Steve Pratt
Appearances
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I start with attention because if you don't have any attention, you have nothing. You have no audience. You have no time. You have no engagement. You have no trust, no relationships. No one's even hearing you. No one's sampling.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It can't be some bait and switch Trojan horse thing where it looks like it's a gift, but it's actually like a bunch of salespeople pouring out of the Trojan horse and trying to close you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah. And it's like this is where it is. This is where the piece is. It has to be a genuine gift. It has to be a really good show. And I think the part where you think about how do you tie that into a business outcome is it has to be a show that's from you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I'm full of it. I'm going to empty it all out today. It's great.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It has to be something that is a gift that only you can give that group that is somehow tied to the things that you want people to associate with your expertise or your brand or the things that you know that would be valuable for an audience. that are going to help your business.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And I think, I don't know, I was at a conference in Copenhagen earlier this month, and one of the speakers was from LinkedIn, and she was talking about how 95% of the people that you're reaching with your marketing aren't actually in buying mode right now, that you may be like 5% are actually going to buy. And I was like, this is amazing, because that means 95% of those people, you can just...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
get to know them. You can create value for them. They're going to know what you stand for, what your voice is, what your values are, the areas that you're an expert in. And if you can create value for them by sharing those sorts of things in a way that benefits them, they're going to spend lots of time with you and they will build up trust for you and have a relationship.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And when they hit that 5% that are actually in the buying window, if they spent hours and hours and hours with you and received a lot of value and benefit from spending time with you, are they going to choose you or are they going to choose the one that is like screaming at them and interrupting them and following them around the internet like a disease or something like that?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So it feels pretty bad. obvious to me but it's not the way most people market and if you actually commit to doing it and think about yourself as an audience member it works like it it really works to be generous first by giving people things that only you can give them talking with steve pratt he's the author of earn it steve
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I am super excited to talk to you in South Carolina. I, uh, we were saying earlier, I love South Carolina. I used to go there all the time, the best. So, uh, yeah. Awesome to talk to you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I think everybody just wants to jump straight to the bottom, right? Yeah. It is a race to the bottom though. Your urgency is not my urgency as a consumer. The marketing is a race to the bottom.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You know, my favorite thing is, I look at the, like, if you just Google right now, you could go in and Google, what are the conversion rates on digital advertising? They're almost all sub 1%, right? And I think about that that is considered successful advertising.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And in marketing, I kind of zoom out and I'm like, there's nothing else on the planet where 1% success would be considered awesome and where you'd be like, hey, we're doing a great job and we shouldn't explore any other alternatives to doing this. And I think about the 99% and I'm like, if your job is to make people like you so that they want to buy from you because you're interesting...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
and you're annoying or irrelevant to 99% of the people you're reaching, why would you not be thinking about is there a better way to do this stuff? And I think it's because people are very happy to annoy 99% of the people in order to get that 1% because they have short-term urgency. It's like we can get the 1% over and over, and we don't really care how many of the 99% we annoy.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I just think there's a better way to do it where you can target the people that you really want to reach and be valuable to them and know, like you said, when they're in market, if you've already built a great amount of trust and a relationship with them. They will convert and become longtime customers, and it will pay for itself.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You just need to actually get away from the short-termism that you're talking about. Bingo.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It is not warm here now. It's come in the summer. It's like the nicest place on earth. Uh, right now there's, it's cold and dark. And this is, unless you're a skier, uh, Don't come right now.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You need like a soundboard with the amen on it. I know. I've thought about it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So the first thing is, I think if you want to find success in marketing, again, what does it look like to earn attention? You have to set a high quality bar for yourself. And so I use the term creative bravery as kind of my lingo for making something that's going to stand out and that is worth people's time.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And you can kind of think of like, you know, on a scale of 1 to 100 or 1 to 10 or whatever it is, how creatively brave are we being creative? with the podcast or the video or the newsletter, whatever we're putting out, is this a real show or is this something that feels like an infomercial for our products and services?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And I think, you know, when you can ask yourself some test questions to be like, are we making a real show? Are we making something that has a high level of creative bravery or not? Would you listen or watch or read this if you didn't work here? Like if you had no tie to the company, is this worth telling other people about? Is it so good that you would tell other people about it?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
That's a really high bar. But to me, that is what it takes to do that stuff. And I think most marketing wouldn't pass that test. Would you remember this?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
in a week or a month or a year or five years, if we change the things that we were putting out and think about how different the stuff that you would make would be if you designed something that people would remember it in five years and how good that would have to be to do that stuff.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And maybe one other one is, you know, like at the end of spending time with a thing you're putting out, would people say that was time well spent? If they had a chance to go back in a time machine and make the same choice again, knowing what they were going to get, would they choose the same thing because it was a valuable use of their time? You kind of have to pass those bars these days.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And I think setting that bar appropriately high is a great starting point. And there's a whole bunch of... We could dig into a whole bunch of nerdy stuff if you want around like... how to think about differentiating shows and making things that stand out and, and pop in there. But I think. Hey, go down.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So you let me know where, where I go to too deep in this and we can, we can pull out and go back to shallower waters. But yeah, So I think one, you have to know your audience and choose a very specific audience. And the more you know about the audience, the better.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And you need to look at who else is out there and where they're being served and whether they're being well served in all the different areas. And then you need to look at yourself and ask yourself who you are, what's your voice, what are your values, why do you exist, what are your superpowers or your weird areas of expertise relative to your competition.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And you've got to spend some time in front of a whiteboard or whatever it is with a group of people in a room and figure out What are we going to be able to do that is going to create huge value for that group of people that is not already being addressed by other competition that can only come from us?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And generally speaking, that will come up with some sort of subject matter or approach that you can take. This is the sort of stuff we're going to talk about. Once you know what you're going to talk about, I feel like there's... a lot of opportunities to set yourself apart and make something that is differentiated.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And it's not just the subject matter, but it's like, what's the format of the show or the newsletter or video or whatever it is, how are we going to present this information in a really interesting way? And so when I think of, you know, when we're talking about that idea of a gift, how are you going to wrap the gift? You can take the same information and you can present it in 10 different ways.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And some of them are going to be really boring and conventional, and some of them you can make really, really exciting and interesting. So I'll give you a weird example. We worked with a company called McAfee that you may know. They're a software company that helps people avoid cybersecurity threats and viruses and things like that. Yeah, lots of it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah, so this is not about the founder. That's a whole different kind of finish.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
This is not the story of the McAfee founders.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So the business outcome they wanted was to establish their brand positioning as cybersecurity experts and not just preventing viruses. And to help consumers understand how to protect themselves about what they should worry about or not worry about from cybersecurity threats.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And so the super obvious way to do it would be to have some cybersecurity expert on the show every week and interview that person and they just tell you Here's why you shouldn't use public Wi-Fi because you're going to get hacked and here's all the things they can get out of it if you go to a coffee shop and use public Wi-Fi or something like that, right? That is not what they did.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You could take that same information. They instead created a show called Hackable. And it's kind of a mix of two different formats. It's part Mythbusters, so the TV show where they look at urban myths and legends and being like, is this real? We're going to investigate and find out whether these urban legends are real or not. And then part Mr. Robot, which is the show about hacker culture. And
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
They kind of took a different situation from pop culture, like the Wi-Fi in the coffee shop, for example, and said, should you be worried about it? We're going to actually put the host of the show in a coffee shop on public Wi-Fi, and then we're going to get a hacker to go in and see what they can find out.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You're going to get the exact same information about how to protect yourself, but you're also going to have a fun narrative story. watching this host get hacked by a hacker. And it's a bit of a spoiler, but the host almost always gets hacked by the hacker.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So the packaging and the wrapping that you put around shows is also a really big way to stand out and earn attention relative to other things that are out there. And then there's a whole other kettle of fish out there for how you market it. Because if you make a great show and you don't tell anybody about it, you'll have this little tiny pocket of people that love it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And if you have a crappy show that has no creative bravery and you market the hell out of it and a ton of people come in and sample it, they're going to be like, this is horrible and I'm never coming back. You kind of need to have awesome creative bravery and you need to market it well to exactly the right people. That's where you find a lot of success with this stuff. There you go.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I love the niches, honestly. I had, I'll tell you two relatively short stories about how I learned this and then forgot it. So when I was working at that music service, the innovation lab at the public broadcaster, We made the worst radio station in the history of radio stations. It broke every rule. It was so dumb. So the radio station was not on AM or FM, so it wasn't on radio.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It eventually got on satellite radio, so no radio. Horrible. It only played Canadian music. No one wants that. No one listens to music by nationality. That's just not a thing. You think about radio station formats, they're all by genre.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
this radio station in an hour, you could hear rock pop, hip hop, country, death metal, electronic singer, songwriter, like all mixed together, horrifically dumb from music programming standpoint. It was only new music by new artists. So there were no hits and no big name artists. So again, that is not how people listen to music.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
We like familiar stuff with just tiny sprinkles of unfamiliar things in there. Um, And then the dumbest thing is we decided to put out this thing called a podcast in 2005. And the guy who was hosting the show was amazing. But he was like, I don't even know what a podcast is. This is such a waste of my time. I should be on radio. I don't get it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I'll give you the short version is I come at it from a little bit of an unusual places. I come at it from the media background. So I did about 10 years of television. I worked in music television and children's television and journalism and things for about 10 years. And then I went and ran a digital music service for about 10 years at Canada's public broadcast.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Why are you making me do this stupid thing called a podcast? So it turns out the podcast... went to number one podcast in the country and ended up getting like 80 to 100,000 downloads a week in 2005, which is crazy. And we're like, how is this happening? Why is this happening? It makes no sense. It all is horrible. Like no radio station on earth would ever do any of those things that we did.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And it turns out there is a group of people who love that thing. They're just not a giant audience that you would normally target with a radio station. They are music super fans who are omnivores for different genres of music. And they like all the new stuff because they want to hear it first so that they can tell other people about it. And no one had made a show like that for them before.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And so we were kind of the only gift that was out there for an underserved niche. And when you aggregate little pockets of music superfans all over the world, it turns into a really big audience. So for me, that was like my giant first lesson in like super serving an underserved audience and the value of doing that. But then I forgot it when I was at this podcast company.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
We were working with Red Hat, which is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. And they're a provider of open source software solutions. And they said, we want to make a podcast only for open source enthusiasts. And I was like, that sounds like a bad idea. I don't know if there's enough people out there who care about open source software to make a show. And they're like, trust us.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And of course, they knew their stuff inside out. They knew their audience. They knew their subject matter. It was not incredibly hard to make a fantastic show about open source for all the open source enthusiasts in the world because not a lot of people were serving that group. And you aggregate that thing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
That show had a bigger audience than a lot of the shows that we made that were for a mainstream audience. It was ridiculous. A massive, massive success. And so for me, just to double down on it, I always look at how can I target a smaller and more unique audience that is underserved? And how can I create extreme value for those people? Because they're going to give you tons of time and attention.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
They're going to give you tons of trust and loyalty and passion. And you end up with a really amazing community out of it. Do you find the same thing, by the way?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It was kind of like NPR Music, but in Canada. And started podcasting in 2005, which is super early in this innovation lab thing. And I guess around 2014, I left. And it was a mix of different reasons. But part of it was because... the media business model seemed pretty broken where so many
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You know, the neat thing is too, is when you're actually marketing, you know, the content or the show that you make for a niche is you can be really targeted with how you market it. Like you don't actually have to market to everybody. It's, it's much more obvious where to market those things, where you can be a lot more efficient and effective with your marketing strategy.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
for the content you're putting out.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah. Well, there's so many of those. Like those are the, those are the 1% conversion things, right? Is the spray and pray stuff. But when you know where your audience is and you can go look at and find out who else is in that space, um,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
that's talking to similar audiences or kind of adjacent subject matters, you can go advertise with those groups and have those groups talk about your show or, you know, go, go find out where the community gathers. I remember we did a show with, um, with Ford for the relaunch of the Ford Bronco and,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And there is, and this is kind of before video podcasts were so big, but our head of audience development was a guy named Dan Meisner, just incredibly smart guy who's now at his own agency called Bumper. And He found a YouTube channel called Past Gas. I love it. Already. They went after this channel.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
They're like, hey, we want to send you some sample episodes of this Ford Bronco podcast because it feels like it would be a good fit for you and happy to pay you to listen to it and do an endorsement for it if you like it or whatever. And that thing converted like crazy.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Because they had exactly the right audiences and the hosts were trusted by the existing audience, and when the host says, I listened to this Ford Bronco show, it's awesome. If you like this show, you're going to love it. Go check it out. That converts like crazy, and it's worth paying higher rates to get a more effective response. conversion.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I think in some ways one of the things Dan taught me was you might not want to think about traditional ad metrics when you're thinking about content promotion. You may not want to think about CPMs. You may want to think about cost per sample. How many people are actually coming in and clicking play on your podcast or how many people are coming in and clicking play on your video that if you can...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Think about it in those terms. It might actually make more sense to target a smaller group and pay more to have a much more effective ad that your acquisition cost is going to go way down compared to the spray and praise. Bingo.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
You hit that amen button on your soundboard. Yes, I will.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah, me too. It's amazing, right? I think it's really engaging when it's done well.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It's interesting. The book is for brave marketers. When we're talking about being very specific in who you choose for your audience, it's in the subtitle of the book. It's Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. It is for people who want to question the status quo because they know it's not working and they want to find some different ways of doing things and think differently.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
advertisers were leaving for the digital space and so many audiences had tools to just bypass interruptive things that they didn't want. And I saw all these companies like Red Bull who were acting like their own media companies that they realized pretty early on, we don't need a media company. We don't need broadcast towers or licenses with the internet.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
but I think it is actually also relevant to a broader audience too. Like I think when you do a good job, I mean, I hope the book is doing a good job of this, but like in general, when you do a good job of picking a very specific audience, their adjacent audiences, they're going to find it and they will find it relevant and interesting because the strategies can apply to almost anybody.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
If you're a content creator, you know, and you're making content for a living, um, The book will totally apply to all of that sort of stuff. If you're somebody who just posts on LinkedIn or Instagram or TikTok, just socially, you could get a lot out of figuring out how to make better stuff that people pay more attention to. I feel like, you know, honestly...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Anybody that is putting something out in the world where you want people's time and attention and you want to figure out ways to differentiate yourself and be special or be memorable, you'd probably find some value in it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I'm down for it. That is very generous of you. And I'm honored even to hear you say something like that. That's awesome, Ryan.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
This has been a real blast.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Hey, you too, man. Let's do it again soon.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
We could just decide to make awesome stuff and build our own audiences. And I, I had this moment where I was like, you know what? I know how to do that. My whole career in media is I know how to make great shows and engage audiences. What if we went and helped teach a bunch of marketers how to do that and help companies build their own audiences and turn this into a business? And
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So I left, and then very shortly after, Serial, this huge podcast came out. And podcasts were big in 2005, 2006, and they kind of dipped as YouTube and Facebook came up. And then they came roaring back with Serial. And we were like, let's make the weirdest business ever and double down on helping brands learn how to make podcasts. Yep.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And we were the first people on the planet, I think, to actually have a company that only did that. And a bunch of people almost had interventions with us because they thought we were going to go bankrupt and lose our houses and all that sort of stuff. I think we got really lucky. We picked something at the right time, and it turned into a really, really...
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
like good but also just really enjoyable and fascinating business helping figure out this whole space um so yeah i did that for about eight or nine years uh and then the last three years i've kind of been on my own writing this book and going on you know helping companies do it uh not just in podcasting but figure out kind of broader content strategies for doing this stuff yeah man it's uh it's
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
It's a hard business, right? Like it's... you think about how many messages we all get fired at us every single day as audience members and how picky we can be now compared to where we used to be 20 years ago. If you want to be one of the few things that people actually pay attention to, no matter what platform you choose, no matter what kind of content you make, it's hard.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Like it's a, it's a really hard deal, but it's also, that's also kind of the fun of it. And yeah, it's figuring out how to make things that are actually valuable for people that they want to spend their time with. Cause, um, I don't know. I feel like people don't suffer through mediocrity anymore. They don't have to, which is nice.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
I think it's a great way of phrasing it. I may have to borrow that. Mine is usually something like you're either earning attention or you're getting ignored.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Well, we were talking earlier about this idea of sampling, right? Like I think you brought up, you know, like the, The goal of everybody is to get sampled and then it's the job of the show to keep people listening afterwards or the video or the newsletter or whatever it is. it just getting sampled as the on button, right?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Like it has to be so interesting that out of all the different options, all the Netflix tiles, all the Spotify podcasts, all the TikTok creators, that they're even willing to give you a shot to give you a second or two to get in there. That's a hard on button to get into, right? Yes.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah. It's funny. Even in podcasting now, the video stuff is fascinating. Like I have a, I have a 22 year old who loves podcasting. never listens. It's always on YouTube. And she knows it's like, it is like podcasting is like the new television on YouTube where it's, she knows exactly what shows she watches, what days they drop, what time they drop all of it. It's a, it's amazing.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And to be able to get to that point where people know that about you and look forward to you like appointment viewing or listening is, That's really hard. Also, you have to be pretty awesome or pretty valuable to a very specific group of people to get in there. I'm fascinated by all of it.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah, that checks. That checks.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Well, I guess the premise of the book is that you have to earn attention, that if you actually want to get the business results you're looking for as a marketer, there are not any shortcuts that are going to deliver the real deal. Consumers have too many defense mechanisms to keep messages that they don't want out of their lives.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And if you think like a consumer or like an audience member yourself – you know how picky you are about the things that you actually give your attention to. Our level of time and attention that we have every day is finite. There's a maximum number of things that we can possibly give our attention to. And there's more and more and more things competing with it every day.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
So we can afford to be really picky. And I think it just means that the quality bar is higher for everybody who's trying to earn someone's attention. And The things you were talking about before, in the past, we just kind of had this deal where we would suffer through things we didn't want in the middle of our shows because that was the only way we could get them.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And that doesn't really apply anymore. And so I think as marketers and brands thinking about how we want to connect with people... it puts us in a different mindset of having to make things that people genuinely want to spend time with and setting a really high bar for creating value first for the audience rather than things that are primarily about us.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
And I think that there's, you know, there's a nice intersection, like there's a Venn diagram intersection between the job that we're hiring our marketing to do, like the business outcomes that we want to achieve and the value that we're creating for audiences, you know, which I kind of like framing as a gift and,
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Can you design gifts for the audience that they're really excited to spend time with on an ongoing basis that also accomplish your business outcomes? That, to me, is where modern marketing sits and where you can get marketing results and keep your job and build an audience of people that are happy to spend time with you.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
But the sad part is there's not really any super shortcuts and hacks to get there. You actually have to do good work, and it's hard work to do it. It's fun, but it's hard work.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Yeah, super, super smart. I love their stuff.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Hey, thanks for having me. I feel like I'm going to be like a shit distributor today. This is good. We're all going to know our shit.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
We're early. I'm going to let you re-decide that. I love the book too much.
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Well, I guess I start with attention because if you don't have any attention, you have nothing. You have no audience. You have no time. You have no engagement. You have no trust, no relationships. No one's even hearing you. No one's sampling. So without attention, you have nothing. And so I think you have to start by saying. Are we going to make something that is worth people's attention?
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
Because we all have these huge defenses set up. We have skip buttons, we have VPNs, we have ad blockers, we have subscription services. We can avoid all sorts of things we don't want. The unpopular opinion that I strongly believe in and have had lots of great success with is make stuff people love as a starting point because it's the only way you can get in and actually get the attention. And
Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers
if you have somebody come in and sample and it's mediocre or it feels salesy or whatever, they're gone and they're never going to come back. And the secret to building trust and relationships to get customers, to get revenue, is to spend time with people on an ongoing basis and to have them come back. And if you won't be able to come back... It's got to be the real deal.