A (2:32)

No, I. I probably know, like, the south of Africa and because. And then that's. That's about it.

B (2:39)

Wow. You did not too well in, like, kindergarten, apparently.

A (2:42)

Yeah, you don't learn that at kindergarten.

B (2:44)

So when you learn, like, the States. When you're in the United States, you don't learn, like, where. What's an afternoon.

A (2:49)

Yeah, I don't think in. When you're in first grade, you're starting to, like, know the capitals of every state. Maybe. Maybe it's some schools in the US.

B (2:57)

But we're going to test Daniel, at the end of this. All right, so we're talking. Listen, the world is heading into kind of a little bumpy economy. Doesn't matter. We don't care about politically what anybody thinks. I don't care what I think. There is no doubt that there is this kind of, like, uncharted economic stuff that we are all navigating in terms of our companies, our brands, B2B consumer. And so we want to talk about auditing. Auditing. This is the moment that you really want to audit what you're doing from a marketing perspective. So that way you're making sure that it is aligned with what's going on on the planet that you are locked in and not wasting budget time, resources, whatever. So how do we audit, Daniel? How do we make sure that we are locked in?

A (3:40)

I think the first question you ask is recentering on revenue. So asking yourself, like, what's directly contributing to pipeline and revenue and thinking, like, if it's not helping you make money or keep customers, you probably should trim those things for now until we get that. And that also adds another layer, like, go back, like, audit your KPIs and message if they're realistic, because if you message it early, it's better to get ahead of that with leadership than fall way behind. So audit if things are tied to revenue or keeping customers retention, and then audit your goals to see if they are realistic in this time based on where you think the economy is headed.

B (4:32)

You know, and along those lines, within whatever it is, your CRM or however you're capturing, your pipeline, your sales, all that stuff. You also want to add a little asterisk to this moment in time for the next few months for sure, because you'll know what's going on now. But a year from now, when you look back and you're like, well, our metrics were here and we crushed it versus, you know, Q2, 20, 25, you're not going to exactly remember that moment that we're in now. So you want to put a little asterisk on this time period. But then the other thing in terms of audit is, listen, we all have marketing spend. We're doing paid media out there, all that stuff. You want to look at all your paid media and that sounds obvious, but there are ways that you could rein it in. So for example, well, this just happened in my organization. We run a ton of remarketing and retargeting campaigns and we upload our databases to all the different platforms and we try to run all these ads for ourselves, for our clients, whatever. But we just went through and we looked at the files that we were uploading, which are all pretty large. And what we decided in order to save some dollars, we said, you know what, let's reprocess those files and only look at our top, you know, 10% customers, our most active, you know, people that are clicking through on other things. And we cut down on the size of our retargeting and remarketing files by about 70%. We lopped off a lot of people and we're still getting great performance, but we're saving massive amounts of budget. So thinking about ways you can kind of get rid of some of the leakage can really benefit you.

A (5:55)

I also want to add on that note is usually in harder times, a lot of people do pull back on marketing, which actually helps make marketing cheaper. So if you're doing things efficiently, you are actually your marketing can get more efficient because more and more people are going to pull back the budget. So don't stop marketing. That's not what we saying. Just find those channels or the, the, the highest performing creatives, the highest performing campaigns, the highest point like mo. A lot of the time when you audit your revenue, you will see that 80% of your performance is coming from 20% of things. So double down on things that are working right now. The best performing content, the best performing ads, the best performing. And you can run tests, but in micro, micro tests. But I right now I would double, triple down on my content, my creative, my audiences that are working right now, because that is what's going to keep you, you going and get a better return on investment, on your cac, on your spend.

B (7:06)

You know, another thing to think about is for consumers, they get nervous about buying from new brands, trying new things, risking their money during a bumpy economic time. And for businesses, they don't really look at onboarding new vendors and putting through new vendors through procurement during a bumpy time. Everybody wants to kind of stick with what they know and what they got. And the reason that's really important is you really want to think about how are you going to get more revenue, how are you going to get more business? It's going to come from your existing customers. That is really where you want to focus in on how do we offer new products, new services, new things to our existing customers? How can we handhold them better? How can we treat them like VIPs? And overall, for everything that you're doing, your messaging needs to be audited as well. What is your tone? What are you saying? Because you want to be of the moment. You don't want to just be out there saying we're the greatest thing of all time and blah, blah, blah, as you do at any other time. You want to be more of a thought leader and position yourself. So audit even how you are outward promoting yourself.

A (8:13)

Yeah, I would double down on that. Double. You need a double, triple, quadruple down on retention right now. Retain those customers. Talk to customers, ask them what they need. Like Jay said, treat them like VIPs. And another thing that I think or is a missing piece is go do an audit on your tech stack. There's probably like a lot of spend that is happening of like usage in your tech stack that you're not using. And that's a great way like to not cut spend on marketing. You can cut spend on costs of I'm. You're probably overspending on some, some tool. You probably. Someone's probably not using a tool. You probably have too many seats in a tool. You're probably. This is a time to cut the fat of your tech stack and find, consolidate and make it more efficient because you need that cash somewhere else.

B (9:08)

Dude, that is so true. We have a thing in our company that anything that auto renews we have in the special calendar because nothing's more frustrating than you have some sort of, you know, something in your tech stack. And then you're like, okay, we're cutting budget. And you found out, well, we just auto renewed with blah, blah, blah. And you're like, what the hell? Why did we do that? So I think that's a really important point. All right, before we wrap up here, I want to know something. So we were talking about TV before, but movies. Mission Impossible is coming out. Are you like into Mission Impossible? Are you done with Tom Cruise? What is Daniel's take on Mission Impossible?

A (9:43)

I'm probably going to tell a story that nobody knows right now, but I think in fifth grade I played the trombone and the only song I knew was Mission Impossible. I knew you would get a kick out of that one.

B (10:00)

Amazing.

A (10:01)

The only song I knew how to do is Mission Impossible.

B (10:04)

Okay, if I got you a trombone for real and I shipped it to your whatever, would you play that on this podcast?

A (10:12)

I don't even know if I know how to. This is like the fifth grade. But I played for a year, though. I played in front of, like, this whole crowd. Mission Impossible. And that's the only song I knew. And it was. Yeah. I mean, so I guess I have an affinity on Mission Possible, though I don't even remember which was, like, the last Mission Impossible movie.

B (10:33)

Oh, it's the Reckoning. They've Reckoning is part two of the one he released, like, two years ago. What's wrong?

A (10:37)

Oh, I like that. I do. I did like that movie. I did like that movie.

B (10:41)

Ethan Hunt. This is great.

A (10:42)

I do like Ethan. I can't believe that he's still going on. That is crazy.

B (10:46)

Dude's amazing. He's a robot. All right, well, once again, we've really said very important things on the show. Thanks for being here and follow the show. Follow Daniel's marking Millennials do this, not that. DM Daniel, the Meaning of Life. And we'll see you the next one.

A (11:02)

Peace.

B (11:07)

Daniel. Come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay. Check out my podcast, do this, not that for marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

A (11:23)

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Mark and Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the Bathroom Break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email, subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.

B (11:46)

Later.