“When people ask me what marketing is, I say it's the customer experience from the first time they engage with your brand to the last time they purchase and after that.”

Erik Huberman, the Founder, and CEO of HawkeMedia, the fastest growing marketing consultancy in the United States, appears on this episode of Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos. Hawke Media began operations in 2014 and has seen its valuation rise to $75 million while expanding from seven to more than 150 workers. Among the many accolades bestowed to Hawke Media include spots on the Inc. 5000's "Fastest Growing Companies" list for 2017, the "50 Best Workplaces in Southern California" list from Fortune and Forbes' "Content Marketing Companies to Check Out in 2018" list. In today's episode, Erik discusses the underpinnings of marketing and the future of the field as a whole. 

[01:00] Erik's Journey – Erik discusses the distinguishing characteristics of his career while recounting his path to this point. 

[03:34] The Hawke Method – Erik explains the impetus behind the writing of his book.

[06:27] Three Pillars - Erik outlines how he works with and advises customers by referencing the three pillars outlined in his book: awareness, nurture, and trust.

[16:49] Social Media – Erik addresses the impact of social media on marketing and how social media has altered the nature of trust.

[21:23] The Future - Erik expresses his predictions for the future of marketing over the next few years.

[2437] Impact on CX - Erik outlines the effect of marketing on the customer experience, specifically how the three pillars described would affect the customer experience.

[25.35] Inspiration – Erik shares the sources from which he draws his inspiration.

Resources:

Connect with Erik:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/erikhuberman/

Mentioned in the episode:

The Hawke Method: The Three Principles of Marketing that Made Over 3,000 Brands Soar:goodreads.com/en/book/show/60087797-the-hawke-method

Erik Huberman on Marketing Principles and the Future of Marketing

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B Customer led. I've got a really cool guest for everyone this week. Eric Huberman is the founder and CEO of Hawk Media. Now Hawks a really cool agency. They work with companies to develop sales, marketing and e-commerce strategy, really with a, from a perspective of like maximizing visibility for the organiz.

Eric also wrote a book called The Hawk Method, and we're gonna get into that and what Hawk Media does. Eric, welcome Michelle. Really excited to get into this conversation. Yeah, no, thank you for having me. All right, so today folks, we're talking about the principles of marketing and where the discipline is headed.

We don't do a lot of marketing shows. A lot of them are much more geared towards customer and employee experience, but marketing is a discipline, obviously is, sometimes the other side of the coin to experience, right? So, Eric, I ask all guests, the first question is just tell us about your journey.

You've got a cool story. what were the differentiating factors in

Sold that to Bow Total Fitness after a year called Ellie Still. This is about, it's almost a decade ago now, it's actually nine years ago. And then, started advising consulting for a bunch of brands and ran the same problem over and over again, which is when it comes time to execute on marketing.

Finding good marketing is really, really difficult. 99% of agencies out there have no idea what they're doing, and the few that are good are either really expensive, long, long contracts, high minimums, or something else that makes 'em hard to work with. And hiring in house has a slew of problems too, and I talk about it all the time.

Like I, my job is. Hire, retain, train, build, incredible marketing talent and marketing infrastructure. You can't replicate that in house unless you're a multi billion dollar company. And even then it's hard. So we, I, I always allude to the fact that I spend 20 to $30 million a year on my marketing team.

So it's got a decent infrastructure. And so, and it just got frustrated with it. I saw this with my own brands too, where it's like, why can't this be easier? It doesn't make sense. So under the mission of accessibility to great marketing, I set out and I hired a small team of experts, a little SWAT team.

I never thought I was gonna build something big, so it was like a Facebook marketer, an email marketer, a web designer, a fractional cmo, seven people originally and, went back to these brands and said, Hey, everything's Alex cart, month to month cheaper in hiring in house, but basically we can spin up what you need when you need it.

And ebb and flow changes, your needs change. And that's how we started. And now we're 300 people have managed marketing over time for over 4,000 brands. We've awesome. We've currently got about 600 companies we're running marketing for as they're outsource CMO marketing team. And everything's a la carte month to month, but everything's, we really try to have the best talent out there.

Yeah.

Or was it, Yeah. You were trying to put the business and the book out there together and kind of say, Here's what we do and here's our process.

I obviously talked to tons and tons of CEOs about their and and CMOs and heads of marketing, about their marketing strategy and I realized that I was being very, very redundant cuz it was kind of the same thing every time. And it fell into these three ca principles of marketing. And I was talking about it for year, and I'm talking years not just like, yeah, for three months.

Or might as well put it in writing. Yeah, so I always say like, writing the book was really easy. Like it took me, there was no writer's book cause I literally had been talking about it for seven years and I just had to, I wrote an outline and a, an half hour and then just filled in the blanks with stuff I talked about every day.

And so, and I ba how I did it was I dictated it and then had them transcribe it. We edited it together. So that's how I put it together. . But yeah, it, it really was. And then in terms of, as a tool, it was great as a marketing tool together. Name out there. Mm-hmm. . but more than that, we send it to every client and every employee.

And so now we're all on the same page. We all speak the same language, which I would say was the biggest issue, and I don't wanna give this full credit, but the retention of customers we've had is actually skyrocketed. We've, the little bit of churn we used to have has gone away. Now we all talk about the same things.

So they can literally go to like, Hey, but in chapter four we talk about this and like, so our clients aren't trying to guess what we're doing. And one of the three principles of marketing is trust. Mm-hmm. . And it helps build a lot of trust when you are Splitly showing them, this is everything we do. This is how this works, this is our principles.

And so when you're questioning our strategy, We're both talking about the same thing. Let's just, What part of the book are you talking about? Yeah. Cause it is a framework. The idea is it's, My favorite thing that happened was when we launched, I got my first one star review on Amazon and it was like, I don't get it.

It's just basically modern marketing 1 0 1. Yeah, No, you got it actually . So still Well referring to that one, I almost wanna put that on the cover. One star on Amazon. I don't get it, it's just bought it. But the guy saw, I looked up the guy on LinkedIn cuz everyone puts their name on Amazon. I was like, I wonder who this is.

He saw it and deleted his comment. So it's just a one star now, which hurt cause I rather have the text there. But yeah, that's basically what we put together there.

Is there, is there a sequence. I mean, obviously you can't have trust without awareness, right? You've gotta show sort of that nurture, that commitment. Yeah. Is that the way you are also working with clients? Like first create awareness, then show them how to nurture clients and then that will ultimately lead to trust in long-term relationships?

Or how do you think about it? I

The day you create awareness. If you're not building trust, same thing. Like, it's like you have to fire on all cylinders. So actually a lot of times we'll do a little bit of nurturing infrastructure before we launch awareness to make sure that we have email drip campaigns and sms, et cetera. Mm-hmm. to make sure that we can actually follow up.

Tell us a little bit about finding that authenticity, creating the credibility. Certainly awareness is a big part of that, and creating those associations. What are some of the trends you're seeing there? And then what is your maybe favorite medium to kind of build that awareness

Yeah, so I'd separate the two honestly, cuz I think awareness isn't about building credibility. It's about building awareness. So it's, in terms of credibility, it's usually third party validation. So that's where influencer can come in. Mm-hmm. that's where testimonials review. Pr. And I would say over time it just become, comes from consistency.

What do you consistently deliver? Mm-hmm. people trust you, good or bad? one, an example I use a decent amount is McDonald's. Like, it's gonna be fast. It's probably gonna taste the same whether you, let's say you like it, you'll know you're gonna get exactly that Big Mac you enjoy. It's unhealthy too and just pretty much known to be unhealthy.

So that's their brand. That's what you trust them for. I don't need anyone else to tell me otherwise or support that at this point, but there was a period when McDonald's was new where it's like you had people talking about how fast it was and I had to believe, had to be told that cuz nobody really believes from the, directly from the source.

I will say with the nuance of if you say it over and over again for long enough, a lot of times people will believe it. It's, Like him or hate him. And I'm not a big fan of him, but Trump saying, Make America great again over and over again. There's a psychological factor to that that it's like, Yep, he's gonna make it great, and people just start believing it.

So that's kind of the dark side of marketing, but it's a part of it. On the awareness side, you asked in terms of channels, not much has changed and so ha what I say that my favorite current example is anyone that's advertising on Facebook for the, over the past year, like meaning like they were more advertising prior to the iOS changes in April of last year.

things that Facebook has fallen through, the four Facebook advertising doesn't work anymore, and I love hearing these, and I've, I've heard this about email marketing. I've heard this over the years about every single marketing channel has failed and it's going away and nobody uses anymore. Only boomers are on Facebook now and only Gen Zs on TikTok, these generalizations that are completely wrong, but do get people to quick publications.

Mm-hmm. , you're creating awareness on Facebook. They're clicking in. And then what we found was in e-commerce specifically, where we have a ton of data for a $50 average order value, your purchase cycle is about three weeks. So purchase cycle becomes one of the most critical things to measure in marketing that almost no performance marketer looks at.

I mean, it's baffling, so, The best, line that we use for this is nine women can't have a baby in a month. There's n like there is a time that it takes for people to buy and that has gotten longer over the years cuz there's just so much more inundation and information out there that it takes time for people to make a purchase decision.

And so for a $50 order, it's about three weeks. For a hundred dollars, it's about five weeks for $200, about six weeks, and then it trails off between two and three months. But that means for most orders you're talking about three weeks to three months. So if I advertise something on Facebook today, I'm not seeing the performance of that for about, let's say three weeks to three months.

But let's just use that four week number as a general average. So when they were tracking four weeks, you were getting a decent idea of what your performance was on Facebook, and it was matching up. When Apple changed their tracking, they Facebook can't even accurately track at all anymore. But what they do is they create an algorithm that kind of tracks around one week.

And so you get kind of one week of purchase data. Mm-hmm. . But if your average customer doesn't purchase for four weeks and you're staring at one week of data, it's always gonna look bad. So Facebook, for some reason, isn't educating their audience and their customers, their advertisers about this. The same time, they're basically completely under reporting their performance of Facebook.

So if you're reading in the Facebook dashboard right now, how it's performing, you think everything has gone to. The truth is it's not that bad. And the thing I always throw back at people, cause they're like, Well I don't know. I can't really see a performance. I'm like, do you think that Apple changing its tracking system stopped people from purchasing off Facebook

Like, let's just take basic numbers here. Consumer spending is up. Do you think people just stopped purchasing Cause you can't track them?

Like how does that

Honestly, it's just, I think it's a direct attack from Apple to Facebook more than anything. And I never understand the politics of these things and why people don't call it out. But if I were Facebook not knowing a lot of nuance, they know, I'd be like, Yeah, by the way guys, it's just a tracking problem.

Cause Apple's being a dick, Like that's

Like what really drives a lot of that decision

There's probably a hundred million American, or not a hundred million. There's probably 30 million Gen Z on Facebook in the US outta a hundred million. Like there's plenty of people. Yeah. So you, we don't really worry about demo or that type of talking. What we look at is context. What is the context that the person receives, the added, and what, what do we need them?

So for any type of company that we're trying to create, demand. Meaning like they, it's not a need based product. It's not something that I'm like, I need to solve this problem right now. I have, I don't know, what would I say? I got a dui. I need a DUI attorney is an easy one. Cause it's like that's a very specific need.

Mm-hmm. . I can't target an interest base off that. So I need to go to Google for that. I need to go, that needs to be looking for DUI help DUI attorney, for me to advertise for a DUI attorney. We're gonna go into Google. Vice versa, I'm a running shoe company. Or let's say T-shirt brand. I like this because it was BA Still to this day, we go into some of these bigger brands and they're literally bidding on the keyword T-shirt on Google, and you're like, What do you think someone's searching for when they Google t-shirt?

Yeah, it's probably not your shirt, so you're gonna spend money on that and it's not gonna do anything. So Google becomes a hard place where you're creating new demand, where you're like, We don't know what they're looking for, but we can probably drum up some demand. And that's where Facebook and Instagram really win.

because the difference is, again, Google, you're actively searching for something. Facebook, you're literally just bored and scrolling through a news. And what's really exciting is, in a weird way, is TikTok, I think is an even more powerful platform than Facebook and Google. The reason being Facebook and Google are built on your social graph.

Cause I'm a pilot and I didn't tell it that. I just go figure. That's what I. Look at, and one of my favorite things is I got someone that raised their hand. They're like, I thought talk's just a bunch of girls in bikinis in one of my talks. And I was like, That's awesome. And it was a, yeah, really funny event.

And you said this in front of like, hundred CEOs and I'm like, so this is how

[00:15:17] Erik Huberman: So that's hyster, but that is how TikTok works. So the reason that's so powerful is people are now used to, you don't see videos from people you follow as much as you see videos of things you like.

If I can build in what they haven't done yet, but I'm sure is being built right now, is building more and more of that algorithm into the advertising where it's like, Oh, like me, I like snowboarding and I like airplanes, and I comedy. Now it starts showing me advertisements for comedy shows, snowboards, equipment, pilot stuff.

I'd be a great target. I've told you that and I'm used to seeing that. So it's both are great cuz both are basically used at a boredom and you're willing to go do something else. But TikTok has that interest graph benefit that I think over time could be really powerful if the Chinese government doesn't continue to use it for Google and end up getting it better.

Which that part is concerning.

Right. How is social media changed sort of the, the, that that trust game, whether it's even at the company level or at the individual level? Like certainly like you see all these sort of like individual folks out there with like 500,000 followers. They're putting out like books they're putting. online courses, et cetera.

How is trust different because of social? If you guys

And he, his best friend is like a ladies man. It's Neil Patrick Harris. And he goes and he's trying to help him meet girls. Ted is the main star, and Barney is his friend Neil Patrick Harris. And Barney goes up to random girls in bars and goes, Hey, have you met my friend Ted? And just walks away and Ted's like, and they have no idea who Barney was, but they're like, Oh, okay.

And that third party validation, regardless who the third party is, does actually work. So when you. Social media posts about brands, even if you don't know the person, a lot of times you're like, Well, if someone's willing to go out and say something like that about them, like at least they're, there's someone validating them.

It does create trust. Yeah. And. You mentioned the influencer side with these bigger followers. The, The problem there frankly is they abused it up until Fyre Festival, when the FTC finally said this is gonna be regulated. So now they have to disclose this as an advertisement. Yeah. And when that happened, the dynamics of that advertising channel completely changed.

It used to be the golden go influencer marketing was insane. Now it's basically just another media channel, and it works still, but it's not quite as effective. But I will say, And it's just like endorsement deals. Everyone knows people get paid to endorse products, but there's still a level of trust that like this person still put their name on it regardless of a paycheck.

So if you believe that they're not just gonna put their name on anything, which some people will, you, you still build that trust.

Do you think people give trust more quickly now because of the social aspect of that? Or is there still that, that element where it's like, I'm gonna follow this a little bit before I really kind of dig in?

We're trying to find the early adopters that don't need that much trust. Mm-hmm. , that's where the well hanging fruit is. In the beginning, most people that need trust, Oh, word of mouth is still the biggest driver of business and I think probably will always be, Which is where again, social comes in on that.

Yeah. So in lieu of word of mouth, you're trying to find people that don't need to build that much trust. So like, screw it, I'll try it, kind of thing. And with whatever that product is, and obviously different products, I need different levels of trust. You're talking about a fashion company, I just wanna know it's not gonna fall apart when it gets here and show up.

Like it's gonna look like it did in the pictures. you're talking about a supplement company. Well now we're talking about life or death. So, I might not just take your random supplement. Yeah. But the, so building that becomes a different animal. But I would say people still have the same, I'd say actually it's gotten worse in terms of like, people have been burned by so many things.

Like one of my, I I, I haven't seen an Instagram channel for this, and I feel like there needs to exist with like, all the Chinese products advertised on TikTok and Instagram that you get them and you're like, What the hell is this ? I, I got like in the. in the middle of the pandemic I bought, and I'm not a big golfer, but I thought it'd be fun.

I bought a floating, golf hole from my pool and I was like, This is gonna be so fun. I'm gonna chip in my backyard. And like, again, I golf like three times a year, but I was like, But now I have it in my yard. This could be great. Shows up. And it was like a flat piece of plastic with a little flag and it was like the cheapest piece of shit ever.

Oh my gosh. Like what? But I, and then I saw it like, people have been posting about this stuff, but like that alone has ero it, My mom was someone that was clicking all these Instagram ads during the pandemic and buying random stuff, and all of it was. And so that erodes a lot of trust in these things.

Yeah. So people definitely wanna see things that indicate they're actually gonna get what they're seeing. I'm

[00:20:22] Erik Huberman: It was so disappointing. I even kept it for like two months, just like, I'm still gonna use it.

And then I was like, this thing sucks

Right. And then you've got sort of the no code, low code, kind of put component in there, picked in. How do you see these capabilities evolving and where do you think marketing is headed over the next few years?

Seven years ago, we set out to try to build a marketing AI platform. The idea is, can we monitor marketing in real time so we can see what's working, what's not? Where are the low hanging fruit? Because it's a lot to look at your Google win exit, Google Analytics every day and try to figure out where should I be spending my time?

Like how can we pull that out in real time? Tell you where to look. Benchmark against your industry. Cause one of the biggest challenges I see in marketing is working in a vacuum. That's why agent, every big company uses agencies. Like we need that outside perspective. Mm-hmm. . So how can we pull benchmark against industry data in real time as well?

And then how do we, can we get insights to be like, hey, Our conversion rate is down and compared to the industry, it's actually about 25% under industry average. So we should be based on our AOV or however, whatever correlations we discover. So that's something we need to focus on. Well, what's driving that?

Well, nothing's changed on our email marketing. Nothing's changed on our website. Oh, but our site speed is down, so there it is. Our site speed went down 30%, so our conversion rate went down. Let's go fix our site. That in, I've watched take people weeks to figure out, or months mm-hmm. and instead we're trying to make it so it's just like, bing, this is what's happened.

That, So what ended up happening is we, found a software company that had already built the monitoring tool part of it. We, we had tried to build it a few times and failed a few times, frankly. Finally found someone that got halfway there, partnered with them in February, and now we're gonna be launching the first iteration of this tool next month.

So Hawk ai and we have not announced it publicly. So, what do we, hawk.ai is where it's gonna start. Populating probably aug in a week, probably August one is what we're looking

[00:23:04] Erik Huberman: we have tens, we've partnered with other data companies.

We have a Got it. we've audited like Yes. And, and our clients are included in that. We do have anonymous, usability of their data. Mm-hmm. , but we wanna make sure that's super clean cuz obviously we don't wanna, our master's still the agency and we don't wanna piss anyone off. But the point being it's tens of thousands of companies marketing good.

It's not just a few here and there in different industries and. Yeah, we're building that out. Again, the bench, that benchmarking side, which is super compelling. And again, the idea is where do I think marketing's going? I think that over time, more and more of what, what marketers do will be automated.

Mm-hmm. and hopefully the utopian side is we'll be able to use our highest and best use of our brains to do the really, nuanced part of marketing and not spend all this time pulling data and doing things that a computer can do. That's what we're trying to build and get to. Very

That's awesome. How do you, I, one, I got a couple more questions for you before I let you. Talk to me a little bit about sort of the impact of marketing on customer experience, specifically around sort of these three pillars and how do you think that they could even influence the experience?

So I actually think it's completely intertwined and the difference is I think that like CX and customer experience and as a practice has a much more direct in, view of engagement with the customer and again, narrating their experience. Yeah. But I do think that marketing and CX are just their overlap completely.

I I do think that someone paying attention to CX is awesome. And important, but I think from a marketing standpoint, that fits right into a lot of what you're doing on the marketing side too. It all needs to be seamless.

[00:24:46] Erik Huberman: the inspiration, it's funny, I haven't been asked that question. Had for a long time. I was a chip on my shoulder for sure. , like I just gotta, and. You know it Mo I'd say more motivation than inspiration comes from, I really wanna experience everything life has to offer, like professionally, personally, I, whenever someone's experienced something, I haven't, I'm like, I wanna try that.

Like, it's that not a jealousy thing. It's just like I. Not to get too spiritual, but like I'm very agnostic. I'm born and raised Jewish. Love the drive, but like in terms of like religiously, I'm pretty agnostic. And so I don't know what happens after I die. Yeah. And so I kind of take it like, this might be the the shot I get and if that's the case, I wanna do everything I can.

I wanna maximize my time here. And so that drives me. Personally to go, bucket with like add to my bucket list and check it off as much as fast as it gets on there. And so thankfully at 35 I've done some pretty ridiculous stuff. But then professionally, same thing. I'm like, well, example, I wanna run a multinational company.

Now we have offices in uk, Canada, China, Philippines here. And we'll keep growing like that sounds like something I wanna experience. And then, oh, I wanna manage a fund. I. Get into investing, Boom. We have, our second fund is a 50 million fund, not boom, like, took years work. But the point is, like I, And so, and same thing with software.

Like, I want to disrupt my own industry. I wanna figure out, I, I'm not a software guy, but I wanna figure out how to be a part of it and build this thing. And so, Same thing. We have our nonprofit arm. I wanna give back. I wanna make the world a better place. Like I wanna try writing a book and publishing a book.

Generally it's check boxes too. Like I will say, I don't know that I'll write a second book. Yeah, I really don't. That was a fair to take on and I love that I did it, but it's again, kind of checking off like what's, try all these different things and figuring out what that next move is, is really a part of what drives me and inspires me.

It's like new experiences, new.

[00:26:47] Erik Huberman: See, that's the thing. If I'm dying to do it, I've probably done it. I'm trying to think of one experience that I sincerely, I mean, I've, I wanted to go he boarding now I go every year.

That's awesome. Wanna go to the Monaco Grand Prix? I have a friend that lives there. Thankfully, like there's a lot of like luck in this and is like, I just happen to have a friend that lives right minute walk from the racetrack. So very good. Was able to do it even when the means weren't there. Monica's

Yeah, it's, you really do need means for by the

Just almost exactly. And while we're on our honeymoon, everyone's like, Oh, you gotta try hiking with the gus. And like my wife goes, Yeah, that could be like a once in a lifetime thing. I'm like, Where we could just go next year? And we went and booked it. Then Covid hits, we punted it, but we ended up going in August.

That was a big one too. having my first child next month. That's

[00:27:44] Erik Huberman: That's awesome. And again, like I don't know that that's an exper an experience. Of course it is an experience, but you know what I mean, Like that is by far. And so I think, my thought is I've done most of the things to this point that like are like, I really want to try that.

Including, again, doing my pilot's license and all these things. I'm pretty sure it's gonna be a lot to do with her and what I'm gonna be doing with my child in terms of the personal. Very

And, yeah, folks, if, for listeners who are not familiar with H Media, check them out. I'm, I'm really curious to see how that AI platform, I'm gonna talk to my co CMO about it as well. So hopefully we have another conversation at some point in future. Thanks so much for coming on. Good. Thank you for having, All right, everybody.

Another great week. We're out. Talk to you soon