How We're Pivoting Our Marketing: Behind the Scenes
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If you're like many marketers, last year was very challenging. But this year doesn't have to be that way. Napoleon Hill said the starting point of all achievement is desire.

If you want to improve your know-how, your results, and your career prospects, then Social Media Marketing World is your solution. It's the place where smart marketers go to get new ideas and strategies that actually work. Get your tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info and secure your future. I hope to see you there.

Last Thursday, I wrote the following. It hit me while I was reviewing our numbers yesterday. Something fundamental has changed in our industry. For 12 years, marketers would flock to Social Media Marketing World, our signature conference, and the tried and true marketing playbook that we've always used year after year just worked.

But this year, it feels different. The algorithms have turned against us. Our emails are getting buried in spam folders and all sorts of other challenges. Our social posts aren't reaching the same people that they used to reach. And honestly, it's keeping me up at night, dot, dot, dot, dot, as I went on to write. And I went on to reveal how we as a company have had to pivot.

And we're in the middle of experimenting with a whole bunch of things right now. And on those posts that I published recently, I got hundreds of comments and private messages from people across all the social platforms saying, Hey, I'm feeling the same thing. And, and I'm having the same exact struggles and I don't know how to deal with this. And, you know, you're not alone. I'm not alone. You're that watching or listening. This is not alone. And,

And that's why I decided today was going to be a great day for us to do a special behind the scenes episode. And I'm going to be joined by Dan Sanchez. If you don't know who Dan is, he's our senior AI marketing strategist here at Social Media Examiner. And if you don't know me, I am the founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner. Together,

We'll explain the challenges of marketing in 2025, why we believe they're happening, and what we're doing about it here at Social Media Examiner. Dan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Thanks for having me on. Super excited to have you here, Dan. So let's explore some of the big issues that are going on in marketing. Dan, take it away.

It's been crazy to hear the feedback from that post that you posted because I can sympathize with a lot of them. I've been in the game since about 2010, kind of when social media was starting to pick up steam. And I was that 22-year-old kid that's like, yes, I'm going to make a career out of this. I'm going to master digital marketing, right? Because back then, traditional marketing was still the primary thing. And the only people doing digital were bloggers and internet marketers,

It was kind of a niche thing and it paid off. I remember mastering channel by channel. You slowly worked it, you know, and get Google ads and you get Facebook ads. You start the blogging thing and the SEO and social media podcasting, YouTube, the works. And I just went channel by channel systematically trying to learn as much as I could.

But it has been shifting the last couple of years, especially now. You can feel it. All the old playbooks, they're just not hitting as hard as they used to. Even your best tactics, you're pulling them out of your pocket like, this is going to work. And you're like, oh, it did something, but...

Not quite as much as it used to, not as much as we were hoping for to make up the difference of where we want to be. And reading all the comments in there, I could feel kind of like the similar feeling of like, oh, like what's going on with marketing? And so I've identified like four major things that are happening right now. That's kind of causing that feeling of like, what's going on? Things are changing and what's coming next. But the things that are changing is when feeds are dominated by interest based content.

content or the interest graph, they call it versus the social graph is what a lot of these social feeds used to be based on. Used to be able to just be followed and liked and maybe subscribed to by fans, customers, or even friends and family. And you had a reasonable expectation that if you posted, especially in 2010, you'd reach all of them. And then it started getting harder to reach some of them because they started applying the algorithm to it, right? So we weren't reaching 80% of our audience. We were reaching, you know,

10, maybe 15%, down to 5%. But now we're lucky to reach even that because the interest-based graph is much different. It's serving it up to all kinds of people, even people that have never seen you before based on what the algorithm knows they're interested in. And TikTok had a lot to do with this, but it's kind of seeped its way into every platform now. Maybe minus LinkedIn is still kind of on that social graph, but it makes it hard to stand out. And the work you can put into building a following

doesn't amount to much when you're only as good as your last post that just makes it hard to stand out these days for marketers the second thing that I've seen a lot of is just that short form videos become so prevalent and it's not like videos new and short form because of TikTok's become a big deal for the last couple of years it's but if you've made some short form videos it

takes time. Even making a good 60 second reel or TikTok video takes me a few hours sometimes. You're like, wow, like it's a lot of time to put into these short videos that are here today, gone tomorrow, but we've been beating the drum on it. I mean, we've been beating the video drum for 10, 15 years now, right? It's been a big thing. In the last five years, we've been beating the drum on shorts. So a lot of people are doing shorts.

It's competitive. You can't just put a little clip from a podcast out there and hope that it's gonna perform well. You gotta actually like roll up your sleeves and put some creative energy into it. So that's hard. The third thing I see going on

Is that the algorithms then bearing anything you do that's like promotional? So you do all this great top of the funnel work. You're putting out the shorts, you're entertaining, you're engaging, you're nurturing, you're, you're educating your client base. And then you're like, finally, I've done a hundred of those. Now I'm going to put out one promotion and ask people to join my newsletter or, you know, buy my product. And Al goes like, no, put it down. Got a link in it. No go. Yeah.

makes it hard to make all the work worth it of all the content marketing we were due on places like social. And then the fourth one I see is just SEO has been shifting a lot this year, right? And I think the writing on the wall is kind of on that. And it's kind of early now, but that's another big shift from

from digital marketers is that the SEO game is changing a little bit where AI is kind of eating away at that to where most people who are planning on writing a lot of blog posts to rank are like, I don't know if that channel's got a bright future ahead of it. So now I'm hedging on that one too, which kind of leaves you in digital marketing. I mean, like, well, like,

what's, what's left, like what channels are, are prone for growth and are, are working and are tried and true and have something that we can really really lean on, not just for the short term, but for the longterm. I mean, email is one that I kind of come back to, but then we have some, some news on what happened to us with the email, right? Yeah. And I just want to double down on some of the things that you've said, Dan, um,

AI, as everybody knows, is only getting smarter, right? And Zuckerberg and company have been using AI algorithms for years to kind of determine what our interests are and to determine whether or not our content is or is not relevant.

And they're only getting smarter and they're only getting better. And Dan and I know this because we have a show. We both have shows dedicated to AI and we're very focused on this. So that is part of what's at play here is that like, yes, a lot of these things Dan's talked about short form video has been around for years, right? Algorithms have been around for years. SEO challenges have been around for years. But the new layer on top of all of this is.

is really that these AI systems are getting incrementally smarter, incrementally wiser, and many marketers try to game those systems, and they begin to realize that they cannot game those systems because those systems are only getting smarter, and it's kind of a losing battle. So it does make it a real challenge, and I agree with everything that you said. Now double down on this or layer into this the email challenge.

Um, many people here listening or watching know how important it is to own your customer base, right? We talk about how we're playing on rented land, which is okay when we're on the social platforms and we have to play by the rules.

But when we own the email addresses, that has always been the holy grail, right? Because the hypothesis is that we can communicate with our prospects, customers list as often as we want. That's the hypothesis at least, but the reality is something completely different. And in order for people to wrap their heads around this, I need to tell everyone a story right around

a week before Thanksgiving, something happened. Something happened with both Google and with Microsoft. And if you've not been paying attention to what's been happening in the email marketing world in the last year, there's been a lot of changes in the last year where the email systems have gotten really strict on the number of negative reports that people have. You could get kind of like blackmailed or not blacklisted is probably the better word. And right around Thanksgiving,

And we send millions of emails a week, everybody. So we understand this stuff intimately. We discovered to our great shock and surprise that we had a perfect sender score with Google and with Microsoft like forever. And then literally overnight, it went to the worst possible score. And we have been stuck in Microsoft jail, literally as I'm recording this in the end of January for more than two and a half months.

And what this means is that everyone who is on our list that is a decent sized business and they're using Microsoft products, which a lot of bigger businesses use Outlook and a lot of individuals use Microsoft products as well. Hotmail, Outlook, none of these people are receiving our emails.

And when I say they're not receiving our emails, they're not only not receiving our promotional emails, they're not receiving our newsletter emails. They're not receiving our transactional emails. Here's your receipt. We have vendors that are not receiving emails from our staff.

This is a serious problem. So that's been going on. And I've hired two different deliverability experts and they said, this is not just your problem. This is a big problem. Layer into this Google. Google also is a major player. Like the majority of our list is on Google of some sort. And we have not been able to get out of the promo tab for months. And we've not been in the promo tab for years.

And even though, and I know maybe we have some deliverability experts here, trust me, like we have a flawless record according to all the consultants that we've hired. But the challenge that we're facing right now is now some of our best prospects and customers, which are the medium and larger businesses, simply we are invisible to them, right? So that's a really big problem. That's a huge problem, right? Because what it's meant is that our biggest challenge

um, base, if you will, all these social audiences that we've been developing relationships with for years and this massive email list of hundreds of thousands of people, they're simply not seeing,

what we're sending them anymore. They're not seeing our promos for social media marketing. Well, they're not seeing our newsletters. They're not seeing everything. And that's a serious problem. And as some of you that are listening today, you might be like, holy crap, maybe that explains why my revenue is down. Maybe that explains why I've been having some of these problems. So this has been something that at Social Media Examiner, we became aware of

just before Christmas, basically. So it was about a month into this that all of a sudden we started connecting the dots together. So there is a series of things that we ended up doing. And what I'm going to share with you all today is at least eight things that we have done. And there's actually more than eight, okay? But the very first thing that we did was it became apparent to me that we needed to hire someone in-house to do what we are weak at.

We are like the cobbler's children, you know, even though we bring some of the best people in the world on these various shows to talk about how to do marketing.

We don't really excel at social marketing. So I went out and I found someone who does, and his name is Dan. And Dan Sanchez, we hired in early December. And what's great about Dan is he is a creator. He's a creator who understands how to create short-form media, long-form media, audio, video. So this was a strategic hire that we made in the early parts of December to

And in addition to being a creator, Dan is part of our marketing team. He's helping our marketing team employ AI to help streamline the marketing efforts that we're doing at Social Media Examiner. And it was a really great hire. And we're going to talk about what Dan is doing for us in just a little bit. But Dan's been with us for pretty much about two months, and it's been really awesome. The second thing that we did was,

was it became very apparent to me that like we needed to start spending money on ads. Like so many marketers who are listening right now, we have been an organic first marketing company. It's not like we haven't done ads. We've done ads in the past, but we haven't really done ads at the level of what we probably should be doing ads. And here's kind of how it went through my brain. Holy cow, we can't get through to the people that are on our list.

Whoa, what am I going to do? Whoa, okay, I think I know what I need to do. I need to advertise to those people across Facebook and Instagram because I know those are the platforms that they're most active on. So I went out and I hired Emily Hirsch.

And if you've been a regular listener to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, you know that she was recently on this show. You also might know if you're going to Social Media Marketing World this year that she's speaking on paid acquisition. So I reached out to Emily just before the holidays. We got on a phone call and I said, hey, I think I need to work with you. So here's my dilemma. What do you think?

And she has worked with people that many people in this audience are familiar with, Amy Porterfield, Rachel Hollis, Mel Robbins, and a lot of other creators. And she said, well, this should be something that should work because you already have a really big audience. We can identify and address those audiences. And there's a really good chance that they've not seen your advertising for social media marketing world. So I allocated a $10,000 budget a month

to literally doing these ads and the creatives that were doing these ads are all over the place. Some of them are videos of me. Some of them are original content that's being created. And you probably have seen some of these ads if you are either on our list or are actively amongst the community, because that's who we're targeting right now. And Dan, any thoughts on that as we transition into what you've been doing? I mean, what's your thoughts on paid media?

I'm a huge fan of paid media as much as I love organic. And I love, I mean, earned media is probably my favorite of all time. I'm actually not very good at great getting earned. I generally just try to double down on owned. We have been earned media like forever, you know? Yeah. But paid media is fantastic because it's fast. You can get up and running and in front of people really quickly. And it's so flexible on how you can target it, how you can split test it and all the things you can do with it. So I'm a huge fan of paid media. I've spent a lot of money on it.

it over time. I found that it's gotten harder over time, kind of like the other channels, like Facebook ads used to be a candy land of targeting options, the way you could overlap audience and all that kind of stuff. And they've kind of pulled back some of that with privacy concerns, understandable. And because it was so good, it's gotten a little more crowded. So it's not quite as effective, a little bit more expensive. But-

But paid media will never go away. It'll always be one of the three big avenues that we have as marketers in order to get in front of the audience, you know, paid, owned, earned.

earned. Those are the three staples. And I think balancing all three of them as well as we can is probably the best way to, to leverage, leverage people's time and our budget. Yeah. Now that you say that I realized, uh, owned media is where our strength is rather than earned media. The, um, in addition, just in case someone's curious, we have been doing Google ads, uh, and we always have done that.

for a very long time. So really what we're focusing on today is all the things that we decided to do that we've historically not done. So Dan, let's transition over to you. Why don't you share some of the things that you've been doing for us? So I was excited to come work here because you guys have a huge audience, big following on all the different social platforms. I mean, you've been steady at this for well over a decade now and there's an audience here. So I'm like, oh, this is exciting. We're not starting from scratch here.

So, but it is like some of the problems that I mentioned before, it is harder to get attention, especially, and it can be, it can be a different kind of challenge working with an audience that's been collected over time because a lot of those accounts are inactive. A lot of those accounts are people that were once subscribed and are still technically subscribed, but they haven't paid attention in a long time. So the algo hasn't fed them something in a while. It's hard to reactivate them. So I have to come up with some creative ideas in order to start getting reach again, to start reactivating old, the lapsed audience.

And one of the big, big ideas that I'm bringing to the table is an idea I call premise-based content. I've heard some creators call it content series or series-based content. But it's this idea that when you're coming to social media and creating new content, you don't want to start from scratch with every single post because it's creatively, it's just hard to always be staring at a blank screen and be like, dang, what are we going to do today? Even batching, it can be hard if you have to come up with 10 bangers that are all totally original, totally unique. Yeah.

Like, so there's this idea going around that if you can just, instead of just doing tips and tricks, because that's overplayed, everyone's like, everybody's sick of tips and tricks. Everyone's been publishing that for well over a decade now. But if you can do it and give it a creative twist that makes it a little bit more interesting or adds a unique gimmick to it,

it to make it a little bit more entertaining even, all of a sudden you're back in. You think of like a good example of that one is the Hot Ones interview show where Sean is interviewing celebrities, right? Like everybody interviews celebrities around the late night shows and the talk shows, like what's different about it? But in that show, they're eating spicy chicken wings.

Does that have to do with any of the celebrities? Not really. But is it interesting to watch Tom Holland like burning while he's like eating something? Yeah, it's really interesting. That's why that show does so well because they took a gimmick premise and applied it to a normal format of a talk show in order to make an interesting series.

Now, the cool thing about series two is you can have multiple series within a single channel, hot ones even. That's not even the channel name. That's just the series within the channel. Now we feast, right, is the name of the channel. And that just happens to be the most popular series. They have many other types of content in there. But we can do that same thing for our channels. It doesn't have to be as produced as hot ones or you don't have to be discovery channel and have a bunch of TV series within a Facebook feed.

But you can do some short form video and have a unique twist to it that makes it interesting. And it could have nothing. It doesn't even have to necessarily be even related to what you do, though it can. There's a bunch of different ways to set up premises that I won't dive into here. Instead, I'd rather show you an example of one of the ones that we're cooking up and have been posting for a few weeks now for Social Media Examiner.

We have a premise short form video series called dollar marketer. And it's a challenge premise where I, as the person recording the videos am tasked with trying to create a viral social media post for a dollar. And I even flashed the dollar in front of the microphone and the camera for the visual effect.

And I try to make that the hook with every single show where it's like, can we make a social media post to market the world's largest social media conference? Because that's our goal, right? We want to make up for email and get more registrations and tickets for the social media world conference. And that's my goal with every single video is how do I create a viral social media post for the budget of a dollar, right? Challenge post. You can go big with it or go low. I like low because, well, it costs less. Yeah.

So give us an example of how you did that. Like give us an example of one of the things you've done. So one that I did recently was with a pack of googly eyes because you can buy a pack of googly eyes from your local Dollar General for a buck. You know, all the little circles with the little eyes bouncing around in them as they move. And so the video starts off with, can I use a dollar pack of googly eyes and I hold them up to market the world's largest social media conference?

Let's find out. I then cut to like a montage where I whip pan just my iPhone camera from object to object around my office and then around my house as I'm sticking googly eyes on them in different ways and positions. They're like my Apple mouse and my microphone and the light switch and even on the mirror with me panning to it. Then my daughter and then some toys and then it's just kind of a funny, humorous montage. And then I finally pan to my computer screen where I have two googly eyes stuck to it.

And behind it is the Social Media Marketing World Conference speakers page where I'm scrolling through and you can see the speakers line up with the googly eyes. And I pause as each speaker tries on the googly eyes as I'm just scrolling up recording it with my phone. But it made it for a social post. And that's the kind of the fun thing about this series is I ended up getting two posts, the making of and then the post itself. But the meme that I created out of that post of me just scrolling up through the googly eyes is like who wore it best.

And then it's a promotion for social media marketing world and the speakers, right? As I'm scrolling through Mari Smith and then Sean Cannell and then Michael Stelzner with the googly eyes, right? It's kind of a funny post, yet it's promotional. That's what I like about this series is it's a hard, pretty hard sell for social media marketing world, but in a way that's

and kind of interesting and kind of like, how can you do it for a dollar? I wonder what else he's done for a dollar. I always end the series too with a little funny kicker, usually using one of my kids doing something silly or my toddler doing some saying something funny in order to reward people for sticking all the way through. And I do all this and this is like a 60 second video. So it

It's a heavy lift because it takes me about four hours to record and edit this type of video. But again, I get two posts out of it, so it's not bad. But that's an example of like a series that now I don't have to repeat. I don't have to come up with a unique idea. I could be like, huh, what can I do with the dollar this time? What can I do with the dollar this time? What else can I buy a dollar general? Can I pay my kid a dollar to do something funny in front of the camera? And then I turn that into a viral post. I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. And I make a series that people might want to come back to. It is now more bingeable, bingeable.

bingeable than, than just one offs. Nice. So,

Another example of this that is in a short form video, because you could do this with all kinds of formats, is with memes. Made a whole series called Meaningful Marketing. Because who doesn't love a meme, right? We love memes because they're humorous. It usually has some like real good punch of truth behind it. Sometimes painfully, right? Especially like your marketing memes, you're like, oh, bosses do do that, don't they? Oh my gosh, right? And we all commiserate over the thing, like make the logo bigger. Again, right?

But instead of just doing a meme, because anybody can just like repost a meme or share something like that, we're coming up with original memes. And then we're asking a question around it and posting a little mini post, not quite a blog post, probably like more of like a longer text post, like a mini post with every single meme. So not only does it have the meme, but it has a deeper truth with it, hence the meaningful message.

part of the meaningful marketing series. So those are pretty fun to produce because I get to come up with a bunch of different creative ways to get memes. I'm getting my meme muscles getting stronger as I make this series. But it's fun because it's good. It's good top of the funnel engagement. It's educating them, endearing them to social media examiner

And in some cases, I'm actually starting to work ads for social media marketing world within the meme itself after they read the content. They'll plug if we have like a speaker or a session that lines up with the topic of that day's post, then I'm plugging it there. So that's more top of the funnel, but I am sneaking some middle bottom of the funnel type activity into it too. Do you want to describe what one of these look like? Yeah. Yeah.

I just posted one a few hours ago. The meme has like in letters across the top, social media marketing. And then on the left side, it has how marketing sees it. And it has like a woman with a laptop and she's on a whiteboard, clearly like brainstorming or working out with her team, some kind of marketing endeavor on a whiteboard. Fairly typical. Like if you've been in a marketing team long, you've had some whiteboard sessions. That's what it looks like.

And that's what social media marketers do is we craft our different content, plan it all out and stuff. But then it has the other side, how sales sees it. And it has a toddler with stickers all over his face. Because if you ever worked for a sales driven organization, you've probably heard that sales thinks that marketing is just the department with the crayons and the markers and like, oh, what do those guys do over there? Oh, they just make memes. Right. And that's the fun behind the meme is it's like that few seconds of like humor and just visual punch, right?

But then the question above the meme, a little bit more muted, so you find it afterwards, says, how do you get sales on board with social? And then that's what the post that's attached to the meme ends up going into, the pain of sales and marketing alignment. And with some really good tips on how to get more aligned with sales and getting sales more aligned with what you're doing on social, including them maybe contributing to social, right? So put the marker in their hand. So that's an example of meaningful marketing.

Okay, very cool. So, so far we've talked about two things. Number one, we've talked about creating some sort of a short form video series like the $1 marketer. Number two is leaning into memes and ideally creating original memes if you're able to do that, which requires a little bit more effort. I know you're also doing something specifically with the folks that are speaking at Social Media Marketing World. So why don't you talk to us about what you're doing there? Yeah, with every company I find has a strategic strategy.

asset of some kind. Like every company has something unique that can make it, that's leverageable for social media. With Social Media Examiner, it was the great relationships that you've been building, Mike, over time with all these different speakers and wonderful people coming and speaking at Social Media Marketing World. So even when I was even in the interview process for this role, I was like, man, we got to do something with the speakers. I don't know what it is yet, but that relationship

has potential. And we went back and forth on and landed on what I just call internally is the speaker clip series, where

I'm having people like Pat Flynn and Mari Smith and Mark Schaefer, Sean Cannell, come on for just a quick 30-minute interview where I'm asking them five strategic questions, not in like a podcast interview like what we're doing now, and I'm clipping myself out of this interview, but I'm queuing up a really good question to give them a good minute to two-minute, maybe even three-minute answer that's perfect for a clip.

And I tell them like, this is just for a clip. So give it, make it short, concise and punchy. Like get all the content nuggets right within this short time. And I find that speakers at this caliber is, it's really easy for them to give really short and punchy answers.

So I'm actually going through and working through five questions. And I started the questions, you help me perfect them. That's a fun thing. And I'm getting some great content out of them. Each one, each answer becomes a clip in and of itself, which is the thing I love about this series. And I'll get into the questions in a second, is that it's great content, even by itself.

But not most, most of the questions are just leading to great content. It doesn't have a lot to do with social media examiner. They're usually speaking around the topic of their session or their expertise, but all the clips are great content. And then I take some graphics and kind of surround the clip just around the header and around the sides and the footer to match it to the branding of the conference. And then the last three seconds of the clip promotes the conference by seeing, saying, see Mari Smith speak.

at social media marketing world that has the logo and the dates of the conference. So it's just a little content and then just a little bit of promotion right at the end. So it's more of a bottom of the funnel, but at the same time, it's really engaging bottom of the funnel content. But these are the questions that I'm asking them to get the good insights out of each one of them. And I'm tailoring it a little bit more to absorb expertise every time, but the questions are usually something like this.

What's a mistake you see marketers making with X? So it might be paid media, it might be Instagram, whatever they're talking about related to their session. Why are you excited to speak at Social Media Marketing World about this topic? What's one big change you've seen recently? What's a common myth marketers believe about that and why?

What's a popular tactic that no longer works in 2025? And with this one set of questions, because they're all talking about their unique story and their unique expertise, I'm getting fantastic content for every single clip. In fact, I told them like, oh, we'll probably get three or four clips, but I'm generally finding I'm getting five out of five. And some of them will have more room. They'll be like, actually, I have one more take on that. I'm like, great, let's make a sixth.

So we're taking and chopping those up and every week and dropping one a day. Because again, one 30 minute interview is five pieces of content. It's kind of a, I am spending an extra time editing and cleaning it up and making them really good at the end. But it's well worth it because they're recognizable faces, getting it out there. It connects with the conference. So I love that series for this reason. I'm hoping this becomes like an evergreen thing that we just do moving forward.

One of the tips that I gave to Dan that I'll give to everyone who's listening is when you prompt them with the right question, they will repeat back.

So like, for example, why are you excited to speak about blank at social media marketing world? It's almost guaranteed they're going to respond back. I'm excited to speak about blank at social media marketing world because right, Dan, have you noticed like when you prompt them, they're going to echo back the question. What's the mistake you see marketers making? They're going to say a mistake I see marketers making is blank. Have you noticed that the way you ask the question and the way they answer it is really kind of magical?

A hundred percent. And like, I've told you, like, as soon as you gave me that advice over, like the question is the hook, I'm like, I actually went down and like documented it, put it in my notion of like, remember this forevermore. Like the question becomes the hook for the content. So now like every time I design questions, I'm like, how is this going to lead to the hook? Yeah.

Okay, so let's review. So far, we have talked about five things, I believe, right? First of all, we hired an internal content marketer, in the case of Dan, who has AI experience. Number two, we hired an ad agency to help with meta and Instagram ads.

Number three, we started creating a series of contents, premise-based content, as Dan called it, right? And the idea there is to allow us to basically, without having to reinvent the wheel every time, we've got kind of a theme. And if it can be fun, that makes it even better, right? And then the last thing we talked about is taking advantage of our network.

whether you're putting on a conference or not, there's a really good chance that you have relationships with staff, customers, or people, if you are a podcaster or any kind of producer. And if you can leverage their insights in a way that is advantageous to them, and that's the key. The reason why these speakers did this

is because we told them we were going to promote this across our social platforms. But if we're intellectually honest, we were hoping, Dan, that they were going to share these as well, right? But the conversation internally was like, how can we get our speakers to talk about the conference? Well,

by not getting them to talk about the conference, getting them to talk about themselves. That was the key, right? And by extracting insights from them, we were able to publish that on our channels, which are decent size. And the hope is that some people will share those. But even if they don't, it showcases these experts, right? So sometimes you have to create, you have to think a little creatively out of the box. Anything you want to add before we move on to the next thing?

Those are the first four things, actually. I had two things. One is that I think you're right. Anybody can do what I'm doing with speakers. You could do this with staff, especially your subject matter experts, because oftentimes the social media marketer is not the subject matter expert that the audience cares about. But the subject matter expert doesn't know how to do video.

But the easiest thing you can do is write really good questions for them. And if you take that tip that Mike gave about putting the hook into the question, chances are you can get someone who's not even too great on camera to create some actually pretty good content that your audience really cares about. So I think this is a really big hack

for putting out good short form content in a way that's going to be compelling to your audience? Because your audience might be like veterinary assistants and that's your audience or veterinarians or like nurses or something that you're trying to sell to. But can you get your subject matter experts on camera recording these answers? Okay, so let's move on to number five.

Um, we have been publishing special podcast episodes. Dan mentioned earlier earned, owned and paid media channels. And for those of you that have an owned media channel, like a podcast, um,

like we do here at Social Media Examiner, you can take advantage of what I'm about to share with you. And just before I share what we did, I just want to explain, we've got a network of podcasts. We've got the Social Media Marketing Podcast. We've got the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. And we have the AI Explored Podcast. They're all slightly different audiences, slightly different objectives. But we started thinking to ourselves, what's to stop us from publishing special content?

That is outside of our normal scheduled calendar. And the first time we did this, and we did three of these, first time we did this was on January the 11th.

And, and the way the idea came about was, and by the way, what I'm about to talk to you about is something really magical. When something works somewhere else, consider doubling down with it everywhere. Okay. This is like some magic sauce stuff, right? Because if it works in one place, it might work in all places, right?

So in December of last year, Sean Cannell interviewed me in a two-part series on his podcast, his Think Media podcast. And...

The podcast interview he published went viral very quickly. It was called Three Social Media Trends You Need to Know for 2025. And when I looked just a few days ago, already 43,000 people had watched that interview with me and him, and it was a two-parter. And

there was hundreds of comments and I'm like, that's actually pretty good. And I don't normally like to say that I'm pretty good, but I felt after watching it again, that it was actually really good. And some of my staff listened to it and said, you know, that's really good. And we were planning to publish original content, but I said, you know, we can move really fast. I'm just going to text Sean and ask Sean for permission to republish the audio of this podcast across all three of our channels. And,

And actually he texted back within an hour and said, go for it. I explained to him I was going to strip his promotional ads out of it. He was cool with that. And this was like on a Friday and on a Saturday, we published this thing across all three of our shows. It didn't have the fancy introduction. We believe in published is better than perfect here at Social Media Examiner. We just published it. It was just me starting out the interview.

And the reason we did it is because Sean in the beginning introduces me as the founder of the world's best conference, social media marketing world, right out of the gate. And throughout it, I'm kind of instinctively talking about social media marketing world. And I'm like, this is stuff that people are going to love because it's content marketing. It's highly educational. It's my views. And it's got promotional stuff in there. So we did that. That was the very first one.

Then literally, um, I took a social post and I, for folks that have been following me on the social channels, you know, that I I'm a writer and every week I write an original post and me and my director of marketing, John analyzed over the last six months, what, um,

Some of my most successful posts have been the ones that had the most comments, most shares and most reach. And it turned out that one that I had published just before Christmas was called most marketers have no idea what's coming.

And this was based on all the AI news that had dropped, which Dan and I are very familiar with. It was called Shipmas by OpenAI, the people behind ChatGPT. And in that post, I made the case as to why this is a big deal and why marketers need to wake up. So I took that post as an outline, and I ended up creating like a 25-minute interview out of that post.

Now, it took me four hours. No, it took me like at least half a day, four hours easy all in to like script it, to get it to where I want to. The first recording, my voice sounded like a robot. I had to rerecord the whole thing again. But we published that one on the following Saturday, and that one did really well. And I encourage people to reach out to me. And at the end of it, I made a real direct pitch. I actually flat out said, you need to come to Social Media Marketing World.

You need to grab a, a, our AI ticket dot, dot, dot. And, and, and you also need to listen to our AI explored podcast. What ended up happening is the AI explored podcast went up the ranks and Apple, and all of a sudden ticket sales started coming in. The last thing that we did is this episode, this episode is publishing very soon. I think it's February the 8th of, I'm not mistaken, but it might be, yeah, it's going to be Saturday, February the 8th. Cause my director of, of editorial is out of town. So,

But this is a very meta series, right? Where we worked, Dan and I, really hard to kind of identify what the challenge is, what are the things we're doing. We wanted it to be educational. And obviously you're experiencing this either on our YouTube channel or in audio. So these are three examples of us deciding to push our

original content that was never part of our production schedule. All this work was done in the month of January. And we're hopeful that as people listen to this, some of them are going to want to say, huh, social media marketing world. I think I want to discover more about it. Dan, I just want to hear your thoughts about this because this is probably something you know because you've done the podcast and stuff before. What's your reactions to all this?

There's something else I've been thinking a lot about is like a larger strategic narrative, which is a term I kind of stole from Andy Raskin or that he coined. But oftentimes stories matter. I used to be a marketer that actually didn't like stories. I was like, little stories here and there, but like, give me the value proposition. Just tell them what they're getting and the benefits and the life they see themselves because of the thing that they're buying or whatever.

But over time, I found that stories are really important. They're actually the shortcut to the value proposition because people can't always articulate the value proposition, but I bet they can remember the story. So I find that doing all the posts that you've been doing, talking about this behind the scenes stuff, it's not that it's behind the scenes, it's that there's a story behind it. So it makes all these tactics make more sense and you're probably more likely to remember it because it's in the package of a story and we're so hardwired to remember them that the story is really like the glue to it.

And I like the story that's kind of been shaping out of this one because it's even guided me in the marketing that I'm doing. But I think it's helpful for the audience because it's more likely for them to understand what we're trying to accomplish. And even the urgency of the hour and marketing to why you want to come to something like social media marketing world, because we're all kind of in this story together of things changing and things getting harder and the playbooks not working as well as they used to. So we can try to figure it out separately.

or we could try to figure it out together. But we're not all in individual stories. I think a lot of our stories are aligning. And I think that's why it's important that we're doing a series that shares our story because I think it's matching a lot of yours out there.

Yeah. And for folks that are regular listeners, I'm acknowledging that this is going to go a little bit long, but trust me, we've got more solid gold for you. So number six is we trained up an AI sales and support bot on social media examiner also in December. And this is really cool because

AI has finally gotten to the point where it's really good with natural language, right? So anybody can ask it any question, frankly, in any language, which is really fascinating. I'm seeing people communicating with our bot in French and it's communicating back in French. I'm seeing them communicate with it in Spanish and it's communicating back in Spanish. But what's really cool about what we did here is we ended up embedding a little, you

Guy named Scout. And if you go to our sales page, you'll see what Scout looks like. And after a few seconds, it'll prompt you to ask it a question. And you can literally ask it anything. And it's been trained up on every single frequently asked question document that we have and also every single page of our conference. And we've got a lot of different pages. And it every 24 hours retrains itself. So what that means is if we add a new speaker to the sales page, it knows we've added a new speaker to the sales page. And we've also trained it up

to basically encourage people to do certain kinds of things, which I'm going to talk about in just a minute. But what's really cool is once we added this, we started to notice our sales increased because people sometimes have questions that they cannot find answers to.

And also it did reduce our customer support tickets as well, because we also put it on our customer facing portal, which is kind of cool. So adding a AI bot that can answer any questions is absolutely a magical thing.

The next thing we did was we trained up this AI bot, this is number seven, that if people have a series of questions to encourage them to participate in our conference advisor program, which is something brand new that we rolled out. And basically the way the bot did it is like I trained the bot that if after a series of questions, people still have questions, encourage them to meet with an actual human. And it says, hey, would you like to meet with one of our conference advisors? Do you have more questions?

click here and it would go to a schedule page where they could actually schedule on a calendar to talk to an actual human being. And that human being is someone on my sales team. And her job is to try to get them to close the deal.

This has been really cool because these have been more complex sales that she's dealing with. You know, people that want to buy multiple tickets or have questions about what kind of ticketing type they want. We eventually added this beyond the bot. We added it to the actual page where all the ticketing options are in a big bar. It says speak to a conference advisor because, you know, when you're dealing with something as expensive as like a trip ticket,

to San Diego with airline hotel and ticket stuff, it can be a multi-thousand dollar investment. And people sometimes just want to talk to human beings. Reactions to either one of those things real quick, Dan, before I continue. I think it's one of the big game changers. It's like a no brainer. Is this, this always on chat bot assistant. I've been in situations where I'm driving tons of demand and people are, we're going outbound to a sales and we're calling all the leads, calling all the leads. And it,

people have questions and I can't, I can't like sacrifice a whole staff member to do nothing but run site like chat. Right. And then when, even if I do, it's only 40 hours a week, like, like I can't put them on the evenings, which is when most people are coming in. It's so frustrating. And then even having an inbound call center where someone can call in with questions is really, is really difficult to staff because think of how many hours you have to be available to take, take calls or have chat come in. So to have AI be able to at least take like

the site chat and be there 24 seven, 365. And it is really good at finding the answers as good as a human would be able to. That's, that's maybe like entry level to have been able to answer it. It's there to actually do what you've given it to do. And I, I like, I used to hate AI chat bots, but now I love them because they're generally well-trained and understand what you really need.

Yeah, they're so good. And if you do nothing but go to our sales page at socialmediamarketingworld.info and just test the bot, I think you'll find it absolutely fascinating. In addition, I didn't mention this, but we're also doing outbound sales to our customers who have attended the

in the last couple of years and are not yet purchased because why not? You know, it makes sense. We make, cause especially cause we know they haven't been seeing our messages, right? It's just another way to get to them. So that's number seven. Number eight is I have been experimenting for a long time with this long form text only writing and where I publish them is on LinkedIn, Facebook and X because those are the only platforms that,

that accept long form copy, long form text. And the way that I do it is I always try to make a story out of everything that's happening. And recently I started experimenting with daily posts just to see whether or not actually I would get penalized at all. And shockingly, I know it's not sustainable and I'm going to be moving to twice a week, but I do know that

There's been no diminishing returns for me sharing really fascinating stories every single day across the social platforms. And I'm sharing them on my personal profile and also on our company pages. And Dan, do you have any thoughts on this? Because I know you've been experimenting with long form text only content as well.

Yeah, long form is something that's kind of near and dear to my heart for social posts, because it's kind of like still a staple on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is kind of behind everybody else. They keep trying to get in the video game, but like long form text posts is still what works. And I think it's because

Oftentimes when you're doing short form video, people are kind of in entertainment mode. But when I find out, especially on LinkedIn, like people are there to learn, they're there to kind of like, you know, take a break for 10, 15 minutes in their workday too. But they're also there to learn and pick up some new tips.

And it's hard to do that in short form video in a quick way. You can scan text much more quickly. And I still find that I'm reading text posts, even in when I'm browsing through Facebook and some of its personal stuff, some of its random stuff, because again, it's more interest graph there, but some of its work stuff.

And I glance over it and because it's text, I don't have to like kind of wait to see if I'm going to get the goods. You can kind of glance at it and know if it's going to be good. Right. So there's still a place for these text posts. And the cool thing about text posts is they're, they're a little bit easier to make than these long form or these short form video pieces. And I still find that people read them, they engage with them. And let's be honest, like the written word

He'll never die. It just kind of changes from place to place in different formats and different mediums at different times. Audio, video, text, these things will always be around. Audio will always be around. Like, so nothing ever dies. It just kind of changes. And there's still always a place for text. For my OG marketers out there.

They remember it was only text in the early days, right? That's all it was. It was pure text across all the social platforms, except for Instagram when it came out. And that kind of began to change things with images and everything. So for those of you that are writers out there,

I'm here to prove that it's possible to write really good stories and have extremely engaging interactions with people across the social platforms. Now, this is the magic sauce. I didn't share this part, but I talk about the struggle.

I talk about the plight. I don't talk about the things. As a matter of fact, most people won't talk about the things that I talk about. I talk about how our numbers are down or how I'm being kept up at night. And you, you heard that at the start of today's podcast. And I can tell you that people love that. They love it because so many people talk about only their wins and they don't talk about their struggles. And I,

What's really been fascinating for me is because I've been so transparent across the social platforms, it's endeared people to me at like a deeper emotional level. And I've had people reach out to me, some that are strangers and some that are friends just wanting to help. And as a matter of fact, this last idea came from my good friend, Mari Smith. She said to me, Hey, Mike,

I know that you decided not to do your affiliate program, but I would love for you to reconsider it. And I said to myself, you know, we're definitely going to do it again. Why not? I want our speakers to be incentivized financially to talk about our conference. So we are spinning up the affiliate program for our speakers and possibly even some of our customers.

So there you have it. Like we've spent a lot of time today sharing with you all different things that we are experimenting with across the socials. And we've just barely scratched the surface, frankly, of all the things we're doing, because there's so much more we took off the list that we just didn't have time to talk about. But I, if you're struggling,

If you feel as if this is so hard, like you're not alone. Like this is the nature of the world that we're in and it's not getting easier. It's only going to get harder. And there really is no better way for you to learn new ideas and be around other people that are going through the same trials as you, other than coming to social media marketing world. Because when you come to social media marketing world,

Literally, you get to sit and hang out. This is such a social event. People sit around all these different themed tables and all these different industries and all these different topics. In addition to listening to so many of the amazing speakers that you all have heard across all the different shows that we produce, it is in San Diego.

It is March 30th to April 1st, and we have a bunch of different tickets. The least expensive ticket is the AI ticket all the way up to the all access ticket. We also have a virtual ticket. So if you're listening somewhere in the world where, you know, traveling to San Diego is completely out of the budget, the virtual ticket gets you live access to all the keynotes and all the breakout sessions, not the workshops. And it also gets to the recordings. So check out our lineup at socialmediamarketingworld.info.com.

And thank you so much for joining us today. Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld.info.