Marketing Happy Hour - The Guide to Using Humor in Your Content (+ Scaling Email) | Aidan Brannigan of No Boring Brands

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

How to grow your audience and your brand with humor – This week, I’m chatting with Aidan Brannigan, founder of No Boring Brands and former Marketing Millennials’ strategist, who scaled social followings to over a million and crafted email campaigns that drove six-figure ticket sales. Aidan shares his journey from working with top startups to building a humor-based agency for B2B brands. Learn how humor can transform your marketing strategy, increase engagement, and help your brand stand out in the crowded digital landscape. Key Takeaways: // Scaling Social Media: Learn how Aidan grew The Marketing Millennials' following from 250k to 1.2M. // Humor as a Tool: Discover why humor is crucial for increasing brand retention and recall. // Email Marketing Success: Gain insights on crafting email campaigns that convert. // Building a Business: Hear about Aidan’s transition from corporate to founder and his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Connect with Aidan: LinkedIn Follow Aidan: Instagram ____ Say hi! DM me on Instagram and let us know what content you want to hear on the show - I can't wait to hear from you! Please also consider rating the show and leaving a review, as that helps us tremendously as we move forward in this Marketing Happy Hour journey and create more content for all of you. ⁠ Join our FREE Open Jobs group on LinkedIn: ⁠Join now⁠ Get the latest from MHH, straight to your inbox: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our email list!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow MHH on Social: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

90% of consumers are more likely to remember ads that are funny, yet only 20% of business owners say they use humor in their ads and their content. Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour. I'm Cassie, consultant, podcaster, and your host. Every Thursday, you'll hear episodes packed with insights from brand leaders on an array of topics, from crafting effective marketing strategies and hitting career goals to building leadership skills and launching your own business. Inspired by those unfiltered happy hour combos with peers, this show is all about practical, empowering chats to support your professional journey. So grab your favorite drink and let's

get to the episode. All right. I'm so stoked to have Aiden of No Boring Brands here today on the show. We're going to talk social media growth, humor's impact on engagement, tips on creating emails that convert, which is a favorite topic of mine. I'm super stoked to dive into it, but Aiden, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. Yeah, absolutely. You were also in the past a part of a brand that I strongly admire, the Marketing Millennials. But also, I have to say, like what you're building with No Boring Brands is so unique. We were just talking about that off record. And so stoked to hear about your journey, not only diving into

entrepreneurship, but just kind of what you're focusing on there. But on that too, can you tell us a little bit about your journey? How did you land into creating your own business? It's weird to say this. So I hope people don't take this the wrong way, but like I benefited from the, from COVID a little bit, the timing with COVID. I was a freshman in college when COVID hit. So school went fully online for the next year and a half for me. And I just had so much time on my hands. So I started working at startups. And being I was like 18, 19 in these startups, like, oh, young kid, run our social media. So I just got immediately in this world of social media. And it was right around this time of like GameStop and like crypto and like this meme culture was also really coming to the forefront.

And so it was like this perfect timing. And that just snowballed into I worked at a couple of different media companies and I had a couple of really good mentors. And one mentor planted a seed in my head and just said one time, his name is Corey Noble. He said, you're really good at this one thing. Do more of it. And that was like being witty and like humor. And so that's like the very abbreviated version of how I've gotten to this point. But he planted the seed and I just couldn't get out of my head for the next three or four years until I left the marketing millennials and went really full tilt on this creative humor agency.

Oh, that's awesome. I feel like humor on social is still such a unique skill. Like I have I can think of literally one friend in marketing who's like excellent at it. So how do you like, I'm just curious, like with that skill set, I'm sure you're like generally funny as a human being too, being that you write like that on social media, but how are you kind of like cultivating that skill? How are you coming up with ideas? Like what's kind of your thought process there? Yeah, when people meet me,

all my content online is humor focused, but I'm not a class clown. Most of my content, it's like wit based. If someone meets me and like, if my friends think of me, they'd be like, oh yeah, Aiden's funny. But if I meet a stranger, they're gonna be like, this dude's not funny. He's not a comedian.

It's just something that from an early age, there's an author and philosopher, his name is Naval Ravikant. And I just really got into his words. And he talks about doing more of the things you did naturally when you were younger, that you assumed everyone else could do because it came naturally to you. And for me, that was making people laugh and like being quick on my feet, witty, quick remarks. And so it's something I've just been naturally good at, but I cultivate it now in a business sense by like massive blocks of uninterrupted focus and like just ideating. Even though I'm heavily involved in social and like I create content

myself, I'm creating hundreds of pieces of content for clients. I have social media at like a stiff arm away because I know the best ideas come when I'm in these deep like flow states of focus. So I get the ball rolling by like setting a timer on my phone, closing all tabs and just like thinking. And like, that's really how I get the humor flowing a little bit. That's awesome. Well, I love how you mentioned too, just about tapping into like your childhood nature. I think that's so important. And a lot of times I think it naturally comes up to like, we fast forward to age 30, 40, whatever. And we're like, oh my gosh, I'm doing something that is directly tied to a passion I had as a kid. But I think even more intentionally, like sitting down

with yourself and thinking about like, what have I always drawn to? What am I good at from a young age? And I think that will help identify like, what should you be doing moving forward? Like for me, for example, I wrote so much as a kid. I love to write. It was one of my favorite things. And now I do copywriting. That's one service I offer to clients.

I did not necessarily mean to do that. But now looking back, I'm like, I should have paid more attention to that and maybe intentionally stepped into that. I mean, it happened anyways. But yeah, I think there's a lot to learn with that. That's huge. Yeah. And when I like say that, I don't mean like, like, here's a good example. In addition to that, like, I have a friend, his name's Mason, and he's an insurance underwriter. So like from an earlier age, he wasn't thinking like, oh, I want to be an insurance underwriter. But he was my, out of all my friends,

like I thought I was pretty good at math. He was always so much better at it and he loved it. And so in school, he pursued a business degree. But now when he graduated, he's in insurance. And all he's doing all day is just crunching numbers. It's like, are the probabilities right here that we can offer this line of credit to this company and that they're going to pay us back? So it's like those little things, like the numbers came naturally to him. And so now he's in a degree and a field that really can, he can showcase that. Yeah. It's really cool how that works out like that sometime. So I want to talk quickly about the marketing millennials and then we'll pivot more into your experience, just again, building your own business. But specifically on social media, if you follow the marketing millennials, you'll notice the following is very decent. So you helped scale that brand following from 250K to 1.1 million, which is incredible.

So congrats on that. Thank you. What key strategies do you feel kind of drove that growth? And how do you feel brands can maybe getting inspired by the strategies that you use to hopefully find some success on their own too? Yeah, you asked that question perfectly. Brands should definitely get inspired from what we did at The Marketing Millennials, but not copy it.

Right. Because The Marketing Millennials is a media company. And obviously, brands, they're trying to sell a product like Awala or however you pronounce that water bottle. But so when I started, Daniel, it was a very small team. And Daniel's goal was like, how do we just scale this audience so we can scale our newsletter, can scale the business overall, scale the podcast. And he knew the strategy. He knew what he wanted to implement. He just didn't have the time or bandwidth to implement it. So that's where I was

brought on to help just scale the efforts in totality. So he started just on LinkedIn, built a big following, like 250Ks. I think it's a huge following. And so that strategy was just building as much top-of-funnel awareness as possible through super niche memes, primarily targeting B2B marketers. And so that's how he found his initial success. And, you know, when you get to a size of 250K, like, you can almost fall into a trap of, like, shifting that focus from B2B marketing and to just corporate culture memes, which is a lot of big accounts now that are making general corporate culture memes. But what we did that was, I think, super effective. We just leaned in and doubled down on this niche meme targeting. So I was brought on.

We scaled the audience to maybe 300, 400K on LinkedIn through these memes. We were posting two times a day, more than anyone else was doing. They're all super targeted. And in every post, we had a CTA to subscribe to our newsletter because we were trying to own more of our audience because you're building on rented land when it comes to social media. And when we got to a point where we felt like, okay, the LinkedIn's really got some momentum, we branched out to Instagram and we started building an audience on Instagram. And in a year we gained 100K followers with a little bit different of a

strategy. It was more short form video focused, video memes. And we were posting three times a day. So I say often like for brands and creators, consistency is the biggest growth hack because with consistency comes knowledge and the knowledge of like what types of content works for your niche and what people want to see. So me and Daniel, we'd always have these, like if an idea came up, it'd be like, let's try it. Like let's throw it out there. If it flops and nobody sees it, great. Nobody saw it. If it does well, it performs well. Now we have a new avenue to create content. So we would just use it as a test and learn, which all the best marketers know, like that's really what marketing is. It's test and learn.

So that's how we scaled it like in a simple sense. It's just top of funnel awareness through relatable and digestible content. Yeah. And you talked a lot about just this importance of niching down and like finding an avenue you want to focus in and just hitting that so hard and consistently over and over again. Why do you think that's so important for brands to find a focus? And how do you recommend brands like figure out what that thing is that they want to kind of hone into? I have a strong belief that differentiation is like the biggest thing you can do in marketing and it has the highest impact. So for us, that was our differentiation. Like everyone who works in corporate can make corporate culture content and like pull on those pain points. But you have

to be a highly knowledgeable B2B marketer to be able to make a meme that targets a 44-year-old demand gen marketer located in Iowa. So that was our advantage. Daniel and I, through Daniel did a bunch of podcasts. Daniel was my mentor, so I just absorbed all of this information from him. We knew what made B2B marketers tick, and so we realized not

anyone else can do this. Now there's people trying to do it, but they're not as big as the marketing millennials because they don't have that secret sauce that Daniel holds. So like, I think like it just comes down to that differentiation piece and then you need to have mental real estate in people's minds. So when people think marketing millennials, there's a clear differentiation between them and, you know, official work memes on Instagram. There's a delineation there. So that's why I think niching down is so important. And I think to your point, too, with that is just knowing the audience within that niche

so, so well. I think the one reason that your content, that content stands out is because every single meme that comes across my account or my profile or feed, for example, I'm like, oh, I feel that, or I get that, or that's something I face or whatever. So knowing your audience so that you're able to create content that's so relatable that they can't help but share it and obviously resulting in like those high levels of engagement too. So I don't know if you have anything else to add on that level too. That was like our, like, you know, internal like goal was to, with every piece of content, make it, make our audience's reaction be like, wait, do they have a camera in my office? Like, how do they know I just experienced that? And like, that's, that's

how you get the people sharing content and shares a forefront of our strategy because we had the theory that shares on Instagram, on any social platform, are the modern day word of mouth marketing. So we really tried to get those shares numbers like up. Yeah. So now pivoting into just talking about what you do with no boring brands. So obviously incorporating humor into social media is a core focus of what you do. Why do you feel a humor works? And then B, is humor for every brand or how do you kind of pick and choose when you're strategizing with a brand, whether or not it makes sense for them? Yeah, so humor absolutely works, but it needs to be done well. A lot of the brands I talk with, they're scared of humor because

what comes to their mind is the fear of getting canceled. Like that's number one or offending a group they're trying to target. And there's just simple ways to completely avoid that. If you never punch down, right? If, as long as you don't make fun of someone or something that can't defend itself in that moment and you just avoid politics, you will not get canceled on social media. And so, yeah, I also have done a bunch of research on humor and I've just seen the way it works in just conversation and how you can build rapport. But Oracle did a really cool study on humor. And I also, there's a TED Talk of these two ladies. I forget their names. I can send them to you after, and maybe we can link this TED Talk in the description.

But I watched that. It was like a 15-minute TED Talk. Saw this article from Oracle. And it was like the data I felt I needed to be able to bring to B2B brands. D2C brands have always been two, three to bring to B2B brands, right? D2C brands have always been, you know, two, three years ahead of B2B brands. And most of the decision makers when B2B, it's like, they need some concrete evidence that this works before they put budget behind it. So I realized this is what I need. I can bring this to B2B brands. One of the stats from Oracle,

it said their data showed that 90% of consumers are more likely to remember ads that are funny, yet only 20% of business owners say they use humor in their ads and their content. So there's a gap there. And that's what I want to pursue with this business. That's so interesting. So with that too, like if you were to encourage a brand to maybe thinking about incorporating humor into their strategy, like who would you recommend to encourage a brand to maybe thinking about incorporating humor into their strategy, who would you recommend to be thinking about that? Are there certain types of brands you think it works well with versus others? What's kind of the thought process there?

I do think humor can work for every single brand, but it's different shapes and forms for every brand. Just an example, like TSA, it's literally part of the Department of Homeland Security in the United States. If you look at their socials, it's all humor. You would never think that our national security and humor could go together. Boom. And then insurance, like all insurance commercials are humor-based. So it can work.

It just comes in different shapes and sizes. But what I would say, you need someone who's incredibly knowledgeable of who you're targeting. Because the worst thing that can happen, and this is how you come off as cringe and out of touch, is you try and make a joke and it doesn't actually resonate with your target ICP. So you need someone who either knows the processes and systems to extract the right information out of their audience to understand what makes them tick or you need someone who is a representative of the icp that also works at your company so like i wouldn't put a blanket statement on like it needs to be a

social media manager it needs to be xyz it just needs to be someone primarily on your marketing team who knows how to extract the right information from your ICP to pull on those pain points that make funny content actually funny. That's what I would do. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So with that, too, I know when brands are assessing, whether it's humor or some other element to incorporate into their strategy, they're like, okay, sounds awesome. But how does this lead to the goals I'm trying to achieve?

Whether it's follower growth, conversions, whatever. So how, what would you say to that? How does humor kind of tie into the bigger picture? Why is drawing the consumer in in that way beneficial for a brand long-term, you think? Yeah, there's a few things. This type of content is usually more digestible and is viral in general. So there's that brand awareness and reaching new audiences and organic reach on socials. And then sometimes with brands, they really want to see what's a dollar impact. B2B brands,

let's say their CPM is $20. So to reach a thousand people, it costs you $20. Now working with us, if a retainer is, let's just say it's $5,000 and after three months of working with us, you're going to be reaching 5 million people organically. You do the math on that, maybe the CPM is like a dollar. And you're like, hey, it's $40 to reach a thousand people running paid. It's $1 to reach a thousand people working with us. And that's how I'll do it. A dollar value, but separate from that. So it's also just a great way to sell to people without them realizing it. So I do influencer partnerships on my personal account, mainly as a test and proof that I can bring to brands that, boom, this is a paid ad that got 120,000 views because we led with humor and entertainment. And then at the end, when everyone's guards were down because they were like, oh, this is a funny video, we sold to them and they received the CTA that we were trying to deliver.

So that's like the ultimate one is like, hey, you're in B2B. We know that your executive board is just telling you, drill down on our services and offers and everything that we give to everyone. We know that. You can still do that. Let's just hide it just like you,

like not hide it, but the same way you give a dog peanut butter and a pill with our content, we're going to leave with humor and entertainment and then give them the CTA because they'll be way like more open to it after we like lure them in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point too.

And I'm curious if you agree with this. I think there's like so much to be said about having a page or a platform that someone is so entertained and so engaged by, and maybe they're not quite ready to convert on whatever you're offering right this minute, but down the road when they go to plan to make a purchase on whatever you offer, chances are if they've been following you for a long time and engaging with your content and they're like interested in what you're doing, they'll probably think about your brand first before any others, because that's just something that's fresh and relevant in their mind. And they know that they've been engaged and entertained in what you've created in the past. Yeah. The 95,

five rule, I think it is, uh, where it's like 95% of your ICP is, is not ready to buy. Um, so it's like just staying top of mind. You're exactly right. Yeah. Awesome. So, okay. So I want to talk about email really quick. Um, I absolutely love email and so excited to hear your thoughts on some of these questions, but, um, you've run some really incredible email marketing campaigns that have generated insane sales and conversions, et cetera. What just generally, I know this is kind of a broad question, but what do you feel are some best practices for crafting email campaigns that convert? Yeah. So with the, with the marketing millennials, like the business, what people see is, is the content on social media, but the business, the revenue driver is our newsletter

and then events. I had my hand in every bucket, um, trying to scale the newsletter, trying to get people's butts in seats at in-person events and virtual events. I had my hand in every bucket trying to scale the newsletter, trying to get people's butts in seats at in-person events and virtual events. So I would say one, people think they're more important than they actually are when it comes to email and trying to get opens and crafting a good email. You really need to work to get people's attention. So even if you're a big brand, like you're a Nike and you're like, oh, someone sees Nike in our inbox, of course they're going to open. But that's a complete lie. You have to earn the right to get that open.

So one of the best people to study is Jay Schwedelson. He has like a bunch of really good actionable tips on how to get emails opened and have them convert and drive revenue. Just some simple quick hitters like subject line, it's gotta be between three and five words. You can throw in an emoji, use ellipses, like get bold with it. If you got an email with the subject line you're trying, would you actually open it?

Like ask yourself that before you hit send. And then like another thing, send more emails than you think you should. And it would come to events. Like we had an in-person event in Austin, Texas in 2023. And that's like driving the ticket sales, 100K in ticket sales. So we had 300 people out there and we sent so many emails, so many. We sent segmented list emails to people who live in Texas and we would send them like

three times a week. We would send emails, obviously the regular newsletter three times a week. And we'd have CTAs to come to our event. And then when it comes to virtual events, I think the day of our virtual event in October, which is like four or five months ago, we had, I want to say we had 12,000 registrants. We sent 12 emails in a 24 hour span to get people to come to the event, like after they registered. So send more than you probably think you should. Why is that? You think, is it because people are just not seeing half of the ones you're sending or you think people don't care that they're receiving that many emails? Why do you, why do you recommend that? It's just the, the, like you were saying

earlier, like the stay in top of mind, like it even pertains to email inbox like this we we sent emails like 24 hours before the virtual event 12 hours 10 hours 5 hours 3 hours 1 hour at the start 10 minutes in 30 minutes in hour in and she'd be like just keep in top of mind so that we get an action out of them and then action like I don't want a blanket statement for everyone at the market my own but my was always I want some sort of response out of them and it's either yes boom I'm coming or holy crap they're so annoying I'm unsubscribing like I just want some action I'd rather that than them just not know if they ever receive the email.

Sure. Yeah. And it's probably better, like we talk about this all the time, but it's probably better to get someone to unsubscribe who's not in that ideal market versus like just keeping them in their cold and they're not really doing anything. So yeah, keep that list healthy. Yes, absolutely. Well, speaking of that too, strategies for list growth. I know you mentioned a little bit ago you know uh just sitting on borrowed land social media is borrowed land we do not own our profiles it can be gone tomorrow unfortunately so how do we like whether we're building this large following on social or like getting someone at an in-person event on our list or on our website like converting someone to email like what

strategies do you recommend for just building the list in general so we did run paid ads um but but not too many our subscribers typically month over month 50 was organic 50 was from paid ads um you can absolutely grow a list without any ads um we just had the benefit of having a little bit of money that we could invest in like meta ads, Twitter ads. So what we did was in every single post without fail for like a year long period, we would have our link to our newsletter in the post that we posted on LinkedIn. So we'd have a CTA. We messed around with the CTAs. Like some were, instead of just like, oh, subscribe to my newsletter, we got creative with it. It was like 111,000 others subscribed already, comma, why haven't you, question mark. And then we just

threw the link in there. Or like coffee, AirPods, 10 minutes, subscribe to the Marketing Millennials. Just different ways to drive people to the site and show, you know, put in that little extra effort. So the way we grew it was a little bit of paid ads and then touch points nonstop on LinkedIn and reminders for people to subscribe. That was the secret sauce. Yeah. Well, and you've already mentioned a couple of just common mistakes. I think one overall is you said having subject lines that are too long. I've seen that many times from brands of just doing way too many words and it just gets lost in the email inbox and everything.

But anything else you'd say in terms of just mistakes you're seeing brands make, whether it's on trying to build their list or the content itself that they're sending out to? I'm going to say it again, like broken record, I think it goes back to brands thinking they're more important than they actually are. You have to give people a reason to go through the effort to subscribe and you have to build momentum for this new thing. People aren't just going to subscribe because obviously your brand value translates a little bit, but not as much as you probably think when it comes to people subscribing and giving you access to their inbox. Like an inbox, an email inbox is a little more

intimate than clicking follow on social media. So people's resistance to give over an email is significantly higher. But that's like the biggest thing. And you just got to be scrappy. Even if you're a big company, you got to be scrappy and willing to take some risks and swings. But do you have an email list right now, Cassie? I do. Yes. How are you growing it right now? I have some free resources that I offer. I would say that's probably the biggest one. I don't, I will say transparently, I do not talk about the email list enough in my opinion. So to your point, how you're like putting that CTA and social media posts consistently, all of that, that's something I need to do better. But right now it's just loosely kind of mentioning a resource here and there. Okay. The free resource is a great lead

gen too, to get people to subscribe and get emails. We didn't really do that much, but that is definitely an excellent way. So everyone listening, subscribe to the, what's the newsletter called? I appreciate that. It's just the Marketing Happy Hour newsletter. Let's go. Awesome. I appreciate that. Yeah. I'm excited to like test some of this stuff and see what I can do. As I said, I love email, likeering that as a service to my clients is one of my favorite things. And I fall guilty of pouring more time and energy into client work, obviously, than I do myself. But I need to start treating this brand more as a client too. So that's also a lesson out there.

If you have your own business, make sure to focus on marketing yourself too. Because it's something I do not do enough. And one other thing too, just like, I think people overlook this. We had fun with our intros to our emails. So like, I wouldn't overlook that too. And we, what we would do is like, Daniel would give a peek into his life a little bit and talk about some funny things. Like he's a huge F1 fan, tennis fan. So like I would play tennis with him and you know, we both, both used to live in Texas. And so we would go play tennis. I'm trash at tennis, but typically I'm athletic. So like I'm, I'm, my ego's like, Oh, I'm going to whoop him in tennis. And I get over there. He beats me

six, Oh, six, Oh, six. Oh. And it's demoralizing. And of course in the next newsletter, he's like, Oh, I whooped Aiden's butt or whatever. And it just definitely don't overlook your intros to your newsletters. That's the equivalent of a hook, maybe less or so because the subject line is the main hook, but it's a little bit of a hook to get people to actually want to read and everything like that. Yeah. I also love that. It's very humanizing. Very humanizing. And even further that every email we would send we would do it on a one-to-one basis so we'd talk as if we were talking to one person even though we knew this was being sent to 110,000 people it would always it would never be like when we started and we switched this quickly we would be like oh hello to the 5,000 new people who subscribed since last

time we sent we just cut that out and we're, this is a one-to-one conversation. And we just made it incredibly personal. Yes. Yeah. 1,000%. That's so important. And kind of with that too, you mentioned just segmenting and making sure you're serving content directly to those people. Anything else on that? I feel like I have a million questions for you, but anything on the segmenting front of just like the personalization piece of how do you tailor your content to specific people? So we would do segmented lists

when it would come to events. And what that was, it was just based on intent. And like, we'd have lists of like, oh, these people have bought something in the past. These people have attended events in the past. And it was just these layers of like, oh, these are like our brand champions. Like these people love the brand. And so we would give them a unique offer. Maybe it's like a free resource we'd only send to them and tell them we only sent it to them or early access to register for an event

or for VIP pass at an in-person event. But other than that, we didn't really segment too much. And instead of personalizing all our emails and having it be like, uh, to, to the entire list, their name that they'd receive, we gave the community a name. It was marketing besties. So every email we addressed, Daniel would just say, Hey, marketing bestie. Um, so the segmenting we, we did a little bit more. So when we were having in-person events and now it's just like we're hosting this event in Austin Texas so all of our subscribers who live in uh Texas we're gonna send them this and be like boom you get a special 150 off or here's a 20 off at a hotel in Austin Texas do you collect data like that from your subscribers yeah a little bit more of like

when I when people first sign up, it's like, what are they looking for need the most, but for the most part, to your point, like I don't segment weekly emails unless it's like a specific offering. And I think that's I think that's great. And fine. Yeah. So I don't think we have to like overthink it too much. Personally, I guess, depending on like, what kind of brand you have, and like product stuff is a little bit unique and whatnot, but yeah, I think that's great. Okay. I want to hear about your journey of entrepreneurship too. There's a lot of listeners here, um, a lot of corporate marketers, but a lot of corporate marketers that have side hustles or they're interested in kind of launching their own thing or just straight up entrepreneurs who have been in this space for a while. So what kind of inspired you to leap out on your own? And were there any challenges that

you faced in that transition phase? So I'm like, I do have a high tolerance for risk in some aspects of my life. But it took me a while to get to a point where I wanted to just go full in on this. So I actually started the company October of 2023, got an LLC, had three clients, and I had a full-time job. I was living halfway across the country, just working all day. And so I did that for over a year where I was balancing a full-time job and also doing my agency part-time. So I spent multiple hours on the phone with Daniel making sure that, hey, I love you. You've done so much for me. I want to make this process as good as possible so that I can go full in on this.

So I made sure all my I's were dotted and T's were crossed just so that I could make that transition and not burn any bridges, which I didn't want because I'm young. And so many people took a chance on me, especially Adam Ryan. He's the CEO of Workweek, which partnered with the Marketing Millennials, Daniel and Ari Murray. So I recognize that. And I'm like, I need to make sure that I do this smooth. But the nitty gritty of it, I didn't quit until I 100% knew that one, I had enough savings

and two, the business was at a point where I could like afford to one, hire people to help me and also like not be super stressed out that if for five, six months I couldn't pay myself. That's like the straight up answer. Like I love personal finance and I just waited until it made sense for my personal finances to leave the full time job. Yeah, I did the same thing. I,

I would say, gosh, I was probably building clientele on the side for like, a year, I would say. And at the beginning, it was like, Oh, this is just a fun side hustle, like whatever. And then I was like, No, I think I can do this full time. And then it was to your point, like looking at my finances, seeing what do I need to do in order to leave my job? And same thing, like I left, gosh, I left my full time job October of 2019, right before the pandemic. And yes, the pandemic was challenging.

But I think to your point that you mentioned earlier, like there was a lot of opportunity that came out of that but yeah I think just making sure like really really sure that it is going to work financially number one because it's terrifying if you get to a point where you're like I don't know if I can put food on my table or pay my rent or whatever so yeah I just recognize too that for me to operate at the highest uh like level i can't be worried if i'm gonna be able to like afford rent or put food on my table like there's a level of desperation that i think you need to you know kick yourself in the butt and to get yeah but too much desperation then you start to make dumb business decisions. Yes. Agreed. Okay. So besides, besides that, like making sure financially you're set up, leaving on a good

foot with your former brand, that's so important, first of all. So thank you for mentioning that. And then just making sure, like, again, you, you feel good about, um, sustaining what you're building and everything. Any other tips for someone looking to maybe launch their own business, like just things to think about or consider with building out what the brand looks like or whatever you want to share on that? Yeah, obviously, I'm coming at it from a very specific angle, just from my experience. But what I did was I just tried a bunch of things. So

like, end of 2023, I was just, you know, on the side trying out random things. Like I was writing website copy for the escape game, which is like an escape room company. I was being like a fractional marketing manager for one of my friend's companies. I was also making memes for a B2B SaaS brand that I still work with. And then I was also doing ghostwriting. So like I was trying all these different things. One, to learn the skill of how to make money on my own. And two, how to service clients correctly. Three, how to retain clients. And four, decide what I actually like. So like I

didn't just start and be like, oh, I like humor. I'm only going to do humor. I tried a bunch of things because I know I liked marketing. I love copywriting. So I was like, oh, maybe I'll write some website copy. And then after two or three months, I realized I like all this, but what is giving me the most fulfillment, feels the least like work, and is paying me enough that it makes sense to fire all the other clients is this humor route. So I fired all the other clients, made sure they were okay and help them get the next help. And just really locked in on this. So I would say like simple answer is just trying a bunch of things until you figure it out. Yeah, that's good. That's that's something I have been through as well.

Just iterating like offerings and learning like what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. I think that's huge too. Like if you are still in corporate of just literally keeping tabs and like, how do I feel working on this type of project versus that project? And like that is a really strong internal intention. I think that you can build in order to help navigate whether you're building a business or like building your career in general of like, what direction should you be going in? So that's important. What, so when you, you quit your job in 2019, what were you doing before that? Were you just like consulting on a bunch of different things? What, how did that work? So I was, I worked for an agency in New York city. And then at that point, that for me was the pivotal

role where I was like, I think I can do this on my own. And I was like starting to build clientele on the side. And so after that, though, I was like, before I quit my job and before I start my business full time, I feel like I need to get some leadership experience. Like I need to manage people. I need to be in charge solely of running projects and, and, uh, managing like partnerships and things like that. Because at the agency, I was an account executive, which was great. And I worked on relationship building with clients, but it wasn't like as much responsibility I felt I needed. So funny enough, like a few months later, I ended up getting a call from a former boss. So again, don't burn bridges because this is

where this comes into play. I got a call from a former boss and she was like, Hey, the marketing director who was your boss is leaving. Do you want the job? And I was like, sold. Yep. So I ended up moving back to Tampa, doing that. And that I did that for like, nine months. So short period of time, and then I was out. I was ready to go. So yeah. Wow. Great. Yeah. Okay. That's, that's cool. Yeah. Definitely the leadership piece. Yeah, that's like a, that's something I'm still trying to flesh out because I'm 23 and I'm well aware that if I'm like all the people that I'm working with, I have no full-time employees other than myself. I have contractors that are full-time, but I also have part-time contractors. And I'm well aware that if I'm working with someone who is my mom's age, it's kind of weird from a dynamic of like, like I'm their

client. Right. And like, so that is something I'm trying to navigate. Yeah. Which I mean, listen, I am not the best leader I can be right now. Trust me. So I think it's like something, and this goes with a lot of different skills, right? Like it's something that's a lifelong learning experience, right? Like the leader I am today is not the leader I'm going to be in 10, 15 years. And I think just be encouraged that like, you will, you will get there. And I think just as long as you keep practicing again, same with anything like consistency of doing it reps, like seeing how your team responds to different types of leadership or whatever, and you're going to be great. But that's amazing that

you manage that many people. That's awesome. So kudos to you for that. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Well, again, I feel like I could ask you a million questions, but I want to kind of close out on just asking you about trends in the next few years. As we're recording this, it's the beginning of 2025. We're stepping into a new year. What do you feel, whether it's on social media or just content marketing in general, what do you think like trends wise is going to dominate the next few years for us? I like that you asked the next few years because I feel like when people say, oh, what's going to happen in 2025?

I feel like trends happen by like two to three year chunks, not necessarily like a 365 day period. But I would say with like this humongous influx of people using AI to write and create content, I would say the more obviously the content that is obvious that there's a lot of effort in it is going to actually perform. Like that's going to be a key performance aspect like up until this point honestly for the last five years like random like iphone video has dominated where it's like you don't need a nice camera this can like you can have a cracked camera and just record as long as it's like seems super authentic i think we've gotten to a point where like it's going to come back and like not necessarily more highly produced but more well thought out and clearly intentional content is going to start to perform better than it's going to bounce back to where like, you know, uh, podcasts are going to dominate more than they are currently versus the podcast clips that are

dominating socially, you know, like podcasts are huge, but podcast clips are mainly how people discover these podcasts and like they're everywhere. So I think it's going to balance back a little bit interesting I feel like a lot of people are saying that too with like long form versus short form I feel like in was it like 2023 2022 2023 we were like so focused on short form it's like less than less than 60 seconds like that's it like nothing nothing than that. And now I feel like do you feel like too, we're going back into this long form, like people want more to consume? Yeah, I think as a business and just career wise, I try to get really good at things that I know not a lot of other people can do. So if you can get exceptionally good at retaining attention of people longer than 10 seconds, longer than a

minute, like, you know, an hour long podcast, I think you just sit in a league that like people can't touch you. So like, I'm really trying to learn that. And like, you know, I posted like a two minute video on LinkedIn, like a week ago. I that's by far the longest video I've ever put on the internet under my own name. So I do think there's a little bit of a shift. Yeah. I'm excited to see what happens. I think lots of opportunities as we know, working, working in marketing, like things are changing by the day. So it's going to be really fascinating to look back like December, 2025 and wonder if our predictions were correct and whatever. But I, I really do think you're right.

I think that's going to start to be a shift we see. And it sounds like a lot of marketers agree with that. Sweet. Yeah. Well, Aiden, how can we stay in touch with you personally and also just your brand, No Boring Brands? How do we get in touch with you, learn more about what you're doing online? Well, thank you. You let me plug it. Let's go. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'll just say

noboringbrands.co and check out my website and you can book a call with me, but I'm only on LinkedIn. My name's Aiden Branigan, but that's where I put all my content. Amazing. Ashley, you're really good at this, the interviewing and everything. I've done a lot of podcasts and I feel like sometimes I have to shift to become the podcast host to us. And I'll, I'll have to have you back on here in a little bit. We'll check back in, see where those trends are at, like see what our thoughts are, you know, mid 2025, for example, but thanks so much for coming on today. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It was fun.

Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I would love your feedback. And if you're ready to take things to the next level, sign up for my weekly newsletter in the show notes. You'll get weekly career and marketing insights straight to your inbox. And if you have an idea for a future Marketing Happy Hour episode, shoot me an email. Hello at marketinghappyhr.com. Thank you again, and I'll see you next Thursday.