Lessons - Marketing Lessons Learnt From Presidential Campaigns | Phillip Stutts - CEO of Win BIG Media

In this lessons episode, you'll learn how to take a data-driven platform-agnostic approach to marketing that eliminates inefficiencies and maximizes ROI. Discover how to focus on what resonates with your audience, test creative ideas effectively, and build a loyal customer base. You'll also gain insights on applying political campaign strategies to consumer marketing for impactful results. I'm just going to challenge you on one more point with that. So when your platform ragnostic logically you go into the data and you figure out what works like it just makes a lot of sense and I know a lot of marketing agencies don't do that because they have their specialists in each platform right and that's what they sort of push it towards. But the reason they do that is because it's hard to have the best practices across every platform. So how do you have that? You say you want to go into Pinterest. You just hire the best in every platform. Are you on TikTok YouTube ads, Facebook, all that? Or is it? Yeah. We have an internal team that knows how to focus on those platforms. Now, if the client, like it's a Fortune 200 client and they want to get, you know, they want to, you know, they want to spend a lot of money onto millions. Yeah. Then, yeah, I come, I have deals with almost, you know, a thousand different marketing agencies that specifically focus on certain platforms and we can partner with them on those. But yeah, that's how we would look at it. You know, like, here's an example when I'm up. We worked with a background check company. They're one of the top in America and they came to us and they said, hey, we want you guys to do your marketing, but we've had this marketing agency for three years. We just got rid of them. We want you to look at all of our data. They work with like the big fast food chains because there's such a crazy labor turnover. They have to do background checks on these people. And so they said, and we, one of the things we also do is we audit everything they've ever, they do in their entire marketing systems, figure out what's working and what's not like where their inefficiencies are. And one of the things we found with them was that Google had changed some rules on them about three years ago on how keywords and Google ads were running and their marketing agency did it know that the rules had changed and neither did the company's internal marketing team. And when we looked at them, we found out they were spending $15,000 a month to bid against their own keywords. They were bidding up, they were bidding on multiple keywords, but they were bidding against each other. And they didn't know that they were doing that. And they've been doing it for three years. It's a lot of money, a lot of money. Right. And so what I'm what I focus on first is eliminating the dumbtacks that businesses are paying in marketing by figuring out how the efficiencies work better. And then we go in and look at the data and figure out first of all what platforms you want to be on should be on how you should be allocating your budgets more efficiently like a money ball approach. So I'm not saying you shouldn't spend money on Facebook if you're that that chair company I was telling you about. I'm saying how much of your allocation of your budget should it be? Right. And then the last part is the messaging in the creative. You better in a you know, Forbes has this stat out right now. We are seeing up to 10,000 ads a day online and offline. 10,000 ads a day online and offline per day each person. So are you breaking through the clutter with your ads? Or are you one of 10,000 that no one's paying attention to? And so you use the data to find out what is going to ring the bell of that customer. And then you make creative and messaging that makes them pop through the screen or the page or whatever it is to say what is that? And they want to know more and they want to click through. And that's the key the whole thing, man. Do you do you pull over any learnings from when you market? Like I know a very data driven approach is probably very important obviously in political marketing. But are there any other key lessons that you've found after years in political marketing that you can pull into consumer marketing, marketing, B2B, B2C that are like hyper relevant that the average marketer may not think of? Well, so I have this five step we call the undefeated marketing system, right? It's the name of the book too. But yes, so two things that really stand out for me. When the politician comes to me and says, Hey, I want to run for the United States Senate and the state of Florida. The first thing I do is I say, Hey, I sit down and say, what do you want to let's just say, you know, she sits down and I say, what do you what do you believe in? What do you want to run on? And inevitably the egotistical politician will give you like 25 things, right? And you're like, all right, no one wants to play five things, but I appreciate that. But here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go and survey and it's, by the way, much more complicated than this, but for the brevity of this podcast, I'm going to go survey these customer, sorry, these voters in the state. And I'm going to figure out of the 25 policy issues you think are the most important. I'm going to figure out for them, what's the top one or two? When I say one or two, I mean, it will get you to election victory if you run on those two issues. Now, for the other 23 issues, probably not going to talk about a much, but for those one or two, that's all we're going to focus on because it's an alignment between the politician believes them in the voter. And we know that those issues are so important to that voter that they would vote for an unknown or even an unsavory candidate. And so the point I'm trying to make is I'm obsessed. I love the politician, but I'm obsessed with the voter. And the translation is, I love businesses and I love business owners. I'm one of them, but I'm obsessed with the customer or the client obsessed. I'm their advocate for that company that hires me. And that's how I look at it. And that's for me. I've always thought that. And I think that's what makes us a lot different than most marketing agencies. The other, it's sound like most marketing agencies do what I'm about to say, but they do it wrong. And that is testing messages. So all marketing agencies will tell you, Sky, they're like, hey, we test messages. Yeah, we test that. But they're typically making those up in a brainstorm session around a conference room table. Hey, let's say this. Let's say these 10 things. Let's go test it. I'm only pulling the messages out of the data. And then I'm going to test those to see which one rises. We already know that 10 messages from the data will work, but which one rises to the top. So let me give you an example. So please know the story about I got a disclaimer. The disclaimer is this. I am not here to talk about left or right. I'm not here to talk about Democrats or Republicans or woke cancel culture or Trump like and Trump in the sense of campaigns and stuff like that. All right. But I'm going to use an example of what the Trump campaign did in 2020 2016. That was brilliant. They followed this undefeated marketing system because all politicians follow it. And when they got to the testing phase, they tested what they found out the data. And they would they would they would test one message 162 different ways. 162 different versions of one message. They'd have a green background or red background. They'd have a man in the ad of women in the ad. They'd have different font sizes. They'd have fonts in the right corner, the left corner. They did 162 different versions. And ultimately they knew the message would work. They just didn't know which how to optimize that message the best. And so they went out and ultimately they found eight or nine messages that blew through the roof and they had no idea why. But before they went out and spent a lot of money on their marketing dollars to win over voters, they now know these eight or nine different ad concepts are going to work and go blow through the roof. Instead of throwing all 162 up or using one of those ads that wouldn't have worked as best, they optimized based on data. They optimized tested and put it out there. So the difference in what translates is that we do testing based on what the data tells us, not arbitrary brainstorm sessions around a conference or table, which is what 99% of a lot of marketers do. And what's the easiest way to test? So is it talking to customers, jumping on calls? Is it running different creatives on different platforms? What's your record? Running creatives on different platforms. That's the best. Low cost. Yeah. The other part of this is in politics, not everybody's a self-funding candidate. Like people most candidates started zero. And so we do low cost testing. Usually motion graphic of banner because if you're if you click through a banner, that means that message is really going to work. Like nobody clicks through banners, right? It's that so yeah. So if you do low cost banner ads, it don't cost much money. You can do a lot of them really cheap and you can ultimately find what messages are going to click through because again, they're clicking through a banner. That message is we're going to resonate and you know it. One of the one of the themes in your book or one of the things that sort of I pulled out was the like your marketing agency you're working with should be working towards working themselves out of a job at some point. But what does that actually mean? Does that mean that you are actually trying to when you work with companies? Are you trying to eventually exit and let them run on their own? Or is it just that's the mindset you have to have? Yeah, it's a mindset. It's like do you ever really think you're going to retire at 65? Like, you know, but you know, the mindset is hey, you know, you're working towards an exit. But does it mean you're ever going to stop? Right? So what I mean by that is your intention should be to create a loyal fan base, a loyal customer base. You should do so much for them and provide so much value. It's over and over and over again that they become so loyal to you that they won't work with anybody else and or buy products from anybody else. And like an example of that is Yeti. You got them right there. Yeti, Rick and Cooler's people over. Cooler's not the mic. Sorry. No, no, I got a Yeti mic right now. But no, I don't have a blue mic. But anyway, Yeti, Cooler's people put their stupid logo on a hat and wear it proudly. They put the bumper stickers on cars. I mean, I'm drinking out of a, out of a Yeti right now. I mean, people are obsessed with this company, right? Does it mean Yeti doesn't market anymore? No. But they, they make so much damn money because of their loyal customer base. Like here's another one. No one has ever gotten a tattoo in their arm of a Honda motorcycle. But I have of a Harley, right? And shouldn't that be the aspirational way you look at your marketing? Like that's my whole point. It's aspirational to what you're trying to achieve. Because you're going to say you're going to make 10 times more money if you have that kind of loyal customer base or client base. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one. you