My First Million - Announcement: Marketing Against the Grain

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

The HubSpot Podcast Network is proud to announce our latest podcast: Marketing Against the Grain. Listen here: https://link.chtbl.com/eASRByGO About Marketing Against the Grain: If you want to know what's happening now in marketing, what's ahead, and how you can lead the way, this is your podcast! In this weekly show, HubSpot’s CMO and SVP of Marketing, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, share their marketing expertise - unfiltered in the details, the truth, and like nobody tells it to you. Tune in for high-level perspective, conversation, and the occasional argument as they serve up an honest-to-goodness sense of how you can move your business forward!

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. What's up, everyone? This is Sam Park from My First Million. So today's a special day. You are getting a special episode.

The two guys who decided to buy my company, their names are Kieran Flanagan. He's the SVP of Marketing at HubSpot. And then Kit Bodner, he's the CMO of HubSpot. They've decided that they love My First Million so much that, guess what? They decided to launch their own podcast. It's actually pretty great. I've been listening to it as they've been getting going. and I love it. It's called Marketing Against the Grain.

And it's a podcast all about how to capitalize on marketing trends before they blow up. And in this clip, they're going to explain how YouTube can beat Apple and Spotify and win podcasting. And they're also going to talk about Web3 apps and how they will literally pay you to exercise. It's pretty interesting. These guys are kind of geniuses. They are definitely two of the guys who are most responsible for this acquisition of the hustle. They're really, really sharp. I look up to them.

So check it out. It's called Marketing Against the Grain and it starts now. YouTube can win podcasts. Yes. Because it actually has a better distribution engine than Apple, Spotify, any of these other platforms for podcasts, which is Search. Because the death of most podcasts is there is zero long-tail equity. You listen to a show and then it disappears. YouTube, which Search has all of that equity.

And I'm curious to get your opinion on what do you think about that move by YouTube and what do you think the long-term plan here is for podcasts. Kieran, I'm fascinated about what you just said. I want to break it down a little bit more for the listeners. Before we even go down this, if you think about this first segment of the show, Kieran is dropping some knowledge on YouTube and its advantage in the podcast space. The reason for that is YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world after Google. And if you're a business and you've got a podcast or if you're an individual, you've got a podcast,

basically how you attract people is through word of mouth and people knowing about the name of your show and looking for the name of your show, listening, subscribing, because they basically have have that branded search term, they know what your show is called and what it's about. There's very little traffic that comes from people looking for topics that they want to just listen to a bunch of different podcasts on. And that latter part is what YouTube nails, right? You can look at specific topics, specific guests, much better YouTube search than you can in Spotify search or Apple Podcast Search because those traditional podcast platforms are anchored around

the hosts and the name of the show versus the content of the content of. of the show itself. And I think we're going to move to a world longer term where the content is more important or just as important as the host. And so that means if you are a business or individual doing a podcast, you can't ignore YouTube. And the fact that YouTube is now going to start giving you money

to make a version of your show, which takes some of the video production and editing expense away. That is just a no-brainer because then you're going to see growth and that growth is going to allow you to fund better and better investment into the work you're doing on YouTube. So I think it's a huge opportunity

for creators. And I think we're going to see the rise of podcasting on YouTube really take off over the next 12 to 18 months. The thing that I think that most podcast discovery engines miss is one of the big ways that you can get people into different podcasts is through related podcasts. Like you like this thing. You probably like these other things, which is what? The large proportion of your traffic in YouTube will come from related videos. Some of it will come from search, but a lot of it actually comes from recommended videos. And all podcast discovery engines are predicated on here are other podcasts you like because you listen to this podcast. they all miss out on, here are other podcasts you like because you enjoy this guest. Yes. And I think YouTube can do those things much, much better.

It shows you that audio as a format podcast in particular still has tons of discovery problems. And so when you're thinking about your marketing strategy, thinking about the stories you're trying to tell, audio is a powerful tool with deep engagement. But wow, there's still some underlying flaws in the infrastructure around how people experience and discover audio stories today. All right. So everyone listening to this episode, I wanted to do a very special episode that I'm calling the Twitter episode. I wanted to take the best and brightest from Twitter. And instead of having a guest, I wanted to talk about fascinating things from Twitter that will

tilt everybody that's listening's perspective on growth. Okay. This was given to me by Matt Barbie. Matt Barbie has a lot of great crypto knowledge. If you want to check him out on Twitter, you're going to love this one. So you know the app Strava, Matt Myron. right? I'm a big Strava user. Yeah, I use it for my hikes. I use it to track my pelotoning. Absolutely. So would you sit down a web tour? Like, how do you disrupt an app that is just so ubiquitous for the thing it does across the smartphone?

And you're like, oh, geez, that's really hard. It's really hard. Let me talk to you through a great example that Matt and I were talking about Web 3. There's an app called Steppen. And Steppen is so dope, right? It is a basically, it combines, like, fitness would have played an earned game. So what they've done is they've built the actual app, like a Map My Run or Strava, where you can log in and you can actually do your exercise and it tracks you.

But the thing you can actually do is you can go and buy an NFT within their app. So you can buy these different NFTs, different kind of sneakers, a walk, sneaker, a jog sneaker, a run sneaker. Each NFT then comes with ranges that you need to stay within when you are either walking, running, or jogging. And when you stay within those range, for each 10 minutes of activity, you earn $30 through this land of blockchain. That, to me, people look for tangible examples of why Web3 companies will be able to win and disrupt Web 2 companies. That is an example of a company that actually is using Web3 mechanics to do something differentiated and better, right? It's differentiated and better. So this is important.

This is really important. That's an awesome example. I'm going to go use the app. I'll take 30 bucks. I love money. I'm not a bash in saying that. But this is a really important point for everybody listening. So I want to slow it down a second.

So when you're listening to the news or you're on Twitter and people are talking about NFTs and Web 3, it seems like really abstract and futuristic and stupid. And like it's really easy to like, naysay, all of it. I get that. A lot of it is going to be crap. and a lot of it's going to fall away. But at its core, when you think about the difference between the last generation of the internet and the next generation of the internet, understand that it is a massive change in incentives

and the ability to incentivize. Exactly. And that the last version of the internet, your whole job was to make a product or value proposition 10 times better than it was before. In the next generation of the internet, it is making something somebody thought was impossible, possible. Did you ever think it was going to be possible? to get paid to exercise.

Exactly. That's what you just said. Somebody gets paid to exercise. Exactly. Do you know how much of a massive impact that has on humanity if you pay people to exercise? You know what it does to hospitalization rates, insurance rates, all of those things. It makes something that you thought was impossible, possible. And if you can't pull that magic trick out as a business over the next 10, 20, 30 years,

you're not going to exist. Yep. Because that is the game that is going to change. Don't think about the technology. Think about the change in customer experience and that move from impossible to possible is that change. Right. So I think in the future, really understanding incentives

is going to be a marketer's core skill set to acquire customers within the future, right? Really understanding how to incentivize your community. And so I went down a rabbit hole, as always kept, I didn't just stop and go. That was cool. That's a real good example of an app incentivizing and how you could actually disrupt these players

and do great marketing and get people using your app versus these apps. I went into other incentives that are cool for marketers to know about. I want to run some of these by you. Please. Learn to Earn. So let me bring the listeners through Learn to Earn. Exchanges use Learn to Earn to get you to actually use the exchange and start to trade coins. And if you do those things and complete exercises, they will actually deposit free coins into your account.

What a great incentive to get someone to you actually start to use your product. There are other sites out there. I think Rabbit Hole is an example of a site that aggregate all these tutorials. together. And the reason they're doing that is they're acquiring traffic to their site and then they're able to get brands to pay the money to run these tutorials through their site to promote those products. And those brands actually give people free coins to start to learn about their products, use their products. So I think learn to earn is another example of in the future. You could go from the impossible to the possible, which is I could incentivize people within a freebie product

to do the core actions that I know translate to that person, probably becoming a customer, probably to retain and better. And I can incentivize them through a token. And again, I think it's just a really clever, it will be a really clever incentive in the future to actually help get people to learn, use your product, and incentivize a community around that product. Look, again, people right now are going into debt for education

in the world we live in right now. We're going to move to a world where you're going to get paid to learn. Like, that is a massive society. change. And if you're a marketer and you can make that change in the little part of the world that you're involved with sooner rather than later, that is an unfair competitive advantage that will last for years. Right. All right. That's a wrap. So if you liked what you heard, click the link of the description in the episode. So, all right. All right, that's a wrap. All right. That's a wrap. If you like what you heard, click a link of the description of the

episode in this podcast listening app that you're using or search marketing against the grain on Apple, Spotify. And you know, know the drill, wherever you get your podcast. Talk to you all soon. We'll see in the next My First Million episode.