“The market changes quickly, and if we aren’t thinking long term, we get beat. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, and what worked 10 years ago doesn’t work the same today. However, we have never had it better than we do right now.”
Enter entrepreneur and best selling author Gary Vaynerchuk.
He inspires thousands of marketers and subscribers every single day. As a marketing guru and businessman who started out by building his father’s wine store to a $60 million wine empire, Vaynerchuk is more than familiar with how to build a business from the ground up and remain ahead of the curve.
According to Vaynerchuk, we are in the golden era of marketing. There has never been a better time to reach your audience in a personable way, engage with customers, and experiment on different platforms. However, people are getting lost in broken marketing tactics that no longer work, and aren’t executing in the most crucial areas of marketing today.
Here are 10 of Vaynerchuk’s most valuable pieces of advice on how we can capitalize on the golden era of marketing.
1. Facebook & brand is crucial right now
If your business is growing, you have to have a healthy balance of marketing, sales and branding. Most marketers thrive in two of these areas, but rarely succeed at all three of them.
The reason Facebook is so special is it’s the first platform that does marketing, brand, and sales in one place with underpriced attention. A few years ago, there was no branding in marketing the way Facebook allows. There was just Google and blue letters. Facebook gives you the ability to not only reach your audience but to also showcase your brand while doing so.
Brand is crucial to balance marketing and sales and people are not understanding the balance. Vaynerchuk held up his Nike shoes at his Inbound keynote and exclaimed, “I did not buy these sneakers because Nike cookie-d me and sent me to some website and converted me. I bought it because of brand. And there’s a lot of people mixing it up.” For more on Nike’s branding brilliance, check out our previous post.
2. The single most importance variable of success
It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B, B2C, startup, or Fortune 500- we are all battling for attention. But it’s what you do with that attention that matters. Once you have the attention, creative is the variable- the creative is what decides if someone is going to convert.
“If I had one plea for the room tonight from a marketing and business standpoint, it is that we have to understand that creative is the variable of success” says Vaynerchuk.
So many people are focused on clicks, but clicks are overrated. If someone bounces immediately or spends less than a minute on your site, then the click isn’t necessarily worth much. The creative is what matters- knowing your audience, tweaking your forms, formatting landing pages, creating copy, and graphic design will lead to conversions.
People who pour money into commercials usually focus entirely on art – it’s the “Madison Avenue” marketing. But audience engagement and converting requires both art and science; math and creative equally. “When you understand the balance, you will be a successful marketer” says Vaynerchuk. Most people fall into one camp or the other. Build your skills around the one that you are not doing.
3. The future of the price of your attention
Billions of dollars are being poured into marketing that is broken and unpractical. No one watches commercials. We fast forward or we look at our phones. And yet, 80 billion dollars is put into making 30 second videos every single year. And it is the reason that 95% of the Fortune 500 biggest brands in the world have declined in market share in the last two years.
And here is what matters: all of that money is coming into our ecosystem.
“Once they start calibrating how bad it actually is… once they take that money from page 147 of Sports Illustrated and from a commercial… and they put it into Facebook and Instagram the price of that attention is going to go through the roof,” says Vaynerchuk.
If you are not activating your marketing in that ecosystem you are going to miss the golden era of Facebook marketing and you will regret it.
4. Facebook video is the best ad buy for your money right now
If you want to get the word out about your business on a budget, you should be putting your money and time into publishing video ads. Facebook’s price point is extremely low for the the amount of attention and business development opportunities it provides.
Eighty-three percent of marketers said they’d like to create more video content if they didn’t have restraints such as time and resources. But, you don’t need to have a large budget to produce videos. You can begin with a smartphone. If you can get in front of your audience with a video and creative that people will care about, you have a much better chance of audience engagement.
Eventually, getting in front of Facebook audiences will either be 1) much more difficult 2) much more expensive. There has never been a better time to connect 1 on 1 with your audience and engage them in the most personable way to date.
5. Influencer marketing
“The greatest marking arbitrage besides Facebook is Influencer marketing.”
Influencer marketing is not evolving as quickly as it should because people don’t fully understand its role in their marketing strategy, and according to Vaynerchuk, because people simply don’t like it. But it doesn’t change the fact that -even in the B2B environment- if you put in the hours to map out the people who reach your customers, you can gain massive amounts of attention for a low price point. Go into Instagram, search hashtags that your business relates to (SaaS, B2B, etc.), and find the people who have 4-5 hundred followers that consistently post. Build a database of names, email them one by one and ask them to promote your businesses. The price points are incredibly underpriced for the amount of attention, and yet we continue not to do it.
6. Don’t put yourself out of business.
Airbnb should have been invented by Marriott, and Uber should have been created by Greyhound. But they were looking short term, and consequently they got beat. The market changes very fast, and if you are making short term decisions you will lose. “If you are comfortable or cushy, you’re in trouble” Vaynerchuk says. “If you are not making long term decisions you will be vulnerable, because somewhere out there someone is hungry and working to put you out of business themselves.”
7. Be more risk adverse
Marketers need to lose the “wait ’til its popular mentality” and have much more risk tolerance on new platforms. If you aren’t experimenting, then you aren’t capitalizing on what could be the next big thing. Countless people said they would never have a Snapchat account, and yet now everyone is on it. What are the up and coming apps? How can you insert yourself on these new platforms? Gary was experimenting on House Party when it came out half a year ago and Snapchat long before it took off because he was thinking long term.
8. The market doesn’t care
The market doesn’t care about you or your business.
“We spend unbelievable amounts of time dwelling” says Vaynerchuk. Twenty years ago, there was no respect for 20 or 30 year olds in marketing. Today, there is a tremendous amount because of our tech ecosystem. “So now I sit with 40-60 year olds every day that say, ‘But Gary, I didn’t grow up with this,’ and I responds “well neither did I… Susan. But I figured it out.”
People are crippled when they don’t understand how things work. “We are just filled with excuses,” says Vaynerchuk. People fear what they don’t know – they fear what they weren’t raised with or what they don’t understand.
“We need to start realizing how big this opportunity is. For everybody, you will sit back in 20 to 30 years and regret if you did not execute in this era.”
“People think they are scared now. Wait ’til people won’t get off the couch because they are in VR all day, then you will long for this era once again.”
9. No more banner ads
Rather than spreading yourself thin and posting whatever content you think might work best on any given platform, we should figure out where our customers attention is being focused.
What type of content enticed our followers in the first place? Where can your maximize on that audience engagement? Avoid the temptation to deviate from what originally hooked your audience.
No one clicks banner ads anymore. Your money is far better off being put anywhere else mentioned in this post.
10. Hustle!
“Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.”
– Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk runs VaynerMedia. Check out his website, and watch my favorite keynote of his here.
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