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Hi. There we go. Okay. Okay. Let me send this over to Eric. Ok. I am going to share the space link, and then we will get going. Oh, there we have him. Awesome. Okay. So let me invite Eric to Cohost, and then I will try and get Jeff in here, too.
There we go.
Hi. How are you?
How are you doing?
Good to see you.
You too.
So last time I saw you was about two years ago at a summit at YEC.
Yeah, that's right.
I believe it's been two years. Jeff, are you going to Mexico for the YEC trip?
No, honestly, it was kind of a diehard snowboarder. So to give up a weekend during snowboard season to go to Mexico, where, frankly, I have a place and go all the time. I'll be there next week. I was like, yeah, no, not doing that. Love. Why I wish they could prop back the snowboarding.
All right. Do you have Jeff?
It's a technical difficulty. I am here.
Awesome. Okay. So I guess we'll get started. Well, Eric, thank you for joining us. Hi, everyone. I am Chris Ruby, the founder of Ruby Media Group, a digital PR and content agency. I am here with my co host, Joe, who is the co founder of Market, who specializes in all things AI and content optimization. And we are joined by our guest today, Eric Huberman, who is the founder of Hawk Media and is the author of a new book called The Hawk Method. And we are going to be talking with him about all things, the principles of marketing, the three principles he mentioned in his book, which I enjoyed reading. And I guess we will get into it. So welcome, Eric.
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
So I want to get started. I'm going to pull up the LinkedIn post that I did. But before I do that, Eric, why did you write this book? What propelled you to write it?
Yeah, it's frankly, the same reason I built Talk Media. It frustrates me that marketing is so convoluted and difficult. I don't think it should be. And so the reason I started the company was I was advising consulting for a lot of brands after I built and sold a couple of brands and just found that executing on marketing is incredibly difficult because of this inaccessibility to great marketers. It's really hard to find decent agencies or decent marketers. Every entrepreneur has dealt with this. And so that's what caused me to build the team. And so continuing on that mission of accessibility to great marketing, I still think that it's way too opaque and hard to figure out how to do marketing. And so after eight years of building over 3500 brands, we found that there's sort of a methodology we use that works over and over again. And why not articulate that? And I spoke on it a lot. I did a lot of public speaking around how we looked at marketing and then distilled it down into a book to try to just share with the world the things that we see are working.
So what are those three principles that you see are working and what can people learn from them?
Yeah. So it basically comes down to again, three principles, awareness, nurturing and trust. And the idea is it's kind of like a tripod, like if you do all these things, well, you'll have a really stable foundation for marketing. If you don't, you kick out a leg. It's kind of what happens to a tripod. It topples over. And so awareness being how do you introduce your product or service to new audience? How do you nurture that awareness from the moment they are introduced to your brand to the point that they buy and then what you do after that point, and then trust those anonymous with brand. And basically, what can people trust they're going to get from you? And how can they trust that you're going to deliver on what you're promising? And if you could cover those three categories, you're going to have a successful marketing campaign at some level. And then it also helps you inform. And this is on the book how to Continue to Triage, to Know Where to double down on.
So you say you've helped thousands of brands grow. So out of all of those brands that you have helped grow with this methodology, what are some things that you have seen over and over that some of the brands that didn't grow, what were they lacking? What were some of the mistakes that they were making?
Yeah. The biggest one that I've seen most commonly. And it's still to this day, it seems to be just a blind spot for a lot of people is the idea of a purchase cycle or consideration period, same thing, just two different words or ways of putting it. And what that is, is there's a period between the time someone learns about your company and when they buy? And I feel like digital marketing and all the tracking that we have has caused people to think that marketing happens instantly, that I show you an ad and you go buy it. And so we constantly see people that, like, run ads on Facebook for two days and they go, oh, it's not working and turn it off. And the problem is with knowing purchase cycles and averages in that space, two days is almost never going to be your average purchase cycle. So in Ecommerce, what we've seen is the average purchase cycle for about a $50 purchase is around three weeks for $100 is around five weeks for $200 is around six weeks. And then it goes between two and three months for anything above that. And knowing that means that when you run ads, you got to wait weeks before you actually see the efficacy of them. And you've got to do things during that period which is the nurturing piece of this to actually make sure people convert at a high rate and you stay in touch with them to keep on selling them. So that is probably the biggest crux of where we see people break. I just had that conversation with another brand like, this is not something that's caught on. And we're trying to make a catch on last night at a brand that's doing incredibly well with us on Facebook, and we're looking at them. And my team said, hey, the next thing you need to do is email marketing, and they're like, and they looked at it and they're like, okay, well, but that's just going to optimize what we're doing like, yeah, email marketing can drive about 25% of your revenue. We've seen email marketing triple people's returns on their ad spend because again, they're just running ads right now and doing nothing once they collect that information from that customer to actually continue to push them to buy. And even after the fact, continue to drive lifetime value and have them come back and buy more. And they were actually really sort of shiny object. They were talking about advertising on Pinterest advertising on search advertising, all these other channels. And I had to explain to them which they got after I explained it. Yeah. But if you keep doing all those channels, but you're not doing anything deeper in the funnel, you're going to have a worse return. And this is a competitive landscape, meaning other people that are doing the things to help convert will be able to spend more on acquiring a customer because they get a higher lifetime value and a higher conversion. And so they're going to beat you every time and drive your cost up, which then you're not doing the things to maximize on that cost, and you're going to suffer as a business. And so that's by far is the number one thing I see broken.
And Jeff feel free to chime in or jump in at any point. But one of the things Eric, you said is you talked about how an ad it could take weeks. And I think from a PR perspective, PR could take months or even years. And I think that's one of the things you bring up in your book as well. It was actually one of the few times I've seen PR really put in the correct lens or light of really how to actually measure it. Sure. The things you wrote are typically things that I'm saying. It was interesting to hear someone very much marketers say those very same things about PR. And so before I get to your LinkedIn post or my LinkedIn post about what you said in the book, Jeff, do you have any commentary before we go there?
No, it's great. I think it's most commonly in my world that connects to certain ads and that multi channel discussion, multi channel structures. And then the second pieces are that content. A lot of times, teams will be focused only on one stage of that buying cycle or that purchase cycle or that consideration cycle they won't see there for the entire journey. And as Eric put in there, it's the post purchase troubleshooting. It's the post purchase champion development. It's getting them to be advocates for your company. So you need content that connects with this campaign across every channel where they might be, or else they're going to get that information from someone else. And I don't care. I joke around here. I always say whether you're buying a sock or you're buying $100,000 software product, there's a purchase journey, there's a buying journey. And a lot of times, especially in paid media. The expectation is that conversion is going to happen immediately by itself. What that does is it makes you undervalue your spend, and that's the part that breaks people's brains because you buy and only attributing that instant gratification conversion. So you miss optimize and you incorrectly optimize your media spend and that's to where people are like, wait, what are you even talking about? So imagine you turn off a campaign that has a delayed conversion or when you only keep that immediate gratification stuff on, you are cutting off a huge potential driver of revenue from a paid perspective that delayed gratification work that can be supported by things like email marketing, things like organic community management and other components like that. So I love the thesis of this. It is the most common mistake made by demand generation professionals today in B to B technology. It's believing that awareness based content or consideration based content isn't important and demanding. People are trying to only focus on the page that converts, but you got to be there on the top of the funnel to have the honor of being there at the bottom of the funnel. And I think that that really resonates with me.
Yeah. I mean, you just absolutely nailed it. And I appreciate the way you articulated it. It is that piece that people forget that they're optimizing to the numbers that they have. And that's what I mean. By this day and age, where we have all this data a lot of times, the data is misleading, and you're looking at a perfect example is the current tracking window on Facebook post or team changes is seven days. And I just told you guys that it was little as a $50 average order value on a company. It takes three weeks for your average purchase. Yet Facebook is only tracking seven days. So all of our clients, Facebook is looking horrible because, frankly, right before that, at the beginning of the year, it was a 28 day window. We're dealing with this as an agency. A lot of our clients are going. Our Facebook ads have completely collapsed from iOS 14. It's like, no, they haven't. Your tracking window completely changed. It's just a different number. It's not that your performance has gone down. It's that this little number you look at. Actually, the variables changed. So understanding that and it is pretty basic once you get it. But it's not that complicated, but so many people just take the numbers at face value. And I think that might be one of the most devastating things to do in marketing, because there's so much nuance. And there's such an art to marketing. Still, even though we fool ourselves with all this attribution and track ability, it's still such an art that you have to be careful how you look at this stuff.
Yeah. I'll just leave one thing. It's a really great thing to figure. I joke around with keyword research. It's wonderful when your competitor, you figure out what software they're using, and they just sort to send a list of words by things like search volume, right? Because you know exactly what they're going to do, not just today, but for the next three to six months, you can kind of predict the outcomes. It's wonderful in PPC when you see people optimizing their campaigns solely based on immediate gratification. And that's where the super strong, talented teams really burn out their competition. That's the key.
Actually, you had two interesting stories in the book about that. I think one was in terms of SEO. One was about when you had that meeting, I believe, with a client you talk about, and you asked them the words that they were optimizing for. And I think one was like a blanket term, like dress or like shirt. Can you go into that story that you shared in there?
Sure. I'm going to be blunt. I don't remember the exact story I shared, but that happens a lot. The funny thing is, I do this all the time when I speak at conferences because everybody loves to talk about their search marketing when they're lifestyle brands and lifestyle. What I mean is like fashion brands, beauty brands, et cetera, that are more driven by the lifestyle and feeling around them than they are by just the function of the product. Like, you don't buy a shirt because you need a shirt, you buy a shirt because of that specific shirt. It's this brand, and I trust it. And I like what they stand for, et cetera. That's more how people are driven as sort of the emotional purchase and fashion. And that's what I mean by lifestyle. And so when companies go, oh, yeah. We're doubling down on Keywords, and there is one major fashion brand we worked with that their entire marketing budget was going towards dresses and women's fashion and things like those kind of search terms on Google, and they couldn't figure out why things weren't working well. And it's like, okay, so we're standing in a room and it's like how many of you, frankly, a bunch of women in the room, so show of hands. Who here has Googled the word dress recently and bought a dress. And I'm even curious in the crowd here. I spoke at a conference with like, 500 people in the crowd and one person raised their hand. The answer is almost never. That's not how people behave. People don't go to Google to find their fashion. And that's very specific in terms of like, as a guy, I'm going to a Hawaiian party and I got to find a Hawaiian shirt, and I don't even know a brand. I like, I'll go Google Hawaiian shirts, but it's not a common practice. And so the idea of putting your bidding on the word dress, where all these frankly mediocre marketers are going to be bidding on it, and you're going to compete in that. And if someone Googles dress, chances are they're not looking for your dress. And so you're going to get a bunch of traffic and look, you lose. But you're not going to get many people converting, which means you're going to pay a bunch of cost per click. But you're not going to be getting much many customers. And so same thing with ranking on SEO, people say, like, oh, we want to rank for the word dress. Well, why especially I think the story it was that company was a very expensive company, so their customers not the type of person to go Google dress and then buy their dress. So if you're maybe like an entry level dress or an everyday dress that could work for T shirt, if you're like the best blank white T shirt and you want to rank for T shirt. Yeah, maybe that could work. But also the more name brands are going to win a lot of the time with those. Anyways, where if I'm Googling T shirt and Hayes or Fruit of the Loom or whatever show up, that's probably what I'm going to go for versus your random brand I've never heard of. But you're going to spend a lot of money on people going, oh, but what's this? Oh, that's interesting. Maybe next time. And so Google is not a good place to create new demand for your product. It's to answer existing demand for people that are already looking for you. Unless you're serving some sort of function or you build a brand that people recognize and you fill a service. Google is a lot harder to make money on as a lifestyle company.
When you talk about that, though, it really can form for that. And when you do, why did you get to the top of that summit? I work with a lot of very large brands. Some of them focus heavily on extremely high level, high volume topics. But the way they get there isn't by just saying, hey, let's go write an article about and we're going to rank for dresses. You create a mass of content that tells the story that you have the best products, the most stylish products that you are an expert on the topic. You understand the buyer journey. So you've got this huge blob of imagine this huge infrastructure and this huge block dress related content. Then you're also buying. So you're just basically owning the real estate that tells the story of, wow, these folks have everything I might need. The page that I perform well for. That is related to the explicit keyword that you just mentioned. Eric also performs for 28,000 other topics. Right? And the infrastructure around that is over 600 pages. And the total volume of stuff that relates to that is over 1 million topics just related to that concept. So to win there, like buying this brand new niche dress brand. You shouldn't be going for that because it requires a whole massive amount of investment. That's why I love the thesis. And what you talk about is that have smart expectations, understand the return on investment and really know what you're getting into. Regardless of the campaign type that you're building, so many people, they take a shot at something high level, not really knowing what would be needed for that to be successful. And like you said, you are fighting big brands, whether it's a big publisher or whether it's a big retailer. So know what that investment needs to be.
Eric, one of the day in terms of sales, you said, quote, if you're not introducing new customers into your sales funnel, you're slowly dying. Let's talk about that.
Sure. This is where logic and being rational comes into marketing. It's like let's say you have a pool of people that are your existing customer. What that statement says is you're introducing no one else no one knew is coming in. There is a high likelihood that one of those 10,000 people are going to fall off. I mean, just not to be too morbid, but someone is going to die just as an extreme example, like just going to happen. And so you're going to overtime lose some of that 10,000 people. And so this is another situation, another story in there where someone was doing an incredible job of email marketing and retargeting and nurturing and content all these things that were keeping their existing customer base. But they literally did nothing to drive top of the funnel to drive new awareness to their company. And they were trying to figure out why they were declining because from their perspective, they were doing so much. But they were literally missing this entire pillar. And so again, over time, you're going to lose customers, whether it's they change their taste, they move, they change the sort of phase of life again, they can pass away there's all these things or they just have enough of your product and don't need anymore. Whatever it is, they get add and get a new favorite T shirt, whatever it is. These are all things that are going to drive your customers away. You're going to lose your customers over time. And if you're not filling it back up, you're going to die, you're going to start to decline and you're going to continue to decline.
So what should people do differently? What should they think about after? Let's say they're on a winning streak. So I guess your thesis there is that winning streak is going to end at some point if you're not constantly.
I guess that's the thing. I know it's way to a fault where it's like there's no such thing as a winning streak. It's kind of how I looked at it like things are going well, I'm already looking at okay, but what's next? You have to be looking down. And I will say as I said to a fault, you have to sometimes stop and celebrate and be like, hey, we're winning, which is where I have to almost force it sometimes because I'm just naturally predisposed now to be like, okay, but great, we won this. We did this. We hit this goal. What's next? What's coming for us in the next piece. And you kind of have to be that way to continue to grow and build a business. It all depends on what you want to, because there's also the path of you build a business just to get you want to build a small business and just sustain and do the things you're doing. And you're not looking to build a massive business. But you want to build that big business. You have to constantly be looking at where you improve. So there is no win streak because winning is being Amazon or being Apple. And if you're not there yet, which I'm going to guess, Jeff Bezos is not in the crowd, and they're doing the same thing, by the way, because for them now it's how do I double? How do I grow more? How do I take on more? And you kind of have to have that mentality. So it is a constant look at. And that's where this book comes in. From the marketing perspective, you're constantly looking at awareness, nurturing and trust and where you weak at its current state. And where do you need to do more? And where do you need to invest more growing when you grow a business, that should mean you have more Reese, too. So now that I have more resources, am I doubling down on trust or am I putting more into awareness? Or am I putting more into nurturing and at what scale and what ratio are we distributing that? And you're constantly watching where do I feel my weak point is at this moment?
And let's double down there one of the lines that you said early on in the book is you said, quote, It was never going to be my big win. I think it was referring to something, maybe a company you started earlier in your career, but I thought it was a really interesting line. Can you walk us through that? How did you know that feeling that it was not going to be your big. Do you know that there was more out there for you?
Yeah. So I don't know where it came from, but it's funny because it's not that I ever had a numerical idea or a real solid idea of what success looked like. I was confident that I'd be successful. And again, I didn't know what that actually meant. It's just more like I knew that I was going to create something and build something great, and it was a given. I don't want to call it a cockiness, but it was just like because it didn't come from a cocky place. It just came from like, I was very sure that at some point I was going to land on something that I was going to be able to build a business. Even at that time. I'd talk about that would pay for my kids to go to College, and I'd be able to own a house and all these things. I was very confident in that state. And so with that business, which was Fame Wizard, it was something I started when I was 22. I realized that we were kind of on a hamster wheel when it came to our business because it was one on one business coaching for musicians. So we pulled in a ton of incredible record executives and rock stars and all these people to basically coach musicians on how to make money, being a musician and how to actually make a living doing it. And I realized having an audience of struggling artists was a very hard business to build. And we are also on this hamster wheel of churn, where a lot of musicians, frankly, from experience. And this is not meant to come from a place of being jaded. I just experienced it. I'd say 90% of musicians are struggling musicians are struggling because they're lazy, not because they're the industry because the other 10% are incredible. They're hard working. And a lot of times I'd say hardworking musicians, that really it's kind of like they're going to do this for a living no matter what. And they're going to work their ass off to make it happen. I actually saw a high success rate there where I saw a lot of problems where people that use it as an excuse, just not to work. And so having that as a customer because they have no money. They like touting the struggling musician thing. And if they're not famous in a month, they're done, they're not going to put the work in. And so I saw that. And so I saw this. We had a profitable business, but it was a hamster wheel that we would lose business as fast as we get it. After a couple of years of building it and getting it there, I went, this is never going to be a huge success. Like, I was 24. At that point, I needed to build something that can set me up and pay the bills and again, start. I wasn't building a family of 24, but I wanted that future possibility, and I knew that this was not going to be the horse to bet on, so to speak. And so I went to the board and said I ended up replacing myself as CEO and moving on to starting another business.
Of that story. And I think that gives people a lot of hope, especially now as people are really looking at what they want to do next. And is this the path for them? Do they want to stay with what they're doing? So I think that was a really interesting story, which is a good segue into the next section here, which is your commentary on agency growth. So there are some bold lines in the book with quote, agencies are built by snake oil salesmen who know how to sell services but don't actually know how to grow businesses. That's a bombshell of a statement. So let's dissect that one, Eric.
Sure. No, I firmly believe that my mind since I started this is 99% of agency shit, and I believe that wholeheartedly it's a shame. But we work in an industry and this is something there's a longer term problem to solve. But an industry that currently Hawk Media manages about $250,000,000 in other people's money in terms of in 2021, we have no government oversight. We have no necessary training, licensing, anything. There's no industry like that other than marketing. If you're a CFA, you have a CPA. If you're a lawyer, you have to take a bar exam. And marketing, you don't need anything. You just need to be a good salesperson to convince people. And the other part of this is given the rise of all marketing has become to most people running businesses opaque. They don't understand what's going on there, but they know they need it, and it's also become a necessary function in business. And this is something that has been super interesting. The past decade, when 2008 recession hit, marketing was the first thing everyone cut because digital still haven't been adopted at the level it has now because foot traffic, you could sell all these other things that marketing was a nice to have for growth. It wasn't a necessary for survival. Now it's more of an oxygen line and a lifeblood. That when Kovan hit companies that cut their marketing basically just committed suicide. And most companies doubled down on marketing, which is what we did really well. So our economy did really well. This thing happened. So marketing has become more essential for these companies. This all being said, the problem is there's no barrier and no proof point to say this person is actually qualified to be a marketer. And so you get all these. And I hate to say it, but young kids, I get it all the time. With 1819 year old, I'm starting my agency. How do I learn about marketing? So I get that in my email box regularly say, hey, like, before you do that, go work somewhere, learn on someone else's dime, get trained, really learn that you have a knack for it because selling yourself as a marketer and starting an agency and getting business to be a salesperson when you don't know anything about marketing to me is a Con job. You're basically a Con artist. You're convincing people to trust you with their dollars, and there's this opportunity costs, like, are they actually going to benefit from hiring you or are they going to hurt because you're learning on their dollar? If it's the latter. Again, you're a Con artist because you've convinced them that you can market their business when you know wholeheartedly, you have no idea what you're doing and people get lucky. But most people don't. And so if you go into a room with a bunch of entrepreneurs and say, show of hands, who here has had a bad experience with a marketer, 99% of them will raise their hand. So that's where that comes from experience to two. And that's what drove me to start Talk media and write the book is like, let's demystify this. Let's make it easier because it's ridiculous how much business owners have to go through to find decent marketing.
Jeff, I'm going to give you a chance to jump in there.
That's a whole lot to unpack. But where I see understanding that the business just to talk about the pros and then I'll disagree with a couple of components. But one when you see an agency become something else, so try to morph into a different type of business. They struggle significantly five or six examples, primarily where they go from agency and they turn into software as a service, or they turn into some other kind of business structure. And that really kind of supports Eric's discussion that they're not necessarily running a wonderful business. They haven't done the level of research needed. They don't understand agency valuations and how businesses are valued. That is a big hindrance, because a thing for your supper agency who's rocking short term agreements and has really creative paperwork, isn't worth all that much money. But the more intelligent, thoughtful business persons that are building agencies from that perspective, I just think it makes them stand out from the crowd and you can see it. You can hear it in their communications. You understand in their niche, the way that they niche down and really understand their target audience. I was the MC for the agency stage at Marketing World this year, and almost every single person that I spoke with said the way we lived through Covet and continue to grow niching down because we're specialized on this specific thing. We bring the most value here, and we've been able to turn that into a way of increasing the valuation on our agencies. So if you are an agency who used to, you know, we do conversion rate optimization generally it's like, okay, well, that's not going to necessarily differentiate you. But if you're a I do conversion rate optimization for membership management sites that are in lifestyle brands that are amongst those, well, you immediately become so adapter. Now can you turn that into a way of making your agreements more valuable so that the valuation of your agency is higher? Technical SEO, for example, has a few agencies who are really intelligent business persons, and they're focused on valuation. So I think what differentiates teams is being willing to niche down understanding how agencies are valued, being acquisitive. So I know a number of agency owners or agencies, and the way they basically take them, steal them and they roll it into their better operating agency. So I think there's a top 1% of agency leads that are ultra rock stars. But it's not the rock stars you see on TV. It's not the rock stars you see pointing at their face on YouTube. It's the ones you don't see who run great businesses.
So that brings me to my favorite snippet in the book, which I'm going to read, which I shared from on LinkedIn. So quote, I had gotten so sick of watching people waste my time, waste their time and waste their money doing stupid things, they would hire me, but then they never did the proper things on their end to support our work actually get the most out of our services. I described how companies should work with an agency like ours if they wanted to succeed, stating plainly that it can't be adversial, it must be a healthy two way relationship. So in this quote, Eric is sharing how an article he wrote actually led to him landing one of his agency's largest clients ever. And so the key takeaway for content marketers here is quote, when you share your truth openly in print and it aligns with someone else's values, you can immediately build trust with your clients even before the initial sales call, which I just think is so true when it comes to content marketing. But Eric, let's unpack the above quote because I feel like we are in mid December, like you are probably a lot of agency owners and people in the service industry. And you are everyone spirit animals saying what you just said here. So walk us through this because I could not agree more. And as people servicing clients, we all want everyone to get the most out of what they are spending. And you hit on such an important point here, which is that sometimes you could be doing everything right. But if you have no participation from the client side, it almost doesn't matter what you do, because they're just not going to get as much out of it as they could. I love that you actually said this. I mean, so many people think this. We say that most people aren't writing articles without it publicly. So as part of a content marketing strategy. I think that's great. But this is a bold statement. I think there's a lot of bold statements in this book, actually, but tell us more about this. And what is the solution to this?
Yeah, the solution is, I think communicating upfront that this is necessary is probably the one thing we do, but it's also something that we haven't perfected. I just dealt with it with a client that they hired us to do a few things. They also hired another agency to complement us, and they were livid with my team on monitoring their other agency's work so literally didn't hire us to do it, missed that their other agency hadn't executed on what they promised and blamed our team for not managing their other team. And so that's just an example. We also have another client that we're working with through right now that they hired us, and they literally said, we don't want you to handle conversion. We don't want you to handle email marketing. We don't want to handle nurturing. None of this just drive us leads. We'll handle the rest, and we drove them an absurd amount of leads qualified. We targeted the right way, and now they're saying they're not converting. It the way they need to. And it's our fault. So whose fault is the thing is, I think where people fall in and it's so easy to scapegoat an agency in these kind of situations because it's the one you're least committed to, and the issue is not to be conceded about it. But we've had a ton of success at this point. We've built many multi billion dollar companies as their main marketing partner. And so when a company that's just getting started goes, oh, well, our company is struggling because you're the agency. It's like if we're going to look at variables here, we're a little more consistent than you are. It's like that thing where it's like, stop turning this into you or us. Why don't you call us and say, hey, things aren't working. What can we do? How can we fix this? And generally, we deal with this all the time. It's even in the book, people will start pointing at the wrong thing. So we'll manage their Facebook ads, and the revenue will start to decline. They'll be like, oh, Facebook must be broken. It's like, no, your site speed has tripled, like, your load speed is taking three times as long, or you stop doing email marketing, and that's broken. We have these conversations constantly where it's like, stop looking for someone to hang and look at, like, how do we solve this and work together in conjunction and collaboratively? Because by the way, we have way more data and way more knowledge of marketing than you could ever imagine. Because we have hundreds of people that have worked with thousands of brands, and they do work collaboratively internally. At our team, they all work together, so we're able to pull from a brain trust that's massive versus what you're doing. And you come at us with your screwing up. We're just going to get defensive naturally, like, our people are just going to be like, no, we're not. And they're going to start working on proving why we didn't screw up versus, hey, guys, we need help. What should we be doing differently here? Then we can go to work. And I think people miss that completely. And I learned this on the other side. I have tons of vendors, too, at Hawk Media. When I'm working with them, it's all about enabling them to do the best they can do with their job. And what can I do to make your job easier? And what can I do to enable you and to also motivate you? Then I get more out of you. If I'm constantly like, you fucked up, you fucked up. You fucked up. They literally are just fighting to get off the phone with me and doing the minimum to not lose me as a client. And that's where people miss it's like you're still working with people. You still have to figure this out. And so many young entrepreneurs when I say young, I don't mean by age. I mean, new entrepreneurs don't get that. And all of a sudden, it's the first time they've been a CEO. They think some gravitas comes with that title and they throw their weight around and just piss people off. And then their business fails and everyone else is to blame. And so I think that's taking it to the extreme. But really what it is when you hire an agency or hire a vendor, take accountability to enabling them like you're on a team. You're not there to dictate to them.
Yeah, it's very difficult to focus on ethics when you're hot running an agency. But those are the companies that when you work with them, stand out from the crowd and they don't act as just toxic. I've heard it all from agencies, and you probably have Eric, based on what you're discussing in our clients core, that's a good thing alluding to the fact that all they're doing is getting stuff done so they can put work on to their client. And if they're not worried about me, then things are okay. Commentary like that. That's not how you account manage your account manage by understanding the client. What's the experience? It's just like a software product. What's their appropriate experience with us? What's their expected outcome are? We matched on value. And what Eric said really resonated because it was we don't want you to do these other things. Just do this, then you do this, and then they say, Haven't you done that? And that's tough. It's tough, but it is a common situation. You've got to really be confident in the ethics of both your account manager, your project manager, and just the overall sentiment of the agency. I thought those were really great points.
Yeah. I think from a public relations perspective, as someone who does a lot of also work in the medical and health care space, I'm at the point where I'm going to be working with a surgeon or someone who has very busy practice. I need them to have someone that's going to interface with me on a day to day basis if they can't. And I was just thinking about this for 2022, actually sort of terrifying of being able to just sort of state that up front. And someone says, well, then that means that technically the cost is more expensive. But yeah, certainly it is. But also the Eric's point without doing that, you're spending the same amount of money and you're just sort of not going to get as much out of it if you're going to blow off the meetings with that person that you hire and then say it's not working out. The reason it's not working out is if no one is there to actually man the four and work with you on a day to day basis to implement all of the things that you are suggesting. So I do think Eric is part of what you're saying there as a solution there stating this up front is probably something that really needs to be done more from the agency side. And I think it's something that too many agencies are afraid to say because it means that they could technically lose a client or that prospect. But I think that it has to be said.
Agree.
Okay. So next year. And by the way, I like Eric, when you talk about the fact that this article, when you actually did come out and say this led to you landing one of your largest agency accounts. Is that true?
Yeah. What happened was a very successful guy. Multi billionaire out of New York won't name him. But he apparently was looking for agencies to partner with an incubator he had built, and he literally Googled, what's the best way to work with agencies? And my entrepreneur article about this topic popped up, he read it, looked at my name, looked me up and went, yeah, this guy sounds good. And then called me.
I love that as a content strategy success story. Right. Because that's so like, did this happen right away when you wrote that article, or did this happen? Maybe a few months later?
No, it was like six months later.
I think exactly right. So if you were, like, most clients in that, you could have already fired an agent point if you could have read that article. And then they said, oh, well, you did this article, it went nowhere. It led to nothing. But Meanwhile, had they just waited six months, like you said, it could have landed to the biggest and best thing ever. So can you talk to us a little bit about timelines and patience when it comes to content marketing success?
Yeah. That kind of goes back to what I was saying about the art. Part of marketing. A lot of it is just doing the things you know, are going to be the message you want to put out there, the things that are going to build a long term benefits to the business, whether it's an article that you know will live. I want to say forever. But for a long time out there about a topic that you think is really important that you want to be associated with. It's the same reason we wrote the book. It's not like I think that we're spending a lot of money. Our goals for the book are very high. So we have a lot of partners that we've brought in PR firms, et cetera. And we put a lot of time into putting this book together. And part of it is we want to get it out there and get this message out there. But from the benefit standpoint, I don't think that I'm going to get an ROI on it in the next three months or six months. I think it's going to be the next decade or two that we get a benefit from this book. And so the idea is like doing things that you understand help you long term, not just things that are short that are like, we need to drive sales next month. I watch too many of our clients never graduate from that early on in a business. Your timelines are short. You don't have months. I remember when we were this was a few years ago. I was talking to my management team at the time about things that were happening. It was October a few years ago, and people kept started saying, oh, well, we'll visit that in Q one. We'll get that done in Q one, and it drove me nuts. So I started saying, Guys, we're at a business in Q one, like, stop talking about Q one. We don't have that kind of time. You got to get things done now. And so that urgency is really important, and it gets less important as a business matures. But always you're taking a balance of urgent and long term sort of foundation building and content really builds a great foundation for your company, because again, it's always there. You can always visit it. An article like that still drives traffic to our site and drives us leads, and you can build off of it versus something like running Facebook ads or search ads. They're great, but it's a hamster wheel. And so the combination is really what's important to getting success. So doing content marketing and doing advertising and doing the nurturing pieces like email marketing and SMS and doing all these different pieces, the influencer, marketing, PR, et cetera. That all of it together starts builds that foundation in a slow way, while you're also able to drive in those quick sales.
So is content being a critical component then of your own strategy. And also how does content marketing play a role in what you're doing with the book London?
Yeah, content obviously has a broad term. But the way we look at content is like creating content as a company, as an individual and positioning yourself, whether it's a thought leader or an engagement tool. And the way we look at content is it's a way to engage people above and beyond a purchase decision. So the way we try to create content is what is our audience interested in reading about whether it's marketing tactics, entrepreneurship, different things that would attract the people that are potential audience. But it's not about just selling them on our skill sets over and over again. So it's creating content that helps them and engages them above and beyond that purchase, because inherently, some percentage of those people that never intended on hiring us in the first place will now be engaged by us, and some percentage will end up contacting us and buying from us. That's the same thing with any brand. It's about getting that engagement above and beyond. And then the biggest part of content that I think people miss is people are a lot more likely to share your content than they are to just share your company. And so no matter what type of company or if you sell shoes or you sell marketing services, you will get people that refer your business just for the sake because they like your product or service. But a lot more people will share your content if it's decent content. And if you create content that aligns with your value proposition and actually is content that's valuable to your potential audience and potential customer, then you're getting your existing audience to share it with a new audience. And driving word of mouth, which by far is the biggest driver of success in any business. So content, to me, is one of the most under celebrated pieces of marketing because it drives what is critical, which is word of mouth. It can build trust with your audience. It can help nurture them, because when they're thinking about buying now, you've created content to engage them. It can create that awareness through that word of mouth. There's all these pieces that it covers. The hardest part is it's really hard to track. So it's super hard to drive a direct line from the content you're creating to the amount of sales you're driving. So that's where a lot of direct response, marketers and performance marketers have a hard time with it. But from what I've seen, if you've got a good product or service and you can create good content, it's going to be successful for you.
Everything Eric just said is right. I have nothing to add, just the direct to second level correlation to value. It's a very common mistake. I'm not understanding that. It's not just about last touch. It's about everything they saw. I mean, it's about the LinkedIn post that they read it's about the ads they saw, it's about the content they read. And when you don't create that dossier of all the actions taken where you don't have the ability to you can't qualify your leads. Right. You can't attribute the value of those elements. And, yeah, that's the thing. If you can get instant gratification from a paid campaign or you can do a math equation to qualify leads, people are more attracted to that because it's easier in their brain. But it's not the way you build the business.
Eric, I'm going to go back to something to bring us full circle. Something you said earlier when you talked about marketing very much so being an unregulated industry and there being bad actors in the agency world. Conversely, there's also some good actors as well. So my question for you, there is where do you draw that line when you have people, when you have clients who are sort of telling you this is error to do it, this is the right way to do this, right. Where do you as an agency owner at this point or the people who are working with you because you have over 200 employees at this point. Is that correct?
Yeah. We're close to 300. We should be over three by the end of the year.
Wow. Great. Okay. That's awesome. So my question for you is so many people for as many bad actors as there are in the agency world, there are also really good people who know what they're doing, who are fully treated. Maybe not so great because of what the faith actors have done. I think to the landscape. One of the things I always talk about is what I call malpractice in the area of PR and marketing. And what I mean by that is that she went to a doctor and you said, the doctor, I want this Hill like, I have this pain, but I want this pill. The doctor wouldn't just say, okay, I'm giving you the doctor would say, no, that's not right for you. And here's why you're not getting it. Conversely, in client services, if a client says I have this pain and I want you to do this, we have too many agency professionals who are saying, okay, I'll just do it because you client are asking for it. I tend to call that malpractice because it means giving someone what they're asking for easily the wrong strategic move for them. So I'm curious your take on this from a consulting perspective. And I think in your book, you also mentioned having a background earlier on in consulting, too.
Yeah, I did a lot of marketing consulting that led to Hawk, but didn't work at a consulting firm. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think I will say a lot of times the client is right with what they want. Similar to, like, you go to a doctor and go, I need pain medication. Because my back hurts like you still want to triage it. But sometimes that is correct. So I don't want to just be like, no, the client's always wrong. But a lot of times. And that's something that we're very adamant about, because we run things month to month. If we sign someone up for something they shouldn't be doing, we're just going to get fired. And, like, frankly, different from medicine, we rely on recurring revenue and having companies that work with us for a long time. So we can't just sell them into something that they don't need because that lasts a few months. And then they're out. And frankly, just like any business, our lifetime value is the biggest driver of our success. And a lot of agencies. And you'll see that it's actually funny, like a little tangent. But I see a lot of companies look to hire boutique agencies for their growth. And I'd say the biggest cause of a lack of growth from these smaller performance agencies is the inability to retain clients, because then it's really hard to grow a business. If you can't retain your customers again, it's really easy to sell companies into marketing. I hate to say just the fact it is really easy to sign a client. The hard part is keeping them where a lot of these snake oil salesmen end up falling short is they do exactly what you said. They commit malpractice. They sell them on things they shouldn't actually sell them on. And then a few months in the company goes, oh, wow. This isn't doing anything for our business, and they fire them. And so that's where we try to avoid that. So we do an audit for every company we bring on and make sure that these are the things they should start with. This happens a lot where they'll come to us and be like, we want Facebook ads and we go, yeah, but your website doesn't work. So when we run those Facebook ads, nothing's going to happen. And a lot of people, they're not marketing specialists. A lot of entrepreneurs, aren't they're more operational? They're product development. There are other pieces. And so making sure that we are back there so that we set them up for success is critical. Or it's two things. One, you just turn through them and it was a complete waste of time. And two, it's reputational risk, because then they go around saying, oh, this agency sucks. It's like not really. We did the things you asked us to do. You just shouldn't have hired us for that in the first place, but that's our responsibility. And I do believe that. And we have a whole process around that.
Can you walk us through that process in our final few minutes here? I'd love to hear what this is.
Yes, it's not that shocking. It's basically we start by doing an audit on their analytics, doing an audit on everything they're already doing in marketing and where their business stands and what stage they're in. And then we put together a plan that we think fits their financials, fits their needs. And basically, regardless of what they're asking for, we say no, but these are the things you need to start with. And then when they on board, our client success team actually takes an assessment where they sold into the right things initially, because once in a while, things flipped to the cracks. We have, as mentioned, a lot of people now, and we're not always perfect. And so we even have checks and balances around that, too, to make sure when we onboard them phone call, the service team actually agrees with what was assessed and what was sold into. And so every once in a while do actually have to. We actually onboard a client and then go, hey, listen, we don't actually sorry you were sold into this. This is not what you should start with now that we looked into it again and we're going to adapt and change what we originally agreed to. And don't get me wrong, it causes a little friction, but it's a lot better than spending three months working on the wrong things and then dealing with that backlash.
Love that. And that's such a great point. And finally here, just as I close out, one of the quotes here that I wanted to get to you is when you're talking about in house, I know your whole thing is about it looks like you've been trademarked. Is it the virtual CMO?
Tell us a little bit about your outsource CMS with our trademark. Yeah, that's more of a tagline than anything. And it works. But what I found was everyone's got a bad connotation with digital agency, everyone's got a bad connotation with marketing agency or consultancy, all these different things. And so when I was originally starting, I was trying to figure out how to articulate the fact that we start with strategy, that we do have a team of fractional CMOS that work on our accounts that we don't take. This is actually exactly what you said. We're not just order takers, like, your Facebook person, that we start strategically, and we continue to work strategically along the way. And the best way I found to articulate that that seemed to resonate with entrepreneurs I was selling to, frankly, was outsourced CMO, because when I say where you're outsourced CMO marketing team, people go, they seem to immediately get what we're about, that it's an elevated level of service, that it's something more strategic than just Facebook ads or digital agency. But we still are marketing and are just outsourced service to them. So generally that works. I'd say that there's two people or two misconceptions with what we're pitching to happen, one that we're like outsourcing to India or something, which isn't the case, but that comes up rarely. So it hasn't been that big of an issue. And two once in a while, we get a CMO. That goes, I'm going to steal my job, literally. We had a guy go, fuck you. I'm not going to talk to you at a trade show. And to me, it's like, perfect, because that insecure CMO is the last client I want. I really don't want someone that's that worried about me taking their job by hiring us. That's the kind of insecurity you do not want in a client. So when I saw weeding out a lot of people, we don't want to work with, it's, resonating with the people we do. This is exactly the tagline we want. We've stuck with it for eight years.
So I love here. You said, quote, People do not want to dissent against their CMO. So there's less pushback with an internal marketing team. An agency, by contrast, can be more vocal without fear of forfeiting their next promotion. I think this is a really important point as to why certain things are able or an agency can get certain things done that sometimes you just cannot get done with an in house team. Can you say anything else on that one?
Yeah. It's one of my favorite marketing stories is the chief growth officer at Pepsi, went on stage at a marketing conference, and it's like the agency's dead. We're bringing everything in house agencies are worthless. I had this crazy tirade about how agencies are awful. And then they literally inhouse about that Kendall Jenner ad where she apparently solved racism with a can of Pepsi, and nobody dissented. Nobody said, hey, maybe this is a little tone deaf, like no one's brought it up because they all reported to the person whose idea was that obviously had a little bit of a grandiose vision of themselves anyways. And so it's just a case in point. That's where that came from was like watching that this person being so adamantly against agency and then completely shitting the bed on his campaign. And somehow no one at Pepsi brought it up. But again, they had let go of their agencies. So there was no one outside to be like, hey, maybe this is a bad idea. And the nice thing for us is we're not reliant on any specific company for the survival of hoc media. So if we have to push back a little bit on a client, we can. And if we have to bring up ideas that might be a little controversial, we can because they're not our boss. Don't get me wrong. We want to serve them. But we're not reliant on any. And that's part of our business model. We don't have any key risk of any clients. So we're going to rather do the right thing and try to help the long term versus just be like, yeah, okay, fine. And keep our mouth shut to get a promotion.
Eric, thank you so much. I know. We have two minutes left. This has been wonderful. If people want to get your book. How can people buy your book?
Yeah, it's just Hawk method. H-A-W-K-E. Method. It's on Amazon, so prefer Amazon. But you can also go to hawkmethod. Com.
Is there anything else they can do to support your book that they should know about before we close out?
Really share it. Our whole mission here is 1695. It's literally, I think, has been displayed, like, pretty transparent about the things we look at in marketing and so really just trying to get it out there. We have a lot of universities picking it up. We have a ton of companies picking it up for their employees. We're really just trying to get it out there. So feel free to reach out to me. Just emails at e at hockmedia. Com. I'm just looking for any opportunity to really get it out there, because the goal for this is really get it out to the masses.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Was really great. I feel like we could probably go on for a few more hours. And I know Jeff loved it to you. He just has a hop on a call, but all right with that. Thank you, Eric.
Thank you everyone, for tuning in.
If you have any questions for Eric, feel free to ask him or shoot him a DM or let me know what you thought about today's show, and we will try and get Eric back on in here sometime soon. Thank you so much.
I love to thank you all. Appreciate you coming out. Thank you, Chris.
Thank you. Absolutely. All right. Bye.
SPEAKER A and SPEAKER C talk about eric huberman, the founder of hawk media and author of a new book called the hawk method. SPEAKER A and SPEAKER C discuss the three principles of marketing.
SPEAKER B talks about the idea of a purchase cycle. SPEAKER A notes that the average purchase cycle is three weeks for $100, five weeks for $200, and six weeks for anything above that. SPEAKER C mentions that email marketing can drive about 25% of your revenue. SPEAKER B discusses the post purchase champion development.
SPEAKER A notes that people forget they’re optimizing to the numbers they have, and that’s one of the most devastating things to do in marketing. SPEAKER B talks about keyword research. SPEAKER A says people don’t go to google to find their fashion.
SPEAKER B and SPEAKER A talk about working with large brands that focus on extremely high volume topics. SPEAKER B says eric also performs for 28,000 other topics. SPEAKER C notes that eric said if you’re not introducing new customers into the sales funnel, you’re slowly dying. SPEAKER A talks about how over time, you’re going to lose customers.
SPEAKER A notes that they were confident they would be successful and that they pulled in a ton of incredible record executives and rock stars to coach musicians on how to make money. SPEAKER A talks about how 90% of musicians are struggling because they’re lazy. SPEAKER C says agencies are built by snake oil salesmen who know how to sell services but don’t know how to grow businesses.
SPEAKER B notes that agencies don’t understand agency valuations and that makes them stand out from the crowd. SPEAKER B talks about how seo technical has a few agencies who are really intelligent business persons, and they’re focused on valuation. SPEAKER B says there’s a top 1% of agency leads that are ultra rock stars.
SPEAKER A notes that they dealt with a client who hired them to do a few things, then said they didn’t want them to handle conversion or nurturing. SPEAKER A says they have hundreds of people who have worked with thousands of brands. SPEAKER A notes that they have way more data and knowledge of marketing than you could ever imagine.
SPEAKER B discusses working with companies that stand out from the crowd and don’t act as toxic. SPEAKER B mentions that you’ve got to be confident in the ethics of both your account manager, your project manager, and the overall sentiment of the agency. SPEAKER C mentions timelines and patience when it comes to content marketing success.
SPEAKER A talks about content marketing as a way to engage people above and beyond a purchase decision. SPEAKER A mentions that the biggest part of content that people miss is people sharing their content. SPEAKER A talks about how content drives word of mouth, which by far is the biggest driver of success in any business.
SPEAKER C discusses malpractice in the area of pr and marketing. SPEAKER A notes that they do an audit for every company they bring on. SPEAKER A mentions that the biggest cause of a lack of growth is the inability to retain clients.
SPEAKER A mentions the process of doing an audit on a client’s analytics. SPEAKER A says they have checks and balances to make sure the service team agrees with what was sold into. SPEAKER A discusses outsourcing cmos. SPEAKER A says there are two misconceptions about outsourcing cmos.
SPEAKER A notes that they are not reliant on any specific company for survival of hoc media. SPEAKER A says they have a ton of companies picking up their book for employees.
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