The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Top 5 Digital Marketing Hacks For Creating Brands: Build a Multi Dollar Business by Ms Maliha Farooq Ismail

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Top 5 Digital Marketing Hacks For Creating Brands: Build a Multi Dollar Business by Ms Maliha Farooq Ismail https://amzn.to/3VvFVmP As a marketer I have always been looking for novel ways to study this discipline. Not just that I have also been constantly trying to find new avenues to apply this knowledge to gain a better perspective. Marketing has evolved to adapt to an increasingly online world with businesses following suit to incorporating the digital wave of marketing in their day to day operations At the onset, digital marketing may seem daunting. Whatever the reasons for you to delay jumping on this digital marketing bandwagon, you will eventually regret not embracing it sooner. The greatest advantage of using digital marketing is that it is scalable. You don't need to invest a huge sum of money to start and whatever you invest can be easily tracked and monitored through the help of analytics. This book is an attempt to highlight the top 5 digital marketing hacks for creating brands. It gives you an in-depth look at the hacks you can. use to deliver a rock solid digital marketing campaign. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I have enjoyed writing it for you ....

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. At least not as harshly as your other family members. Because you're probably the black sheep of the family. But you know what? The best way to get on their good side is to refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives.

Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Chris Voss 1, the TikTokity. And all those crazy places on the internet. We have an amazing young lady on the show. We're going to be talking to her about all of her works and everything she does and her amazing book she put out in January of 2023. It is called Top 5 Digital Marketing Hacks for Creating Brands, Build a

Multi-Million Dollar Business. We have Malihah Farook on the show with us today, and we're going to be talking about her insights, how you can make your business and life better, and improve the quality of all that good stuff. Because who doesn't want to make their lives better? Is there people out there right now who are like, damn it, Chris, I don't want another show of making my life better. I want a show about how to make my life worse. We don't do those kinds of shows, folks. So there you go. Malia has over 15 years of professional marketing experience with a focus on digital marketing and corporate affairs. She presently serves as Secretary General at the

American Business Council, Pakistan, a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and businesses to leverage vast business and economic potential in Pakistan. She is a distinguished graduate of Warwick Business School and a Cornell University alumni. Her exposure to international best practices and leveraged network keeps her abreast of global initiatives and trends. She champions smart communications and excels in developing data-driven strategies that yield tangible results. She's also a recipient of the Senate Leadership Award for Contributions to the Field of Marketing and Advertising, and a recent book, Digital Marketing, the one we aforementioned, was featured on Amazon,

made her one of the few Pakistani female authors to be featured on Amazon on the subject. There you go. Welcome to the show, Malihah. How are you? Hi, Chris. I'm the subject. There you go. Welcome to the show, Malihah. How are you? Hi, Chris. I'm very well. Thank you very much. And I have to say that the drum roll that went before you just actually went live did

bring a lot of energy to me as well. I'm really, really excited to be here. And thank you for the wonderful introduction. Thank you. There you go. So give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs So give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Basically, my dot coms on LinkedIn. I'm not on Twitter at the moment

and Instagram. So it's called Malspeaks at the rate Malspeaks, where I do talk about digital marketing. And I also talk about everything related to marketing, as in the hacks, you know, things that people would like to do, they would like to stay away from and i will give a you know my links at the end of the show as well there you go yep we always do the we call those the bookends a lot of a lot of tv shows and major shows they do the bookends they do the plugs at the beginning and plugs at the end and i'm always shocked when a lot of podcasts don't do that i've been on podcasts where i'm like hey when do i get to do my plugs that's the whole reason i'm here so let's plug your book top five digital marketing hacks for creating brands give us a 30 000 overview if you would please of what's inside there or rather than you know i'll start with why it's actually there on amazon rather than what's inside

and i'll get to that in a minute the reason why a lot of people have actually asked me this question on a podcast, why did you feel the need to write a book on digital marketing? There is a lot of text out there, right? But there was just one reason, because when I was studying in the university, I realized that there were a lot of books that were written in the context of first world countries and not really in the context of countries that we belong to, like South Asian countries. I wanted to bring a perspective of digital marketing from that side of the world as well. So that is what made me, that was one of the reasons

why I decided to write a book. The other reason for writing a book was that the field of digital marketing is ever evolving and it's changing so rapidly and so frequently. One wants to know exactly the top hacks because there's so much material out there. I wanted to pen down the most important hacks that are there to build businesses because Chris, as you obviously going to agree with me, when you even Google the term marketing or when you Google the term digital marketing, you come across such a lot of text that it's very difficult to sift through it and find out exactly what works for you. So this is an attempt and the book actually features on very different sections of how you can look at digital marketing from your business point of view. And as you rightly mentioned, create a multi-dollar business, a multi-million dollar business.

There you go. And, you know, there's so much you can do now. You know, I started my first companies in what we call the brick and mortar. And, you know, you had to buy a business and spend a lot of money and set it up and then hope it made some money. You're just like, I hope this thing makes money. You know, it makes all the difference in the world. But now with online marketing, there's like so much you can do. It's just crazy what you can do. What's crazy about it is that you can do so much with it, but you still meet people who are trying to find out where to start,

what to do, exactly how to go through all that information and try and find out what best suits their business. So there still is a dearth of data and there's still a how you can sort of deal with this entire gamut of information. There you go. So let's talk a little bit about how you were raised and how you grew up and what motivated you to excel there in Pakistan and get into social media marketing. As you mentioned, I do belong to Pakistan, born and bred here. A small family, I just have a brother. The reason why marketing has always appealed to me, and that is when I did my first, you know, my first degree, my first professional degree, which was my BBA, I realized that when I looked at marketing, it was something that did not have to put in a lot of effort to understand.

It is something that came naturally to me. And then when I looked around, and that is a time when I'm talking about the early 2000s, where this part of the world was primarily focused on either becoming a doctor or, you know, becoming a chartered accountant. And I did face a lot of backlash when I decided that I wanted to be a marketer, primarily because people believe that this kind of marketing job would probably not be quite self-sustaining. It would be related to a number of projects that would just come in if and when there would be a need. And then after that, just, you know, sort of fizzle out. So my interest in marketing developed when I actually went and did my degree at the Warwick Business School, which is a marketing strategy and big data.

And I realized that there is a lot of potential that we have not really looked into as far as Pakistan and other neighboring countries are concerned. So the idea stemmed out from the fact that you take the best practices from the, you know, developed countries and you try and tweak it with a local flavor and do marketing because Chris, I'm sure you're going to agree with me. Marketing is everywhere, right? Nobody can sort of ignore marketing, whether it is traditional, whether you, you know, driving around, you look at a, at a billboard, or you, you know, looking at your, at your feed, you realize that marketing at one point or the other

does affect us in one way or another. And I wanted to be the driving force behind that as well. So that was one of the reasons why I decided that I'm actually not going to take it as a hobby. I'm going to take it as a career. And I'm going to one day, hopefully, try and remove that stigma from marketing, which we still face that it's more of a cost to a business than an investment. And I think with digital marketing, that has really gone up because now you can show with your numbers, what kind of attributions you've made and what kind of, you know, contributions you've made to the bottom line. So that is something, these are a couple of

things that really interested me here. And also because the marketing landscape in Pakistan is growing. We're still quite behind, but we're catching up really fast. So there's a lot of room where you can do a lot of things and leave a legacy, which I'm really interested in. There you go. And leaving that legacy is really important. You know, you've done a lot of amazing things. You work with everything from banking to Pakistan's largest commercial bank to the third largest Dutch bank, life insurance. You've done real estate development and Canadian multinational information conglomerate. What's motivated you to really excel there and, you know, help these companies take it to the next level in your area? Chris, I think there is one driving force behind everything that you've mentioned that I've done.

And that is basically to help companies realize what their pain points are and try and give them those value additions that they're probably not getting elsewhere. So if you look at my career trajectory from ABN Amro to you know, to the largest bank in the country, to a real estate, you know, to a life insurance company, all these companies had approached me with some kind of a problem statement. And a problem statement that I felt I could handle with the proper, not just with the proper marketing, but also with the proper communication, because I believe that marketing is not just churning out campaigns, right? It's about churning out those campaigns, but at the same time,

communicating it in a way that resonates with the consumers as well. And when you look at customers in Pakistan, when you look at the consumer base that we have here, it's an evolving database of right, of customers who are being exposed to a lot of things for the first time. And this is where the opportunity lies in to be, you know, a market leader to be and have those brands become the top of the mind in the consumers, right? That is something that I've always had. I never choose a job based on any other factor rather than what I can contribute being there, being a part of the team. And I'm quite happy to say that in everything that I've actually done in all of the projects that I've taken up, I've made a significant impact, which makes me quite happy with the fact that, you know, marketing has the potential of turning around brands.

And that is what I've done over the years. There you go. So tell us about your services that you do at your website. Let's get a plug in for that one more time. We'll get a third plug. Tell us what sort of services you provide and clients you're looking for etc etc so so so right at the time of covid i i was i was approached by a friend of mine who actually was going bankrupt because traditional marketing was just ending so we decided to revamp his traditional marketing

agency into a digital marketing agency which is called called Thinkers Digital, which I've co-founded as well. We do projects across Pakistan, the UK, USA, Turkey, and now in the UAE as well. So when you talk about, you know, what kind of services we provide or I provide as a consultant, we really provide a 360 degree view on marketing. But what makes us really different is that we don't really pitch the entire suite of services to all our product to all our customers. We look at what exactly will work, what the pain points are, where we can add value. And also, you know, we look at budgets, and we give a very bespoke for lack of a better word, kind of a proposal with absolute complete timelines and KPIs, measurable KPIs that the brands can measure themselves as well to gauge whether, you know, this kind of a commitment has really paid off for them. And so we do the full app development, website developments. We do digital brand audits as well,

where we look at all of the brand's digital touch points, what kind of work they're doing, the kind of followers they have, what can be a growth plan, can we monetize it when, you know, and then it's also based on content. Because I believe that whatever medium of marketing you're using, if you don't have the right language

and if you don't have the right content, it's never going to work. So we really, really look at content marketing as well. And we tailor that content marketing strategy for our clients and for the markets that we serve. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And what sort of client do you usually have? Like, is there a minimum net worth or income level spend or

spend level is there a minimum that you'll work with no no when we started off there was no minimum threshold that we that we kept primarily because we wanted to we wanted to get it on you know we wanted to start the agency and get on with projects we usually get a lot of startups from from the places that i've mentioned in the countries that I've mentioned to you. And primarily, the reason for working with startups is that it's very exciting. And it's very real time as well, Chris, because they know exactly the kind of things that they want to churn out, let's say, in three months, in six months. So helping them out with their marketing is a real high because, you know, you tend to understand what they want.

And there's a lot of, if I may put it, you know, there's a lot of A-B testing that we do as well because every startup is different. And when they operate in different markets, there's a lot of testing that we do in terms of kind of concepts that we take out for them. But having said that, we obviously don't have a scale that we that we take out for them but but having said that we obviously don't have a scale that we work on we primarily work with brands that that that we feel we can add value with but at the same time brands that could add value to our our name and our brand as well because at the end of the day when we are pitching to clients one of the most recurring questions that i get is which which clients have you served prior to you know sort of pitching to clients, one of the most recurring questions that I get is, which clients have you served prior to, you know, sort of pitching to us. And that is very important, especially in a

market like Pakistan, where marketing, the kind of marketing work that we do is not scaled up to that level. So having a, you know, a brand that is probably a multinational operating in different regions, a startup that has done well, that just adds validation to the spectrum of work that we do and the kind of help that we can provide to brands. That is very important to us. So we don't really, but having said that, we do ask for budgets prior and at the time of pitching, because that also gives us an idea because there are a lot of times when customers do come in and they have a very extensive array of services that they want from the agency. But obviously, they do not have budgets to back that up. So what we do is we look at those budgets and we divide the services into phases. And we make sure that, you know, whatever we are pitching in whatever time frame is delivered.

So we move on to the next phase of our services. And this kind of business model has really worked for us because I believe over time, customers have also tried, you know, they've accepted our view of pitching them something that would actually work for them rather than just giving them everything that we do. So that is something that we're very, very proud of as well. Do you want to tease on any, you know, you can't give all your client details for client privilege, of course, but do you want to tease any maybe successful anonymous campaigns you've run or things that you did for a client they were struggling with and maybe you stepped in and helped them yes absolutely i think about two months back we're

working with a sports brand in turkey and then they were churning out a lot of a lot of influencer videos with their products but they weren't really getting the engagements and they weren't really getting the views and and and and and they were looking at a matrix that they were very concerned about, and that was impressions. And just for the listeners, if I could just say, impressions is nothing. It's basically the number of people who've actually seen it. So it's the number of people who that particular content piece has been served to, whether it's a post, whether it's a video or something like that but when you look at when you look at videos impressions is not the right matrix that you look at because it can be shown to a thousand people

but what really matters is and i'm sure you've looked at it from a podcast point of view is how how much time does the listener or the viewer spend with engaging with that video or that podcast episode. So if I look at you, it's probably the number of minutes that they're into listening to your podcast. So the same way, there is a graph that people follow when it comes to videos, right? And that is, what is your most viewed point? What is your least viewed point in the video? What is your average duration of the consumer viewing it, right? And these are some of the matrices that were absolutely not being looked at by the brand.

And surprisingly enough, they were putting a lot of money behind this i mean behind the entire production of those videos so we had them and what we did was that we looked at we looked at their previous videos and we we took out certain matrices that we wanted we we looked at a desirable average view time and what was actually what we were actually getting from their original videos. We sort of tied that up. We did a lot of A-B testing as well. We brought in a lot of user generated content where we said that, you know, we'll just not only work with brand ambassadors, we'll actually come and we'll make a video with your consumers who actually use the product and frankly speaking there was a lot of skepticism to that because they had they had

probably had you know contracts with these brand ambassadors that they were paying huge sums of money too but sometimes what what brands need to do is just step back look at what what the the customers actually want and when when we did that we brought in real customers real stories real real products that they bought and we we took up the average duration time from i think 26 seconds to 1 minute and 10 seconds which is statistically the most important time through which there is the bounce rate is the least. So that is the time when usually the customer, if a viewer has actually watched it till that time,

the probability of them switching it off goes considerably down. So I think that is one success story that we've looked at and it's worked for us. So my message to all brands would be to at least understand the kind of matrices that are actually important for the content pieces that you're churning out. It's not only brand names and it's not only brand ambassadors, but sometimes people want to see the real thing. And that is what we give. There you go. It's quite interesting, all the different work that goes into it. What do you love about doing what you do and the work that you do for your clients? What is it that

motivates you and keeps you waking up every day and returning to work? That's an excellent question, Chris, because somebody asked me, how many years have you been working for? I think that somebody asked me this last week. I said, I've never worked a day because when you love what you're doing, it never feels like work. What motivates me to actually get up every morning and do what I do is the fact that I can see those real-time changes that makes brands work. Brands are everywhere, right, Chris you can i mean i can see this on my screen right now you have you have all your branding there that that's the brand so when when you work with brands and when you feel that you've made made it a positive change in the brand life cycle or you've made a positive change in getting it to top of the mind recall or getting it the bottom line as some of

the brands struggle with, that is a completely different high for me. So when I see that my work is being looked at by consumers, it's being shared, there is virality, there is engagement and so that leads to a very positive kind of an energy that is instilled in the kind of things that I do. And then to top it off, marketing is evolving by the minute. So you just, you know, what you did, let's say six months back, is probably being copied by a lot of brands now. So you have to come up with something new. So the idea of always staying relevant, coming up with something new that resonates with the market that you're operating in is something that really motivates me. And the fact that you can get up and you can take out something

totally different to what you were doing three months back and anticipate the results, whether good or bad, is something that I really, really look forward to. Nice. So what do you see as the future this upcoming year, say maybe just in 2024, AI is coming along? What do you see in the future of the business of online marketing? So AI is something that we've really, really taken up to because I mean, I was just talking

to somebody and they said that, you know, chat GPT is a part of the bookmark of every, every laptop these days, we're all using either it's Gemini or a chat GPT or whatever. But when you talk about the future, I'd like to mention something that I've recently done, which is relatively unknown new field of marketing, which is neuromarketing which which i've recently done a certification for which makes me the first pakistani you know nsmba certified neuromarketer in pakistan so what it does is it looks it goes beyond conventional digital and it looks, it goes back to the very authentic way of doing marketing, which was combining principles of neuroscience, cognitive and behavioral marketing. And it comes up with real time. It sort of blends neuroscience and marketing to understand what goes on in the

consumer mind, whether it is attention, whether it is impulsive decision-making, whether it is memory, whether it is pricing. You know, what is the kind of pricing that would make me activate a reward system in my mind and probably grab that product? So I think the future of marketing

is still going to be digital. It's still going to be AI because that's the medium through which we communicate these days. But what I do feel is that we're going back to understanding the way consumers actually behave and coming up and totally disregarding the assumption that sometimes we as marketers have that consumers are very rational. They know exactly what they want to buy. They stay away from what they don't want. Because, Chris, you'll be surprised when I do these studies and there are a lot of neuromarketing tools that you use with consumers, you understand that sometimes the preconceived notions that marketers have about consumers are absolutely wrong.

So I feel the future of marketing is to make it less complicated, to understand what consumers actually want, to churn out marketing that resonates with them. And something that I always say in my interviews is grabbing the attention ROI, because we all talk about return on investments, but we have to look at the new matrix, which is the attention ROI. And that is something that the future of marketing is going towards. When we look at AI and when we look at machine learning, it is actually replicating the way our brain makes decisions and the way our brain sort of computes big data. So going back to those basics is the future.

And there are a lot of brands, there are a lot of international brands that have approached me to understand more about how they can stand out of the clutter in this day and age. Because obviously we are bombarded with a lot of marketing information. And that is something that I feel the future of marketing is going to be making it less complicated but at the same time you know just just understanding what consumers want and give them exactly what they want in the time frame that they have for you yep there you go ai is really cool i mean it's really helped me make better ad copy write presentations you know different marketing stuff it's just like you know i've even had editors like I think for my Amazon page

on my book my editor helped write the the the page for it and for some reason I just never liked it I don't know why there were some words that I insisted on having in there that kind of were jumbling it and the editor I'm like I want those words in there and they're like okay and it just didn't just didn't ever read right in my mind. I didn't like it. And so then ChatGPT came along and I put the, I put the description of the book in there and man, it was really professional.

Nice. So it wrote something better than me and my editor combined. And you know, utilizing tools like that, especially if you're working with clients like yours, you know, are going to give you guys more power to deliver great resources and different things. What haven't we talked about? But you see something, sorry to cut you, but you see something that is very funny as well, is that when AI sort of came up, a lot of people were very skeptical that it's going to take a lot of jobs away so when you say that you know you've written a prompt on on on chat gpt and it's given you a good a better result than than than human beings combined i just want to make a point here and that is that yes ai has helped us tremendously with absolutely the majority of projects we've done but what what we've also tried to do is try to

master the art of what kind of prompts we give it because it it it does require a lot of human intervention to get the right output out of it um and and and as much as it saves time i think a lot of information needs to also be churned out, how to actually give a command, a proper command to an AI tool. So that's something that we are working on. We have a proper team that does prompt engineering for us. And we're surprised and shocked pleasantly at the results that it's given us. It's really worth it for us.

There you go. So give us your final pitch out to people to how they can onboard with you, how they can reach out and see if you guys are a fit and all that good stuff in your.com. The easiest way to get in touch with us is to just hop onto Instagram, just type at the rate Thinkers Digital. We are there 24-7. Somebody is going to answer your query,

and then we will direct you either to a Zoom call or to, you know, and if we're there in the region, like an in-person meeting, and we can just take it up from there. So we've made it very easy for people to contact us with whatever pain points they have. So that's something that we've done. There you go.

So thank you very much for coming on the show. Give us your dot coms as we go out. Absolutely. Thank you, Chris. It was lovely speaking to you. As I mentioned, it's at the rate Thinkers Digital, at the rate Mal Speaks. My website is going to be right after the show as well. My book is on Amazon.com.

It can be booked from there as well. And for anything, you can just search me on amazon.com it can be it can be booked from there as well and for anything you can just search me on linkedin i'm i'm there and we can always connect through that there you go so thank you very much for coming the show thanks to our audience for tuning in go to goodreads.com for chest christmas linkedin.com for chest christmas christmas one the tiktokity and all those crazy places the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you next time