Lessons - Marketing a Presidential Campaign | Andrew Frawley, Presidential Candidate CMO

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. What is one marketing lesson in sight that transcends industry? Hmm. That transcends industry. Well, or product or product. Yeah, I think the one I said transcends industry for sure. The product focus, so having an incredible product. Yeah, I think, I mean, I just think that's like the... What about community? Step one. That's what I wanted to unpack, because you did it well. Yeah, I mean, I definitely think community transcends industry. I mean, I really think everything I had said about how we built our community is pretty much what other people should be doing. To me, I say this to friends, I think marketing today is harder than it has literally ever been, because I have the little... So this is the way I look at it. There's... You essentially have like four ways, well, technically there's five. Well, here's the biggest insight that I gained from the campaign. And if you're designing your marketing plan, like the first question to ask yourself is like, do I have credibility or like clout or some sort of influence in this industry? And pretty much for everyone, the answer is no. Whether you're young now or Joe Biden or, I don't know, Bobby Hundreds, that's a random streetwear artist. But like those people have credibility, like they already have sort of like a reputation of brand. So they can cross industries, they can jump into the more traditional social channels and marketing channels and actually have success. Like Bobby Hundreds probably actually grows his Instagram on Instagram, because he's big enough that people share stuff, he gets added to, you know, the Discover page. You know, things like that happen when you're big. When you're small and have essentially no credibility, you have to find a way to get credibility. That retrospectively, to me, was like the central task that we were trying to figure out on the campaign. And one of those ways to get credibility is having a community. And for us on the campaign, we had obviously no credibility, yeah, it was like had literally nothing. I mean, just like not even super rich, like just a guy. And so your task to grow becomes very challenging. You pretty much have four marketing channels, four options. So you have stunts. Well actually, let's start with the number one. We have legacy media, which is like New York Times, you know, Washington Post, Fox News. If you have no credibility, though, like, you're probably not getting on there to be get with. Yang got on there a few times early on in like 2018. And I swear to you like five people on our website. I mean, he would go on Fox News live with Stuart Varney, you know, 10 people on our website. I mean, really when you don't matter, it's just no one cares. They're like, oh, who's that people don't even look up at the TV. So your second option of stunts, which is, you know, what it sounds like, it's flapping your hands and the air. It's doing crazy things. And ultimately, I realized they don't really help or matter, you know, Andrew Yang at the peak of his hype goes on to the debate stage in July 2019. And he says, I'm giving away, you know, or maybe a September, whatever. I'm giving away $120,000 to 10 Americans each person gets $1,000 a month or whatever the numbers are right. He said, he's given away a bunch of money to 10 Americans. Our website blew up. And we had a hundred, God, what was it, 150,000 people on our website at one time. We have like a million signups on our website in 24 hours. And I swear to you like 95% of those people unsubscribed in like a week. I mean, it was like no hesitation. So I learned a lot about stunts. We were truly the stunt campaign, like trust me, like we did all the stunts, just Google Andrew Yang stunts. I'm sure you'll find a list somewhere. They really didn't help, like they just don't. I mean, it seems like it's going to be good, but it just doesn't, unless you can truly find a way to make it last long, it really was just up and down and it was like a total waste of effort. Your third option is paid ads, which again, if you don't have credibility, you really probably don't even have money to begin with, because usually if you have money, that's unfortunately just like inherently credibility. But you know, the same thing with us, 2018, what are you going to do, what are your Facebook ads going to do for $2,000 a month running for president? You need to go from, you know, I used to do the math. Like we had to, we had to like 100,000 X, you know, ads, like paid ads are generally a linear group. You're not going to find some magical exponential in there. So that's not your channel. So the last channel that you really have is alternative media. And the challenge is that alternative media is saturated. Like it's alternative, but Gary Vaynerchuk has basically been screening for long enough that alternative media is the way that even new media just gets blown up immediately. I mean, I think the best example of this is clubhouse, whatever it became hype, you know, and march or whatever. I mean, that thing in like two weeks just became a self-promotional hellhole. I mean, you couldn't get on there without someone sounding like, you know, they were, you know, on SNL, I mean, it was like, are you serious? I mean, you get into a clubhouse and they're like, I mean, it was just self-promotion everywhere. And then everyone hated it immediately and now their users are down 90%. So I tell you, I'm like, man, alternative media is just the hardest or marketing right now is harder than ever. If I were to be like launching a venture, I mean, you still have to do alternative media. That's your best shot. Like even podcasts, I mean, you know, you have to have some sort of credibility to even get on anything. I mean, like, you're not getting on Sam Harris without Andrew Yang writing a whole book published by a top four publishing house, you know, you're not getting, so it's like D's like, even that's tough. Even I'm on here because I built, you know, something. So it's like, yeah, yeah, even podcasts, pretty high wall. So, yeah, if I were launching, I mean, I'd be on like TikTok, I'd be exploiting growth and stuff like that. But I think depending on your business, you could even try like older things like, like my girlfriend's launching a business or has been working on a business and I've even told her to do like flyers, like she's doing them. It's sort of like a spiritual therapy sort of thing and she lives in Mexico and applied alcohol. And if anyone knows that, it's right next to Tulum, very hit place, very transient. And so I said, honestly, like, go put up flyers and like yoga studios. And she did that. And she's had like moderate success, I mean, very low cost, you know, really targeted. So very different than what people are very different than being, you know, what people are used to when they're consuming content and being inundated on social and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, the, the, the whole point of marketing is to, you know, stand out effectively, well, the whole point of marketing is to sell your product. But really, how you do that is to just sort of like stand out in some sort of way. And sometimes that's just, you know, going back through the whole cycle of things that sell and like maybe it's doing a traditional method in a different way. But if everyone's doing something like you should probably still be there, like she's on TikTok has great success on TikTok, but, you know, it's like, it's not a zero sum game with marketing. It's actually just, it's infinite. You could do it all and just burn all of your life balance. Just, just have no life. Just do marketing all day long. It's a joke. I wouldn't encourage that. But you can, you can, you can, you definitely, I think that the most important takeaway is like if you are trying to alternative media, like you have to test to figure out like what works, what doesn't and then double down on what's working and just exploit that medium as much as possible. Yeah. I mean, without a doubt, the testing is like all marketing principles that anyone's read about, like, you know, those are bundled into this recommendation as a default.