Ryan Deiss was recently featured on the Perpetual Traffic Podcast to talk about the future of marketing and conversion.
Marketing, at the end of the day, is the crafting and amplification of a message—and the crafting piece is more important today than it’s ever been.
We’ve been receiving so much positive feedback about adding Ryan as a co-host on Business Lunch. We recently featured Ryan on another one of our podcasts, Perpetual Traffic, about the future of marketing and some cool things happening at Scalable. (One of those cool things is Scalable Impact LIVE. Get your ticket HERE.) It’s a great episode to listen to as a leader and entrepreneur—and to have your marketing team listen to as well.
No one knows marketing like Ryan Deiss. Listen in as he chats with Perpetual Traffic hosts, Ralph Burns and Kasim Aslam, about what we can expect in the world of marketing in the weeks and months to come.
How Digital Marketing Has Changed in the Past Two Decades
Ryan has been in the digital marketing game since he was 19, and he’s almost 41. If you do the math, he’s been at it longer than he hasn’t. And he’s seen a lot of changes. When he first started, obviously there was no Google or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok. Over the first decade of his career, he watched it move toward marketers’ ability to target. There was this push when it was all about “right person, right time” (and the right message wasn’t as important).
In the past few years, we’ve seen a shift away from that. Things got harder, more expensive. It’s been fun with Facebook ads from 2007 to 2017. There was a new social channel coming out every other month. You could get in early, build your following. We watched influencers become celebrities.
But paid ads have straight up doubled in the past year. The average marketer has to spend more, and it’s only going to get harder. We peaked, we crested, and now we’re seeing a shift back toward digital marketer looking like mass media marketing. Our ability to get our message in front of the right person at the right time is slowly getting taken away from us—through competition, algorithmic shift, and being priced out.
With all this mass media, the message matters more now. It’s the message that reigns. There’s always going to be an edge if you’re really a student of this stuff. It’s really important as marketers that we own our message and become good copywriters again. Bad copy used to work if your timing was perfect. The message could be “want this thing?” People would be like, “I do!” And it was as easy as that.
Now? The sky isn’t falling exactly, but you have to realize that the 2015 playbook isn’t going to work in 2022. You have to build your own community, your own media brand. You need an email list, a podcast, a community of people invested in you and what you do.
The Best Message Wins
Roy Williams, one of Ryan’s mentors, is the author of The Wizard of Ads trilogy, which “everybody should read,” Ryan says. One of the fundamental themes is that the best message wins. Roy knows this because he’s done primarily mass media marketing, and there’s only so much targeting you can do through radio/TV. Roy always says, “The most valuable target is the untargeted target that you target through messaging.”
Why is this true? Because, the more targeting you bring into play, the higher the cost. The holy grail of marketing and advertising is the ability to craft a message, yell it out to the masses, and have people who didn’t even know they were in the market have their ears perk up. That is the greatest skill that has ever existed and will always work in marketing.
Ryan says there’s going to be an absolute bloodbath in the digital marketing space. You had so many agencies and consultants who had their trick. Ooh, I can juggle. In a world where everyone wants juggling, that’s great. But now it’s like juggling sucks. Nobody wants juggling. You’re out of business. Because they weren’t actually marketers. They weren’t even really craftspeople or artists. They knew how to do one thing.
Marketing is all about crafting and amplifying a message. In recent years, all of the emphasis has been around amplification, traffic. Now it’s going to be all about messaging. The folks who win will be those who see themselves as messengers and communicators first. Where the edge will be moving forward is on the messaging side. Most of these marketers have never learned how to craft a message. They’ve never learned how to dig in and figure out “what does this person really want?”
The Concentric Circles of Marketing
It’s easy to market to someone who already knows, likes, and trusts you and desperately wants what you have. Just show up. Then you go out to that next ring—people who are solution-aware and in the market and actively looking. But the biggest gains will come from the problem-aware market and the unaware market. That’s where you’ve got to learn to speak to people about their unspoken need/desire—things they aren’t even talking about.
Roy Williams once wrote a Rolex ad for Justice Jewelers, a regional jewelry company in the Midwest. When Sir Edmund Hillary conquered Everest, he got a Rolex. The whole point of the ad is that you, too, deserve a Rolex when you conquer your own Everest. This ad is for people who might never have even thought about wanting a Rolex. This is for someone who has conquered a mountain and they’re looking for a way to celebrate. You’re selling them identity reinforcement. That’s what great marketers understand.
The New Marketing Playbook for CEOs
A lot of CEOs are struggling with this new world—going from being their own CMO to having others do it for them. Ryan says the days of running the company and doing all the marketing are over. And he says this as the CEO of a company called DigitalMarketer. He doesn’t market anymore. He’s not even in the marketing meetings. His primary job is communicator-in-chief. He’s good at messaging, and that’s where he’ll keep his focus.
Internally, they focus on messaging, and for all the mechanics of a given channel (Google, Facebook, YouTube), they work with external agencies and consultants. Everything has gotten so specialized. Let other people handle it.
Back in 2016, DigitalMarketer set a vision and mission for the next 5 years. They wanted to be all about doubling the size of 10k businesses. It was a cool mission, but they had no way to track it. This year they reset their mission. They’re going to be all about serving and enabling marketers. They’re going to simplify and systemize marketing so marketers can freaking win and do their best work.
See You at Scalable Impact LIVE
That shift meant they were no longer speaking to the small business owner and entrepreneur. So they started another company for that at Scalable.Co. Ryan tells founders to get out of the dang marketing meetings. As the leader, you’re not the person coming up with all the plans. You’re communicator-in-chief and questioner-in-chief. He knows it’s a hard one to hand off, but you’ve got to do it if you want to scale.
They didn’t just launch a new company; they launched a new event. Scalable Impact Live is an annual event for the CEO and entrepreneur. It’s not T&C; there’s literally not a single marketing session. It’s all about asking: what does it look like to scale your business to the next level? Growth is not enough.
It’s single track, old-school, highly interactive, with just 500-600 people. Ryan and his business partners, Roland Frasier and Richard Lindner, will be teaching and walking through different workshops with special guests Marcus Lemonis from The Profit; the NFL’s Emmitt Smith; and brilliant businesswoman, Kendra Scott.
Come confused and frustrated; leave with a scalable impact plan.
RESOURCES:
- Scalable Impact Live (November 2-3, 2021)
- Wizard of Ads (trilogy by Roy Williams)
- Justice Jewelers Rolex ad
OUR PARTNERS:
- Scalable Impact Live (November 2-3, 2021)
- Get a free proposal from Conversion Fanatics
- Get 3% cash back on your ad spend with AdCard
- PodBean, your all-in-one podcasting solution
Roland’s EPIC Challenge.
You may have heard about Roland’s EPIC challenge, which he moved online when the Pandemic hit. It focuses on Ethical Profits In Times of Crisis and dives into no-money out-of-pocket business acquisition strategies. If you’re interested in finding out more about this strategy, click here.
Contact & Follow Roland
Through his Website.
Contact and Follow Ryan Deiss
Through his Website.
