Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Ryan talks with Dave Gerhardt, one of the leading voices in B2B marketing and E-Commerce

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

It's TIME for another episode! Today's episode features author and one of the leading voices in marketing, Dave Gerhardt, CMO at Privy, the #1 sales app on Shopify.In this episode, host Ryan Alford, and Dave Gerhardt talk about:The balance perspective on "the machine" of e-commerce versus true brand marketingBoth Dave and Ryan's take on balancing work and lifeMarketing trends for brands and e-commerce into 2021This episode is anything but light. There's tons of information from the moment we hit record to the end of the episode. If you listened to the whole thing, then you received the promo code for Dave's latest book, The E-commerce Marketing Playbook. Go to privy.com/book and use code RADCAST for a sweet discount on Dave's book!Subscribe to THE RADCAST for more episodes! | Follow us on Instagram @the.rad.cast | Follow our host on Instagram @ryanalford | See you next episode! If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

Hey guys, Ryan Offord, your host of the Radcast. Before we get to today's episode, just wanted to drop a quick note. If you've been enjoying our podcast and want to work with us directly, either with Radical or if you'd like for me to be consulting on your business from a marketing perspective, we'd love to help you and you can reach me directly by text message at 803-855-1832. Again, that's 803-855-1832. Text me. We'll get back in touch with you. We'd love to work with you and help your business in any way that we can. You can learn more about Radical at radical.company online. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and we'll talk to you soon. You're listening to the Radcast.

you're listening to the radcast if it's radical we cover it here's your host ryan alford hey guys it's ryan alford welcome to the latest edition of the radcast we are closing out the e-commerce series the digital commerce i'm trying to change my vernacular. I'm tired of the word e-Dave, but into the digital commerce perspective, I'm joined by Dave Gerhart, who is the CMO of Privy, the number one sales app on Shopify. And you've likely heard of him. If you haven't, you need to go check him out, but we'll get into that. Dave, great to have you on the show. I got so excited. I punched the mic. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Yeah. E-commerce is a word that makes me like, I hate, I don't know what it is. I've seen some people,

Webb Smith, maybe others on Twitter, just say it's just commerce. And I get that also, but in either case, if I told my mom I'm just doing commerce, I don't think she would understand it. So I think you can't win either way. You can't win either way. And if you're doing SEO and other things, it does kind of own the world of the space of search volumes and different things like that. Yeah. You know what's funny? A related story that I think your audience might appreciate.

So we launched an SMS product at Privy last year. And it was right, right after I started in, uh, I was torn because I, I always believe in like marketing and naming things really simple. I don't care if you're B2B, B2C, D2C, whatever. It's just people doing business, selling stuff online. Like let's not make it any complicated, more complicated. That isn't, uh, we named the product Privy text because I just, I just said, who says like, Hey Ryan, Ryan, hey, great having me. Why don't you shoot me SMS later, dude? It's not how people talk. However, to your point, all of the search volume from an SEO perspective and stuff in the Shopify app store is about SMS.

And so that just made me think of that, which is like we had to tell it both ways, but text is a preferred way I would say it. Yes. You can put all your LinkedIn posts and maybe your headers can be text, but your blog posts and everything else, you'd have lots of SMS in it. Right. Yes, it is true. I love the be the human approach and follow a lot of your content. And we preach that as well. So, well, Dave,

I know we've jumped right in. Um, you know, for any of our listeners that may not have followed your path and things like that, they, we just start down. Um, I mean, you are one of the leading voices. I, you, you never leave my feet on LinkedIn. Uh, so you're doing something right. Uh, well, I would look, I would assume that nobody knows about me because I think this is like we live in a bubble inside of a bubble. So my name is Dave, and I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Privy. As you mentioned, before that, I spent four and a half years at a company called Drift, which is in the B2B sales and marketing software space. And I've kind of only been a marketer at marketing companies my whole career by coincidence.

But now it's obviously intentional because people want to hire you to do that if you've done it for a while. So I worked at a company called Constant Contact, which is an email marketing. And then I worked at HubSpot and then I worked at Drift and now I'm at Privy. That's it. Honestly, I got a job in business and marketing because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I graduated in 2009. It was a terrible time to get a job. I never took school seriously. I never wanted to do business or anything. I just wanted to hang out and maybe

play sports with my friends and stuff. And I got a paid internship. It was $10 an hour at a PR agency just because that was the only company that would hire me. And it was successful because of my writing. I was good at writing emails. I was good at getting reporters to pay attention to stuff. And I was like, holy cow, this is an actual real skill. And I got to see how that can be parlayed into getting more coverage for my clients. And if I got more coverage for my clients and I would get promoted, and if I got promoted, I would make more money. And if I want the next raise and be more successful. And it just became really fun that I, hey, holy cow, writing, communication is the most important skill in business. And I can use this to my advantage to build a business, build a career. And I've spent the last decade really, you know, doing marketing to marketers. And so B2B, B2C doesn't matter. I've gotten to learn

B2C over the last year at Privy, but I actually think a lot of the lessons could, could really be just applied in either case. Cause at the end of the day, we're all trying to just, um, convince or persuade people to, to buy, to buy our stuff. Yeah. Love it. So, you know, you're being humble, but whether it's within our bubble or not, I think you're considered, you know, one of the leading voices out there. I know we'll talk a little bit about the DGMG, but talk about, and I see it now talking with you

and I've been watching your content. I think there's qualities about you that are really approachable and really human, which is what you preach. But what do you think have been those qualities that have led to the, and maybe it's both intelligence and approachability, but, but tell in your words, what, what has been kind of that lead up to why you feel like you're getting the reputation as being that voice? There's a couple of things. So, so one of them is I just don't care. Like I really don't care. And what I mean by that is people I published so much because I don't care what people,

I don't care if it, if it works or if it flops. And, and so like, I think people just, a lot of people are, I don't think anything that I'm saying is that, is that groundbreaking. It's not, I'm just saying it in a world where 99% of people in my profession are not. And so like, I'm able to stand out in that world and just, and just say, and so like me posting like a freaking like picture of a quote from a book, people love that stuff. I didn't write the quote. You don't even know if I read the book, but I'm getting credit for that thing. And I'm just publishing that. And I've always understood how that piece of content works. And so I don't think that I'm doing anything. I just don't care. And I think the problem is most people don't ever

build an audience, forget personal brand, for their business because they're so afraid. I'm in stealth mode. I can't tell anybody what I'm doing. And I've just taken the opposite approach, which is, I said, nobody's paying attention to me. So what do I have to lose? If any, nobody's seeing my stuff anyway, if I have all the six email subscribers on my list are going to be, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. And so, um, I just started posting consistently. And the thing that I did was I realized that people love to hear about marketing and they want to learn about marketing and I'm a marketer. And so about five, six, seven years ago, I just started sharing what I'm doing as I'm doing it. I love talking about

marketing. And so like, I'll be posting on Twitter and social, uh, you know, Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever about things that I'm doing in marketing. And I saw a reaction to that, a response to that. Wow. There's a community of people here who want this. Okay, now I know what topics they want because I'm posting regularly. And I see that, wow, people love when I talk about copywriting. So guess what I should do? I should talk more about copywriting, right? If you own a restaurant and you always sell out that pepperoni pizza, are you going to sit there and be like, we shouldn't make that? No, you got to make more of it because that's what people want. And so just really like understanding social media and content and being able to publish consistently. I've also launched a bunch of podcasts on the side. And I think podcasts have been giving me a huge advantage

in my career because even before Drift and before Privy, I had a podcast that I started as a side project. And this is when I was at a company, I was at a big company, 2000 people. I couldn't really do anything, right? Like I can't really touch anything or spend any money, but on my own, I had to figure out how to start, how to build a website, how to get sponsors, how to promote episodes, how to do audio, how to find freelancers to do, to create project, you know, create work for you. And like, I was able to accelerate my career by also doing something outside of work. And so, um, I'm, I'm a huge advocate of just people having side, especially if you're, you know, you're inside of a company, if it's not your own thing,

I'm a huge advocate of having a side project or something where you can tinker on something outside of work. And so I've always had one of those. And so in parallel to talking about work, I've talked about what I'm doing, you know doing with my side stuff. And that just becomes this marketing narrative that I'm putting out to the world. And now, three, four, five years later, it's consistency that is going to continue to win. I love it. Before we get maybe hardcore into our commerce discussion. Our electronic commerce discussion. Our electronic, our electronic commerce discussion. Yeah. Our electronic, sometimes digital, absolutely not a brick or any mortar discussion. The,

but it's interesting hearing you say that. And I'm wondering, you know, having, working for the companies that you have, do you feel like there was ever, um, look at this guy self-promoting what, what, who's, what company is he trying to get to hire him? You mean like inside, inside of the company? Yeah. Like have they, have you just chosen companies that accept that about you and know that that's actually helping them or do you, is that ever been an issue or where you felt that like the self-promoter i don't know i think well so i think there's two separate questions in there one of them is like do people at the company um are they okay with it i think like at my last company i really only talked about drift because i was like a really early employee there um well-funded venture-backed SaaS company, you know, will go,

you know, will go public hopefully one day in the future. And so I was the first marketing person there and I grew the team from zero to 30 people in the company, 300. So I was wearing that jersey. That was the only jersey that I'm wearing. Right. And, and the same is true now with Privy. It's definitely Privy first, but I have more, I think I have a more substantial thing on the side that I want to promote because it's real and there's real value there. And so I think they make me, the way that I pitch it is, I think it makes me better.

I'm able to learn from thousands of other marketers and many other people at scale. And so, yeah, there might be, there might be trade-offs. I get a lot of messages from, from recruiters, but, but like, that's, that's normal. I just don't think like, I don't know. I want to give you a real answer on this because I think it's an important topic. Like, I guess the short answer is probably, probably people think that, and I don't care about it because I know personally how it's made me better I'm working on I'm working on multiple like multiple things in marketing

I'm talking to multiple people. Here's an example. I have a podcast that's called the b2b marketing leaders podcast. This is this is Separate from commerce, right? Yeah I did an interview. I got to talk to the former CMO of Slack and CMO of Zendesk for one hour. And he told me everything, how he structures his teams, how he sets goals. I got to learn all that stuff. And now I get to go back and take it back to Privy and say, hey, we're going to be better as a marketing team because I just stole all these ideas from this guy. Yeah. So the trade-off is you either, you don't get that or you, you know, Hey, no, I don't talk to anybody else outside. I only talk to the 60 people here in

this team. Like that, that's how, that's, I think what the trade-off is. And I think, um, I encourage people that, that work with me to have side projects. Cause I've seen how, how it makes them better. The only, the only thing that I will say is I do think is I do it only because I have the confidence of results. If I was struggling in my job, not hitting goals, consistently have a miserable team, nobody likes to work with me, then I would say, hold on, is this becoming an issue? You got to put the job results first. With the results, you earn the put the, you got to put the job results first with the results, you earn the credibility to go do more stuff. And that's not just side project that's inside

of the company. Hey, we're going to talk about brand later. You want to do more brand? Great. First, you better stuff the pipeline full of sales. Then you can go do the, do the kind of crazy, you know, fun stuff. And I think the same is true in your career. Yep. I love that. And I think it's important because I think there's people listening either on either side of it. I think we have business owners. We have a lot of business owners listen to our podcast that need to hear that and understand that their people get better when they grow and learn from others and not be threatened by it. And then the same for people that are on the fence of whether they should do it. I think that's great perspective. And by the way, you don't have to do like, I think that what I think that my ability

is a marketer. I think that's what I'm good at and that's what I should be doing. You don't have to be self, you don't have to promote your stuff like I do. You could, you could tinker on a side project and never tell anybody about it. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like what I, you know, we, we spend a lot of money, time and effort at our agency on our own, uh, social media and content. And because I, it drives me crazy when I'm, you know, pitching to a client and they've got another agency and I just go take a look at, you know, I'm like, you're selling social media services and they do no social media, you know, like, like, yeah. So practice what you preach.

Yeah. You got to, if you walk into a restaurant and that place is nasty and dirty up front, are you going to be like, no, trust me, we're going to give this place a chance. The food is good. It's the same thing. They want to see, you know, and if you go, if you go to get a personal trainer and that person's not in better shape than you, are you in the right place? A hundred percent. and that person's not in better shape than you, are you in the right place?

100%. So I know this is, I didn't completely realize this, but this was, this is your second stop at Privy? I didn't explain it in the intro because it really just, it blows up the whole intro. But yeah, it's my second time. I wanted to get into startups. And so I left, I was 25 years old. I left the company that I was at. I met Ben, the founder. I was there for a year. I was our customer success person, which is maybe why we ran out of money. I was responsible for making sure our customers stayed happy and paid us. The company ran out of money. I was in a position where I couldn't afford to not work and make money.

And so I left to go to HubSpot where I got connected with Mike Volpe. He is a board member and investor at Privy. And so he kind of knew what was going on. And so he reached out to me from HubSpot back in the day and said, Hey, you could come work here. I did that. Mike has been one of my closest mentors and coaches since. And he's now, now I'm back at Privy and I'm presenting to him at the board meeting. And so it, um, it's pretty wild seven years later to think that I was there, there was a, there was a tearful day where like we had to let Ben had to like, let a bunch of people go. It was awful. And I was like, that's it. I'm never going to work at this company again.

And Ben's amazing. We've stayed in touch. Uh, he's a huge reason obviously of why, why I'm here. I think CEO, founder, fit, especially as a marketing person, is really important. We stayed in touch. Finally, the timing was right at the end of last year where I made the jump. Let's talk about commerce, digital commerce, e-commerce. it's interesting for me um as we evaluate uh platforms and different things for clients you know privy is i think 100 on shopify am i saying that right is that i mean i don't think you're on other platforms no we yeah we are i'm magento and um i don't know i don't know all them off the top of my head. But I guess I just always see Shopify. So I just assumed.

Yeah. We, we, so, so, so we, we have prior, we have prioritized that from a messaging standpoint because I would say the majority of our customers are on Shopify and Google Shopify market cap when you can and see what's happened since 2019. And so we've just prioritized that from a messaging standpoint. Like if you go to our website, you see, you see Shopify, but then if you scroll down and it says, Hey, here's all the other platforms that we also support. If you're there too, you guys, you know, just from, I guess, is your, is a marketer, you know, and we push, we're a Shopify partner. We,

we push clients to Shopify 95% of the time. When does Shopify not make sense for a company? I mean, like... Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't know. I'm not an expert on Shopify. Yeah, I don't know.

That's what they pay the e-commerce agencies for. Yeah, I guess that's why they pay us. Because we have a perspective on it, but I like to ask others. For anyone out there that doesn't understand or isn't as privy to Privy, talk about what Privy does for e-commerce brands, specifically through Shopify, I guess, through that lens maybe. But I guess it's, again, like you said, it's holistic to every platform. But maybe talk a little bit about what it does and how it plays in the overall digital commerce playbook for those companies. So the simplest way to think about it is Privy helps you get sales. Because just because you have a store doesn't mean people are going to come to it and shop, right? And so there's three products that we have at Purview.

One of them is a website conversion product. And so somebody visits your store for the first time, you've probably seen them pop ups on people's stores that says, hey, join our list and get a code for a free gift with your first purchase or 10% off or free shipping, whatever, right? So we help you convert more visitors on your website. a free gift with your first purchase or 10% off or free shipping, whatever. Right. Um, so, so we help you convert more visitors on your website. Uh, you know, we have customers that are converting from anywhere from one to 5% with a, with a pop-up like that on their homepage. The second product is email. It's not just a, it's not enough to just convert people into email addresses on your

website. You need to actually communicate with them. And despite what a lot of people want to say, email is not dead. Email is still the number one sales channel, period, B2B, B2C, whatever. There is no, I mean, I'm sure you all know this, like there is no better print money channel than email, right? If you're going to send an email to your list right now, you know that something's going to happen. And so Privy has the two most important tools in e-commerce, which is like the ability to grow your list, to convert website visitors and grow your list and actually communicate with them. And then last year we launched this SMS slash text product, like we talked about before. And so the way that we think about it now is, look, there's, I think the average, you

might know this more than me, but we have some stat that's like the average Shopify merchant is using six to eight apps. And so the pitch with Privy is like, look, do you want to use six to eight apps? Most people are not here to be a marketer anyway. You started this clothing company because you love apparel and you really want to start a brand and you have expertise in that field. You're not a marketer. Let us help you with that.

So install Privy, use Privy for conversion and communication with your customers. Um, and, and, and we'll, we'll take care of the rest. I think there's a huge opportunity to, to simplify the marketing stack for, for e-commerce brands. We, I mean, you, you guys probably know this as an agency. We've seen some companies, you, you, you go into the backend on Shopify and there's like, you know, 50 apps you've never even heard of that it takes to run, run that business. Yeah. There's a, it's an add-on. It's like the tech stack of Coca-Cola. And it's like a $10,000 a

month D2C brand. It's like, oh God, what do we do to piece this together? Yeah. I mean, think about it. That's an important thing. You 10, $10,000 in sales to, to do what, where there's a couple, it's the 80, 20 rule applies to so many things, especially business and especially marketing. There's, there's always going to be a couple things that are going to have the biggest impact for what you can do on your, on your site. So I know you guys just released the book. We, we bought a bunch of copies for the team here. So, uh, you know, I I've followed enough of your stuff and I'm sure you've put enough into it that, uh, that I was like, we're going to, we're going to get this and read it, but talk about what people can expect from that book. And, you know,

let's plug it a little bit, but specifically, I want to know what people that are, you know, maybe the people out there that are their companies are moving into DTC or, you know, solopreneurs that are thinking about DTC or, you know, solopreneurs that are thinking about DTC or, you know, et cetera. What, talk about the book a little bit. So we want, this is a physical book, like, like sits on your desk, physical book.

We wanted to write that because that's just how real people operate. Uh, I think that you're not thinking about marketing first. We wanted to write a book that could literally sit on your desk. And so as you're just doing business, you can sit there with the book and say, hold on, I got page 42 dog-eared and highlighted and I got this thing. And we wanted to make something really tactical and really practical. One of the cool things about our business is we work with a lot of small merchants. about one of the cool things about our business is we work with a lot of small merchants. And so we get to, when you work with a lot of small companies, we have, there's 500,000

brands that are using Privy today. And so like across all of them, one or two things comes up all the time. It's like, I don't know what I'm doing. I need help. I wish somebody would just tell me how to do this. This is too complicated. Why can't somebody just tell me the marketing things to do? And we said, Hey, what if we just like, we've been doing this podcast now for almost a year and we've had maybe 40, 50 guests on. What if we just take a bunch of the people that we already know are experts? Can we get them to sit down with us and write this book together? And so, you know, there's a chapter on, uh, on SEO. There's a chapter chapter on email. There's a chapter on SMS, a chapter on, on copywriting. There's a chapter on email. There's a chapter on SMS. There's a chapter on copywriting.

There's a chapter on advertising, on brand building. And so we really wanted to make a practical book that people could have on their desks beyond just like, hey, some piece of marketing collateral. And it's been amazing. I think we sold like a thousand copies in the first week. And the response is like, have me feeling like, oh my gosh, we got to double down on this. People want more of this how-to content. Let's give it to them. And so response is like, have me feeling like, Oh my gosh, we got to double down on this. People want more of this how to content. Let's give it to them. And so the book was a cool way to, to deliver that. And there's just something about it's why DTC is such a thing. It's like, there's just something about giving something people, something physical.

It's just, just feels different. I love it. Well, we, we do a lot of B2B marketing, a large company work with Cisco and some other large brands. And we encourage the physical aspect. We're doing a lot of direct mail that has a physical component to it still. And it's still, like you said, email's not dead and neither is direct mail. The mailbox is actually less crowded, believe it or not, because people think that direct mail is dead. Yeah, of course.

I mean, the hard part is now if everybody's working from home, you just got to make sure you get the right addresses. Direct mail to companies is easy because most businesses have an address listed. Yeah, exactly. So what are you seeing? I don't know if you're a crystal ball guy or not, but whether you are or aren't, maybe put your crystal ball hat on. Is there anything that you're seeing like you're getting close to Black Friday holidays, all that stuff, and maybe a touch there if there's anything you're seeing that like, okay, this is, this is in the early stages, but this is going to be, you know, with so many companies coming into DTC with so much kind of digital commerce happening, you know, maybe put your both, uh, short-term holidays,

you know, hat on, and then your, your 2021, I mean, anything, Hey, this is like a board meeting. All right. So what are you going to do to grow the company right now? But then also what are you going to do to make sure that we still have a company in six months? Exactly. So, so, so short term, I think we, we did a quick survey with, with customers and we found that like basically 80%, almost 80% of people don't do anything with black Friday, cyber Monday until like a couple couple weeks ago. So if you're listening to this, I would go get started. Go get started with a plan. It is going to be the number one shopping day of the year. And I think you're silly to not take advantage of that in some capacity.

Even if you're not, even if you don't, participating in Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I don't think means run a discount. You can. That can totally can. That can totally work. That could work. Sell 50% off, make it a one-day insane deal. But you could also do gift with purchase, create value, add stuff. There's lots of opportunities. I don't want people to think that, oh, I can't participate because of a discount or not. But the reason that it works

so well is because everybody, all of your potential customers are primed right now. We all know, consumer Dave knows that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, there's going to be good deals on stuff. I don't even know what I'm buying, but I am buying something that weekend. And so you got to be part of that. You want to be part of that conversation as a brand. The hardest thing in sales and marketing is friction. And there's very low friction on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because people are in buying mood in a buying like mood mode, right? You want to take advantage of that. So prepare now.

And that can just mean mapping out a campaign. What are you going to do? Do you have the right product? Like, can you package your stuff? I did a great interview with Nick Sharma the other day. And he was just telling me about how they just think creatively of like, all right,

what, what inventory do we have? How could we package it? How can we make a cool bundle with, you know, selling a bunch of different products that would really, you know, increase the, the, the average order value, but then also, you know, still give people a really good, a good deal. The other thing is building your list. If you haven't, if you don't have a list, you can still build one in the next month and you could definitely do it, but you have to, you have to build a list because I think everybody falls into this playbook, which is like, I'm just going to run ads and people are going to buy from

me. Well, maybe, but how often do you as a consumer buy something the first time you see an ad from a brand? Very, very rarely. And so the opportunity is to get somebody on your list so they can get to know you, get to like you, get to trust you. And then a month from now, when they happen to see a deal from you, then they're going to buy. That's the opportunities to build a relationship. That's the short-term stuff. Longer term, you mentioned a really important thing, which is there's way more competition coming into D2C e-commerce right now. What does that mean? I think what it means is you need to build a brand, right? It means that a lot of products are just going to get commoditized. Take a look at some companies. Okay, I'll give

you an example. Right now, I haven't changed yet. I'm wearing a Gymshark t-shirt. Great brand. Didn't they just get acquired for some insane price or something like that? Billions. Billions. Let me tell you something about this shirt. It's nice. It's probably not that different than the shirt you're wearing, honestly. They've built this brand and community around Gymshark and now they can do it at scale. And I'm not an e-commerce operator, so I don't know. But my guess is that their moat is a brand. They have people that are part of this community that they now have advocating for them word of mouth. And so the opportunities to build a brand don't become a commodity. Even if you only sell one product, it doesn't make it a commodity, but build a brand around it.

I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with a... Shoot, I forget the name of the company, but they're basically like... They focus on people who grow cannabis, uh, but they don't sell cannabis, but they make like, uh, amazing like journals and notebooks and, and paintings and pictures. And he's like, we don't do discounts. Um, we have this clear statement about who's our brand. We don't want to be big. We just want to be for the right people. And so like the more you can invest in telling, telling your story, really focusing on who, who are you, who are you serving? Like what is your brand? You got to define all those things versus like, if you just try to run the playbook of, I'm just going to set up DG's hoodies and try to, you know, drop ship some hoodies to people and like, think that's going to be a wild business.

It's probably not, it's probably not going to be, you got it. You got to think about brand and you got to think about what, what, how can you tell your story? People want to, again, back to what we just talked about. People want to buy from people they know, like, and trust. How can you use your brand to do that? I love it. Well, uh, a wise mentor, I know it's out there now told me the riches are in the niches and the, you know, the, you know, where that, uh, that's where you build your brand, you know. That's it. 100%. Yep. So as we close out here, Dave, you talked about this, but I think it's an interesting dynamic.

And I'm sure it's one that it comes up probably for your company. And I know it comes up for a lot of companies in building brand. And you just talked about it, but how do for companies out there that are starting up, whether they're starting up or not, what's the balance between, because as a longtime marketer and agency guy, I cringe a little bit at the word performance marketing and it kind of drives me fucking crazy just to be real. Um, and, but it's like, cause it's, I think there's a lot of these people that think exactly what you just said. We'll set up some Facebook ads. We'll set up the pay-per-click. We'll just bring in customers. We start selling that's performance marketing.

Sure. You know, what's the balance of that with the brand marketing? Can I, let me, this is, this is just to give you a real tactical example. I want to, this is not an e-commerce example, but maybe, you know, I hope people are smart enough to be able to apply it. This year at Privy, we've invested heavily in the brand. And so we, we launched a podcast. We wrote a book. We do a ton of interviews like this, right? We have a blog. We've done like all these online masterclasses. We have not really spent a lot of time in very tactical SEO and performance marketing. And yet, direct traffic to Privy.com has grown 40% this year. Where do you think that came from? Because more people are finding out about us.

So now, the problem is, Ryan, it's not either or, it's both. You got to do both because now when we can crank up SEO and we can crank up paid, they're going to be more effective. More effective for a couple of different reasons. One, we have a bigger audience and so there's retargeting audiences and there's more word of mouth. More people know Privy, so an ad that was an ad might now become shared organically. There's lots of opportunities like that. But it's never going to be able to do that at scale. And so my preference would be start a small Facebook group, start a community,

start an email list, even with 10, 20, 30 people, right? Get the learnings from those people, use those to fuel what you're going to do on paid. And so it's beyond just the, hey, more people are going to know about you if you build a brand but there's also a ton you can you can learn from that and i think ultimately they have to work together but you're never going to be in a good position if you have to spend 50 60 70 80 100 in your budget in order to go acquire you know acquire people to come to your site yep um i think about like one of the first campaigns i worked on was verizon and work literally i say that i was in the room because i think i was in the room it was in 2001 so forgive me as an old as old guy um it was like the first one can you hear me now was written on the board um in the

room and you know that became verizon's campaign you know like that and i think about the performance marketers like would they ever wrap their head around why that ended up selling more cell phones you know or why um you know i don't know jared at subway before he became a pedophile or you know like the clydesdales going down the street when when worked on a budweiser campaign and you know the like it's it's that here's the difference here's the difference if it's a difference between people seeing your ad and being like, who the hell is this brand versus, Oh, huh. Yeah. I love their podcasts or, Oh, I know them. I went to, I went to their event and which would you rather have? Right. I've also the way that like for me with a B2B background,

the way that I've always explained this is, have you ever done cold calling? Is it any fun? No. But imagine you could pick up the phone and say, hey, Ryan, it's Dave from Coca-Cola. You don't know why I'm calling, but you've heard of that company before. And so now you at least have a little bit more of an in than you had if you just went straight up cold with an ad. Exactly. Dave, a lot of great insight. I appreciate your time. Where can people keep up with you? Where can we buy the book? Where can we keep up with everything Privy? Yeah. Go to privy.com slash book. And let's do this. If you buy the book,

we'll create a promo code specifically for you guys. So what should we do? Radcast? Yes. Okay. Let's do that. So punch in the promo code Radcast. This is very important. Don't do this while you're driving. Put the promo code Radcast in privy.com book and we'll hook you up with some kind of sweet discount. I'll go talk to the team after this and I'll try to make it a big one. That's a disclaimer to say if it's not a big one. Um, that's a disclaimer to say, if it's not a big one, don't yell at me. It'll be good. We'll put an asterisk on the marketing where we promote it. No, just a radcast, radcast, radcast, check it out. And then, um, yeah, privy privy.com slash book is where we can get that. And then, um, at Dave Gerhart on Twitter

and pretty much everywhere. And, uh, I'm a shameless self promoter, like you mentioned. So you, you know, I don't need to plug anything else. If you follow me, you will, you will see it. Don't worry. Yeah. As a, as a, uh, fellow shameless self promoter, I, uh, I, um, appreciate it. And, uh, and let's the DGMG we didn't get to, but I wanted to be conscientious of your time. Um, any last where we find that info, if you want to find and follow a little more specific on the broader uh dave dave uh marketing machine yeah it's um it's dgmg.co i don't buy the dot com because i'm too cheap right now dgmg.co cool dave really appreciate your time and i look forward to keeping following you and we'll look for that Radcast permanent.

Yeah, Radcast. Plug it in. See you, Ryan. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Thank you. Really appreciate this episode with Dave Gerhart. Dave is one of the leading voices in marketing and e-commerce, especially on LinkedIn. So definitely want to go follow him. really enjoyed listening to just the authenticity of Dave, which you can see why he is so approachable and why people follow him, because he does tell things in ways that really are understandable for people.

Go follow along, Dave, and you can really unpack some of the stuff he talked about with branding, driving performance. Love that, and love everything they're doing at Privy and with the Shopify platform. We'll see you next time. To listen to full episodes or to contact us, visit us on the web at theradcast.com or follow our host at Ryan Alford on Instagram. Thanks for tuning in.