Biggest Mistakes To Avoid in Your Marketing Strategy with Erik Huberman, Founder + CEO of Hawke Media | Ep. 410

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Marketing Millennials

Episode 410: "Biggest Mistakes To Avoid in Your Marketing Strategy"

With Erik Huberman, Founder + CEO of Hawke Media

Date: April 22, 2026 | Host: Daniel Murray

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Daniel Murray sits down with Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawke Media, to dissect why many marketing strategies fail, the basics that still work, and the most common mistakes brands are making in 2025. Erik shares actionable frameworks, candid opinions, and data-driven insights from leading over 6,000 brands. The conversation avoids marketing buzzwords and hones in on timeless fundamentals—summarized by Erik’s signature "Hawke Method."

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Great Brands Win

• Product Comes First

  • "Great product always wins. If you build something that people really love... marketing is easy." (Erik, 03:14)
  • Marketing strategies work best when there's a genuinely desirable product or service. Growth and virality stem from customer demand and advocacy.

• Nail the Positioning Statement

  • Articulate your differentiator in a repeatable phrase, ideally 5–7 words.
  • "You have two seconds for word of mouth. If you want people to talk about you, make your positioning statement easy to repeat." (Erik, 04:01)
  • Erik cites Hawke Media's as: "We're your outsourced CMO and marketing team." This simplified their word-of-mouth referrals and set a template for clients.

2. The Mistakes Brands Keep Making

• Ignoring the Real Purchase Cycle

  • Most marketers don’t factor in the real delay between ad exposure and purchase—typically 3 weeks to 3 months.
  • "The majority of marketers look at spend today and ROI today. It's one of the dumbest things you could do." (Erik, 04:01–07:21)
  • This leads to premature reactions, especially when scaling ad spend.

• Faulty Attribution Models

  • Reliance on 7 or 14-day tracking windows (because of platform limitations) distorts what’s really driving conversions.
  • "The reason most tracking is 7 days is because it's only what iOS allows... not because it's the best frame." (Erik, 09:05)
  • Brands must build better tracking across channels—platforms like Glue, Triple Whale, Northbeam, or in-house systems.

3. What the Winners Do Differently

• Consistent, Quality “Pipes”

  • The core playbook hasn’t changed: robust Google/META (Facebook) ads, adding TikTok, robust email/SMS, a strong website, and steady content output.
  • "The scalable, repeatable stuff has been the same for 15 years." (Erik, 12:42)
  • Expand with influencers and other validation, but never skip foundational elements.

• Not Overcomplicating It

  • Marketers often get distracted by the latest tools and lose sight of the basics.
  • "The problem with marketing: it's not that complicated. It's pretty straightforward. It's all based on human psychology and behavior." (Erik, 20:52)

4. Practical Creative & AI Tactics

• Where AI Fits (and Doesn’t)

  • AI now replaces entry-level, data-heavy, or routine analytic tasks and supports idea generation—but can't replace creative differentiation.
  • "If you’re not thinking critically... there's no need for people anymore. But marketing’s about standing out." (Erik, 14:01)
  • The human creative edge, especially in brand and storytelling, remains a competitive advantage.

• Organic Social Is a Mid-Funnel Tool

  • Organic reach is throttled; its value is in nurturing, not acquisition.
  • "It's a checkbox. I think as a brand, once you've captured your audience, you need to be a media destination for them." (Erik, 16:00)

• Investing in Creative

  • Budget for some high-risk, high-reward creative, but most spend goes to proven channels.
  • "I always say about 10% for high-risk marketing, 90% to scalable repeatable stuff. Great creative isn't always expensive." (Erik, 18:55)

5. The “Hawke Method” Framework

Erik distills all strategy into three pillars:

• Awareness: Consistently bring in new customers.
• Nurturing: Move customers from awareness to purchase (email, SMS, content).
• Trust: Create and reinforce trust through social proof, consistency, and valuable content.
  • "Awareness, nurturing, and trust—the three pillars of marketing." (Erik, 24:44)

He notes that most brands are weak in one of these three.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Product Market Fit:

  • "I've been proven wrong too many times. Sometimes, people just don't want your product. It's not always a marketing problem." (Erik, 29:14)

• On Attribution After iOS Changes:

  • "Most people who think their performance went down didn’t have a drop at all—they just had a tracking problem and never fixed it." (Erik, 09:05)

• On the Power of Third-party Validation:

  • "Brand, to me, is just synonymous with trust... Early on, it’s about third-party validation." (Erik, 22:36)
  • Citing "How I Met Your Mother": "Just the fact someone introduces you is enough of a validator. Works for brands too." (Erik, 27:59)

• On Overcomplication:

  • "Marketers try to overcomplicate... but fundamentals work. Build your pipes, have that message, and a great product.” (Daniel, 13:21)

• On Retention and Conversion:

  • "You'd be amazed how many companies still don't have a quality email funnel. Then SMS, then content." (Erik, 20:52)
  • "75% of people won’t buy from a company they don’t trust." (Erik, 24:44)

• On Why Most Strategies Fail:

  • "Someone’s missing something in awareness, nurturing, or trust. Over and over again." (Erik, 28:06)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Hawke Media Origin & Mission – 01:40–02:55
• What Winners Do Differently – 03:14–04:01
• Word-of-mouth Positioning Statements – 04:01–04:50
• Misunderstanding Purchase Cycles – 04:50–07:21
• Proper Attribution & Tracking Shortfalls – 08:37–09:05
• How to Fix Tracking – 11:02–12:31
• Core Growth Tactics (Playbook) – 12:42–13:21
• AI’s Strongest & Weakest Points – 14:01–15:43
• Organic Social’s Real Role – 16:00–17:38
• Allocating Budget & Creative ROI – 18:55–20:11
• Why Most Brands Fail at Nurturing – 24:44–26:47
• Three-Pillar “Hawke Method” – 24:44–28:31
• Handling Product Misfit – 29:14–31:01
• Benchmarking & Dashboards – 31:01–34:06

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Actionable Takeaways

• Audit your "pipes": Are Google/Meta (and possibly TikTok) ads, email, SMS, and solid content all running?
• Benchmark your performance: Don't rely solely on platform dashboards; use wider industry data as context.
• Test your positioning: Can customers repeat in a few words what makes you different?
• Track the full purchase cycle: Adjust your reporting to reflect real behavior, not just short attribution windows.
• Never stop nurturing: The biggest brand mistake is neglecting nurturing (email, SMS, content) once you’ve got attention.

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Where to Find More

• Erik Huberman: @erikhuberman on all social channels; hawkmedia.com
• Hawke Method Book: Taught at Columbia, NYU, U of Arizona.
• Daniel Murray & The Marketing Millennials: Newsletter, social links in episode description.

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Transcript

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Segment)]

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[Daniel Murray]

welcome back to another

[Podcast Host (Sponsor Segment)]

episode of the Marking Millennials Podcast and thank you so much for listening. Today's episode is with Eric Huberman for founder and CEO of Hawk Media. We talked about why most marketing strategies fall flat, how to make creative that actually converts, and the biggest mistakes brands are still making in 2025. Eric keeps it really real in this conversation. He has a way of simplifying marketing that I haven't heard from a lot of people. I'm excited for you all to listen and I hope you love the episode like I did. Thank you so much.

[Podcast Intro/Outro Host]

Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off.

[Daniel Murray]

What is up Eric? Welcome to the Market Millennials podcast.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, thank you for having me.

[Daniel Murray]

I want to give everybody a quick background. Could you go into like what is Hawk Media? I know you're the founder and CEO so they know where you're coming from.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, background E Commerce built and sold a couple E Commerce brands and then almost 12 years ago started advising and consulting for a bunch of large and small brands on how to drive growth using marketing and just found that the marketing ecosystem is broken. Like there's no barrier to entry to say you're a marketer. I get up all the time by 17 year olds telling me they started an agency and are now selling people on marketing but don't know what they're doing. So how do I do marketing? And so that is a very broad problem in the industry where every head of marketing, every founder I know has had a problem dealing with bad marketing agencies. And I thought that was ridiculous, so decided to hire my own little SWAT team to sort of solve it right in front of me. And the idea was to be the best at what we did in marketing, but easy to work with, you know, nimble, cost effective, flexible, et cetera and fast forward. We now have about 250 full time people. We've worked with almost 6,000 brands at this point, about a ton of success. And then on top of that we have a venture fund where we've invested in over 100 pieces of marketing technology and E commerce tech that basically power the industry. And then we also have an AI tool that's digesting about 6,000 companies, marketing media and revenue data in real time. And then we're able to train our team against it, look at what an individual company is doing and basically create predictive analytics, slash automated marketing strategy around it.

[Daniel Murray]

So we seem to say you're doing a little, like just a little bit of things.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, just a few.

[Daniel Murray]

Just a few things.

[Eric Huberman]

A lot of sitting around, you know.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, exactly. So you've worked with over 5000 brands. Like when you zoom out, what is the one thing the winners do differently?

[Eric Huberman]

I mean, at the end of the day, and this is hope, sadly not that helpful. But great product always wins. Like if you build something that people really love, service or product, like that's going to be where you win. Marketing is easy. When that's the case, growth is easy. You know, revenue growth forgives a lot of sins. Virality forgives a lot of sins. And I mean virality like having a good video. I mean your people are talking about your product because it's so great telling other people to get your product. There's a lot to be said about just creating something great from a product standpoint. And that's the quick answer on. That's where we see people when there's obviously a lot of tactics as well.

[Daniel Murray]

So having a product, like what is the next stage? If you dug deeper, of all the people who are winning or that has a good product, what are they doing differently than the others?

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, so there's a few things. One is articulating that differentiator and value proposition really specifically and succinctly. So we always talk about the sort of five to seven words, your positioning statement, however you want to put it, that allows people to go repeat it. And what I mean by that is people talk about an elevator pitch. 30 minute, 30 seconds in an elevator. I'm going to tell you about my company, but you don't have 30 seconds when it comes to word of mouth. You have two seconds. And so if I have time to pitch my business, I can take 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, and probably sell someone. What I need is for other people to go talk about me. They need to feel comfortable selling it. So you need to give people something really concise to say that creates intrigue and people wanting to check it out. For Hawk, it was where your outsourced CMO and marketing team, because then when people went and talked about Hawk Media, they'd go, oh, yeah, they're your, like, outsourced CMO and marketing team. It was easy to regurgitate, easy to say. I even heard people say they're like your outsourced CMO or they're fractional CMO or they're your CMO in a box. But it was always a play on something that we frankly ceded for them to say, so that it was very comfortable for them to talk about us. Because the first time someone tries to pitch your company to someone else and they don't do a good job and the person looks at them sideways is the last time they talk to someone about your company. So you got to make that easy. So that's number two. Number three. Probably the biggest thing I see people miss from just a marketing standpoint is the purchase cycle or consideration period. People, we're in a day now where everybody has spreadsheets that they're managing marketing on, and they're looking at, how much did I spend today on Facebook and how much did I make? And what's funny is, intuitively, almost everybody understands this, but then rationally, they don't put it into practice, which is from the time someone sees an ad to the time they buy, there's usually a time period, and from our data, it's anywhere between three weeks and three months. So let's just say the average is around a month. The idea that you're going to look at a spend today and then look at the ROI today is frankly one of the dumbest things you could do in trying to measure your marketing, because it takes time. It takes time for people to decide to purchase, to build that trust that they actually convert. And so what I see people miss is not only just that fact. So when they're ramping up, spends again. One of the ways I can really identify someone that's not very good at marketing is they tell me that when you ramp spend, something along the lines of like your. Your roas goes down as you ramp spend, and then it has to catch back up. But they don't know why. It's just like, oh yeah, when you, when you spend more, your returns go down. It's like, no, it's just the timeline hasn't caught up yet. So if you spend the same amount of money every day, you're seeing the returns from a month from now, but after a month it catches up and you start seeing the normalized returns. So if you spend more today, like if I spend a hundred thousand dollars yesterday and zero today, you still are probably going to have some sales today because the people that saw the ad yesterday, so the idea that now your roas is infinite because you didn't spend any money today is the dumbest thing way to look at it. But frankly the majority of marketers do look at it this way. And it goes in the inverse. If I spend zero yesterday, or let's say I spend $10 yesterday and so one customer comes in today, that trickled in from yesterday, but then I spend 100 grand today, no, I didn't spend a hundred grand to get a customer. It's going to take another again month to even see the half life of that spend. So understanding how to measure that is super important. And then knowing that all the things that you need to do during that month to help increase conversion, to help lower that timeframe, things like email marketing, sms, great content, et cetera that get people along faster and more frequently.

[Daniel Murray]

I also think like what you said at the beginning that the five to seven statement that you, you need to make the positioning statement, I people go into the tactic first and then they forget that part. And that's like the foundation of that tactic of like every ad should communicate somewhat of that message. And if, and they go into running ads and they're like why isn't this not working? I don't see results. And. But they haven't even nailed down their position before they even ran that $50,000, $100,000 ad.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, exactly right. It's. And I, I always say like, it's funny, we live in an agoraphob phobic world sort of post pandemic that nobody wants to go out and talk to people. But at the end of the day, if you're starting a new company and you don't have that value proposition or sort of that statement nailed down yet, the best thing to do is to go try to sell people face to face and tell them about your product or service and see how they react. Because then you can start to gauge like, oh, that didn't work. Nobody gave a shit about what I was saying. You have to have EQ enough to like know that people aren't paying attention like that they're glazing over when you're talking. But that's how I came up with your outsourced CMO is just talking to people about what I was doing and seeing enough negative reactions to then identify when someone was like actually intrigued by it and going, oh, there it is. That's what I need to talk about.

[Daniel Murray]

So I know this is like a touchy Topic. But you said that okay, it's three weeks to three months till a lot of people see a sale. But like most attribution models are like one day, seven day, like 14 day, which goes against what you just said, that it takes like three, three months. So like what is your advice to people like when they set up like they're tracking their models to make sure like they capture the actual sales.

[Eric Huberman]

Identify what your sales cycle is like go actually look at what does it take. Don't just pull a number out of thin air because you think it's a best practice or frankly the most. The, the reason Most tracking is 7 days now it's cause it's, it's only what iOS allows to most of the platforms. They don't allow more than seven day cookie windows. So that's why it's set at seven days. You technologically can't because Apple cut that off. So that's not because it's the best frame to look at, it's because that's what it's allowing. So you have to find other ways to track that, whether it's from the first point you collect an email address to when they convert all sorts of other ways to track that. But you've got to build out better tracking than that or you're going to cut off your nose despite your face. Like my favorite thing about people, like again, it goes back to the same kind of ignorance with marketers where, and I blame marketers, I don't blame founders for this because they're not supposed to know this, but marketers are supposed to know this stuff where when iOS 14 change happened and the tracking windows went from 28 days to 7, the idea that your Facebook performance went down versus just it went from 28 days to 7 is really fascinating to me. Like, yeah, there were some other nuances about the change that cut off certain strategies that maybe affected some companies from a performance standpoint. But most of the people that think their performance went down didn't have any performance drop at all. They just had a tracking problem and they didn't never fixed it. So you ended up with all these companies that think that like consumer behavior changed on Facebook because they changed a cookie window. Like no, it didn't. All that changed was your ability to track it. Which again affects some more deep, some deeper tactics that were being done. But at the end of the day, Facebook still just as effective. We have tons of companies scaling like crazy. You just have to do a better job tracking and optimizing it.

[Daniel Murray]

What, what is your Advice on that tracking part. So the 7 day window,OS doesn't allow they dropped it from 28. Like what. What are you seeing the best companies do that are tracking besides I say they figured out their sales cycle is 28 days or 31 days or something.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, I mean it's. There's other tracking platforms like Glue. There's doing your own data tracking just ways to track your conversions aside from just hoping that Facebook is tracking it. So it's building out your own, you know, analytics or that's why we built Hawk too is then you can actually compare apples to apples of like how is everyone else doing on these platforms versus us? So are we outperforming the market? Because my view of it is like if you're already outperforming the market on these platforms and it's not working, you need to fix your business, not change your marketing strategy. And so there's a lot of different ways to fix that tracking whether again that's why we built Hawk AI but there's also Glue. There's several other platforms that have tried to do this in different ways. There's. What's the other one? Oh there's Triple Whale and another one that North Beam that I've also tried. Nothing's perfect but I think that's part of the. That's why like we talked about this internally the other day. If I can have a platform that just tells me everything to do and it's just like this is the fact like just change this and adjust this and fix this and this is how you run your business, then I guess I don't need a head of marketing. Like the whole reason we have someone in that position managing those platforms is someone needs to distill that information, look at it and then make cogent decisions based on their experience and their knowledge base using that data. So none of this is perfect but you can get a lot closer to at least solid indicators of how things are performing. Because again the in dashboard in Facebook is not a great indicator anymore.

[Daniel Murray]

What is a growth tactic that you see over and over again that works long term, not only short term. So if I'm thinking like I want to have a long term play.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah. I mean the scalable, repeatable stuff is still the same that it has been for 15 years. It's Google and meta ads, maybe TikTok now, then email and SMS now to complement it and a great website and then a consistent sort of quality, consistent quality content coming out from your brand so that you're establishing who you are. And creating more of a connection with your audience. That is the core playbook. From there you expand off of it. You incorporate influencers, you incorporate other sorts of third party validation to create more trust around it. But like that those pipes that we kind of call them of like those basics are necessity these days to compete.

[Daniel Murray]

I it's funny because I think marketers try to overcomplicate this process. But the way you're putting it is simple. Like one come up with that positioning statement to here are like pretty much the pipes that you need if you here's the top of funnel, here's middle funnel to keep retention of that list, build that list. You have to have a good product if you want to win. Otherwise you probably have a product problem. If some of these things are broken or a messaging problem. Those are like the two things. What do you think AI is coming into the picture? What. What is the biggest change that is in. In this growth problem? I mean not a growth like in a growth role.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah. Sadly it's anywhere you need an entry level employee or an intern at this point. It was intern until about six months ago. Now it's really taking the job of entry level employees. So data analytics work like going and pulling data and aggregating it and putting it together in a report. Thought jogging. We use it as sort of not prompt in the AI sense but for us to be like what are some good ideas we could do here? I love using AI as a little sidekick of even stupid stuff. Just as an example of what should I get my friend for his 40th birthday? Here are all the things he's interested in. It wasn't perfect. It didn't give me like the thing but it gave me some ideas that I was like oh that's cool. I could take that this way. Da da da. Like there's. And I use that as an example cause it's the same thing in marketing where it's like here's the brand, here's the things it's doing, here's the target audience, here's the value proposition, blah blah blah. What do you think some good headlines could be? And it's not going to give you the headlines that you just like copy paste. But it's like oh, I like that direction. It's like it's just a thought partner that it can be on the creative side and on the practice, like on the more execution driven side and the more logical side it can replace a lot. I mean we've turned it into our analytics and reporting dashboard. It can Help do a lot of the data mining you needed to do to get to an answer quicker so that you can focus on kind of the highest and best use goes back to. If you're not thinking critically and thinking about how do I then leverage this to do some creative things, there's no need for people anymore. You can just go automate the shit and call it a day. But in marketing the challenge is to differentiate yourself, to stand out. And I don't mean that in a like, scream as loud as you can, do the goofiest stunt that you can, but like how do you actually keep get people's attention and keep it because that's the only way you're going to survive in a day like today.

[Daniel Murray]

So you gave some of the pipes and consistent content was one of the things you said. Like what is your belief on like the organic side? Like, like how important is it now versus like it was like 10 years ago for brands to be playing in that V. Yeah.

[Eric Huberman]

So when we talk about organic social, I think it's more of a checkbox because they've done so much to throttle your ability to reach that. Other than YouTube Reels or Sorry, YouTube Shorts and somewhat Instagram reels though, not really. And then TikTok you, you really don't go viral anymore. That being said, I think as a brand, once you've captured your audience, so it's not a top of the funnel strategy, it's actually the best way to put it, it's a mid funnel strategy. You, you need to be a media destination for the people that are interested in your brand. That's how you continue to build trust, how you continue to keep them as a customer. That's how you build a solid foundation because they're not just going to buy shit from you every day. Like, and even if they are, that's very transactional. They need to really be engaged with who you are, what you're about, who you are as a company. And the way to do that is through consistent content. And I believe that with AI automating all the other performance shit now they're automating as we. I'm not saying it's done now, but let's say in the next few years a lot of the math equations that are done by people are going to be gone and all the optimization will be able to happen automatically. Then what really matters and how you differentiate will be your content and your sort of assets, your collateral that's being used and all that. And that's where I don't believe AI is going to replace for a very long time. I think it's going to be too duplicative and it's going to look a lot of the same because it's going to be taking the same thesis around all of this. And so I think that's where you can win and that's where the differentiator comes in. And it's always, you know, they've always said content is king. I just don't think anyone's ever explained that as to why. And to me it's how do you engage people above and beyond a purchase decision? So you keep them engaged with your brand and by nature they're going to buy more, they're going to do more, that's going to be part of their engagement.

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[Eric Huberman]

Today

[Daniel Murray]

you, you said something interesting like AI is going to get really good at and it's really getting really good at like telling you where to put your money, like optimizing like things that used to be like the advantage probably five, ten years ago of like targeting where should I put my money AI could do now what's the best way to win in the creative like space? Like, what are you thinking about? Like, what is your recommendation for like how much budget should be dedicated to just like making great creative versus spending on these platforms?

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, I think that's a hard one to answer because I don't think great creative doesn't necessarily need to be high budget. The best creative out there sometimes is not expensive. So budget wise, that's a really hard one to answer. Just, you know, generically off the cuff. I always say you should take about 10% of your budget and be investing in more high risk, high reward marketing, like going viral kind of stuff, stunts, things that are not necessarily scalable but could, you know, give you a sugar rush while 90% goes to that scalable, repeatable side. So that part I can answer. But in terms of content, how do you create great content? I mean that is the, that's the challenge. That's the, that's where being a good marketer is important. There isn't a straight answer to that. You know, it's what really understanding the customer and what's going to compel them to want to engage in your business more and what are they looking for. And one of my favorite things, sort of the lens to put things through is what is the value proposition of your business and how do you create content that also serves that value so you reinforce the fact that you're the destination to serve that value. So easy example, if you're a running shoe company and people are you know, know buying my running shoes because they want to get out and go running and get in shape, I should be giving them all sorts of tips on how to go out and go run and how to get in shape. Like just how do I serve that value proposition with content as much as I am with my product?

[Daniel Murray]

The thing that I like is like you're distilling this stuff is like a simple like people should just like they over everything you're saying is like, is overthought by so many marketers. Like we just get confused on tools. Like disrupted by all the shiny new tools out there. But really like if you have these fundamentals down, you can easily when where do you totally. What levers do you normally see? So like from the conversion part, what are like the most like easiest way to like lift those like conversion levers? Like where do you see the most problems that people have when like converting off of an ad to like getting an email sign up?

[Eric Huberman]

That's it. It's just email marketing. It's. You'd be amazed how many companies still don't just build out a quality email funnel. Like and then on top of that sms those two like and then content is the next checkbox, so to speak. Site optimization. Once you have something to optimize, you have to have enough traffic to make sense that it like it's worth the time and effort to actually optimize. And those are the things I mean again it's you're that I think that is sort of our ethos. And I think the problem with the marketing world is it's not that complicated. It shouldn't be. It is actually pretty straightforward. It's all based on human psychology and human behavior. And you know, unless you're personally a really awkward, you know, different human being generally you can kind of get the vibe of like, yeah, how do people reach me and get me interested in something? You know, if I go. If I see an ad for something, do I really buy it every time, right away? You know, like, I just bought a pair of running shoes, or not running shoes, but like sneakers from on which I've been seeing their brand everywhere for a few years before I went to a site and was like looking for a pair of something that fit and I wanted a certain color sneaker. And I was like, oh, on, yeah, I've heard they're good because I had friends that have it. I've seen ads for it, I've seen content about them, I've seen runners running in them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, time to try these out. But it took two years for me to buy a pair of shoes there. Whereas if they were running their Facebook ads, they would have thought I, you know, if they served me an ad, it would have been a complete failure on the spreadsheet.

[Daniel Murray]

What is, what is your definition of like what? Like how to build the brand side of the picture. Because a lot of the stuff they do, great brand plays. What should people consider besides Facebook, Google? I mean, you could do brand plays on those channels too. But what are some brand moves that people should think to invest long term?

[Eric Huberman]

Brand, to me is just synonymous with trust. That's what that means early on in a business. It's about third party validation. So it's getting pr, it's influencers, it's celebrity endorsements, it's testimonials, reviews. And then frankly, content really plays into brand too, because it's allowing me to understand what you're about as a company. And originally, like the third party side is you borrowing trust from other parties to kind of lend to your brand because nobody trusts you yet. And then really the biggest thing is just consistency. What do you talk about and what are you consistent about that starts to become synonymous with your brand? Whether it's, you know, Zappos and delivering happiness and being the best at customer service, or it's McDonald's and being synonymous with the obesity crisis. Like, there's a lot of different things that play into branding, good and bad, but it usually ends up what you either talk about the most and deliver the most of, or what other people accuse you of or talk about you the most too. Again, good or bad. It's also like, I do this all the time as a fun. Like, I do a lot of public speaking about this and I always ask the crowd, like, anyone want to shout out who's the worst at customer service? And it is, I'd say 98% of the time a cell phone company or a cable company, one or the other. Because it's just like that's what people have gotten used to. Now part of that is probably not fair. Like, I'm sure they're not as bad as we all make them out to be, but at this point their reputation and their consistently poor delivery has made it so that anyone that thinks about bad customer service thinks about cell phone or cable. So going back to like, how do you win in an age like this? Imagine a cell phone or cable company that was like, we're going to be the best at customer service and how much business they could get because everyone fucking hates them.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, it's always the industries that are like hard to penetrate that like airlines too, where it's like they can get away with these like little things where like the easy entries, like if you have bad customer service, like you're going to get screwed because you, you're used to it. You see a lot of brands come to you. Like what is like the biggest thing they're doing wrong when they come to hawk media? Like what? Like you see, you diagnose it. Like, what is the problem that you usually see over and over, number one,

[Eric Huberman]

is not doing anything to nurture their customers. So we talk about, and I've kind of alluded, not beat around this bush, but we, you know, have a best selling book that's taught at Columbia, nyu University of Arizona, called the Hawk Method. And it breaks down marketing into three principles. Awareness, nurturing and trust. And so that again, going back to the idea of simplifying this, that's the three pillars you have to think about. So awareness, how do you introduce your product or service to a new potential customer? How do you get out there? So step one, I see a lot of people not doing anything to attract new potential customers. So they get really focused on their existing base, their existing list. It's expensive to create awareness and so they double down and they can't figure out why they're not getting growth. And it's because your customers, no matter how hard you push, are going to leave you at some point. And I always use, like there's the morbid example, like they're going to die at some point. Like if you want to take out every other thing, like they're moving, they found a new brand, they like, they changed lifestyles, whatever. At the end of the day there you're going to lose customers, period. Not even a question. So you have to be bringing in new customers all the time to even sustain. Let Alone grow has to happen and then nurturing back to that sales cycle. What do you do from the time that someone becomes aware you exist to actually get them to buy? If you're not doing email, you're not doing sms, you're not creating content, you're not going to convert that awareness at the same rate. And awareness is expensive. So you're also competing with everyone else willing to pay for those eyeballs and doing the things to grab those eyeballs. And if you're not, once you gain those eyeballs, you're not doing everything with them to get them to become a customer and stay a customer again. You're going to have a hard time competing. And then the last piece back to trust or brand. 75% of people won't buy from a company they don't trust. So you have to do things to create trust again early on. Third party validation. And then over time just be consistent with your message and be consistent in building that so that people see you around and start to believe. And that that's just human nature. Back to it. None of that's really. You can't really shortcut any of that. The only sort of shortcuts I've seen is trust is a funny thing. There's actually a little side note and I've told the story a lot but you ever watch how I met your mother?

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah. That's great show.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah. So you know when Barney would always try to introduce Ted to girls and you just go, hey, have you met Ted? And they'd be like. And for the audience, they don't know who Barney is. Barney's is Ted's friend. Ted's trying to meet a girl. Barney's just trying to help him. And so he just walks up to random girls and goes, hey, have you met Ted? And every time the girl would be like, no, hi Ted. And they. And he'd just walk. Barney would just walk away. I talked about this for years. Is like that third party validation doesn't necessarily need to be come from a trusted source. People just gravitate towards someone that has a validator that the fact that they know another person is enough of a validator. And that works with brands too. If you're recommended by someone, even if I don't know who that recommendation is, who that person is, it still creates that. And so back to that story. What's fun is I told this for years and then a couple years ago I ended up sitting in a lunch across the table from the showrunner for how I met your mother. And I told her that I had talked about this and talked to her about it, and she's like, oh, yeah, we used to go out all the time after filming and do that in bars. And it worked every time. Like, just that opener of like, hey, have you met this person? Or you should check this out. And so even when you're thinking about your own marketing, like, getting someone else to talk about you goes really far, even if people don't know who that person is.

[Daniel Murray]

So basically breaking down somebody. It's like one of those three buckets. They're probably. They're probably.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, back to that. Exactly. Someone's missing something there. And that's where that framework came from. It was years of me analyzing businesses and looking for where the holes were and started to realize they really fell into three buckets. It was either they weren't creating any new top of the funnel, they weren't nurturing that top of the funnel, or they weren't creating any trust. And it was over and over and over again. It was one or two of those things they were missing. And so then it. I started to talk about it a lot. I started. And public speaking, and that's what turned into the book.

[Daniel Murray]

And I think going even back, like, some of the. The so and so best marketers just have, like, the best product and they're winning. Like, some of the people I see talk, like, if, like, you could put like 10 marketers in their shoe and they probably would do exactly the same thing as they do because going back, because the product is great, and then you put that same marketer in a crappy product and they're not going to scale it. So, like, having a product, like, how. What. How do you, like, if you come, a marketer comes to you and they, like, they come and you right away see their product is crap. Like, how do you tell a marketer to, like, go back to that founder and say, hey, like, this is like. That's like the hardest part as a marketer to, like, go, we won't say

[Eric Huberman]

their product is crap because I've been proven wrong way too many times. It's not. It's. By the way, I have no problem being direct with someone and being like, nobody wants your product. I'll say that. I won't say your product's crap, but I'll be like, no one wants your product. So if we go and do everything right and no one's buying, that is the conversation. Like, you're. And we can look at it like, if the ads are working. So, like, we, we the value proposition. So there's a lot of different ways you can see where it's failing. Let's say the ads are working, people are clicking them, they're going to the site and we're doing all the right email marketing and everything and they're just not converting. Though sometimes the answer is people just don't want your shit. Like they were interested and intrigued and then nobody's actually compelled to buy it. It's not a marketing problem always. It's sometimes like, yeah, nobody. There isn't a market for your product, Nobody actually want or have we not built enough trust? And that's where, that's where like us as an agency, it's nice to come in, is we can tell you here all the metrics we're looking at. Like the problem is you're getting all the traffic at the right expense, but it's not converting. And we're doing all the things we normally do that build the trust and do all this, you know, and nurture these things that should be working. It might just be the product. And so those are things that you struggle with, especially when it's early on and you haven't had product market fit. Once you have product market fit and you see that things are able to work, then it's just about finding the right early adopters to start buying the thing. But early on, that is what startups are about. You got to go see if there's actually a product market fit for what you're doing. And so again, I wouldn't call it a shitty product because there's products that again, I'm blown away anybody wanted to buy but did really well. And so it's more just finding is there a market for your product and are there people that will value this? And that's hard in the beginning. That's one of the most challenging parts of being a marketer is differentiating between are we doing the right things from them marketing standpoint and you know, is the product being well received?

[Daniel Murray]

I want to go back to one thing you said that. I mean you have Hawk AI benchmarking, like what, what is the best way for marketing leader to benchmark so they can give like that data back to their founders or someone. Because I think a lot of the times I see what happens is they don't have a market comes in. They don't, they, they didn't have marketing before. They blow the numbers out the water the next year. They give an unreasonable target because they saw something like they had a great first year. And then they don't hit the numbers, they get fired. No, that's just like a simple example. It's not everybody, but like I've seen that like a couple companies that I've, I've like been.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, it's, it's common. I mean the life cycle of marketers is really low because I think people don't understand this stuff. I mean, to give you a quick answer without trying to be a pitch is that's why we built Hawk AI like that has all the benchmarks. I don't know another platform that gives the benchmark so freely, that allows people to actually see this is how we're performing compared to the market. That's why we built it originally.

[Daniel Murray]

And how would you suggest people create their dashboards around it? So they say, okay, here's the average click through rate or the average CAC or the average like ROAS for this industry or this product.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah. And you looked at where you, and you can look by industry and then you look at where you stand and then again, this is where you have to be an intelligent human being and go, well, what does this mean? Like if my click through rate is, is, you know, on these ads or on all of my ads average 20% lower than the market, is it that we're targeting the wrong people? Is it that we're not doing the best advertising? Or is it that less people are going to be interested in this than the average company, but that's okay because they convert at a higher rate? Like you have to. You can't just take this in a vacuum and be like, oh, we're below on this benchmark, like we're fucked. Like you have to actually take that and then extrapolate curiously, what does that actually mean? And then is there something to solve there? Because a lot of times knowing where you stand on the benchmarks doesn't necessarily create an action plan. Because like again, let's say, let's say your ads are, have a 20% higher than market conversion rate, does that mean that you've nailed it out of the park with your creative or does it mean that you've just got a way more interesting product that people want? Have you timed the market so well that you've got, you know, lightning in a bottle and you should dump more money into it, which generally is the answer. It's like you're, if you're seeing way more action than anybody else is, it sounds like it's time to, you know, grab the bull by the horns and go and try to grow Your business, you know, and strike while the iron's hot. A lot of cliches there, but that's, that is the, that is what this creates is just that other view because what we deal with is similar to what you just said. I, you know, I knock it out of the park last year and now maybe my performance is down 10 year over year. So like I had a, whatever. I was getting eight times my money last year on my advertising, now I'm getting seven times. Did I do something wrong? Did the market change? Did the click through rates change? Like knowing all those helps you make better decisions but you still gotta have critical thinking and think it through.

[Daniel Murray]

And like things like for example market changing, for example, you said, I mean we talked about at the beginning that the three to three to six months windows. So do you think a lot of problems happen where okay founders or someone gets freaked out that like the economy is going to go down, they stop spending a little bit. They wonder why, like when they start picking up back spending right now, they're not getting results. But really like that those tail end conversions are like trickling off because they pull back advertising and pull back all that stuff. Like I see that all the time where like, like. And you're also learning, losing all that brand awareness that you built up for doing advertising for six months too. So it's just a kind of a death loop a little bit to kind of. It will take you six more months to three to six more months to ramp up again if you just pull back so fast when economy is bad unless your business is going down. That's. Yeah, obviously.

[Eric Huberman]

Yep.

[Daniel Murray]

Last question I have for you is what is a marketing hill?

[Eric Huberman]

You would die on marketing hill. I would die on. I mean I would literally what I said about the basics of marketing, I mean I would, I know that that is as true as true can be. So probably the Hawk method. I would say without being that morbid, I pretty much am putting my life's work into it. So I am dying on it.

[Daniel Murray]

Which I, which I like is like the, the method doesn't necessarily say like right now like you said Google and met. I mean Google meta. Maybe TikTok is maybe the best like awareness play or.

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, figuring out where to do those things is a whole different conversation. But those principles hold true. And the book does talk about the individual tactics of like what channels live in, what and why. And like why you would pick Google over meta over TikTok over Snapchat or whatever that those are. That's a different conversation. But Overall, I don't think the that'll ever change of like, you know, getting customers, nurturing customers, building trust is going to ever change.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, that's a, that's the point I was making. I was like, those channels are going to change in each bucket that you just said. Like they might or they, they probably not for a while with some of these channels. But like it's just like knowing once you know, these are the, the ways to do things, then you figure out the best way to execute the awareness, the consideration phase and the all the three phases that you, you said. Where lastly, where could people find you and what you're doing?

[Eric Huberman]

Yeah, I mean address slash Eric Huberman on any social channel or hawkmedia.com super easy to find.

[Daniel Murray]

Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

[Eric Huberman]

Absolutely, man. Talk soon.

[Podcast Intro/Outro Host]

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