest businesses have predictable wholesale revenue and they can invest in brand marketing that benefits their foot traffic and retail. Don't get me wrong, I know a lot of our listeners are in the early stages of things, so I'll touch a little bit on like how you can use this strategy to also, you know, Just generate community and generate foot traffic in your local area. Because there's the same principles that apply to this, like you could do at a farmer's market, for example. You don't have to do, you know, necessarily at like Target or Walmart, but if you can build a creator community that is able to activate around marketing moments, the spillover of that initiative into real life is one of the most powerful things that a brand has access to. You know, we, we've launched, this is now our third product launch coming up for our brand. Salud. And every single time that we activate their creator community, we have around 600 creators post three videos to five videos each within three days of launch. So we're posting like 1800 to 2500 videos within three days of launch. Yeah. What do you think that's doing to the in store foot traffic or you know, the awareness around this product? And it's like if you can take that and then, you know, most big brands, for example, they'll have like a end cap or they'll have like a seasonal, you know, flavor like Groons just launched, like a new green apple flavor. And the downstream of what we're building for them is like they will be able to have 1800 people say the green apple flavor like run, don't walk to Target.
- [08:10]
A
Yeah.
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B
You know, like run don't walk to go get the new green apple flavor. Oh my God. I'm going to review it right now. So just going to talk about how to build that out, but I want to let you go first.
- [08:18]
A
Cool, let's run it. So one of the larger predictions for 2026 to win on social is brands acting as TV channels. This past year, you and I talked a lot about brands starting their own social shows. Right. They come up with a concept, they have a format that's theirs, that they own, that's unique and they created in an episodic series. I think that's, that's one that's amazing, is an amazing playbook. But how do we look ahead of, hey, what is no other brands doing? Or what are brands going to be doing? Or what are a small majority of brands doing that that are winning? And so that idea is thinking of your brand as a TV channel. Meaning imagine your tnt, your TV network, your TV channel, like you are tnt. What are all the things that are going to be under my umbrella as.
- [09:02]
B
A, as a TV channel, like Die Hard, maybe like some wrestling, NBA, which.
- [09:08]
A
Is like you got Fear Factor, that was maybe Spike tv. But like you have Fear Factor, you have xyz and these are all things that you own under your entity. And so when we think about a brand, we think about the social shows. It's like the social show is now one layer. And you want to figure out, okay, if my content pillars are education around X and entertainment around Y and information around Z, you want to then be thinking about through the lens of how can I create a show for this content pillar and then scale it to the point where you have show accounts. A brand that's been doing this, honestly for a long time is. Is any eats. We've talked about them in the past, but they're kind of one of the first brands that are like, they had something that worked really well and they turned it into its own page so that they can publish a whole episode, like an entire episode, every single day without flooding their main account and then having like the hits collab with their main account if. If needed. And so, you know, I literally had a conversation today about this where your main account, it. It's not to say that it shouldn't have those episodes. You should just be collabing or testing on the main account and using that main account as the testing ground or as the grounds for this is the episode that's going to pop or this is the episode that popped. And so therefore I'll bring it to feed. And so again, the way I'm thinking about is like, you have main account, you have show accounts, and then you test on the main. Or you could also test on trial reels. This depends on. On how good your team is and how fast your team can execute. Where you can test a lot of series and a lot of show ideas on as trial reels and then be able to publish quickly. Not most team. Most teams aren't built to be that robust. Like, that's the reality of it. So that's something that if you have the potential to do that and you have a team that can edit that fast and edit at that scale, do it. Now, I want to go through some examples of brands that I think are doing this and can do this. So we already talked about Emmy Eats and Ramen on the Street. That's a great example. If you want to say, hey, who should I pay attention to? And who's doing this very well, it is them. Now, the thing that's super interesting about that as well is like, let's say you have five shows and five different accounts and they're all producing say, 3 million views a month, right? Because you're publishing an episode every single Every single day on those accounts, obviously that's gonna, that's gonna cost a decent amount. But the idea there is even to start thinking in sets. Think about, okay, if I just had this table and I just had this one setting here, what can I create here forever? That's how you need to be thinking about these so that you can bring the production cost down. So imagine though, as a performance marketer, right, as someone who's running Meta, imagine I have five different accounts producing 15 million views across those five accounts every single month.
- [11:54]
B
Yeah.
- [11:55]
A
Doing all that top of funnel work that you need on. On Meta's side done for you organically going back to what you were saying on the return on ad spend.
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B
Yeah, of course.
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A
Do we even need to go. When you're down this conversation and you're.
- [12:09]
B
Peeling off, at that point, you're peeling off 40k a month maybe to run five accounts. Right. Probably call it something like that.
- [12:16]
A
40, 50.
- [12:17]
B
And okay, so if you're a brand spending $500,000 and you're like, okay, well, how can I, you know, make that $500,000 more efficient? Sometimes the answer is spending at a more efficient level, going down to 450. And, you know, so many of these folks are in crowded categories. Like, I always go back to, you know, like creatine, electrolytes, whatever, or coffee. You know, I was just thinking while you were talking about this, like, imagine you're a coffee brand. Like, I actually there was a guy, I met him in the sauna at Collective. So obviously he pitched me a startup. He was saying that he is launching some sort of like, Matcha with collagen. Right. And he has a clear target avatar. He wants to do young moms who want to grow a booty. And so he's calling the brand milf. Right. I think it's Mom's in legendary form. Yeah. Anyways, as crazy as that is, it's on it too. That's great. Yeah, bro. Yeah, yeah. I had a. I had shorts on, though. Like, you know what I'm saying? Sometimes you're in the. You got the towel. I had shorts on, for whatever it's worth. Anyways, so mom's in legendary form. So how would he potentially do this? Right? Well, there's so many different social shows that he could make for these moms that are adding value. Like talking about the struggles of young motherhood, like, in a relatable way. Like, think about like a Dear media podcast, right? Where they're just talking about, like, you know, postpartum challenges. All this different stuff or like you know, but it could get as granular as like raiding Pilates studios around Austin. You know, like just add value, just understand like what your target demo wants, which like you should understand pretty well like what are their interests and then layer it in, you know, reviewing the top places to get a hot mantra in Austin, like that simple and go.
- [14:17]
A
Back to the number you threw out. So like let's say we are getting 15 million impressions every single, every single month and you're charging 50k for that is a $3 cpm.
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B
Yeah.
- [14:28]
A
Like on Meta. To get in front of that many people. What was that CPM? Probably 10, $12.
- [14:33]
B
I mean no more rare. It's pretty rare.
- [14:36]
A
Lower end.
- [14:37]
B
Yeah, it's pretty rare for a brand that's spending on a conversion focused campaign to have CPMs under like 25 bucks these days. I mean to be fair it's, it's those are converting so like the corresponding boost does need to be like a 10 or $5 cpm.
- [14:51]
A
But like even for like a print awareness campaign, what would the CPM probably be?
- [14:55]
B
If you're running an awareness campaign and you know, you should already reallocate that budget anyway, I'm saying yeah, probably what, probably like eight. Yeah. Five, five to 10. Yeah. So I mean, but again it's like would you rather run an awareness campaign and bought your views or would you rather find messaging that actually resonates with people? I truly that if there was one thing that turned me off about people's perception of organic content the most, it's that organic content never lies. Right. You can, you can get boded with an awareness campaign and your traffic to your site is just literally all like you know, robots. Right. It's not real people. If you have a video that hits, it's never an accident. Like literally never an accident. It means people were interested in that piece of content and that is a message that your brand can then broadcast over and over and over again to people. It's invaluable.
- [15:47]
A
And you always know when people bought their organic as well because you'll see say 5,000 views, a thousand 1200 likes and like zero shares. Or.
- [15:56]
B
Yeah. Or they have a, or I mean they have a 40000 follower account and they hide the likes on their posts. Yeah, right. It's like why'd you hide the likes and you got two comments. Yeah. Are you capping, you know into your burners? Yeah. So you know, it's like it's an investment and it's a long term decision but at the same time, like, you know, delayed gratification is kind of the thing that's in the way of everything good in life.
- [16:22]
A
So what I want to do is I want to give some ideas for brands that kind of put this into perspective. And I'm going to use. Some are boring brands, some are not. But another good example is Drive by Kindness by La La Land Cafe.
- [16:36]
B
Right.
- [16:36]
A
Of course, that's an one that we've talked about before. So I'm not going to dive deep into that one. If you haven't seen it, go see it. But then I did, I did some imaginary ones. So. Have you ever watched Career Ladder?
- [16:48]
B
No.
- [16:48]
A
Oh, you should check this out.
- [16:49]
B
Okay.
- [16:50]
A
Career Ladder is probably one of the most interesting social shows that I've, I've ever watched. It's not. But it's not done or used or owned by a brand. Right. It's this random guy and he will be in the middle of a street and he just puts a ladder and people that he. Essentially his goal is to try to guess what somebody's job is. Oh, I have seen this. It's so good. It's so good. Because you know what you're going to expect. There's a similar whatever. But imagine if this was owned by Indeed or LinkedIn. Right, exactly. Owned by LinkedIn. Owned by Indeed. People that are in the job market that associate and you know this gets 20 million views, probably a hundred million views plus a month. Indeed. Owning that distribution and owning that like net and ecosystem of people is so valuable. Yeah, ridiculously valuable. And it's such a risk for Indeed, honestly or LinkedIn to not go to this guy and try to buy this and it be a LinkedIn show like it should 100% be a LinkedIn show. Another one like imagine Hexclad had a recipes with, you know, just a separate page that was just purely recipes with, with Gordon. Yeah, right. That was 20 minute recipes but shown in 20 seconds or 30 seconds. It's such an easy concept to do and you could do it on autopilot. You have one set. That's the other thing I, I meant to say it's like you have to think in sets, sets of hey, I have this 10 foot square radius, like this 10 foot radius that I need to build a show in for Gordon Ramsey in, in hexcloud. That's obviously a kitchen and that's super easy and everybody. And that's going to get tens of millions impressions every single, every single month for them with Indeed same thing. I have this ladder. I Just need to be in a street. And that is my set. Bass pro shop. What if they did $1 lure versus $25 lure, $20 reel versus 2200 reel?
- [18:35]
B
You know, you know, shout out to Patty Galloway real quick because he's doing this with the Philadelphia Eagles right now. Did you see that?
- [18:43]
A
No.
- [18:44]
B
It's so sick. So he just took on the Eagles as a client and they're doing YouTube shows where, you know how the Eagles kind of have a very charismatic offensive line. It like used to be Jason Kelce and now it's like this New Zealand dude, I think Jordan Malada or something. So it's like NFL. It's like modern NFL players reviewing 1920s football equipment. Is. Is the. Is the one that he just dropped and on YouTube? Yeah, yeah.
- [19:11]
A
And so is it popping?
- [19:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's like 500,000 views. Sick. So I mean, you know, what are we talking about here, right? I think what we're talking about is the beginning of a completely seismic shift of investment dollars from traditional advertising towards content and social media. And if you are watching this podcast, like this is at the level not the. It's not at the same level as the AI thing, don't get me wrong, but I do think people underestimate that there's around 100 to $150 billion being spent on traditional means. And I'm not even capping about that number. That's like TV advertising plus billboards, plus a lot of different shit that will be flooding into the ability to earn eyeballs rather than pay to get in front of people on tv. And so, you know, if you're building an agency, right, it's like, imagine if you become someone who could turn the latter idea into life for someone like LinkedIn, right? Or something like this for the Eagles where it's like, you know, that's a great idea. I think, honestly, like, Patty's really good at what he does, but, you know, this is something that a listener certainly could have kind of thought about, right? 100 to your point about, you know, is. Is the video working? I mean, it's definitely an outlier. You know, it's. Most of their videos are getting around like 200,000, like 195, 47. Right. And those are kind of like the traditional. Right? It's like Jalen hurts most Insane throws All Access players miked up and then they have this, you know, Eagles react to 100 year old NFL equipment. 500,000 plus Evergreen. It's not training camp. All Access mic'd up. It's not gonna go away. It's not irrelevant in two weeks, which is probably 95% of like enterprise social content is like current event based. This is an evergreen piece of content that's gonna print views for the next two years.
- [21:11]
A
My thing with this too is look at you. And I have been talking about this so much about we need to improve our packaging. We need to improve our packaging. This thumbnail so stands out so much more so good than every other thumbnail. Like, I want to click it and I, when I get home, I will watch this video. But I also want to like you guys to see it's just shot on like a counter in front of a green screen. That's all it is.
- [21:36]
B
Like, it's contrast, right? I mean it's contradiction contrast, you know, cleared. Like everything is just very like clear when you read it. I think that that's another thing that is just, it's simple. But the. Brian Dawkins reacts to his hardest hits. I got to ask Patty if that's him.
- [21:53]
A
I know, I'm curious if that is him because it's the same exact, like, headline. You know what I'm saying? Brian Dawkins reacts. The hardest hits Eagles react to 100 year old NFL equipment.
- [22:02]
B
Yeah, that one's one that a social team, like, theoretically would do. And I think sports social teams are actually really good at like creating content. That, that is one area where this is not necessarily as deficient.
- [22:14]
A
But Patty's also an outlier. He's the best of the best in this, you know, in this.
- [22:18]
B
Totally, totally.
- [22:20]
A
Okay, cool. So the next one that I, that you and I are both very passionate about is the idea of the content funnel replacing marketing funnel 1.0. Marketing funnel 1.0 was awareness, consideration, conversion, and like a very linear path to getting an action done. And now when I think about the content funnel, and I want to give an analogy here, but when I think about the content funnel, I think it's. There's the marketing funnel 2.0, and I think the content funnel informs everything going on in the marketing funnel 2.0. Marketing funnel 2.0, through my eyes, is removing all silos and everything being built off of organic or being built off of like what you're doing as an organization through organic content. So that whether that's working with like you said, 600 creators when something launches and then building everything off of that, that is more so what I need for. We. We've talked about the content funnel in the past, but I've sat down and I've tried to like put this into a framework for, for people to, to truly understand the, the nuance differences between top of funnel content, middle funnel content and bottom funnel content. And so hopefully this analogy helps think about the content funnel through the lens of phishing. There's different levels to fishing. There's commercial fishing. When you, when you go commercial fishing or you do commercial fishing, you're catching thousands, tens of thousands of fish. You're putting this ginormous net, putting as much bait as possible, or chumming the water and catching all that fish and you just, you're just getting them all in the boat and you're selling them. Right.
- [23:56]
B
Like you kind of look like you, you'd go fishing right now.
- [23:58]
A
Right now. Right this, with this.
- [23:59]
B
Yeah. Depending on the pants is the trousers. Because you're, you're like a guy who's got olive oil skin vibes. You know what I'm saying?
- [24:08]
A
Yeah.
- [24:08]
B
And. But you're still covering up, you know, because you got respect for the sun. Right. Like that's a fisherman's vibe.
- [24:14]
A
Like SPF lotion and yeah. Because of this thing right here, bro, I have a feeling this is not good. I gotta go get this shots. It's grown. I've been hunting my entire life and it's grown.
- [24:24]
B
We'll keep tabs on that. We'll update you on the December episode Sweat Equity.
- [24:28]
A
Yo. Some. Somebody commented my post and said, bro, you got fly in your face. Damn.
- [24:36]
B
That's crazy. That's actually insane. Dude.
- [24:40]
A
I lost.
- [24:42]
B
I was laughing type of shit. Only an Instagram hater can.
- [24:44]
A
Yeah, bro, you know, point of saying.
- [24:47]
B
That, but that was just wildly disrespectful.
- [24:49]
A
It was so funny. So think of top of funnel content though as commercial fishing. It's your ability to cast a. The widest and largest net possible to reach and get as many people into that net and into your ecosystem as possible. Right. Middle of the funnel. It's a cast net. It's a seven foot net. Maybe it's a ten foot net depending the category that you're in. And the net is a lot smaller.
- [25:12]
B
Yeah.
- [25:12]
A
You go from catching tens of thousands of fish to 50 million fish. So if I'm a brand that, that sells running gels, my top of funnel content could be very general for everyone that runs. But not everyone that runs is going to need gels. And so you have to be able to look at that large, large group of fish and be able to say, well, a very small portion of that. Are they going, the people that are going to be running marathons and are also going to need gels because they take it that serious. Right. And then your bottom of the funnel is a rotten real. It's almost more of a one on one conversation. It's more of a one on one basis. Yes, you're doing it at scale, but it's probably the person that needs to know exactly how to if again, if we're going with, with running, it's a person that wants to know exactly what they should be eating seven days out, 24 hours out, exactly how much stuff they sweat and they do a sweat test. And like that is bottom of the funnel if we're talking about like a performance athlete. And so you have to understand that there is going to be content that is commercial fishing.
- [26:15]
B
Yeah.
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A
It is as wide as possible. It's as many people as possible. It's as many fish as possible. I'm trying to get as many fish as possible. Then you're going to work down that funnel. And working down that funnel is you with a cast net. Your cast net might be 6ft, it might be 10ft. Right. Depending on the category. And then as you go deeper it is and you're the one really landing the action. Here it is rod and reeled. Now how this transforms and kind of informs the marketing funnel 2.0 is the idea of your organic content. If we look at a tree is the roots, it is what everything grows off of and without it, the, the tree is dead. Because I can make content today, publish today, make a lot better decisions tomorrow. Right. So for a performance team, we shouldn't look at it as it being completely siloed. We should look at it as, hey, the roots of the performance team is organic content. It's not another tree growing separately, which in many cases it is. Most organizations, they don't talk to each other. No, it's like performance teams. Over here, that's one tree. Organic is over here, that's another tree.
- [27:26]
B
Which plays into the shift that we've talked about quite a bit. But that social used to be this silly thing that you just pawned off to a 70k a year, you know, social media manager. And now OpenAI is hiring content strategists for 400k a year. There is been a complete shift in how attention is earned. And now it's like your social growth engineer should be probably one of the highest paid people on your team. Like they should have the most resources, they should have the best budget because of what you're talking about and the fact that that's been siloed and disconnected from performance was probably the right move in 2018. But I mean if you're still doing that now, which dude. I'm talking to a lot of enterprise brands right now that they're like, how is this going to affect our Amazon? I'm like, I don't know, probably more branded search. You're going to raise the overall awareness of the entire category and you have an opportunity to actually speak to people about your solution when your competitors don't want to speak at all. So I wonder if they see your product next to another one and they've heard about yours on TikTok or on Instagram, which one they're going to choose. And that was always understood like 5 touch points till purchase, you know. And then now it's like for some reason people disregard social as the way to do that. But it's turned into a complete performance marketing line item and not everyone gets that yet.
- [28:53]
A
The thing that I think is going to shift too is so if we look at the content funnel, we look at kind of what I was just saying, right? If, if we think of top. If we're going back with a running brand and we look at a top of funnel piece being like, remember that tracksmith campaign we talked about a long time ago, the year of the amateur? It was like single shot vignettes. It was like this girl running in the cold, her face is all icy. Do you remember that by any chance? Like it totally thought or even like, you know what supplements you should take while you're training for a marathon? Like that being top of funnel content. Then middle of funnel content being like how do you the difference between like daily runners and race day shoes and then bottom of the funnel being very deep and granular into like education of exactly how much sodium you should take during a marathon. Right.
- [29:42]
B
Why? Why? Why? The extra cushion.
- [29:45]
A
Yeah.
- [29:45]
B
On the soul allows you to last longer.
- [29:48]
A
Exactly. Now where I think it's interesting and we've been doing some tests with some brands that like working with their email and SMS teams is a lot of their top of funnel content they've been publishing as an introducing as email series. Right. So like anything that's if we're doing a. If you know, they put together a nutrition guide. The nutrition guide every Monday is getting published as like a purely educational pizza. It's not like focused on trying to drive a significant amount of clicks. Right. It's not that that doesn't matter, but it's more so I want to be the resource of information because Usually the person that has the resource has the answers and those answers are your products. Right. That's a bard clip that. But. And so thinking through that lens on, okay, what is the social team doing? Why are they cooking up what they're cooking up? And then how can I take everything that they're cooking up that's working and use it here? Right? Scale it. Let me scale that, that series into, into, into this email series that we're going to put out every Monday. And then as your shows rotate or as your series rotate, we also rotate what we're doing in email. And for sms, like, we did something interesting for Cherry where we created an email that was for summer, but it was just a summer playlist, you know what I mean? And we just wanted people to, to listen to the music, but it set the tone for the campaign. Right. And so things like that, that have nothing to do with conversion but have everything to do with brand affect, the things that you're going to do down the road. Versus I was on another call with a brand where I was trying to pitch them on. They had a YouTube video that went absolutely nuclear, right? Where long story short, somebody ran around like on a navy ship or something like that, like an entire marathon. I was like, that needs to be like an email story, right? Like purely top of funnel email story. Just kind of more brand about the actual. What you guys stand for as a brand and people that, that take the product and they were like, oh, that's, that's precious email real estate. Like, if we're sending emails, we have to set, like it has to drive money, you know, and it's just such a old way of thinking, bro. It's so frustrating because you're never going to get through to a person like that.
- [31:57]
B
Oh.
- [31:57]
A
Ever.
- [31:59]
B
They actually think people are. Wow.
- [32:02]
A
So it's, it's interesting.
- [32:04]
B
Email attribution is a scam. I'm, I'm a. I'm gonna come out. Email marketing agencies, y' all are capping. Klaviyo, you are massively capping to the point to the tune of $14 million. Klaviyo's capping? Yeah. I mean, it's like, okay, I, I open an email and then I buy three days later, even though the email didn't influence me. Is that attribution? And then someone will be like, well, I can't send. And so I can't send actual value to my audience. God forbid.
- [32:32]
A
Crazy. So what to take from this that I think that you can use and you can get ahead of is in Q4, build your operations and your workflows for organic the organic team to thoroughly, thoroughly work with every other team, department and channel within your performance team, within your marketing team. Organic should be talking to your retail team. Organic should be talking to your email and your SMS team. When your SMS agencies, etc. Like that is the nucleus of performance. And if you're neglecting that, you're going to be set up for failure going into 2024. If you want to be ahead of the curve and you, you want all your brand touch points to matter, you don't. You're not just thinking about can I get seven brand touch points? Before someone purchases, you want them to tell a cohesive story and influence the perception of your brand. Then you have to think about and build the workflows that help those touch points create some sense of idea of, of what you sell, who you are, why you do it. All of that across the different channels.
- [33:36]
B
Yeah. 100p.
- [33:38]
A
I'll be quick with this last one. So the follow along journey, like kind of series has changed a lot, right? Like in the last, again in the last year. But I still actually think it's one of the best, best ways to grow on social to have some kind of journey, to have something that people want to follow along and they feel like they're part of. Now what I think has happened, it's gotten more formulaic and it's had to where there's actual things that you shouldn't like you should be able to take your story and plug it into this headline and use that headline to be able to do it. And the reality is like it's just gotten more and more specific or it's gotten more and more gamified. It's had to. And so I've kind of have this series or this segment called the Come along the Come along this Journey with Me series Evolution. So in this it's like if you're trying to grow as fast as possible on social and build a loyal audience during the same time, you need to be thinking about Come along this journey with me content. Now the evolution of that is how you do this 2.0 before everybody starts doing this and everybody's starting to do it already. So the first one is I'm going to do X until I reach X. And so I'm going to send you a link. But I've been turning this one guy is documenting and he's like basically sharing or has a goal of selling a billion bricks. He like creates record players out of like Lego Bricks. Right. And so his whole series is getting people to follow along as he tries to hit and sell a million bricks. He's on episode 16 already and he's grown to 18, 000 followers off of 18 episodes. And the reality is he's had like a few episodes have absolutely gone nuclear. Episode five has 71, 000 likes. Right. So probably, you know, one to two million views on that. That's formula one. Formula two is watch me do X in X or watch me do X in Y time frame. So this guy actually, you probably actually like this series. This is day one of me going from unemployed to full time golfer in 90 days.
- [35:51]
B
Yeah.
- [35:52]
A
And it's a six series. It's a great follow along series where like he has a goal and he's setting a, essentially an expiration date for that goal. I have 90 days to essentially go from this unemployed guy to this full time golfer. And every single day I'm going to document that journey.
- [36:09]
B
Care about.
- [36:09]
A
Chances are too, like you're gonna have, you're gonna publish 90 episodes. Five to 10 are gonna go nuclear. Those five to 10 that are gonna go nuclear are gonna cause every other piece to rise with it. They're not gonna go crazy, but they're gonna rise with it. And so that's another one if you're trying to do a specific thing in a specific time frame or else that's a really, really good hook and a really good formula of time to go all the next. I don't know if you've seen this one. This one is so funny. Deer Island Golf. It is. I'm throwing a beer at my boss's face until he guesses which beer it is. Dude. Oh my gosh. It's 31. It says 785,000 likes on it. So I mean, who knows how many views. Probably 10 to 20. Yeah. In that ballpark. Like I just sent it to you, bro. And it is the easiest thing. Has the same characters, it has the same set. Like it's always taking place at the, at their golf course or in, in front of the, the up and the lady just. Or the girl just like says the hook gets the beer, bro. Chucks it, smacks him in the face. He like kind of reacts, licks his lips and he guesses the beer and it's like, nope, not until next episode. Like, we'll try again.
- [37:22]
B
Yeah.
- [37:23]
A
And they're just doing this every. And you have like big names too coming to commenting on this. Like John Geiger, for example, is like somebody that's now following this and comment. Commenting on everything, like, it's absolutely Joey Chestnuts in here. Like, it's so funny to see Joey Chestnut. Yeah, right.
- [37:39]
B
I wonder why he's been out there.
- [37:42]
A
Throwing down them glizzies.
- [37:43]
B
Yeah, bro. Glizzy Goblin. Yeah, it's it. That challenge type content is really interesting because, you know, I'm not going to say they stole it from these two bros that I've seen, but there's a couple of guys that they'll be like, throwing a random object in my roommate and seeing if he can guess what it is. And they'll throw like a theragun at him or something, you know, and he'll be like. Or they'll throw like a hockey puck and he'll guess. Get it wrong. I'll be like, all right. Next time. Creates two things. Number one, obviously, every single time you're watching, you're wondering, like, is the guy going to guess? Is it correct? Number two is just a spectacle overall. But these guys have been able to just completely recreate, you know, you just. They took a proven format, Just took it, stole it for their brand. And so you're someone who's already spending time on social media. I guarantee it. Most people are. Right. And so think about what are these series that you're seeing that you like? And then how can you twist them and apply it to what your brand is and use similar dynamics? Like the boss, for example, you know, they just named like my roommate. That sets a little bit of context. My boss. I'm going to throw something at my boss. Like, I'm going to throw something at my roommate. So just like adjust that. Like, I'm going to throw something up my, you know, marketing manager. I'm going to bully my marketing manager.
- [38:58]
A
Exactly what it is. It's so easy.
- [39:00]
B
The.
- [39:01]
A
The next one that's interesting is the evolution. So, like, let's say I want to go from X to Y as a person. It's putting. It's leveraging the evolution in your series so that people see, like, essentially cane you think about, like, why before and after ads work so well. Yeah, okay. Before and after. There's a big story that happened in between there. Can I just turn that into a series? So one of my favorite ones is this girl, Carla White. And the series is day two or day one of going from a fatty to a Day two of turning from fatty to fatty. And suddenly again, another series that's gone nuclear. Because it's like, okay, I see where you're at right now. Are you going to get there. Are you going to become the baddie?
- [39:48]
B
I'm just watching. I'm just waiting for you to tiptoe around this one.
- [39:52]
A
I'm trying.
- [39:52]
B
Yeah. You talk about the hook.
- [39:54]
A
I'm not going to talk about everything other than it's the evolution to others. But she does. Look, dude, she's owning the role.
- [40:00]
B
She's owning.
- [40:01]
A
I'm not like, I'm not. It's just, it's like, come on, it's. It's like a funny hook, bro. Like it's for sure.
- [40:06]
B
No, it's great.
- [40:07]
A
Very funny hook.
- [40:08]
B
It's great. It's also self deprecating. You know, I think a lot of people like when self deprecations involved and.
- [40:14]
A
What I love is like she does this. She's actually really, really good at like, bro, I was.
- [40:20]
B
Huh? What?
- [40:22]
A
She's very good at storytelling.
- [40:23]
B
I'm sure she got some skills.
- [40:24]
A
She's very good at storytelling. And like day two, she wakes up, she's like breaks the. She breaks the, the fourth wall. She looks at the camera, she's like, it's day two. And she goes, I don't want to be a baddie anymore.
- [40:37]
B
Yeah, okay.
- [40:37]
A
And she's like, okay, look, I've. I've been somewhere fit before. I've had my gym error. I've tried to glow up at least 15 times.
- [40:44]
B
Uh huh.
- [40:44]
A
Right. So she's like amplifying this problem but then she breaks and this is all vo. And then she will break the fourth wall again. She's like, but I have to step with or I have to stick with it. But damn, the treadmill is loud. But my knees were louder. So it's like she's added in like these common points. So just like. It's so funny. That's so, so funny. She's so good at this. At this. The last one I'll touch on is. Well, sorry, I actually already touched on it but was like the idea of like you have to have some kind of progress tracker. Yeah, right. And that progress tracker for whether it's this one or selling a billion bricks is like show it. Have it somewhere on the episode where you show like where you're at and how close you are and. And you know, and somebody could follow along that. Yeah.
- [41:29]
B
And gamify a little bit.
- [41:30]
A
Gamify.
- [41:31]
B
It's like infinite leverage and just gamifying stuff. It's actually like wild how that always is true.
- [41:35]
A
It is. You know, all of this to then drive foot traffic to retail.
- [41:41]
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean the Biggest thing with the foot traffic to retail piece is, you know, a lot of what we just talked about is like, how do you multiply your marketing touch points? You know, to me, a lot of this stuff is very simple, simple math. If someone has seen your brand 10 times, there's a 95% of people are not ready to buy your product right now. Right. This is actually a really good example. I'm wearing a shirt. Have you heard of James Purse? It's like a really nice brand. They basically, I don't know, like luxury T shirts, maybe luxury men's basics. Right. I heard about them earlier this year. I then saw their store in New York. I walked around the store, I didn't want anything, and I went and I was on TikTok the other day doing my usual research, not scrolling passively, and came across a video where like, some bro was just talking about how they were his favorite shirt. It's all ever worse. And I'm like, huh, I've seen this brand. I've been curious about it before. I didn't really need T shirts earlier in the year. Like, I had like my Elwoods, whatever. But a lot of those are not, like, I'm not really enjoying them anymore. And so now, like, that's the actual customer journey. Right. Is you see it one time, maybe on a meta ad, you see a store, you see someone talking about it online maybe, and then you're actually in market to buy. And so that final touch point is the thing that actually pushed you over the edge. Not necessarily like, because the first ad wasn't good. Right. But because you hit that threshold of like, amount of times that you've seen something and were aware of it and it was right time. So what I think brands need to do more of is like, as they're building these creator communities, which should be a default action for pretty much any brand these days, is find these people who are consistently posting online and train them on how to push foot traffic to retail. So retail is like a very dangerous, volatile place. If you're not selling on a Target shelf, your ass is out of there. They will not have any tolerance. You have two bad quarters done. Yeah. If you have good quarters, if you have a really successful product launch, like, that's super valuable. And so a lot of these brands get in Target for the first time and flop. Why do they flop? Because no one even knew you were in Target. Yeah. Like, if you're a $40 million a year brand, like, and your sole strategy for saying, we're now in Target is pushing an email to your 300,000 people that don't give a shit about a single thing you ever email them. Because you've just been blasting sales promotions and you know, last chance to get our Black Friday sale. Last chance to get our Labor Day sale. By the way, we're in Target. Please support. It's like, dude, I bought your product two years ago. I didn't even like it. Yeah, like what are you doing? Like wrong stage of the funnel to what you're talking about, right? That the content funnel has replaced the marketing funnel. Wrong stage of the funnel. You're. You're pushing bottom of funnel people to go support you that don't even really care anymore. What you really should be doing is focusing on top of funnel content creation. So we had one of my employees shout out Amanda. She's listening at this point. That's extra credit. But she had a video go nuclear for a Walmart piece of patio furniture. So she was like, run, don't walk to Walmart right now. Because this patio furniture, I wonder where.
- [45:02]
A
You got that hook earlier when you said it.
- [45:04]
B
Run, don't walk. Yeah, it's hitting, hitting everywhere. We're scaling that crazy. And so she was like, run, don't walk to Walmart right now. This patio furniture is 225. It's got this set, it's got this chair. Look at this quality. She's like punching it and shit. Like just things that you can't really recreate in an email, right? Like she's walking through like the value props of the product and like also building some urgency. She's like, I don't know what, I don't know how they have this deal. I don't know how they are able to sell at this price. But you know, it's available right now. Run to run to Walmart. That thing sold out in Austin. Really every Austin area. Walmart sold out of that piece of patio furniture within a week because it got 3 million views, 46, 000 likes and countless amount of people were probably like damn, I'll go get that thing. You know, it was highly concentrated in the Austin area. Now imagine if you're a brand which we just recently talked to a Swedish fish brand and they have a Target launch, they have an end cap that they're doing in target on October 15th to be super successful. And their thought was we're just going to go through our regular influencers, right? We're just going to go through the usual celebrities, right? So what's what, you know, what's Kendall Jenner going to do? Yeah. Omg, guys. Like my new, my favorite brands at Target. Go get it. Right? Or you could have 600 people say trying like, you know me, my, my, my reaction when the sock or I'm not, can't say the name, but my reaction when the new Swedish fish is sold out at Target. And it's like a meme about her being sad or, you know, just several different formats. Right? Like all of a sudden people know like, I can get this product at Target, I need to go get it because it won't be there for long. And there's also a sense of fomo. Like people want to participate in trends online. That's clear. Obviously. Look at TikTok dances, for fuck's sake. Right? Like, or just general memes and edits that happen. Like, people want to participate in these trends. You can literally engineer a trend during your product launch in retail as long as you activate these creators. So how to do that? I mean, look, ultimately, like there's two ways. Number one, obviously the TikTok shop piece, I don't want to sound like a TikTok shop shill. So I'm actually going to talk about another way to do it which is paying them on a CPM basis. So WAP has content rewards. Like there's several other different softwares that are now tracking CPMs and like distributing incentives. But I'll use a super straightforward mathematical example. So if you have a hundred thousand dollar budget, five dollar CPM, that math gets you 20 million views. So I mean, 20 million views for 100K.
- [47:47]
A
Great.
- [47:47]
B
Pretty great. If you direct 20 million views towards your target end cap.
- [47:51]
A
Yeah.
- [47:52]
B
Or your Walmart end cap. That's pretty great. So the way that we're structuring this is we're saying, all right, you know, go recruit the creators, create the flyer. Right? And it's like, hey, you know, a get paid for your submission. So paying $100 per submission, it's a tiny amount of the budget, right? Like, basically it's like submit two videos. Here's the criteria to follow, which is mention the specific retailer, create some sort of urgency, create a review about the product. We'll have a call with the group of creators that we've recruited. We'll recruit them through either cold email or like, you know, Soral or incense, whatever it may be. Which. Which guy's coming on the pod. Yeah, we'll recruit them through Soral. I don't think he's here, but we'll recruit them through, you know, a software like that, and ultimately set the bounty, right? Say, hey, all right, here's 100K. If you're a creator and you get 500,000 views out of that 20 million, go, go make five bands. You know, like, I don't think this has really happened before, but what. What I'm seeing when we talk to these larger folks is that, dude, they're spending money on, on the internal platform. So, so Costco, Walmart, Target, all make people spend on their website. So, like, their equivalent of Amazon, like, if you want to. If you are, call it. Call it. Trying to think of, like, a brand that I don't work with. Say you're like C4, right? Like, you have to spend money on when people search for C4. Work with C4. I do, but they won't get mad at me. You have to. You have to spend money on when people search for c4 or else ghost will come up. Yeah, right. And so same thing you have to do on Amazon. And what a lot of brands are now seeing is, like, that spend is actually not incremental. Like, they're doing holdout tests and they're like, oh, my gosh, like, our numbers aren't really moving. Like, branded search is actually just more of a tax rather than anything. And what people seem to kind of understand from my conversation with them is that not only does the brand dislike that, but actually the retailer dislikes it as well because it's a good profit center for them to get that ad spend. But what they really need is just more. More sales velocity. So they're actually getting comfortable with recommending the strategy of creator activation in retail. But you kind of, you know, first phase, like, you recruit them, set the incentives, create the brief, and all oriented around, like, a specific time frame. So it's like, okay, you know, if you want to do this on October 15th, like, you probably want to start September 15th, spend two weeks recruiting the creators, have a call with them a week before, and then have everyone go make their piece of content on launch day, promoting it.
- [50:47]
A
Initiate works. We did one months ago with. I'm not gonna name the brand, but they have a huge, huge ambassador program because they're owned by, like, a very large parent company. So they have, like, just huge, huge little creators. And we were able to do, like, a content challenge for them for, like, during the summer. It was like a summer campaign. It was like, it was supposed to work in tandem with organic content. And we did a content challenge, bro. It absolutely went nuclear. And they. They became the number one selling, like, hard Seltzer in the Northeast.
- [51:23]
B
Yeah.
- [51:23]
A
Passing Red's Abloyo. For a brand that.
- [51:26]
B
It doesn't do that normally, like a.
- [51:29]
A
Year, year and a half. Like, it is such a good, good way of driving foot traffic. Because like you said, it's. When you do it and there's so many people talking about it, it becomes the. In people's mind, it becomes like the. The hot thing that you need to try. It happened with White Claw. Regardless of like, that was what they did. White Claw had a takeover very similar to that where it felt like, damn if you weren't drinking a White Claw. Like, what are you doing during the summer? Yeah, you know, I mean, it's such an interesting. It's very interesting. And it's. It's so dope to see, like a. An evolution of creators and influencers that's in a way that, like, performance can be tracked because for a longest time you pay $2,000, you get someone just holding your. Like this, and it didn't do nothing.
- [52:13]
B
I laugh at that so much. There's the. There's still people doing it, which is massively. It's. It's the standard, actually. The, The. The meme is like, how much did this cost? And then the friend who's an influencer is like, oh, just two story posts and a reel.
- [52:29]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [52:30]
B
And. And then they're like, ha much. Right? And it's like, yeah, it's actually not, you know, like, simply like getting sent something and tagging on the story, which Loki, I will say, I'm sure you've experienced this too. Like, I've tagged some stuff on the story and like, they'll send like a thousand clicks to their page. So people do. Bro, that does work.
- [52:47]
A
When I shot with. And I like, posted a clip of them in the, in the. The video we were shooting. 3200 clicks. Ra. I've never had anything like that.
- [52:58]
B
Yeah, it's. Wow.
- [52:59]
A
Anything. All right. Shit. I feel like that's a. That's a wrap on the episode. I think that was a banger of an episode. So next. Next week, what we're going to do is we're going to take a bunch of brands, listeners, brands. We'll put it on our ig. And now we'll create the roadmap for those brands on 2026. What I think could be interesting too, as I brainstorm, is like, maybe we add a third camera and, like, I'll talk organic content pillars, and then you talk retail and we go whiteboard session for that. I think that could be super interesting.
- [53:26]
B
Yeah, I'm down. I'm excited about a lot of the formats we're about to roll out, but if you enjoyed this episode, as always, please, like, subscribe on YouTube. Leave us a review on Spotify, Apple, check us out on ig. Not Twitter anymore. Twitter's cooked. Yes, X. But we'll catch you all next week. Peace.