The digital marketing world is constantly changing and evolving.
So how can a marketer keep up? How can they future-proof themselves so they can ensure job security and rise through the ranks?
That’s exactly what Ryan Deiss, DigitalMarketer’s Co-Founder and CEO, covers in his Day 2 opening keynote at Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018.
To learn how to become a full stack marketer, watch Ryan’s keynote from Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018:
(NOTE: Reserve your seat today for Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 and SAVE 50% with Early Bird pricing. But hurry! This discount is for a limited time. Learn more here.)
Don’t have time to watch an hour-long presentation? Read the transcript below!
How to Build the Marketer of the Future Keynote Transcript
Really, really glad that you all are here and excited to be starting day two. Did you learn some things yesterday? Get some good ideas? Fantastic. We’re going to be picking up right where we left off on day two. I know I started yesterday talking about really where I see you know marketing as a whole going. All right, where is marketing going and what does it mean for those of us who are in marketing? What are the trends? What are the things that are really are going to matter over the next you know 12 to 18 months that we need to be focusing on the most?
Today what I want to talk about is what’s the future for marketers? Specifically, what does the marketer of the future need to look like? Right? What does the marketer of the future need to become? Because it’s changing a lot. I believe that what marketers were, what we as marketers, as marketing professionals, what we used to be has fundamentally changed and what’s cool is there’s something really strange. There’s a very strange and I would say kind of cool phenomenon happening in marketing today.
I mean in the past, when you told people that you were in marketing, I don’t know if anybody else has experienced this, the response was kind of like, gross. Right? Gross like especially if you’re doing something digital marketing. Right? Like are you a spammer? You know? The best you got, I remember when I first got started, the best in the world that I ever got was oh, so I guess you sell stuff on eBay. That was the best. Everything else if you were doing anything you know in any kind of online marketing, digital marketing, it was like ew, that’s super strange you know or people like, ew, I don’t really like that you know or worse. They’re like you’re the one that’s sending all those you know emails.
But now, you know what’s really cool about this it’s more like mmm. I don’t know what has happened, I kind of do, but in the last couple years in particular, the nerds, the social pariah have kind of become the cool kids, right? We’ve kind of become the cool kids. Everybody wants to hang out. You heard David Cancel up here yesterday. He’s an engineer. He’s in the SaaS space talking about how he’s making his engineers hang out with marketers. He’s allowing the marketers at the company to bend everyone else to their will. This is coming from somebody who’s started multiple SaaS companies. Daymond John, same thing. It all comes down to marketing.
We are the ones for better or worse who are driving the ship, right? So what’s causing this phenomenon? What has caused this change to occur? I believe that there’s one word that’s really driving all of this and that one word is convergence. Convergence. Convergence is the one word that is really driving this. Convergence in marketing and this is really nothing new. This idea of convergence, it’s been around for a while. People have kind of been predicting this and talking about how sales and marketing and service, how they’re all converging together. This has been talked about a lot and it’s part of the reason that we created the Value Journey.
The Value Journey is an acknowledgement that marketers, if you’re doing your job, you’re not just there to generate brand awareness. You’re not just there to generate some engagement. You’re not just there to generate a lead. You own the entirety of the customer journey as a marketer. You own the entirety of the customer journey from awareness all the way to the end until they’re an active promoter generating additional awareness for you. As a marketer, if you’re doing your job right, you own the whole journey so this is nothing new.
Sales and marketing and service, you know they’re all kind of combining. In fact, I’ve talked about this idea, this concept on stage last year, day two at Traffic & Conversion Summit.
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I don’t know if any of you were in the room, I’m guessing some of you were here last year and heard me talk about this and I pulled this up and I said you know really, we shouldn’t even be thinking about marketing as marketing because there’s so much baggage around the word marketing. When people you know think about marketing, they think about such a narrow idea. I believe that marketing is this whole big, broad concept.
So when most people think about marketing, really what they’re talking about you know is they’re talking about acquisition. And similarly, the word sales. I don’t have a problem with the word sales. People ask me what do you do at the end of the day. I’m a salesman. I didn’t like selling face-to-face so I got good at selling in print. I got good at selling on the Interwebs. Make no mistake, we’re all selling. You shouldn’t be ashamed of that. You should be really, really, really proud of that. Because nothing happens until something gets sold, but there is baggage around this idea of sales so maybe we think about it in terms more of monetization.
That’s why Marcus Murphy is our Director of Monetization. When we’re out in public, we refer to him as our Director of Sales and Monetization because people don’t necessarily know what monetization is, but internally we use the phrase monetization. So we talked about how really acquisition and monetization, now you bring in this idea of customer success, not customer support or customer care, but people who are at your company who their job is to make sure that the people who consume your products, that they’re actually successful. Those of you who were in my workshop yesterday, we talked about the aha moment.
Right, we talked about that aha moment. We talked about how you know generating promoters and ambassadors for your brand, right? That’s only going to happen if people are successful. It’s only going to happen if people are successful and then content. Content markets. So last year I talked about these kind of four things being the four things that converge to really establish this idea of a growth team. And thinking about marketing not merely as marketing although I don’t have a problem with the term, but when so many people think about marketing, they think about just you’re going to generate awareness so you’re going to generate a lead.
So let’s think holistically. Let’s acknowledge that this convergence is happening and let’s acknowledge that all these groups, they’re not different teams within a company. They’re not different teams within a company. They shouldn’t be silos. We should think of them instead as different positions on the same team. So if you’re playing soccer or football if you’re anywhere other than here, they don’t think about you know the people who are the forwards, they don’t say like oh, the goalie’s on a totally different team. No, they acknowledge they have a different role. Right?
So we talked about this and we’ve been talking about this and this is important. But then things get a little more complicated. You know kind of in the 12 months since I you know first really began looking into this and talking about it, I’ve read some things. I’ve learned some things. I read this book here in particular, Hacking Marketing. I would commend all of you to read this book. Very insightful. It’s written by Scott Brinker who is, he’s the creator of that big, the Martech 5000 landscape that you talked about. He authored this book. Really great book and what I found fascinating in this book is he’s not talking about the convergence of sales and marketing, he’s talking about the convergence of software and marketing. And he even talked about like the idea of digital marketing. It’s not a separate thing anymore. All marketing is digital.
What in your life today, unless you still collect vinyl albums, what in your life today isn’t digital? It’s all digital. Every aspect of it is digital. So marketing and software are converging. So marketers need to start getting good at data. Marketers need to start getting good at product and when I read this book, some of the conversations that I had with David Cancel, some of the conversations that I had yesterday talking about making the engineers go kick it with the marketers, it began to make sense. This is happening.
Marketing and software. Marketing and product are coming together. Then I reread a really phenomenal blog post. Again, I would recommend that all of you read this, by Brian Balfour who’s the former VP of Growth, head of growth at HubSpot, he talked about this. I think this post was written in 2013. Every bit is relevant today. Every bit is relevant today. If you just Google how to become a customer acquisition expert, Brian Balfour, you’ll find it.
But in this, he talks about this idea of a T-Shaped marketer. Right? A T-Shaped Marketer. So basically the idea of it, this is kind of what marketers need to be good at. Marketers need to be good at all of these different things, but they need to specialize in one or two. So that’s the idea. The breadth of knowledge needs to stretch far and wide, but you need to be really good and you need to go really, really deep in two of them. Now what those two are could vary depending on your particular role.
If you’re Russ Henneberry then it’s you know it’s going to be content and it’s going to be on the search side. You know if you’re me, it’s going to be more on the offer creation copywriting. If you’re Richard Lindner, President of DigitalMarketer, he’s one of the best email marketers out there so even though he’s running the company, he goes deep in email. All right? That’s his role. that’s where he lives.
So this is the way that marketers need to be shaped and I remember going back and reading this. Talking about all this convergence and he’s saying like okay, so if you’re a marketer, you need to kind of be good at all of these things. That’s just a few, right? You kind of need to be good at all of these things, but then also need to be pretty good at statistics and programming and product design and UX and analytics and why not just throw behavioral psychology in as well? Although that is why we had Dr. Cialdini on this stage and then just for grins, marketers as storytellers so get good at brand positioning and storytelling as well.
So where does this leave us today? What does convergence look like today? Well, obviously as a marketer, now you don’t just need to know marketing, you need to know every little piece within marketing. We’ve kind of narrowed this down to the eight critical core disciplines of digital marketing. That’s where we build our certifications around, but within that there’s a lot of bullet points now. There’s sales and service which is its own thing. We’re adding now product design. If you understand the Value Journey and you understand that excite stage, if people are not excited about the experience of your product or of your service, then they are not going to ascend.
So yes, marketing must begin to own or play a role in product. Whether that product is a physical product, whether that product is software, whether that product is a service, marketing needs to inform that experience because that experience is right smack dab in the middle of the customer journey. You can’t divorce marketing from that. So yeah, we got to get good at product design.
And then of course, remember behavioral psychology? We all need to like now be amateur psychologists. That should be fine. I’m sure we won’t screw that up. And then let’s throw in technology and programming. Right? So now, we have this massive convergence of all of these things into marketing. Right? We have this massive convergence into marketing. So what’s happening is marketing and marketers, they went from being the social pariah, the outcast, to now the girl that everyone wants to bring to the dance. Everybody wants to hang out with marketers because marketers sit at the center of all of these other core disciplines.
This is good news if you’re a marketer. I think your future is well positioned because they quite literally can’t ignore us and they can’t avoid us because we’re all up in their business. Okay? So in other words though, because this is kind of the, so that’s the good news. This is kind of the bad news. If you’re a marketer today, you kind of only need to be good at everything. You kind of only need to get good at everything. Right?
So there’s a phrase that’s coming out right now, this concept of a full stack marketer. How many of you heard of this phrase, a full stack developer? A developer that can basically do everything. This is a new phrase. You’re maybe hearing it here for the first time. I believe that this is a phrase that you’re going to be hearing a lot. There’s going to be hiring for I want a full stack marketer. I want a marketer who’s only good at everything. I need him to be able to do everything or at least go kind of wide on everything.
That’s the ultimate combination, but there’s something funny about combinations. Combinations of things because you see while some combinations are good, other combinations, not so good. Okay? Peanut butter and jelly for example, good combination. Ice cream and apple pie, great combination. Avocado and pretty much anything, great combination. Socks and sandals, bad combination. Meat Skittles, oh my God.
Here’s what I think you’ll all love. Who in here loves spaghetti? Who loves tacos? How about a spaghetti taco? Spaghetti’s good. Tacos are good. Let’s bring them together, spaghetti taco. No. How about hot dog pizza? But what’s good is I think we’ve got a little bit of a, I believe this is a ranch dipping sauce on the side. So that should really bring the flavor combinations together, don’t you think? I would’ve opted maybe for mustard although I’m wrong. There is mustard on there already. Okay, cool. No, not cool.
And then there’s this one. This is my new favorite. How many of you guys have seen this? Teens and Tide Pods. This is apparently a thing. I don’t know if this is only a thing in the states or if this has going worldwide yet, but there are teens now who are eating Tide Pods. What the heck is wrong with us? This, by the way, is why I think we’re, if you’re like hearing you’re not eating Tide Pods, I think your future is fine. This is your competition. Okay? Future marketers and residents, you’re fine. Uh-uh. Nope. Not a good combination.
So how do we make sure that marketers don’t turn into this? How do we make sure that we don’t ask marketers to be Frankenstein? Right? To Frankenstein together a role so that it’s like I need you to do everything. How do we not do this or worse, how do we make sure that we don’t become Tide Pod Hot Pockets? Looks good, doesn’t it? I think the textural combination of the burst of the Tide Pod with the crust, mm, beautiful.
What we need to figure out is what does the marketer of the future look like? How do we build the marketer of the future? That’s exactly what I want to do right now. I want to focus, let’s start initially on the head. If we’re going to build the marketer of the future, let’s start at the top. Let’s start at those important bits floating around.
The first thing is the brain. What does the brain of the marketer of the future need to look like? Well, first of all, I hope it goes without saying, great marketers need to be smart. You need to have some degree of intellect, but I’m not really talking about IQ. Really what marketers need is they need to be analytical. They need to be comfortable with data. They need to be comfortable with spreadsheets. One of the happiest moments of my life, that’s a bit of an overstatement. I was quite pleased when I saw, my wife’s out there she’s like, really? This was one of the happiest of your life? I was really happy to see Suzi Nelson who works at the company, I’m also friend with on Facebook. She was talking about I just had you know the nerdiest conversation with my husband about pivot tables in Excel.
And I saw that, I was like that’s great. Because if you’re a marketer and you hate Excel, I think it’s going to be hard. I think if you’re a marketer and you’re afraid, you don’t want the analytics, you don’t have an appreciation for statistical significance, you’re dangerous. You’re dangerous. If you’re the type of marketer who went yeah, we ran that test for a few hours and it’s looking good. Scale, baby. You’re dangerous. You’re dangerous. Marketers that don’t know the difference between correlation and causation are dangerous. You got to know this stuff, but marketers in addition to be analytical, they also need to kind of be amateur behavioral psychologists.
Now I’m not asking that you actually like get a couch and have people lay down. I’m not doing that. What I’m asking is that you become students of the human condition, that you understand how humans work. So what is the marketer of the future need if they want to develop this type of a brain? Well, I recommend that you read books like Lean Analytics. If you’re a marketer, even if you’re like I’m not on the analytic side, I’m on the creative side, uh-uh. Read Lean Analytics. I also recommend that you read the book Fooled by Randomness. You don’t have to know how to do Z tests and T tests. You don’t have to know how to do all these things, but you should at least have just the general overview of how statistics work and how they can lie to us.
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I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that at DigitalMarketer, we do have two certifications on analysts and data as well as one on optimization and testing. But you also need to read books like these, it’s again why we had Dr. Cialdini on this stage. It’s why I loved it when I heard David Cancel say if I’m interviewing somebody and they’re a marketer and they haven’t read Influence, they’re not a marketer. I would add Pre-suasion to that as well. I would add this book, Predictably Irrational, to that as well. I would add this book, I know that was too fast.
Meet Your Happy Chemicals. What makes people happy? You know right now the fact that you’re all in this room surrounded by other people even though you don’t know them makes you happy? There’s a reason that solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments you can give someone when they’re in prison. It is very difficult for our brains, if not impossible for our brains to produce certain happy chemicals if we’re not surrounded by fellow human beings. It’s part of the reason we come to events. It’s part of the reason we come to events.
And then Hooked, Nir Eyal. Great book. How to build habit forming products. How to build some aspect of a viral coefficient into your products. How to get to that aha moment. Right? The information is out there. The mentors are out there and they put their best ideas in some of these books. You should begin building a library. This is what the library of the modern marketer looks like. It’s what the library of the marketer of the future looks like and again, I’ll plug my own certification that I did, The Customer Value Optimization special certification.
This cert is really all about how to craft an offer that makes sense to humans who generally don’t make sense. That’s what that certification is all about. It really is. It has way to do with psychology than the actual tactics of marketing.
All right so we talked about the brain. Now let’s move to the eyes. Marketers need to see what is in front of you, they don’t need to see the future. This is so important. Marketers don’t need to see the future. I was talking to somebody backstage. They asked me how do you make the predictions? You know in your opening keynote you made a bunch of predictions, how do you know what’s going to happen? I asked the same question of David Cancel and he had the same answer that I offered to the lady I was talking to backstage. I said I don’t predict the future. There was nothing that I said yesterday, said this is happening, this is going to happen, this is around the corner. I said no, no, no. This is happening.
It’s easy to make predictions when you’re not predicting the future and you’re just talking about what’s happening all around us. The danger of marketers, right? Is they don’t appreciate real people trends. We geek out on marketing trends. We decide that Snapchat is the next big thing. We decide that well obviously, QR codes are going to change everything. We decide this stuff because we think it’s cool because it’s new and it’s novel and we get bored with email. Email’s obviously going to die. Except for the fact that everyone you know uses it and most of the people you know aren’t on Snapchat.
So as a marketer, don’t worry about predicting the future. You don’t have to do that. The more you do that, the less relevant you’re going to be to your customers. Don’t predict the future, look around and see what real people are doing.
I like to say marketers need more redneck friends. Okay? All right? Marketers, hang out with more rednecks. But they’re like man, I don’t even know what that is. Listen to that. No, it’s the greatest thing in the world. You just don’t understand. Uh-uh. They understand what matters to them. You’re the guy, they’re the hero. Don’t tell them where they need to go. Figure out the journey that they’re on and help them get there.
See what’s around you today. You don’t have to predict the future. And begin to spot patterns in unrelated industries. It freaks me out when I see marketers who only ever read marketing blogs. Especially marketers who only ever read marketing blogs from marketers who only ever talk about marketing to marketers. Freaks me out. All right? Go to business conferences that have nothing to do with marketing. See what’s working in the franchise space. That’s why I love War Room masterminds so much. We get to hang out with people who don’t really know that much about marketing, they’re just business people. They know a lot about business and we can apply different ideas that they have into these markets.
So we got the brain, we have the eyes. Now we need the mouth. First of all, you’ll notice it’s big. It’s because most marketers don’t shut up. But what I mean by the mouth is that words are a marketer’s craft. This is their tool. Design is secondary. So many marketers believe that their job is to make sure that everything is pretty, that everything is on brand. Words. Words. I’m not saying that pictures don’t matter. I’m not saying that pictures don’t matter, but you figure out the words first then you figure out the pictures that are going to reinforce those words.
The pictures should speak. They should be evocative. They should make someone think and feel something and you should know that thing that they’re thinking and feeling. It should be the words that you want to implant in their brain. The pictures, the imagery, the video, it’s all there. Right? It’s all there. So it doesn’t matter if you’re creating video. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing an email. It’s all words. They also think and talk in story, in narrative. As human beings, we learn through story.
Marketers need to get good at storytelling. Again, everything is copy. Everything is copy. I don’t care if it’s a sales page, that’s copy. If it’s a video script, if it’s a blog post, that’s copy. That’s copywriting. If it’s a social post, everything is copy. Everything is marketing because in everything whether you’re trying to convince someone to buy something or you’re just trying to convince somebody to read something that’s valuable or watch something that’s going to be meaningful to them over all the other options that they have on that particular day, you need to sell them on that action. They’re not going to do it on their own. Everything is copy.
They also study the old masters. I would much rather if somebody’s going to come in and they’re going to interview at DigitalMarketer, I would much rather hear that they know who John Caples is, that they’ve heard of David Ogilvy. I would much rather hear that than that they know who Ryan Deiss is. The only thing I’ve ever done is apply what the old masters did to a new media. That’s it. I’ve never invented a single thing. Once I thought I did then I read it in a book that was written 200 years ago and turned out no, that’s been around for a while. Right?
So if you have a chance to come to the DigitalMarketer office, you walk around, you’re going to see art like this on our walls. This is an actual picture taken from our office. This is in one of our meeting rooms and it’s a piece of art that’s kind of dedicated to John Caples and his famous ad. They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play, how many of you are familiar with that ad? You know what that is if you’re not? Got to get educated.
How about this one? And you see our marketing calendar over here. Now you got the Charles Atlas ad. This ad ran successfully in comic books for decades. Anybody respond to this ad? Yeah. Yep. Hey, skinny, your abs are showing. Your ribs are showing, not abs.
How about this one? The Schlitz beer ad by Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins took an unknown beer company and put them in the like number two in a very brief period of time because he began advertising the beer as cold filtered. Guess what? All beer is cold filtered. There’s kind of no other way to do it, but he began talking about it.
Anybody in here remember the pilot episode of Madmen? Pilot episode of Madmen? Right? When Don Draper has this idea well, you know cigarette companies can’t advertise that cigarettes are healthy anymore. What are we going to do? And he said yeah, we don’t have to talk about how cigarettes are healthy, let’s talk about how our brand of cigarettes are toasted. It’s toasted. Do you remember that? It’s toasted. That was his big thing. It was a straight knock off of Claude Hopkins and this ad. Right? The producers and writers of Madmen knew about this. They put it in. They just shifted it from beer to cigarettes.
And then there’s the king, David Ogilvy. Any of you familiar with the man in the Hathaway shirt ad? Anybody in here familiar with the Dos Equis most interesting man alive ad? The Dos Equis most interesting man alive ad was a direct rip-off of the man in the Hathaway shirt. David Ogilvy was there decades before. Nobody knew it. Nobody appreciated it. As soon as I saw it, I was like somebody’s read their Ogilvy. So have you read your Ogilvy? If not, get this book, Ogilvy on Advertising. Don’t read my stuff. You can read it later. Start there. Go read that one first.
Get Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. So many people say that you should read this book. I’ve met very few people who have actually read it. You ask almost any marketer like what book should I read if I’m, oh, Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. Like it’s one of those things we feel like we should say if we’re in marketing, but no one’s actually read it. I read it. Read it a lot.
And then this one if you can get your hands on it, it’s not cheap. I think this book is like $300 bucks on up. $400 bucks? Yeah, about $400 bucks on Amazon. And it’s just a book. Don’t think there’s like you know gold inside, but there’s gold inside. I bought this book a couple of times because mine keep walking off. I’ve spent easily thousands of dollars buying this book again and again and again.
And then Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. Another one that’s more current, but it’s probably where if you were going to say what’s the one book I should read, it would be this one, The Wizard of Ads by my friend and mentor, Roy Williams. Roy’s an ad man. He’s a radio ad man. You want to get good at copywriting? Study radio. Digital today is way more akin to radio than direct mail. If you think about it, when you’re scrolling through Facebook, scrolling through, scrolling through and then something catches your eye. That’s just like driving down a road and a commercial catches your ear. Study radio. When you’ve got to compact like a very complex idea into a 30 or 60 second spot, that’s hard. You give me 12 pages, that’s a piece of cake. I need to condense this down to 30/60? That’s hard. Study radio, people, and Roy’s one of the best. And again, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that we have a certification on direct response copywriting. I’d go through that one too.
Now we get the ears. That’s because great marketers listen. Specifically, great marketers listen to their customers. I loved when I asked Daymond at the end of the day yesterday you know, what would you do if you were in your worst, worst, worst possible state? What would you do? He said I’d wake up and I’d make 50 phone calls and I’d call 10 of these people, 10 of these people, then 10 of these people. If you’re a marketer and you’re unwilling to talk to your customers, you’re unwilling to have conversations look, I’m an introvert. I do a good job faking it up here, but I’m an introvert. You put me out in like a social setting and make me kind of like, I’m dead. It’s brutal. It’s hard. But later on today, I’m going to go to the unplug stage and I’m going to talk to a bunch of you guys and a lot of you are like strangers and strangers, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they want to stab you and sell you drugs. Okay?
And it’s hard, but you got to do it. I did it a couple years at T&C when we first came out with our certifications and we launched our HQ platform. I had to talk. I had to have the 50 conversations. Have you, if you’re a marketer talked to 50 of your customers? Or are you outsourcing that? Are you having somebody else do that? Great marketers listen.
By the way, the best listeners in your company are usually in your customer care department, customer success departments which is why I love promoting people from a customer care role into marketing. They’re diamonds in the rough. They know your products. They know it well. They know your customers and if you’re going to be good at that job, you must have empathy. You must have empathy and empathy is the ultimate tool of a marketer. Sincere empathy. So that’s the head.
Now let’s go out to the body. Let’s talk about the hands. If you notice, this particular marketer of the future has multiple hands and they need it because there’s a lot of work to be done. Great marketers know the tactics and they’re willing to get those hands dirty. They know the tactics. They know them. They know the tactical stuff. They try new things and they test new channels. Right? They try new things, they test new channels and they are T-shaped. So great marketers understand what’s going on here, but they really go deep in two.
I would never have a marketing manager who all they did was talk about stuff. Uh-uh. You’re going to specialize in something. You’re going to do it and you’re going to do it better than anybody else and that’s why you get to run the team. You stop doing is the day you start really sucking. Okay? Be T-shaped. You got to be good at that stuff and yeah, you got to have a general overview of the other things.
At DigitalMarketer, we’re all about the tactics that’s why we have the eight critical core disciplines. That’s why we created DigitalMarketer HQ. Tactics are important, but if you notice, I got to them late, breezed through them quickly because without all the other things, the tactics are going to be useless to you. You’re going to wonder why isn’t it working? It’s because you haven’t developed the brain, the eyes, the mouth and the ears of a marketer.
Let’s talk about the feet. What does the feet of a marketer look like? Great marketers are fast. They move quickly. Great marketers are agile. Now I don’t just mean that from a, I mean that from an actual agile marketing. How many of you have heard of the phrase minimum viable product? Yeah, this idea of a minimum viable product is big in product. In marketing, we’ve got the minimum viable test. We have the minimum viable offer. This doesn’t have to be perfect. We just have to know enough to be able to test it. And marketers of the future understand that perfect is the enemy of speed and money loves speed.
They don’t try to make it perfect. They’re okay making a mess. I mentioned Hacking Marketing before. This is going to get into a lot of the agile marketing tactics. How to set up an agile marketing team. And there’s also this book, The Agile Marketer. It’s a book on the subject of building an agile marketing team within an organization.
Now we come to the skin. First thing you should know is that it’s thick and the reason it’s thick is because great marketers are regularly criticized because great marketers make lots of mistakes and they push too far. And that’s why great marketers must have zero ego. If you’re unwilling as a marketer to admit that you made a mistake, that a test that you were really excited about didn’t work, you’re going to be a terrible marketer. You’re going to be dangerous marketer. You’re going to be a disservice to your company and your customers. All right? Great marketers, you’re going to be great, you’re not allowed to have an ego. Not allowed to have an ego.
And finally, we have the heart. Great marketers love their customers. We used to say jokingly boy, business would be great if it weren’t for the customers. Screw that. If that’s existing within your organization, even if somebody’s being sarcastic or humorous or whatever, get rid of it. Doesn’t exist. You only live, you only have a reason to be because of those customers. Love your customers. Genuinely, sincerely, care about them and I mentioned it before, but great marketers are students of the human condition.
Great marketers don’t just love their customers, they love humans in general, but above all else, great marketers have empathy. I said it before, great marketers are empathetic. Great marketers can feel what their customers are feeling. They can think about what they are going through. They can empathize and they can sincerely want to solve it.
The key to being a great marketer, to having a great business is simply in many cases caring a lot more than your competitor. If you care more, you will look for ways to add more value. If you look for ways to add more value, your average customer value will go up. You will be able and willing to spend more to acquire a customer and you will win. That’s the key. That’s always the, that’s the oldest rule in business.
He or she who is able and willing to spend the most to acquire a customer wins, but how do we get to the point that we’re able and willing to spend more to acquire a customer? We add more value so we can ask for more value. How do we get to a point where we’re willing to add more value? We care more. It sounds cheesy, but it’s real.
So let’s review. Modern marketers are highly analytical. They’re able to spot current trends. They are wordsmiths. Modern marketers listen to their customer. They execute tactics with precision. They move quickly and they make messes. They have a thick skin and zero ego. And they possess an abundance of love and empathy.
Just know we’re going over time like five minutes just because of you guys. All right, you get it? Snap your pics. Post them up on the Facebooks for all the world to see. By the way, if you get the recordings, you also get the slides. Just FYI.
So the challenges of full stack marketers, they aren’t born, they are made. What I just described, nobody comes like out of the womb like that. You’ll have a few of them, but the rest of them need to be built and that’s why if you’ve ever, how many of you guys run a company and you say this all the time, I just can’t find good people. I hear that all the time. I hear that all the time in work. It would be so good, I just can’t find good people. There’s good people everywhere. The problem is the person that you’re looking for, they don’t exist and the reason this has happened is our economy has fundamentally shifted.
We used to be in a credentials based economy. The world economic forum has been doing a lot of work on this over the past couple of years. This was the thesis of their entire conference. This idea of the shift in you know jobs from being a credentials based meaning I go to school, I learn to do something and then I get plugged into an organization and they trust me to do it because I have a sheet of paper known as a diploma that says I can do it.
Now this is going to still be here for a lot of roles, but it’s not going to be here for a whole lot more roles and that’s because 65%, think about this, this is my kids, well, these aren’t my kids, but this is my kids at this age, if these were my kids, my wife would have some explaining to do. 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in a completely new job that doesn’t yet exist. How can our school systems prepare full stack marketers prepare for other roles when those roles don’t even exist and they don’t know that they exist.
So we believe that the companies who win will be the companies who bear the burden of educating and training their workforce. That’s it. Those are going to be the companies that win. The ones that bear the burden, if they do that because the universities can’t and the people don’t know how. And employees tend to agree. Again, this was a peer research study. Nearly half, 49% of people in the job force today believe that employers should have a lot of responsibility. 89% believe that employers should bear at least some. That’s where we are today. And it isn’t just for entry level. The more educated someone is, the more they believe that their employers should bear the burden of their continuing education. So don’t think that this is just entry level positions. This applies across the board, every role at your company.
So the solution, what do we need to do? We need to combine best practices. Best practice meaning all the genius, all the brilliance that exists within the books that I gave you, within the courses that we sell and other companies sell, we need to combine those with the tribal knowledge that exists within your company. That’s what modern workforce training is going to look like in the future. You need to know this. Now let’s apply it toward what we’re doing.
That’s why I’m excited to announce that very soon DigitalMarketer is going to be launching a new platform called GrowthRamp (GrowthRamp was renamed and is now Praxio). Now this is not available yet. In a minute, I’ll give you a chance to get on an invitation list, but we believe that GrowthRamp is going to be the platform that powers the new skills-based economy. If you’re familiar with the HQ platform, GrowthRamp is essentially the next version of that platform. It’s going to allow you to upload curated courses, so any course that you have, put them in there for your team to see. It’s also going to allow you to create your own courses. Right? So we’re going to build marketplaces within that so if you want to bring DigitalMarketer certifications in there, great.
I want to go out to some of my friends, people that I know that are really, really, really smart and good at this stuff. I want to make sure that their trainings are also available on our marketplace so that you can decide yep, I want those pulled those in it as well. I want my team to go through those trainings, but the great part is that you can supplement these courses with your own video. This is how we combine best practices with tribal knowledge. So, if somebody’s going through one of, maybe they’re going through Richard Lindner’s certification on email marketing, when he finishes a particular module, there is you being like, okay that was great, right? Now let’s talk about how we do this within our organization.
So the training is never separated from the work that you need done. You could create your own tests and quizzes and even if you do some integrations, offer your own certificates of completion and badges to reward the people on your team. You can monitor your team’s progress at the individual level or you can monitor it at the team level. Then you can switch from learning mode to execution mode and actually begin applying what you’ve learned.
How many of you have ever though I really wish that both the execution plans that are in lab were also in HQ? Anybody thought that? That’s happening. If you’re a lab member and you have an individual HQ account, we’re introducing a new level called lab plus that’s going to bring all of those into one area which means by the way if you’re paying for two, you’re about to only be paying for one. What we’re allowing with this particular platform is for you to create execution plans, for you to create playbooks such that when somebody completes a training, it unlocks one of these execution plans.
So we never divorce what people learn from what they do. It’s quite literally now that you know this, this is what you do and you at the company level, you at the administrator level, will be able to create your own execution plans, but you’re going to have a lot of our templates in there to get you started. So our different execution plans are going to be there Wiki based. Make them your own. Make them your own.
This is what it’s going to look like actually being able to create drag and drop within the platform. We really look at this as the brain of your company. Your company’s brain. All the collective wisdom that’s out there combined with the tribal knowledge brought into one place. You can create these projects from scratch or start with some of our pre-built templates. You’re able to assign projects to team members so as a manager you can say I want you to go through these and you can track their progress in real time.
So what does this look like? What does the future of this look like? Well, number one, rapid onboarding of new team members. Any of you guys see, remember The Matrix. When like Neo sat down it’s like plugged in. It’s like I know Kung-Fu. Right? It’s not quite that. It’s going to be pretty close. It’s the best of both worlds. It’s not merely an LMS, it’s an LMS that you can combine your tribal knowledge in. It’s your LMS.
It allows you to truly create a culture of growth and learning so now there’s one place where everybody can go to figure out what they’re supposed to do. So you’re not spread out across like 50 Google Docs and like a thing that’s scribbled on a whiteboard over there. I don’t know if anybody else’s office looks like that. Gets it all in one place. Take that Google Docs. Love Google Docs, but boy, for process and learning management, it’s brutal.
We think this is going to be great for owners and executives. Like I said creating that brain for the company. We think it’s going to be great for agencies and coaches. You’re an agency or coach and you want to have your own platform to facilitate that training for your group. Carl. It’s going to be great for you. And it’s also great for HR professionals. Probably don’t have a lot of those in this room, but we believe it’s going to be an LMS that people actually love.
So how do you get it? Well, the good news is if you’re a member of HQ, you will get it. If you’re a member of HQ, this is going to be an upgrade to the platform. You’ll simply be able to do all of these things where you weren’t able to do it before. That’s exciting. In HQ, users will get first access. They will get beta access to this. No additional charge so if you’re in HQ, you’re welcome.
Our mission, said before and this is why we’re doing this to double the size to 10,000 businesses, but we know that marketing alone does not double companies. It’s helpful, but really, really good marketing without all the other stuff can actually blow up a company so we hope that that’s why we’re rebranding from HQ to GrowthRamp. It’s not just about marketing. We hope you bring all of these best in class trainings in.
Option two, you could go right now to GrowthRamp.com. GrowthRamp.com and you can get on the invitation list. So there is absolutely nothing to buy right now. I’m sure you’re all very disappointed, but I do hope that you sign up for the invitation list. First dibs is going to go to current HQ owners. They’re going to get the first crack at this and then we’re going to open it up to some beta users through the invite list on a first come first serve basis.
I really do hope that you get on this list. I hope you check it out. I hope if nothing else though, some of the resources in the library that I have given you are going to allow you at your company or you within your own being to build the marketer of the future. Thank you very, very much.
(NOTE: Reserve your seat today for Traffic & Conversion Summit 2019 and SAVE 50% with Early Bird pricing. But hurry! This discount is for a limited time. Learn more here.)
