7 Honest Ways to Break Through the Noise (Using the Principles Behind Drift’s Success)

Why Marketing is Harder Than Ever

Louis: So it seems to get harder and harder to get noticed for companies, right. To stand out and break through. So why. Why is that?

Dave Gerhardt: Oh, man, there’s like. There’s. There’s a bunch of different reasons, but I think it’s like, it’s. There’s just more noise than ever today in every channel. You know, everybody has a podcast, everybody has a blog, everybody’s doing video, everybody’s on social media. That. That’s like part one. Part two is like, there’s a million different companies in any sing. Like cars, technology, shoes, clothes. Doesn’t matter. Because technology has gotten so widespread, it’s easier than ever to start a business, to start a company, to start a product. And so it’s kind of these two forces of, like, it’s easier than ever to create information, and it’s easier than ever to create businesses and products. And so people are just drowning in the amount of stuff that’s out there. And the real challenge is not. Not that there’s a lot of noise. What challenge is? If you’re a marketer, you can’t rely on the crutches of, like, we have the best product anymore because. Which is a bummer. Which is a shame, because you should, like, the best product should win. But that’s not how it works. And the reason why is because buyers, your potential customers, are more skeptical than ever. Every marketer in the world, every sales rep in the world is gonna tell you something like this. I joined. You know, I’m selling this thing. It’s faster, it’s easier to use, it’s better. It integrates with all the things you work with. Like, everybody says that same stuff. And so even if it is true, even if you did make the best, fastest, easy to use product in the world, people just aren’t gonna Believe it. And so I think marketing is like, harder than people who have been in the marketing industry for like 30, 40 years. They don’t like when I say this, but, like, I think marketing is harder than it’s ever been because we’ve kind of rode this wave. Like 10 years ago. It was amazing. Marketers started to use technology and it became easier. Cause you got to track and measure everything and funnels and campaigns and blah, blah, blah. But now, like, there’s too much that, like, you have to go back to the fundamentals of marketing to be able to get people’s attention and then earn the right to have a conversation with somebody.

Louis: Right? So let’s have a little scenario, a little game together, shall we? Let’s say Drift doesn’t exist anymore for whatever reason. All right?

Dave Gerhardt: Okay.

Louis: So you have all this knowledge, all the stuff you’ve made, all the mistake made, all the lesson learned in the last four years. And you join a company that is not at the stage that Drift is now, which is, you know, maybe early stage, have a product that is good enough, they have some team members, but they’re bootstrapped. They don’t have a lot of money. Right. They don’t have a lot of VC funds behind them and whatnot. Let’s say you join them as whatever marketer, director of marketing. Anyway, you’re in charge of marketing there and your job is to make them like, get them noticed, get them stand out. How would you go about it step by step? What would be your process based on all the stuff you learned? And I know I’m going to add a few more complexity because you’re way too good with just that. You’re going to say something that is going to be quite easy for you. So let’s say you have only like $10,000 to play with to start with. And let’s say you can’t really use your name either. You can’t use your network because it’s too easy. You have a lot of people on LinkedIn, right? So you have to use your knowledge, you have to use your expertise, the lesson you learned to stand out. How would you go about it? What first principle do you start to go back to? What fundamentals do you look into?

The $10K Marketing Challenge Framework

Dave Gerhardt: This is a great. This is why I love your show. This is great. A great question. Most people would say, david, next question. How did you blah. This is great. So I got this, by the way. This would be a great show, which is like, you give marketers $10,000, you can’t use your name you can’t use your network. You have to do something. So I would make a video and light the $10,000 on fire and then tell people to go to my landing page. No, that’s not what I would do. Somebody’s done that. So to me, marketing, whether you have money or not, marketing is all about understanding people. And, you know, I hate that when I say that most people listening to this and most people in life will be like, yeah, obviously. But I don’t think that very many people actually live that in their business and in their marketing. And so I’m talking about, like, what really motivates people. Social psychology, understanding human behavior, like, all of the principles. And, you know, Robert Cialdini’s great book from 1984, Influence. Right. Like, what actually motivates people? So to me, everything I’ve learned that has actually helped me in my career, marketing, relates back to that. So what I would do. I don’t even know if I need the $10,000, first of all. So I don’t know if I would spend it. What I would do is I would spend a little bit. I would spend a little bit of time analyzing my potential customers and competitors. And really, the only goal of the exercise is to try to find the gaps. And so let’s say that I am making a new. I love hooded sweatshirts, right? I would go and figure out, okay, who are the people that I want that. Where are my dream customers? Where are they hanging out online? There’s a great book called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, and he talks about. This was like, before ABM was a thing. He says, who are your Dream 100? Who are your Dream 100 customers? So where do they hang out? So where are my dream 100 customers that I want to buy my hoodies? Where do they hang out in person and online? And I just make a whole list. They go to these conferences, they read these blogs. They listen to these podcasts. They listen to these people, these influencers, these people in the market. They typically live in these areas. Then that’s one thing. Okay, so that would start to give me a list of, like, channels that might be interesting. Maybe this group doesn’t actually care about podcasts at all, but they’re huge on YouTube. Okay, we’re starting to limit. We’re starting to narrow down the channels that I would focus on. Then I would go and look at the competitors in that industry. Who’s already making hooded sweatshirts? How do they go to market? Oh, they’re running ads. What keywords are they using? Okay, what content are they creating? Oh, really interesting. Nobody in this industry has a podcast. Okay, then that’s a huge gap. That might be an area. So I’m always trying to find the gaps because everybody’s doing the same things in marketing. And so for me, it’s really about finding the channels that I could have a competitive advantage on by being the first person there. And so maybe that’s the. Everybody has a podcast, but nobody has a podcast in your industry. I’d start the first podcast in that industry. Nobody’s vlogging or creating video content in the industry. I would do that. Nobody’s running ads. Maybe you start googling stuff and there’s no search terms being bid on on AdWords. It’s all about finding those opportunities first and then you can start to get creative and figure out how you’re going to stand out in those channels.

Understanding Your Dream 100 Customers

Louis: All right, so let’s break down what you just said there. So understanding people, and I know both of us say the same stuff and I repeat that on the podcast all the time. And I know it sounds very cliche, but you have a very practical view on it. So let’s break that down. First of all, how do you actually get to know who your ideal customers, your top 100 are in the first place? How do you define those people?

Dave Gerhardt: Yeah, so there’s usually like, especially if you’re joining a company as a marketer, you’re very rarely like the first person who’s ever thought about your business. Most companies start with product and engineering first. And so there’s gotta be some, you know, some thought about who the, who this ideal customer is. Maybe your product manager is out there doing customer development and interviewing early customers. I want all those notes because those notes are money for. They’re great for marketing content. But honestly, the non sexy answer is you got to open your eyes. And I think the biggest thing that has changed for me as a marketer is like I am not just a marketer at work from 9 to 5, like just who I am as a person. I’m just super curious about why did they run that ad? Why does Starbucks have that billboard over there that. Okay, interesting. Oh, I saw that commercial. Like I’m just instant, like super curious and it’s a gift and a curse because I can’t turn my mind off sometimes. But it’s being curious about what, what people are doing and what people are saying. And so you can find so many things out by doing something like find a related product on Amazon and read the Reviews, read what people are saying, find a related product on YouTube and go. So here’s an example. About a year ago, we launched a product at Drift that lets you book meetings and, like, a calendaring product, right? The first thing that I did when we launched that product was I went to everybody on YouTube to see who was using, like, Calendly. And there was a couple other products like that. I don’t know. Time Trade is another one. And I just wanted to see who was reviewing those products. Not because I wanted to reach them, but I wanted to see how they talked about it. And then you start to get into that world, especially today, this 2019. This is so easy because everybody’s creating this stuff. It’s not like 20 years ago where. Or I just finished watching Mad Men, where in the Mad Men days, you had to hire a group of people to come to your office and be a focus group. Focus groups are happening everywhere. Online on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, groups on YouTube, on Amazon. So I would start to really dig into, like, what are related products to my world. For example, we just wrote a book, Conversational marketing, right? I was like, plugging in all books related to that in Amazon. Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff’s book about the story of Salesforce. What are people saying about that book? Who reviewed that book? What words are they using? Like, you can start to kind of reverse engineer that stuff without ever having to leave your computer.

Louis: So what type of things are you looking into, let’s say? So to understand customers, to understand those people, you would start by just looking online at those reviews, competitor products and whatnot. But what are you looking at in the reviews? Exactly what type of things do you want to know? Like, the words they use, but that’s not enough, right?

Dave Gerhardt: I mean, so the words they use are very good for, like, writing copy, right? But if you’re talking about, like, channels to acquire customers, I’m thinking about. I’m trying to understand which conferences they go to. I’m trying to understand which blogs they read, which newsletters they subscribe to, which podcasts they listen to, which videos they watch, which magazines they watch, which TV shows they watch. Because there might be opportunities to do something, maybe with your money, Maybe with that 10 grand, maybe to create a show, maybe to go out and interview people. So I’m just trying to, like, there isn’t one, like, perfect answer based on the scenario. But, like, I could see how you doing that. You come up with kind of 10 or 20 different options, and you could think about what might be really powerful to make. Like, nobody has done. Nobody’s made a movie in this space. Nobody’s done a documentary. Okay. Why? Is it because there isn’t a market for that or because just nobody’s done it? And I think you have the opportunity today. You have to stand out, out. And so imagine that new company comes on the scene in an industry where nobody’s made a movie about hooded sweatshirts before. Like, that would be amazing. That would get a ton of attention. Just because the fact that you did something completely different as opposed to like, we set up landing pages, we’re running ads, we’re sponsoring some events. Like, I think you always, especially today, I care so much about, like, getting your attention because I think time is the most precious resource for a marketer and it always has been. Right. This is why you go back and read any of the old school copywriting books. Like, they were not afraid of writing long copy because the mindset was like, who reads long copy? Buyers. The people who make it to the bottom are the people that you want. So. So, man, there’s. There’s so many things in there. But, but like, I just ultimately am trying to find, like, where can we be successful quickly and what’s. I would rather do one thing that’s going to get a lot of attention than like 15 things that are going to maybe add up over time.

Louis: Right. So let’s go back to the understanding people bit because you said looking at reviews, understanding what they say about competitors, products, or maybe you can identify the things that they don’t like about the competitors. You might identify words that they use that you can use in your copy. You might identify the jobs to be done or the things that they actually want to achieve with this product. Right. So you can start to understand them. What other sources would you look into to truly understand people?

Dave Gerhardt: How many more are there?

Louis: Thousands.

Dave Gerhardt: I don’t know. There’s thousands.

Louis: So which one do you focus on? Because you don’t have a lot of time, right? So you look at reviews on Amazon. Fine. YouTube and whatnot. But do you think it’s enough to truly understand people?

Dave Gerhardt: No. But I don’t think you ever will. I don’t think you ever. You’re never even if you got 10 people and you talk to them in person, those 10 might say something different than 10 other people. I think you got to make a best guess. And I think marketing today, there’s enough ways to find indicators of success that somebody’s going to be successful. Something that I do a lot now is I will write something or I’ll make a video or Write Something on LinkedIn and Twitter and then really quickly I’ll know like, man, that’s a good idea for my next speaking deck. Or that’s a next great article that I think I might be able to write because you can get like 100 comments on it quickly. Or maybe you can’t get 100 because you don’t have a big network, but you can get three and most of your posts get none. Okay, I’m going to double click on that. And that’s a topic that we should create. You could also do it really cheaply by testing ads. Put 100 bucks on some Facebook ads and test offer copy and headlines and then figure out what you’re going to create. I think marketing is very easy to test really quickly and get ideas about what might be successful versus I’m gonna launch this campaign and I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I think if I think back to like some of the more successful marketing campaigns that I’ve run at Drift, almost all of them I knew were gonna be successful before they were. And that’s not to say I have some like magic skill of predicting success, but like, it’s because, man, we did a podcast episode on that and everybody like 10 people ask questions and we usually get no questions. Okay, I’m gonna make a webinar about that topic and I guarantee it’s gonna be successful. Right? That’s not that I predicted it. It’s just like marketing is all can be related or I gave a presentation and everybody, like 10 people came up to me and they all asked this one question. Well, shoot, I just figured out the next podcast I’m going to record why most people ask about blank. Right? Like they’re all like, it’s just about like trying to put together all these pieces of the of the puzzle.

Louis: Right? So going back to the understanding people side you mentioned, you know, I’ll get to, I’ll get to know where they hang out. I get to know who influenced them. I get to know the channel they are on and whatever. How do you find that out? How do you find the channels that they’re on? How do you find the people that influence them?

Finding Gaps in Competitor Marketing

Dave Gerhardt: You gotta search. Honestly, there’s not much more science to it than Googling. Like, seriously. And I think most people be like, yeah, this guy’s telling me to Google something. But like, you can go on sites like Quora and Reddit. They’re amazing sites to figure out. Like Reddit has like, subreddits, right? I don’t need to tell your audiences, but like, if you are somebody that. Let’s talk about CrossFit. If you’re on Reddit posting about CrossFit, you are like the deepest of the deep people who love CrossFit. If you are on Quora and on Quora, you’re asking questions. Quora is a question and answer site. You’re literally gonna get a million ideas just by based on what people are asking the site, right? Same thing on Amazon. The way you find the right people is you gotta go find something related to your thing. So if I was trying to figure out, should we write a book about conversational marketing? I would go look at what did people say about behind the cloud? What did people say about inbound marketing? What did people say about From Impossible to Inevitable, Jason Lemkin’s book and start to, like, get in the ballpark of like, I think these are going to be related. Very, especially very rarely. You’re rarely creating something brand new from scratch. Like, there’s always some customer or competitor or some pattern that you can learn from. Like, everything’s already been invented. And so one of the biggest principles that’s been kind of beaten into my head by David Cancel, who’s the CEO and founder at Drift, is like, innovate, don’t invent. And so, like, we could be working on a new pricing page for the Drift website. I would be looking at stripe, slack, LinkedIn, how do their pricing pages work? Some of the best companies in our industry that are kind of related to understand, like, what things can we kind of copy and innovate on, on top of them, right?

Louis: So looking at Reddit, looking at communities online where people actually submit content, right? They ask questions, they basically share their worries in the world. They ask questions, they share concerns and whatnot. So you can start reading their mind a bit more now. Let’s say you have a better understanding of that. Let’s say you know who they are, you know where they hang out, you know who influenced them. Then you said, I look at the gaps right between them and what my competitors are not doing. It sounds like it’s not something you can really do just in like an afternoon or whatnot. Do you have a process for that? Like, to truly see the gaps between the two things to identify opportunities.

Dave Gerhardt: So, hey, look, the other thing I just thought of is like back to your question about if you can’t find where your people are hanging out, then you’re in the. Your products not gonna Be successful, you’re at the wrong company like you should be as a marketer. There should already be some demand or interest or reason to build your product and to market your product. So number one is like, if you can’t find, if you’re like I just can’t find where potential customers might be, then you better go get another job because that’s not gonna work. Like, marketing is not magic. It’s something that amplifies the need for a great product. So there’s that piece of it. The second one. I don’t have some, I’m not a very scientific framework type of guy. So I don’t have a system and a framework for that. For me it’s just being curious. I can’t tell you. I pull up a Google Doc and then I do this, then I do that. You can really quickly find stuff if you go and look for it.

Louis: So you look at what the competitors and you start. It seems like from your process, it seems like you’re a visual person as well. You mentioned a few things visually. So you look at the website, you look at a pressing page, you look at billboards, whatever, you look at what they do channel wise.

Dave Gerhardt: It’s an instinct. Some people do marketing differently than I do and they have like they can come back and run you a data nice report of all the websites that have X or Y. But for me, I can really quickly go to two to three companies in a space and get a sense for like how they do marketing and what channels they use. And that’s just obviously from having done it a bunch. But I think it’s a little bit of an art and a science. If you try to out science this process, you’re probably not gonna be very successful because it’s not really just math. Like we just use this channel. This will work. Like it’s a little bit of both. And I also don’t always think that just because someone is doing something in the space doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Like your competitor has a conference and a podcast. Does that mean that those two things are ruled out for you? No, just how are you going to be different? Right? Like what is your take on it going to be? What is your unique selling proposition going to be to that audience? And how are you going to do things differently? If we only. There would not be a company at drift if we worried about what other people in this space were doing. Because there’s literally 7,000 companies in martech and I think we compete with almost all of them. And if we worried about, well, they are all doing. They all have a blog, they all have this, they all have that, then it would be like we would be nowhere. And so I think there’s always opportunities to do something better and to find your channel. So it’s more like the way that I sum it up is if my philosophy as a marketer is if everybody in the industry is going left, I want to go right.

Louis: And it’s funny because it’s frustrating as an interviewer, this answer, because I know what you’re saying and I like to deconstruct it so listeners can understand and do it, but I would do the same. So to tell you, two years ago, the reason why this podcast came to be is that I used to listen to marketing podcasts and I was always like, what the fuck is this? I don’t like it. I just can’t. It’s full of shit. The people don’t listen to each other. You ask a question, you get an answer, you move on to another question. It’s very like, it’s all on the surface. You never dig into it. It’s like 20 minutes long or like 5 minutes long, and you don’t. Anyway, I was very frustrated by all of that and I did the opposite of it. So when you say when everyone goes right, I go left, I completely get it. But what I’m trying to do here as well is trying to. To encourage people to be more curious so that they think about those things. And not only they think about them, but they also, they take the risk to do it. Because I can see you as I follow you online, I see what you’re doing, and I can see you as a risk taker, right? Someone who is not really willing to just stay with the status quo and try new shit. So how will you convince people to do that? When you have a hunch, when you have a gut feel that this is bullshit? I fucking hate this. I don’t like companies doing this. I believe in the other way. How do you convince people to actually take the leap and say, you know what? Try it. Try this one campaign and go against the grain.

Dave Gerhardt: That’s a great. That’s such a good question. Because that’s where most people get stuck. They’re like, man, I want to do it a better way. And here’s what most people do. Let’s just use events, right? Like, here’s a better example. Let’s use your podcast, right? You gotta pitch this to your boss. Cause you can do it, right? Hey, everybody has a Podcast, I wanna start one. Okay. It’s gonna take me four weeks to do it. And you feel like you owe them a business case. It’s gonna take me four weeks. I need this much money for gear. I’m gonna need to promote it. That right there is where most people stop. The only reason that I’m able to get ideas going is because I can just do them myself. And I do them in a way that I just do them behind the scenes and. And then I show somebody, hey. So I’ve had this crazy idea. I already tested it. I think there’s going to be something there. Because anytime you go to somebody with an idea, that’s just like, I don’t know. And I’ll give you another example. Like, I had this podcast that I did about startups in Boston called Tech in Boston. I did it on my own, so it didn’t matter what people thought of it, but everybody hated the name. They’re like, that name is stupid. What does that mean? Tech in Boston? Fast forward two years later, when it was. When it was pretty big in Boston and had, you know, thousands of subscribers and whatever. People are like, of course I love Tech in Boston. Right? But, like, that’s because it became something. And so whether it’s D.C. or whoever else at Drift that I need to convince, I rarely go in there cold. And it could just be, look, I have this crazy idea because I did this video. It already got like 200 comments. I think we should invest $1,000 and make this an online course. Great. Okay, you’ve already proven it, so especially today. This is easy. Marketing is like. Is all technology based today? Like, you can test anything with a Google Doc and Zapier, you know, record a video on your iPhone, spend $100 on a test. Like, I think people get lost where they try to fully bake. I’m gonna launch this podcast instead of doing what you did, Louis. They go away for four months. They record 40 episodes. They’re all crap. They don’t actually. There’s no feedback loop. They don’t know if it’s actually working. Where, like, my whole thing is like, let’s make three episodes and can we get 50 people to listen? And then I’m gonna go tell them, by the way, I’ve been doing this on the side. I think there’s something here. Can I invest in this more?

Testing Ideas Small Before Going Big

Louis: Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what I’ve done. Started a few episodes. I was scared shitless when I launched. And I remember I didn’t even ask for Feedback on the name or whatever, because I didn’t want people to say, ah, you know what, I’m not too sure. And I guess this is something I see on the podcast quite a lot. If you have butterflies in your stomach before you launch something, like you have this, you know, feeling, you know, it’s a good feeling, you need to fucking go for it. But now, two years after, everyone is like, oh yeah, yeah, I love your podcast, love the name and whatever. But like two years ago that wasn’t the case. So to go back to you and what you said, because it’s super interesting and to go back to what you said in the past, first you’ll understand people. Two, you’ll understand where the gaps are. And three, it sounds like even though you don’t necessarily have a process, you do have one. The third one is actually to test something small that is related to that. Right?

Dave Gerhardt: Yeah. The other thing, yes, it’s tests. But then also some people don’t like this about me because I don’t finish a lot of things, but I just do a million things. I test it, I try a podcast, a video, a blog post, a stuff, slideshare deck, an article, whatever. Because I think you got to do a lot of things to figure out, like what, what’s really going to work. And so I write a lot of like crazy ideas that I don’t end up following through on because I just, there’s just not enough time. And so I think you got to have the mindset of like, there is not one magic channel. Like, and I have this, you talk to any great marketer, they have to just constantly reinvent themselves, right? Like everything in marketing, if it goes on for a while, it eventually gets stale. Andrew Chen calls this the law of shitty click throughs. With paid advertising, after two months, of course the ads aren’t going to work anymore. They’re going to be stale. And I think the same is true as a marketer, you got to reinvent yourself. And so I’m obsessed with being, I’m way more obsessed with creativity than I was probably even a year and a half ago or two years ago or whatever. Because I realized that the only secret that I have as a marketer is to just be able to come up with ideas faster than anybody else. And the way that I can do that is by being obsessed with learning, being obsessed with reading, being obsessed with observing what other marketers are doing. It’s like you can’t just come up with that one idea because it’s never going to be A magic bullet. Sometimes it works that way, but I got to be able to have 10 ideas, so I can go to the founders and say, all right, I wanna do this. And when they’re inevitably like, no, then I’m not like, oh, shoot, okay, now what? All right, well, let me give you the other idea that I’m just as excited about. And they’re like, no, let me give you another idea. So I think if you can continue to be creative, then that’s gonna be able to. You’ll be able to maneuver yourself out of a lot of marketing problems now. And now I’ve just kind of become, like, the idea monkey. People will come up to my desk and be like, dave, I need an idea for. I’m like, well, just dance monkey. Give me an idea on the thing spot. I’m like, it’s not that easy. But that’s the thing that I wish I cared about more in my career, like, earlier on. Like, I wish I was more obsessed with creativity than worrying about how to run a great, perfectly trackable AdWords campaign. And I’m not knocking that. It’s just not the thing that I’m good at. And I think creativity has earned me a lot of opportunities, because if one idea doesn’t work, then I’m going to try another, and I’m never going to get stuck until we can figure it out.

The Creative Idea Generation Process

Louis: Where do you keep your ideas? Do you have, like, notes on the iPhone or whatever?

Dave Gerhardt: So, yeah, I have this. So what happened was, is I, like, I just started. I started to, like, be on my computer just too much. I’d be like, I have an idea. Gotta put in Evernote. I have an idea. I gotta put in Trello. So what I do. And I don’t have it with me in this room right now. It’s in the other room. But I just keep a notebook. And my notebook is, like, where everything goes first. And so if during this podcast, I had an idea, I would scribble it down in my notebook, because then I’ve put it down and I’m not worried about. I’m gonna forget it. And then later, then I kind of go and process it and think, yeah, that was a really good idea. Or sometimes, a lot of times, you sleep on it, you wake up and you’re like, you have no. Does it ever happen to you? Like, you think you have an idea, you go to sleep, you wake up the next day, and you’re like, I actually don’t really care about that anymore. Whatever next. Like, I do that all the time. And so I found that just, like, putting it in my notebook, like, gives my brain, like, okay, it’s in a safe place. You’re not gonna lose the idea, but if you want it, it’ll be there. And then I would, like, I use trello to just kind of organize my projects and stuff. And so it would either go in there, or I transfer it to Evernote so I can search it for later. But my notebook is kind of like my scratch pad for notes and ideas and to do list stuff.

Louis: So it seems like the question I ask about the confidence to actually launch stuff and not waiting four months to build something, and then. And then realizing it doesn’t work. It seems like you’ve encountered a lot of people feeling this way, maybe in your team, internally, maybe outside. What do you tell them? To actually convince them to get out there and just test stuff. Right. How do you convince them to do that?

Building Confidence for Unconventional Marketing

Dave Gerhardt: You got to show them. So one thing that I’ll do is I’ll be like, come on, let’s go. Okay, you’re stuck on this idea. Let’s go get in a room. Let’s get a whiteboard. You And I, for 20 minutes, are just going to just make some stuff up. Ready? All right, go. Let’s try to write a hundred variations of this headline. And, like, it’s getting. You have to get somebody involved in that process with you, because they’re not gonna feel it if you just tell them. It’s like, okay, so you want me to go back to my desk and come up with more ideas? I try to help them through it. And I’m like, what about if we did this? And have you thought about this? Oh. And then you just, like, it’s really just a crazy creative process of just, like, to get ideas flowing. And so. And if you’re by yourself, the way that I would do it would be like. There’s a great lesson from James Alterscher, who’s an author, podcast host, whatever. He does this mental exercise that every day he makes a list of 10 ideas. And it can be ideas about. They always got to be about a specific topic. And so it could be about, like, here’s this remote. I have a TV remote in my hand. If you can’t see me on video. And he’d be like, right, now write down 10 ideas about how you would market this remote. Wait, what? Why would I do that? Because it gets the creative. Like, it forces you to think through and break through stuff. Right? And so I think, like, anytime I’m stuck, I try to use that exercise, which is like, I get off the computer, I either go to the whiteboard or get a piece of paper and I write down like, you know, 10, 20, however many ideas, right? Hey, we want to, you know, we’re trying to figure out speakers for our conference, Hyper Growth right now. I could pull up a spreadsheet and have a meeting about it, or I could just be like, okay, I’m gonna pretend I’m just gonna go nuts right now. And on a white piece of paper, I’m just gonna write down a million ideas of speakers. Then I’ve got it down on paper, and then I can pick out three to five. So it’s always gotta be this like, whether you’re writing or talking about it, just like going for a walk, getting in a room, writing it down, actually getting those things out. And this is like, go back and read any creative or advertising book of all time. It’s like you gotta spit out all the bad ideas and that’s where you find the one or two. The one or two good ideas never just hit you, but they hit you if you’ve written 50 bad ones and then all of a sudden you’ll find one.

Louis: And I think that’s where the principle of morning pages are super useful. Right? I did that a lot.

Dave Gerhardt: That’s a great one.

Louis: It’s funny because as you say, morning pages is like. I think you write every morning two pages, like two pages of text. I think it’s 700 words, something like that. Not too sure. It’s funny because the first half, the first third of it is shit. Usually it’s like you just get used, like your brain just shit. Second half is a bit better. And the third half, the last third is like, finally you’re getting to clarity. You’re writing shit down that are super useful. Your brain is starting to process and it seems like it’s a bit the same with your process. You just throw a lot of ideas on the board. Most of them are going to be shit. But as you said, you will recognize the goal from the turds, from those, right?

Dave Gerhardt: Totally. I just wrote something the other day. And for me, the process of writing is never. It’s never in this. It’s never in this flow state. It’s usually like a bunch of ideas from over here, a bunch of ideas from over here, a bunch of ideas from over here. And then I kind of like piece them together. Like for me, writing is more like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. And so I always try to get like a bunch of ideas. The other thing, though, is since I really cared about, like, reading, reading has been, like, an amazing hack for creativity because, like I said earlier, everything has already been done. And so, like, reading is, like, the reason I love reading books is because. And I hated reading until David, you know, also beat this one into my head is like, a book has withstood the test of time, right? Like, show me a book that a good example is right now I’m reading. I never read it because I never read in school, But I’m reading 1984 by George Orwell, which was written in 1949. And, like, that book is so relevant to what’s happening today, 2019. And so I’m reading a book that’s almost been around 100 years, 60, 70 years, and it’s just as relevant today. I’m getting so many ideas from that book. And so I think I try to go back and find, like, find role models who have withstood the test of time, whether it’s books or people or speakers or whatever. And, like, the way I’m able to get more ideas is, like, I’m just leaning on history, like, very. I’ve never created anything original. It’s always something that’s already been done, Right? Like, I saw a great example the other day. There’s a company called Click Funnels, and the founder is Russell Brunson. And they have an event coming up, and they decided to do a telethon to sell tickets for their event. It’s genius. They didn’t invent the telethon, but they created this thing around it to sell tickets or also, I think anything in life, because marketing is all about understanding people. Anything in life can be marketing. And so I look at what influences, like my wife and my best friend and what, they don’t care anything about marketing, but I look and see what gets their attention. Right? My best friend is like a finance guy. He doesn’t understand anything that I do, but I’m obsessed with understanding what blogs is he reading. Why does he listen to that podcast? Why does he go to that event every year? Because you can understand what motivates people. So it’s the combination of learning from books and then learning from observing what people are doing. Also, what’s your title? Like, everybody hates marketing. Everybody hates marketers. Everyone hates marketers, right? The ultimate thing is you are a person. So observe what marketing things you react to, right? Because I think the biggest gap with marketing today is that most of us, we would not react to 99% of the marketing Activities that we’re spitting out into the world every day. That email that you just sent to invite people to your webinar tomorrow, two questions. Number one, would you open that email? Would you respond to that email? Would you attend the webinar? Would you actually get value out of that webinar? Like, was that actually worth 30 minutes? Or are you just trying to do something that you think your customers would like? I think about that a lot and try to only make stuff that I myself, as a very picky buyer and potential customer would actually respond to.

Louis: There’s also something there about how people are willing to admit that they are influenced by ads, right? And I’m going to absolutely butcher this story, but it’s basically about Guinness. You know, the drinks, the beer. And it’s about this guy in a pub who’s saying, I don’t listen to ads. I don’t watch any ads. And then 10 minutes after, I would say, oh, but why do you drink Guinness? Because it’s good for me. And that’s because you’ve been fed this information the last 20 years on TV, and you said you repeat it, but you don’t realize you’ve been influenced. So I think there’s also something here to notice, right? It’s like asking people what they’ve been influenced by and actually looking at what you’re doing now, like, the curiosity of it, observing them is much more valuable. And you can see that. You watch a TV ad, and 20 seconds after you say, actually, we might want to go back to this restaurant. And that was 20 seconds ago. And you don’t necessarily. Your brain doesn’t want you to know that you’re being sold to, but you fucking are.

Dave Gerhardt: What you said is so good, is like, what do people actually go and react to? You know, like, I’m looking out the window right now, and let’s just say there’s a line of 100 people outside. Why? Why are they at that store? What did that store do? Oh, they had a grand opening and they gave away two smoothies to the first 100 people. Okay, that’s a good idea. I wonder how we can do that. You got go and see what people actually do, right? You know, there’s always the. There’s always like the Steve Jobs quote or whatever, which is like, if they listen to. I don’t know, I’ll butcher it, right? He’s like, if I listen. If Henry Ford listened to what people wanted, they would have been still riding horses and buggies or something like that. But I think you Got to observe also, there is no more B2B, B2C, whatever. Like, we’re all people. Because technology is just kind of like, evened out the playing field for every company. And so. And everybody’s glued to their phones today. It’s easier than ever to observe what gets people to actually react because you don’t have to physically see them. You can see which content on Instagram gets a ton of comments. I know that on my Instagram, people don’t like when I post pictures about marketing. They want pictures of my daughter. If I was trying to grow my Instagram, what would my strategy be to post more pictures of my daughter? It’s simple. You can see that, that stuff without having to have people say it.

Louis: So to go back to the initial challenge, right, when you join a company As a marketer, $10,000 sounds like you would spend time understanding people, you would look at competitors, you would identify a gap, something you can actually go after. It sounds like a lot of the marketing that you do, the ideas that you generate, the type of campaigns you do, are always from an outside perspective that always seem to be against something. Or as you said, people go right and you go left, not against, but opposite. It’s like a lot of that. So do you feel like to actually stand out and pick a gap and go for a campaign that will make a big dance? Do you feel it’s necessary to pick an enemy and go after it or to actually go black if others are doing white? What’s the, what’s the thinking there?

Picking Sides and Choosing Your Enemy

Dave Gerhardt: I do think you always need an enemy, but I think most people mix that up with, like, you have to state your competitor’s name publicly. There’s always an enemy, and the enemy can be you before versus you after. The enemy is lazy. You don’t be lazy. You be like, if you’re trying to market a gym, right, don’t be lazy. You be productive. You and work out five times a week. It’s more just like picking a side. And there’s a great, really great lesson that I learned from this guy, Ryan Deiss, who’s the CEO of Digital Marketer, amazing copywriter, and he calls it like the before. He thinks about before and after states for all the, like, what do people feel before and after they use your product? What status do they have before and after they use your product? What results do they get before and after using your product? And so you always do have to pick a side, whether that’s an enemy, quote, unquote. Like at Drift, for example, we decided that back in the day, our enemy was not going to be a named company, but was going to be Forbes lead Forbes. That was our enemy. That’s something that anybody can rally around. Whether you believe it, agree with it or not, that was something that people could rally around. Right. Let’s say you have a non profit and you want to save the world and stop the pollution that’s happening. Your enemy is going to be plastic bottles. That’s not a specific company. But you’re picking a side. And I think you do have to pick sides. You don’t necessarily have to pick an enemy.

Louis: Yeah, you do have to pick a side. But it seems like a lot of marketers are scared of doing this. Right? The status quo is so appealing, isn’t it?

Dave Gerhardt: Yeah. Which is fine because they can keep doing. They should keep doing that because then if everybody picked a side, I wouldn’t be any good at what I’m doing. So it’s fine. But I think it’s just a fear. I think it’s just a fear of like. Just like anything, any project, if you’re afraid of standing out or afraid of being different, there’s risk. There’s definitely risk involved. Right. What if I had a crazy idea and it flopped and I post a lot of things publicly? Then I got to deal with people telling me it didn’t work. And so, yeah, I totally understand that. But I also. I don’t understand how you can win if you’re going to be the same as everybody else. And there’s always the takes on it. Right? Like Uber and Lyft is a similar thing to taxis, but it’s different. Right? It’s on demand, it’s hip, it’s cool, it’s modern. There’s a brand to it. They know who you are, whatever. Like there’s little patterns that you can learn from.

Louis: I want to go back to something you said about competitors. As you said, people think that picking any meme would probably mean, like picking a competitor and whatnot. But there’s something else to mention here. I want to say marketers often misinterpret the word competitors. They think it would mean direct competition, like drift versus I’m not even going to name, because I didn’t even know, but Dre versus another alternative. Right. But actually it’s not that it’s what they’re doing instead of you. And sometimes they’re doing nothing instead of you. Sometimes they’re using something completely different instead of you. Right. And that would mean that you need to position yourself against that Right. Against what they’re doing instead of you. And sometimes it’s not using a competitor. It could be something else.

Dave Gerhardt: Yeah. It could be a routine. It could be something they’re doing. They’re not going to the gym. How do you position against that? How do you show that side? How do you show good versus evil? Before, before versus after? It can always be that, right?

Louis: All right, so if you had to pick the best three ideas you ever had or you had in the last year, that worked really well. Give me the last three that were pretty good.

Three Breakthrough Ideas That Actually Worked

Dave Gerhardt: One of them was use LinkedIn video about a year, probably October 2017. They had added it in August. I noticed it one day and I was like, wait a second, I’ve never used this. And I said, I’m just gonna start posting here and I’m going to post video, just talking about whatever, treating it like I would treat Instagram or whatever, but talk specific about Drift and marketing. So that was a good one. A lot of people thought that that was stupid. Like, who’s this idiot walking down the street on his phone? You know, what an ego. And I ignored almost all those things, and now it’s become an insane channel for us as a business. And now I post there consistently and it works. So LinkedIn videos. 1. Writing a book is another one. Who needs another marketing book? And it’s, you know, one of the number one bestseller on Amazon in marketing and sales, top 20 business book in the world. And because we didn’t listen to, we said, I don’t know, people need this marketing book. Maybe they don’t need another one, but they need this one. And then I think trying to think of another one.

Louis: Let me give you one for you.

Dave Gerhardt: Oh, you got one?

Louis: Yeah, one that I saw recently and I actually screenshot it and added to my list of good ideas, genuinely. I mean, it was the van. The van that you’re using for.

Dave Gerhardt: Oh, yeah. Yes, that was a good one.

Louis: So explain what it is briefly.

Dave Gerhardt: So this year, Saster, which is like a big conference in our space, sas, we found out that it was going to be in San Jose, but most of the people that go to it usually kind of live in the San Francisco area, which is like an hour away. And so we didn’t actually know if we would drive people or whatever, but it would just be a funny kind of play if we created the Drift van. And we said, we’ll give you a ride from San Francisco to San Jose. And so we rented a van, we wrapped it with Drift branding. We did driftvan and we said like, you can go to it. I think it’s drift.comsastor. you should be able to see it. And yeah, we drove people to Saastr. We drove it around the conference, we drove it to and from the airport. I took it to the gym in the morning. And yeah, that was a good one. The other one that we did was instead of sponsoring, we found some real estate kind of outside around the conference. And we got that for like four weeks leading up to the conference, which didn’t make them super happy, but got us a lot of attention and kind of we play. We were able to play on a different field than everybody else that was there because of that. So that was also a fun one, right?

Louis: Dave, thanks so much for your time. Last year we recorded an episode together. You mentioned a few resources for people to check out. So I’m not going to ask you again. I think people can check again. You mentioned a lot of resources in your episode. Thanks for your time. Once again, do you have anything else

Dave Gerhardt: to add or No. I wish more people made their podcasts actual conversations like you do. So keep up the. Keep fighting the good fight and let’s try to get people to love marketing again. Let’s do that.

Louis: Thanks, man.

Dave Gerhardt: See you, Louie.

Louis: All right, take later. Bye bye. That’s it for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com. and this is the moment where I tell you to subscribe to our email list.

Dave Gerhardt: So.

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