Show Notes:

Billy Gene Shaw

Live, laugh, love. “I think the ability to articulate what you’re selling and what you’re offering in one sentence is extremely valuable. It forces people to be concise. But the skill that really gets you paid today is entertaining — making people laugh. The ability to make someone laugh is insanely monetarily valuable right now. Because, in short, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube charge you less money when more people engage with your stuff, meaning when they click it or watch for X amount of time. If you’re putting out funny things that people like to watch, it’s much cheaper to show them advertisements. So, monetarily, it could save you a ton of money to make people laugh and give them content or a sales pitch that they enjoy.”

Find a message that resonates. “An advertisement is nothing more than a message you put in front of somebody. It’s a billboard. Think about it: a billboard cannot not work — just the message on a billboard might not work. Facebook’s only job is to take the message that you create and put it in front of the people that you tell it to. If you’re not getting results, that doesn’t mean that Facebook doesn’t work; it just means that your message sucks. The light at the end of that tunnel is that if your message sucks, you can always make a new one.”

Quality over quantity. “If you’re a new company, you’ve got to come up with quality content. You may look at other companies and decide that since they’re not doing it, you don’t have to either. Those companies are still riding the coattails of their legacy. Every day they continue to do that, they lose steam. Just wait until you see what happens to them in 20 years.”

Seth Godin

Trust is everything in business. “We get hooked on this mindset of hoarding. The problem with that is that most of the things we care about, and our culture, are not driven by scarcity. They’re driven by abundance. If I have a widget factory, and everyone in town comes and takes a free sample, I’m going to go out of business. But if I have an idea and everyone comes and takes a free sample, I’m rich because I get to keep the idea and now the idea has gone up in value. So we have to shift gears and think hard about, ‘How do I contribute to this culture? How do I earn trust?’ as opposed to, ‘How do I approach a scarcity mindset and create distrust?’”

Be the expert in your field. “’When we go to buy anything, we don’t say, ‘What’s the average one?’ We say, ‘Who’s the expert?’ So if you need knee surgery, you’re not going to say to your friends, ‘Who’s a surgeon in Atlanta who can do anything including dentistry?’ You’re going to say, ‘Who is the number one knee surgeon within two miles of me?’”

Set the bar high. “If you don’t focus on a smaller, more viable audience, how are you going to grow your business? If you don’t do that, then you’re practicing average law for average people. Average law for average people would be fine if you were the only average lawyer in town, because there are a lot of average people in town. But you are not the only average lawyer in town. In fact, almost every lawyer is an average lawyer. So if I can’t tell the difference between Lawyer A and Lawyer B, why would I pick you and why would I not want you to be cheaper?”

Ryan Deiss

Do the work the right way. “The only thing that matters is who’s the person who’s able and willing to spend the most to get a customer. That is what marketing comes down to. Marketers like to brag about their high conversion rates — screw that. Don’t brag about that. Brag about how much you’re able to spend to acquire a customer because you’ve engineered your business in such a way that it’s worth more. I’m more impressed with the people who are able to spend more than me, not the people who have found some trick or hack.”

Simple equations. “Way too many people are looking for a shortcut, and it never works. I get it — but spend more time saying, ‘How can I make a customer worth more to me?’ That usually happens by figuring out new and better ways to serve them. By starting with the customer and working backwards, it will benefit you. If your customer is worth half of what my customer is worth, then I can spend twice as much as you to acquire that customer and still make the same margin. That’s just very basic math.”

Play the long game. “People think that their marketing is done because they got the lead. No it isn’t. From a marriage perspective, that’s like saying you’re done dating just because you’re now married. I’ve been happily married for almost 20 years. If I just was like, ‘Yeah, honey. We’re married now, so I’m not going to take you out to dinner,’ that would not be good. But people do that to their clients and prospects all the time and wonder why they don’t ascend. So that’s where, from a marketing perspective, you need to focus. A click costs what a click costs. Focus on ascending that traffic into prospects, and then by all means focus on getting those clients into becoming bigger and better clients and referring clients.”

The customer’s journey. “I see advertising as being a broader subset of marketing. Marketing’s job is to move customers through the customer’s journey. From the initial point of awareness through engagement and nurturing, to getting them to take the first step, to getting them to actually complete and become a client, to making sure they get served and results are delivered, and circling back around to get customer stories, testimonials, and referrals. Advertising is that first stage of amplification — same with sales.”

Quick looks aren’t everything. “Great marketing must get people to not just notice, but to stare. I think today it is easier than ever to get somebody to glance your way. You could do something ridiculous and kind of out there, and people will glance. It’s like if you’ve ever been at a stoplight and somebody honks their horn, you know people are going to turn around. You’re going to get a glance, but to get somebody to stare at a hold attention — that’s a different animal. Great marketing doesn’t merely get a glance. Great marketing gets a stare, and the way that you do that is to let people know that you’re talking just to them.”

Pat Flynn

Build your fanbase. “Business owners are spending decades trying to build their business. What if you just focused on the experiences of one fan per day instead? By building your fanbase, you’re able to make a larger impact, and then you can grow your business from the inside out.”

Cultivate your relationships. “People are not fans the moment people find you. People are fans because of the moments you create for them over time. From the casual audience at the bottom, you want to convert them to an active audience member — for example, somebody who subscribes or is engaged in some way. They communicate with you and you communicate with them, and that’s really cool. They follow you on social media and know what you have going on, and when you create something or publish something, they already have a basis for what they might get. They then make a decision to buy that or take the time to read [your published work].”

Repetition is the father of learning. “You’ve got to know what your super powers are as a company or a law firm. What allows you to stand out above everybody else? Once you know what that is, you’ve got to share with everyone, everywhere, as often as possible. It’s like Gary V. He says the same things every single time. But this isn’t a bad thing. That’s how we know what Gary’s all about. When you need a Gary, you go to Gary. If you keep changing the language and your target audience, how the heck are people going to know that you’re the person to go to if they need help on a certain thing?”

Be authentic. “Your audience almost tells you what they enjoy and think is unique about you, and then you just lean into that. It’s going to take time for that to happen, but unless you’re fully yourself, it’s never going to happen.”

EPISODE RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Dollar Shave Club
Poopourri
Facebook Ads
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn
Boston Marathon
Atlanta, GA
Swiss Army Knife
R.E.M.
DigitalMarketer
TikTok
Charlie Brown
Gary Vaynerchuk
Wired Magazine
Taylor Swift
Justin Bieber
One Direction
Backstreet Boys