[00:04] Speaker #1: This Is Totally Hyped, a marketing podcast for today’s SMB leaders.
[00:12] Speaker #2: Let’s face it, marketing is one of the most important functions of your business. You’re a business leader. So this podcast won’t waste your time on marketing buzzwords or overhyped tactics.
Instead, we’ll focus on topics like optimizing roi, building brand equity, and increasing sales and market share.
[00:28] Speaker #1: Totally Hyped is brought to you by Pure Marketing Consult, the most cost effective way to get the results you want.
[00:36] Speaker #2: On this episode of Totally Hyped, we’ll get ready to dominate the digital landscape for 2025. As an SMB leader, you need to stay ahead of the curve. This guide unlocks the secrets to AI powered marketing. Captivating visual storytelling and personalized experiences.
Discover actionable strategies to boost your brand and engage your audience and drive sales like never before. On this episode of Totally Hyped.
[00:59] Speaker #1: This Is Totally Hyped with your host, Kael Gul Win.
[1:07] Speaker #2: That’s right.
Don’t get left behind. These are essential marketing strategies to get ahead in the new year. I spent a lot of time, you know, kind of con contemplating my next year.
Typically I’m really busy at the end of the year, a lot of people trying to wrap up projects and so I actually push all my planning off until January, which is never awesome, but it’s just kind of the way things have worked for me and, and it works out well. But I can help you get ahead today. I can help you get ahead, start planning for 2025 and I’m gonna tell you what to plan for, what to focus on, and let’s just get started.
You know, SMB marketing trends for 2025 are kind of what you might think. They’re gonna be AI oriented, they’re going to be using different platforms to tell your story, and personalization is still going to be big in 2025, maybe even bigger than it’s ever been. Again, if a lot of what you’re hearing right now is a little bit bigger than what you can handle or your team doesn’t have the experience it needs, don’t hesitate to call us. I mean, call me.
My numbers will be at the end. My contact information is all over everything. You can go to totally hype.com pure marketing consultation. You can, you can find me. I talk to you for free. I’ll help you.
I’ll point you in the right direction for free. I have no problem with that whatsoever. But the idea is to make sure that you’re utilizing these things if you want to Grow your business just period, point blank. Marketing is the way you grow your business. And these concepts that we’re going to talk about today are going to be primary keys to doing that in the most effective and efficient way possible in 2025.
So here’s an example. Did you know that nearly 70% of consumers now expect businesses to offer personalized experiences? Well, how do you do that? Well, with cookieless technology coming about right now, I guess, and not so much cookieless technology, but the necessity of going cookieless is kind of going to transform how we do some things as far as personalization is concerned on websites.
That’s not to say it can’t be done. It can’t. It just means that we have to do it in a different way. You can do the gd, you can do all of the protections that, you know, let everybody know. This website uses cookies, yada, yada, yada. It’s really to enhance your experience.
You can do that. But there are better ways, in my opinion. There. There are ways to ask customers what they want, what they want to be made aware of what they want their experience to be, and just ask them point blank.
When they tell you, you now have 100% permission to know. When they come to the website, you 100% have permission to say, hello, Kale, welcome back. That’s how we do it with cookies today. There’s other technologies that we can use going forward. It’s just a different approach at the end of the day.
But people are expecting that. Certainly when you’re providing offers online through email or what have you, they are expecting like they’re not going to open most emails that aren’t personalized. There’s a lot going on with personalization right now, and there’s some challenges too. But people are expecting a personalized experience and they want that experience to be exclusive to them.
And there’s just a lot that goes into it. The more personalized it is, the more apt you are to get conversions. Just point blank.
There’s no two ways ahead of it, two ways around it. That was a Freudian slip. I read the word ahead and said that out loud.
There’s no two ways about it. You have to stay ahead of the curve is what I was going to suggest. There are all kinds of things that you can leverage with AI to help keep personalization at the forefront. And let’s just jump right into that topic.
You got to get into AI, and I’m sorry if you don’t like it. Complaining is not a strategy I have. There’s an episode earlier this year where we talk about, you’re either going to be bulldozed by AI or you’re going to be driving the bulldozer. And you can’t, I’m telling you right now. Is AI going to take over the world?
Maybe. But while it hasn’t taken over the world, if you’re not using it, you’re going to get bulldozed by it and you can complain about it all you want. It’s going to take over everybody’s jobs. It’s going to.
Yeah, you know what? People are going to have to rethink their positions 100%. This has gone on since the beginning of time. I think of the ancient pharaohs where, you know, people would carry them in those carts. Like they would. Like their four or five guys would be hoisting up that thing and the king would just sit in there and just be eating grapes. And they’re.
They’re lugging them around with those two. With the two poles. Well, the wheel took those jobs away.
Horses took those jobs away. You know, radio and tv, you know, they’ve gotten replaced by digital and I shouldn’t even say replaced, but there are now other options with television or, I’m sorry, with Internet and podcasting and streaming, and the list goes on and on and on. This is just gonna.
It’s gonna happen. Takes creativity out of the. Creativity is going to get better. It’s not there yet.
It needs human beings right now, but it might not always need human beings. And the more it needs human beings is for that growth and that refinement. Get on board.
We’ve talked about it in the past. Go back and visit some of the episodes we’ve talked about. We’ll talk about it again in 2025. But AI is here, and complaining about it isn’t going to help your. Your business isn’t going to grow because you’re complaining about AI. Unleash the chatbots.
Get on chat GPT. It can provide. If you leverage it properly on your website, it can provide customer support and answer questions like you can’t 24. 7.
You can automate some of your more tedious tasks. You can automate the leveraging of all of your transactions and what have you and automate things through Automation software like HubSpot, Mailchimp, Constant Contact to make sure that you’re communicating with your customers. I don’t want to spam them.
I don’t want to spam the. Well, then don’t make it a spam. Don’t be helpful. Be Personal, make it feel like you are talking to them directly. It will never feel like spam. If you’re being helpful and if you’re being personal, I promise you there are ways to do this and do it well.
Promise. I guarantee that there are emails that you get that you did not know were automated. There’s plenty of them that you do.
Most companies do it badly. You don’t need to become a data Jedi. Harness the power of Google Analytics, specifically Google Analytics 4 Looker Studio is another one. You gotta, you gotta embrace this stuff so you understand where you are, where you’re going and how to get there.
You work with a company like me, you get all that stuff. Because we’re gonna be using it. We can show you and your team how to use it.
Right like that. It’s. We’re gonna use it. I’m sorry, if you don’t like that and you don’t want to hire me, that’s fine. But I’m gonna kill it for you and I’m gonna use all those tools.
I mean, if you want, if you want somebody to help you kill it, get used to it. Because I don’t know anybody worth their salt in this business right now that isn’t using AI or automations of some sort. Just, it’s an axiomatic tr. The next thing you got to own up to is getting better at visual storytelling.
People just don’t have attention spans like they used to. And quite frankly, as our audiences get younger and younger, you know, they want video, they want images, they want infographics, they’re using TikTok, they’re using, you know, Instagram reels, Instagram reels and Facebook reels. And it just is the way it is.
I don’t love it because I’m personally not one to just love watching a video to get information. So here’s what I’m going to tell you and I’m going to reiterate this at the end of the program.
Next episode, which will be in the first or second week of January, the next episode is going to get into how to do this stuff and do it well. What it’s going to talk about mainly is you’re going to start with one type of content that you’re going to create, and from that, all other content and platforms and, you know, ways of communicating will be derived from that first piece that you create.
So you’ll be able to do all of these things and do it extraordinarily efficiently and eventually do it very well.
Once you get kind of the Hang of how am I going to do this? You got to do, you know, you got to be on TikTok YouTube shorts.
We don’t do a whole lot of it. Admittedly now my business hasn’t required a ton of marketing. We’ve always, you know, I know that sounds counterintuitive but we’ve just, you know, kind of word of mouth throughout the entire 22 years of Web180. And I know since 2009 with pure marketing we haven’t had to do a lot of that. And I’m not a big fan, I personally am not a big fan of video for education. Just reference wise, it’s hard, right?
Like, oh, where was that spot? Which was the, you know, like it’s hard to, oh, I gotta go back and re watch it again. What did he say?
I don’t, I don’t like that. That’s just me. Maybe as your audiences get younger they absorb that like nobody’s business and they don’t need to go back and rewind and what have you. But I do. You got to be a design pro.
You gotta hire good people that can use Canva, that can use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and whatever tool is necessary to build the supporting materials to tell your story. Partner with influencers that are in your field or that will touch your audience more effectively. It doesn’t have to cost all that much, but at the end of the day they have an audience where you don’t and you need them.
Partner up with them, figure out creative ways to work together. And again, the whole idea behind 2025 and going forward, probably show, don’t just tell show.
Talked about personalization. You got to master your CRM. By the way, there are free CRMs, inexpensive CRMs. We use one by Zoho called Bigin B I G I N pretty easy to set up, has integrations with all the big softwares, can help you with automations. We do kind of a hybrid of automations for the types of communications we do with our customers and our prospects.
But CRMs are extraordinarily helpful if you have, if you’re a huge list kind of company, you’re probably going to want to target more robust. You want to be able to segment your list like never before, know exactly who you’re talking to. And when this group of people gets this communication, this group of people gets that communication. It can all be automated. It takes a while and it takes some effort to set it up.
But if you target like a sniper, you’re gonna get more business. I Promise you that’s a 100% guarantee from me. You call me up any day and say, dude, we segmented like an mrfer and look at, we’ve got nothing. We got bupkis.
It’s not gonna happen. Privacy is becoming more and more of a concern. They always say this every single year.
I kind of feel like that’s not true. I kind of feel like with all the GDPR stuff and the CCPA people are just, yeah, just give me the cookies. I want to move on.
Excuse my language. Just ah, get out of my way, get out of I. Whatever. I don’t know anybody who goes through and does the. Or choose your preferences manually.
I’ve never. Because you’re there and you’re there for a reason. You want to go delight customers with things like discounts for their birthday and just know them. The more you know.
I’m going to tell you a great story. I was working with a large company, you might have heard of them, they’re called General Electric ge. I was actually working with them through a third party, but the story is the same no matter how you cut it. GE had gone to a bunch for one of their products, had gone to a bunch of trade shows and collected names. This is early on in email marketing and the Can Spam act had just come up and they did.
They hadn’t gotten a quote unquote opt in form from the people that they collected email addresses from names and email addresses. So we’re, I don’t know, we’re talking maybe 2005, 2006, something like that. And whenever this was all becoming a thing, that’s when it was. So forgive my, my memory for being exact, they had all these lists, all these names, all these people. But they did two things wrong.
They didn’t get the opt ins and they had all the spreadsheets but you couldn’t discern which trade show each spreadsheet was from. So they didn’t, they weren’t necessarily positive which part of this product people were interested in. So we took a chance, we helped them put all this together so that they could reach out to those people very gently and say, hey, we gathered your information. We’d like to know a little bit more if you’re interested in these things.
Let us know which of these things you’re interested in. And, and if you never want to hear from us again, don’t you just leave this email. We’ll never talk to you, we’ll never bother you again. So it actually went through and it asked people you Know what of our product are you interested in? Which basically told them which trade show they were at, but it didn’t matter which trade show they were at because they really only wanted to know the parts of the product they were interested in.
And by doing that, you’re going to get, you know, special offers and communications from us and you’re basically opting in by doing this. They had an 80% return on that, meaning that only 20% didn’t do anything with the email. Those, a bunch of those probably weren’t even good email addresses or were just their spam emails where they fill it out and they, they never even look.
Everybody else gave them more information. And if you do these things over time, hey, person on my list, here’s a great offer.
If you would like more offers like this, why don’t you let me know other things you’re interested in or let me know what’s important to you or what have you. They just, I mean, it takes them two seconds and boy, you got another data point. You got another reason to segment. It’s an amazing technique, an amazing way to communicate. Once you can get super personal and it feels like it’s an email.
Yeah. How do you know that that interests me? Because you told me and it becomes a relationship. Oh yeah, these are the guys that give me that information.
I love that information. If you’re always being helpful, you will never be spamming. I say that again. If you’re always being helpful, you’ll never be spamming. And I mean that with anything.
Like with ads, with email, which is where we always think of spam. If you’re being helpful, it changes everything. If you’re on social media right now and you’re saying, what am I going to post about today? You’re not being helpful. I’m just saying.
Now let’s get into the practical stuff, the stuff you should be doing anyway and the old school stuff, the stuff you don’t love, the stuff some people are just effing ignoring. And if you’re not thinking about your website, where like 90% of people are going to go to find out if you’re credible or not. And if you don’t have a website, you’re not credible and you’re not getting business.
Have a website and you look like crap, you’re not getting business. If you do have a website and you look good, you’re getting business.
And if your website is done well and is set up to promote selling and to inspire transactions, you’re winning the game. If your website’s not doing that or you’re not sure your website’s doing that, you need to focus that in 2025 immediately. Social media domination Consistently be posting valuable content in the next episode, we’re going to talk about how to always do that.
Every single time you post, you’ll have a reason and it’ll be helpful and you are going to start winning the social media game. I promise you.
This process. This is a process I use for my customers all the time. Some of them, I teach it to them because that’s the relationship that we have. But I have never told this process to anybody before.
So with this next episode, you’re going to learn a process that none of your competitors will have unless they listen. Customer service. We’re going to focus on customer service in 2025. Customer service sucks today. And if you’re good at it, you get the raving fans.
You got to do. You got to play the SEO game in 2025 if you haven’t been concentrating on it. And by the way, this process next week is going to put all of this together. So you’re only doing one thing and all of this will happen. That’s how good next next episode is.
Email marketing. If you’re not focusing on email marketing in some way, shape or form, you, my friend, are an idiot. It is the highest return on investment in, dare I say, all of marketing.
Definitely the biggest return on investment in all of digital marketing. Let me repeat that. Email marketing is the highest return on investment. Has the highest return on investment. Any other practice in digital marketing by a lot. 10 times, basically.
Anything else? Email marketing. Who does that? 10 times the ROI of any other marketing practice in digital. What I’m going to tell you next time is going to be how to pull all this together with a single effort. All right?
So I know it’s big, it’s exciting. You, you’re like, oh, I can’t wait till 2025. I. And I’m kind of half kidding you when I say that.
But seriously, next, the next episode, it’s kind of me giving away the secret sauce. All right, so let’s just wrap this thing up. Taking enough of your time for one week before Christmas and not even a week before Christmas and a little over a week before the new year. There will be no addition next, no episode next week.
So let’s just wrap this thing up by saying marketing Lance. The marketing landscape in 2025 belongs to the bold, belongs to the smart, belongs to the adaptable. It belongs to the action takers, the people who embrace AI or at least want to know enough about it to make it worth their while. It belongs to the storytellers. It belongs to the people who make working with them a personalized experience.
It belongs to the people who are good at the fundamentals. Geez, I got a stuffed up nose and I apologize. It’s hard for me to say that word fundamentals. I don’t know why that’s.
I don’t know why a stuffed up nose makes that word hard, but it does. By taking action right now, you SMB leaders are gonna experience unprecedented growth. If you can keep this all in front of you, which I’m going to teach you how to do next time, 2025 is going to be a hell of a year. All right, before you go, don’t forget to subscribe to Totally Hyped. Tell a friend. Get them to subscribe.
And if you’re ready to level up your content marketing game, check out compelcontent.com check out our friends at puremarketingconsultation.com give them a call, drop them a line, and start improving your business right away. It’ll happen, I promise. As always, you can feel free to reach out to me [email protected] or you can call 877-477-1452.
[25:25] Speaker #1: This has been Totally Hyped. For more information about this episode and to find supporting resources including cited content, links, downloads and go to totally hyped.com Totally Hyped is brought to you by Pure Marketing Consultation, the most cost effective way to get the results you want.
Learn [email protected] on the next episode of.
[25:53] Speaker #2: Totally Hyped, I’ll detail the single most valuable marketing trick I have Learned in over 28 years of doing this. It’s a process for marketing efficiency and effectiveness like none other, and it’s the only place you’ll ever hear about it here on Totally Hyped. Ch.
