In this episode of The Bathroom Break, hosts Daniel Murray and Jay Schwedelson discuss marketing strategies for 2025, their thoughts on LinkedIn changes, and some personal anecdotes, including Jay's upcoming role as a professor.

=================================================================

Best Moments:

(01:09) Jay's upcoming role as an adjunct professor at the University of Florida

(02:57) Discussion on college experiences and study habits

(03:08) Marketing trends and strategies for 2025

(04:54) The potential of live streaming for B2B marketing

(05:22) Impact of the presidential election on content consumption and ad costs

(07:18) Predictions for social media platforms in the coming year

(09:06) LinkedIn phasing out "top voice" badges

(10:29) Criticism of LinkedIn's approach to influencers and content creators

(11:07) Tips for standing out on LinkedIn

(11:22) Weekend plans and upcoming events

=================================================================

MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!

Marigold is a relationship marketing platform designed to help you acquire new customers and turn them into superfans with their best-in-class loyalty solutions. Don’t take my word for it though, American Airlines, Honeybaked Ham, Title Boxing, and Notre Dame University are also customers!

Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!

Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.

Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom. Or both. But I don't recommend both. But that's your choice.

This collab is going to be super fun.

We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this, not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

Okay, we are back with another Bathroom Break. I am Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and I'm here with DJ Shreddelson from Guru from do this, do not that podcast to.

From every little thing. He literally has the most asterisks. If you go see him at the conference, I've never seen someone with most asterisks next to his name.

Like subjectline.com google conference, alchemedia. So he's very astro. He doesn't have, like, PhD, like Maryland, all that next season.

Working on it. Yeah.

But he is going to be a professor soon, so I am.

That's right. Low key, actually.

You want to tell people about that? You want to tell people, oh, my God. What are you going to say?

So I went to the University of Florida, and in this spring, believe it or not, I'm going to be an adjunct professor. I'm going to be teaching a class. They hit me up to teach a real class. We get credits for.

And.

And it's gonna be about podcasting, social media, email marketing, like, marketing in general. And because I'm very lazy, what I'm gonna do is.

And Daniel, he doesn't even know this yet, but every week I'm just having a guest person come in and speak. Like, you're gonna come and speak to the class and tell you what you do.

And it's just gonna be laughable when I see you teaching, like, students what to do, because neither one of us should influence anyone ever.

No. And also, I was the most laziest person in college when it came to stuff, so I don't know how I, like, kept my GPA at, like, 3 above a 3.

Wait, when you say lazy. First of all, Daniel was a D1 football player, University of Cincinnati.

When you say lazy because, like, there was a lot of classes I just did not go to. I know that's terrible. But I graduated. All went fine. Were you, like, lazy like that or are you Lazy.

Like we couldn't do that because you would get class checked.

But I mean lazy in the sense that I would wait till like the last day or even the day off to study for anything or did an essay, like the last minute.

Do you ever have nightmares? I still, I mean, I graduated a zillion years ago.

There's still nightmares that I have a test the next day and I wake up like, oh my God, I didn't study or something.

I, I dream that I, I had this, have this reoccurring dream that I have. I like taking like 18 credits and I forget one of my classes for half the year that I didn't.

I'm just like terrible.

Yeah, we're really, I mean, look, everyone's talking about video and video being so important and you see it, you know, B2B, B2C videos, everything. So we're really trying to play with this idea of micro events, 20 minute events, maximum 30 minute events.

And we're definitely not calling them webinars. The more and more that we're seeing the data come in, the word webinar is a boat anchor.

When you're promoting anything you put in your subject line, you say attend this webinar. It just depresses everything. So we're calling things, you know, live event or live micro event. We're going to be testing that out, going to Q1 a lot.

We think that that's where a lot of things are headed. So we're, we're very, we're pumped on micro live events. What do you got?

I think on that note, I've been thinking about this idea for B2B, but I haven't. I thought about how to execute this is doing live streaming and just random live streaming.

Popping onto LinkedIn and just doing a quick event that nobody knows about and getting people just going live and just chatting about marketing with someone. I think that would be really cool because you see it in E commerce all the time. You see influencers doing it all the time.

You see companies doing it all the time on TikTok and IG, but you don't really see it in B2B. So like doing these like random pop up educational but ask me anything type things could be a really cool avenue to test out.

I don't see many B2B people doing it, so I've been thinking about that a lot.

Yeah, I mean I see Neil Patel do that a ton on Instagram and it's really good.

The thing that's interesting I think for everybody listening is if you do any live events like that, like you know, just pop on live, don't expect big numbers of people to show up. But the people that do actually show up, it's pretty intentional.

It's like, it's like very more mid funnel than it is that you know people that just register for something that never even show up. So I think that's, that's super cool.

I also think that coming out of this Q4 which can be a very bumpy ride because of the presidential election, I think Q1 there's going to be like this kind of like everyone's going to be able to take a deep breath and get back to normal a little bit. In terms of consuming content.

I think we're about to, you know, this last period of the year is going to be a very kind of bumpy ride because everybody usually tunes out content as big elections occur. So I'm excited to get past all this noise.

Yeah, I just remember last election too how hard it was also to just like spend during that time on, on Facebook and Google because so much election budget is going to this. This type of stuff.

So there in the last like even in this next month I guarantee that it's going to be cost way more to get attention and that's, that's something you got to think about like is, is this a big month? Do we need to hit a target? Because this is going to cost more if you do that.

I saw this last election when I was working at Service Titan so I've seen costs go up during election years.

I think it's an excellent point.

You know and the data actually proves that out that especially social, paid social and paid search ad costs rise anywhere from 15 to 50% within like three weeks prior and three weeks after, well actually two weeks after the election. And you want to be very careful if you're out there and you have anything that's automatic like you're automatically have certain ad buys going.

You really got to look at that because your cost per acquisition is going to go through the roof unless you're really monitoring that big time.

And the reason it goes up is that the, all the election, you know, all the, the PACs and the different candidates and local and national, they're not just buying up, you know, politically related inventory, they're buying up all the inventory because they need eyeballs. So that's why B2B or B2C, it ratchet it all up. Let me ask you this, do you think anything's going to fade out after this year?

Do you think that, you know, TikTok's gonna be any, any less than it is now, or do you think that LinkedIn's gonna be changing their algorithm in any way that's gonna matter in a significant way?

I always think that it's gonna be harder to stand out with like LinkedIn not putting up video and everything. You just have the, the bar is way higher next year of what type of content you need to put out.

You can, like right now people are just putting out videos on LinkedIn but I think next year it's going to be like if you don't have a good hook and you don't have a good, there's no value in the content or you aren't keeping people's attention for a long enough time, you're just going to blend in. When everything, anything starts, you get a lot of attention and then you blend in. I think we as consumers are just over inundated on content.

And I, I do have a, I've said this before but I, I really think that our intent, attention spans aren't shrinking as much as people think. I think our ability to filter, filter out BS content is just way higher because we adapt as humans.

Like we're just, we can't, we can't put it, register all this content. So we just, our minds are just seeking the best content.

So, so whether it's long form, short form, we just trying to find because people will go watch Golden Bachelor for an hour and not tune out, but they'll skip a 10 second video. It's all relative of like if it's good content or bad content in your mind.

You know, speaking of BS content that's being filtered out, which I think is a good thing is I don't know if you saw, you know, LinkedIn has their, those yellow badges on profiles like top content voice, top digital marketing voice, those yellow badges that you can earn and they're phasing them out in the next few weeks. They're getting rid of those badges and the, and the reason I say it's BS and I'm glad they're getting rid of them is in order.

The only way you get one of those Badges that you see on people's profiles and makes them all look cool, like they're important is by commenting on these AI generated articles, if you comment on enough of these, what they call collaborative articles that are generated by LinkedIn using AI, then you automatically would get this top voice badge and they're getting rid of it because LinkedIn knows it's total BS. You're commenting on stuff that's not even real. And that badge is not indicative of you being a top whatever voice.

So I'm glad that the platforms are recognizing what's garbage and what's not. Are you sad that your yellow badge is going to go away? You like broken down?

No. But I also do get annoyed that there's some arbitrary top voice that is actually a top voice given out for no apparent reason.

I know.

And they're not given out to people who have like been on the platform a long time that actually have been contributing for a long time. That annoys me too. So I, I get why they're phasing out those, those were stupid.

Like they could have like done top marketing voice for people who actually are a top marketing voice in, in the industry.

But I think the biggest miss that LinkedIn has, I think is that they do not care about influencers and the creators on the platform enough and they don't prioritize people enough. Like, that's why YouTube is winning. That's why TikTok is winning. They, they care about the people who create content on the platform.

So I don't think Nick, LinkedIn cares enough about those type of people. And that's just true. And I think they might change in the future, but they just don't.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, if you want to stand on LinkedIn, this is a real stat. 95% of people on LinkedIn don't post. Only 5% of people post.

So if you want to have any presence, just post. It's really actually that easy. So. All right, before we wrap up here, Daniel, we're recording this. It's kind of the weekend. What do you got?

What's your plan for the weekend? You doing anything big? Going out party man. What happens?

Well, today, it's actually my mom's birthday today, but she's on vacation. Happy birthday to my mom. But, but I am just getting so excited. It's October 11th for guru conference in the next five days.

Like stupid.

Like a spam eating contest. Like who does it also like Carrie Bradshaw live. Like live like what the heck? So it's actually, I know Jay is. Is.

Wants to have a good weekend this weekend, but he's going to be sweating week.

I already told my wife I will be locked in doing work stuff all week. I'm a giant loser, so. Yeah, but that's all right. Being a loser is fine. Being cool is very overrated. It really is. So if you're cool, screw off.

Well, this has been another great episode. We appreciate you all. Toss Daniel a review on the Marking Millennials. You know, tell him how awesome he is on his pod and appreciate you all.

See you at the next.

No, I need to. I really need to catch up to Jay because he. He has, like, 580,000 reviews. I don't know how. His. His podcast is crazy.

So leave Daniel some reviews. He wants some love. Come on.

A little bit of love here, peeps.

Later, Daniel. Come on, man. I got to get back to work. Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay.

Check out my podcast, do this, not that, for Marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Market Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the Bathroom Break.

We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a.

A shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.

Later.