Join us on this week's episode as Jay discusses the essential need for marketers to adapt to changing consumer behaviors and preferences.

"Sometimes marketers be like, oh, this channel doesn't work. Search doesn't work for us, or social or email doesn't work for us, when in fact it's the offer they're promoting,"

Jay explains, emphasizing the importance of identifying what truly works in the contemporary marketing landscape.

In this episode, Jay dives into:

- The least effective marketing offers and why they’ve lost traction?

- What type of content is working now compared to before?

- Is the power of using 'most read', 'most liked', or 'most popular' just a myth or reality?

- What is the importance of properly managing expectations in marketing?

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Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

All right, here we are for another episode of do this, not that. I'm excited about this one because we're talking about offers.

Whether you're a consumer marketer or a business marketer, different offers that you are promoting lead to different outcomes. We're going to get some quick tips here or what you need to be thinking about for the types of offers that you're sending out.

But before we get into what types of offers you should send out, it's incredibly important to think about the fact that not all offers in general do the same. Sometimes marketers be like, oh, this channel doesn't work. Search doesn't work for us, or social or emails don't work for us.

When in fact it's the offer they're promoting. So let's say you are a marketer and you're trying to promote an infographic right now. That's your go to piece of content to drive lead generation.

Or if your entire strategy is a new ebook that your company came out with and you're supposed to drive all this pipeline and demand from this ebook. When is the last time you downloaded an ebook and actually read it? It's a very difficult piece of content to drive a lot of engagement from.

So what are the offers, business and consumer, that are working right now? And by the way, it's always changing. Look, infographics used to be great, okay? They're not anymore. So what is working now? Okay, what's working now?

Let's go down the list of the top performing offers. On the business side, the top performing offers are going to be lists and checklists and guides.

All of these three things are super easy pieces of content that can get digested. When you talk about a list, you say you know the seven things all HR managers need to know, the six pitfalls CFOs need to avoid.

You talk about a guide. It's the 11 things small business Owner Guide to Success. Right? A checklist. The nine things you need to know.

These are all things that sound like they're from an authority. Nobody actually cares who's making the list. That's always the irony of, of marketing. Nobody thinks about that.

But they seem like they're an authority. They're quick, they're digestible, and the person knows when they see it promoted, right? The seven tips for HR Professionals.

They know, oh, I know what I'm getting. I'll open this up, I'll click on this, I will interact with this. I want this information now. It's quick. Okay.

The things that aren't working necessarily, but in a weird way they are. And I'll talk about that in a second. Things that aren't working as well. Webinars are tough.

Getting people to sign up and actually show up is way down from two years ago. So if your entire strategy is webinars, you got to think a little differently. Is that maybe we could turn these into on demand videos.

Maybe we can make the webinar shorter. But just to go to market with our entire strategy, it's just webinars. It is tough.

And the reason you need to know that the metrics are down on that performance is because you need to try to try other things that are going to work. So the top three, the guides, the checklist, the list, those are the ones generating the most interest.

Now on the consumer side, what's generating absolutely the most is back in stock bestseller. And then also right now, pre Black Friday, early holiday season. I know it's early.

I know it's still a while before we hit the holidays, but right now marketers are already starting to hit the green light on holiday related marketing and get in on it early. So that is working incredibly well.

The other offer that's working for both business and consumer marketers, that if you're not doing this, this is a must do. And we all have it. We don't realize we have it, but we all have it. It is a concept of most read or most liked or most wanted.

If you put in, for example, the subject line of your email, this is our most read blog post. This is our most wanted faction item, right? This is our most popular checklist. We all want to know what other people are thinking.

So just by actually saying that this is the most, we jump on that content. Most related content. Actually the word most in your subject line vs non most related content.

The most related content increases open rates by over 20% and all you're really doing is repackaging content you already have.

Now the thing that's really, really important overall, okay, is this idea that not all, forget about not all different content produces different results the way you can upset your entire sales team, right? You want to really upset your sales team. This is what you do. You have your go to market strategy be only lists or checklists.

And what's going to happen is you're going to generate a ton of downloads, a ton of what you can call leads, and then you're going to take these leads and you're going to hand them off to sales.

You can say, here's a thousand people that's just downloaded our latest checklist and they're going to try to reach out to those thousand people and they're not going to get very far, okay? They're not going to get a lot of opportunities and they're going to say that these leads are garbage.

Because when you, when you talk about things like a checklist or you talk about things like a list or a guide, okay, those are very top of the funnel and those are great to get people in the door, right? It's an initial handraiser, but that does not mean that they are a sales qualified lead. And that's okay.

You need to establish what is your goal with, with the content that you're sending out before you send it out. So you're all on the same page.

Now if your sales people like, listen, I don't want a thousand top of the funnel, I want actionable leads I can call today. Well, a case study for example. If somebody downloads one of your case studies, they are all in on whatever you're promoting. They're all in, right?

The management of expectation though is that yes, you could take somebody that downloads a case study and your salesperson should call them now and that is a very good lead. But here's the overall management expectation and this is where we fail in marketing.

Do you want really low lead numbers and use things like a case study or a blog post, right? Or do you want lots of leads that look like fun when you look at all your reporting?

Yay, we got a lot of leads by using a checklist, a list or a guide and yet they are not anywhere as far down the funnel. And so before you just go to market with, okay, we got a new piece of content, get it out, get leads, send them off to sales, Hooray, don't do that.

Okay? That's a recipe for failure. Okay? What you want to do is say, okay, this is what we're going to market with and it will produce this.

Are we all on the same page with the lead numbers that we're going to get and the opportunities that we're going to get and the same thing on the consumer side. Okay, are you going out to market with a 50% off discount where you're going to get, you know, a certain type of customer?

Are you going off with some sort of, you know, free gift with, with trial or whatever your offer is, is going to dictate the type of customer you're going to get and the type of lead that you're going to get. So management of expectations is everything in marketing, Everything. So let's jump into the segment of this called since you didn't ask.

That's the part of this podcast where we talk about things that have absolutely nothing to do with marketing or business or life or whatever. And this is, oh, this is so random. Oh, why do I share things? So yesterday, I've never had a pet. Now you're gonna say, why not?

You seem like a decent guy. I just never had a pet. Never had a pet. My home, no dog, no cat, nothing. Nothing. No pet ever.

I've had no interaction with and I like dogs, I really do. I watch movies that have dogs. Dogs seem wonderful. I just, I have had no interaction.

So my mother in law has a dog and she lives nearby and anytime that she needs some help dog, it's never on me. My kids are always around. My wife, somebody's around to help the dog. But in this particular case, yesterday, I was the last person standing.

There was nobody else that was available to take care of the dog. Harry is his name and very nice dog. You can tell me what type of dog. It's very small dog.

I don't know what kind of dog is, but it's very nice, small dog. So I have to go over there and I'm in charge of the dog. And this freaked me out because I don't know how to do anything.

So I had to go over there and I walk the dog, I had to feed the dog, I had to do it all. So I go to my mother in law's house, I open the key and there's Harry sitting there and the leash was on the couch.

The first job I had to do was get the leash thing, the whole harness onto the dog. And I have to tell you, I've never felt dumber in my life. First of all, I'm talking to Harry like he has any idea I'm talking about.

I go, how do we do this? And I felt like I was working for SpaceX. I could not figure out how to get this harness on the dog. So I put it on him and he looked like.

I put a straight jacket on him. He couldn't move because I was completely on wrong. It took me a full 10 minutes. I was in a full blown sweat. He was very helpful. He was very calm.

I was having a breakdown because I didn't know how soon he was going to go to the toilet and I didn't want him to go to the toilet in the house. And there was going to be an epic fail. So I finally get the harness on. I actually googled how to put the dog harness on while I was doing it.

I was having a breakdown. Get the harness on, we go outside. Great. Now we're walking. It's all going fine. He's going to the. He's peeing. Whatever. I shouldn't say on podcast.

He's peeing in the bush. Great. Whatever. Then he goes and does his business. I pick it up. I feel like a hero. I picked it up in the garbage bag. Yes.

And then another little dog comes walking up right at us. I'm like, oh, no, what's going to happen? How do I handle this interaction? Because I have no idea. And then the other dog comes up and they are.

And I didn't know. I didn't know what the. Because the other person's looking at me like, I'm a dog person. I'm like, I didn't say anything, but I'm not a dog person.

So I come up and the two dogs are, like, staring at each other. And then they proceed to sniff each other's butts. The dogs, not me and the other person. And I'm like, oh, my God, what's happening?

And I didn't know if this was appropriate behavior for. For two dogs to do. And I'm looking at the person like, is this okay? Are you going to, like, call the cop? Because my dog is sniffing your dog.

Like, what? What's going on here? I don't go to jail because I'm walking a dog. And then she gave me a look like, everything's fine, we're good to go. Whatever.

I got home. I released my responsibilities of Harry. Thank God he survived. And I learned a lot. That was my story of the day. And I need to calm down.

And so I hope you enjoyed, oh, my God. This episode of do this. Not that you did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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