How To Build a Successful Brand In The Social Media World | GaryVee Q&A Fireside Chat

a great story will still find its way it's never been easier to tell your story you don't need an editor-in Chief you don't need the local newspaper you don't need someone at the TV network saying that you're allowed to be on camera and talk to the world that's gone democratization of being able to tell a story is fully here now with the full-blown scaled internet on the flip side it's never been harder you're competing with the entire world and the ability and what you need to do to do it well every day the form factors

are changing quickly here's the good news for everyone who's scared by how hard and fast it is a great story will still find its way even if you don't know the best practices of had a post on YouTube or Instagram or Tik Tok you will be stunned how much a story can find its audience if it's just told from the heart in a pure form however and the reason I even wrote day trading attention if you're actually good at the thumbnail and the title and what time to post and the words and all the best

practices across all the different platforms you will reach more people attention is the number one asset what do traditional marketers get wrong about reaching their customers this is an incredibly challenging one for me because the reality is is that I believe most companies big or small are really struggling in today's marketing landscape I think that they're struggling in assumptions or yesterday tactics to reach customers the biggest companies in the world are built on reach and frequency and what they think reaches is running television commercials over and over or if they're modern ban ads uh and

that's just really the truth you know it's as funny I know everyone on the other side of this video right now are laughing and don't think what I'm saying is true but I'm telling you it is true there is an incredible uh misunderstanding of the biggest brands in the world where the consumer's attention is and how do you actually get to it in the form of advertising or organic behaviors but small companies too over the last decade many small companies that sell direct to Consumer have really relied on Facebook and meta to you know run

ads cookie people and retarget them iOS 145 an update from Apple on their terms of services made the ability to retarget uh far more illegal and completely not achievable and so over the last three years even the best direct to Consumer under 15-year-old companies have struggled and are trying to find their way and so this is actually why I wrote the new book I think people are just very misguided in tactics of yesterday or they get over excited about tomorrow I have more people coming to me asking me like they need a metaverse strategy yet

no one's in the metaverse yet at scale than they are about a proper social media media and creative strategy and so the biggest misconception or the biggest misstep that I see from everybody is they're obsessed with yesterday they're curious and willing for tomorrow but they're missing the Mark today do you think the lack of focus represents a lack of caring you know it's a really funny question I think caring comes in a whole different bucket but I will say that it lacks consumer empathy and I think empathy and caring can find a way to dance

together and here's what I mean by that I believe that there is not enough emphasis put on the actual consumer and so what I just laid out is people are putting academics or their selfish wants and needs ahead of the actual consumer what I mean by academics is people are on reach and frequency or like how traditional media works or digital media work they're going based on the books in the classroom more than what's actually happening or on the selfish part they don't care that they're following you around the internet and running a 100 ads

at you and cooking over and over they don't care that they're bombarding you into buying something and so yes I think there is a lack of caring but I also think it's a lack of empathy and a lack of Common Sense and a lack of a lot of things that has led to this big disconnect in marketing that we're living in in the modern world um I think that caring when it comes to marketing is respecting one's time I think we don't respect consumer time I think that if we're going to fill them with messages

wouldn't it be nice for them to enjoy it I see you I think you see it happen once in a while the Super Bowl I would say is a place where we do a better job caring we try to actually make that 30-second video entertain painting I think I see it every day in social media I see young Brands new brands actually make content that people want to watch and they do entertainment that happens to also be advertising but those are very far and few in between in the today's world so what do you think

the stakes are if a brand doesn't have empathy for their customer well I think the stakes are very high I think business unlike education systems unlike government unlike a lot of things in life are actually based fully on Merit the state are staying in business there's a reason a lot of people go out of business and it is almost always directly correlated to them missing the mark on the customers they're trying to reach how does the act of caring help me connect with my audience and my customers when your lens is caring and empathy to

connect with a consumer you're actually thinking about them you know I I could not explain to all of you watching or listening more how many marketing ideas literally spend no time on will the person the other side like this it's just how many do we have to sell or this is the way it's always been done or I don't mind interrupting them in the middle of a video and giving them my video which has no context to what they were watching and I'm going to be sell sell sell so I think when you come from

a lens of caring and empathy you just tend to make better advertising you tend to make better advertising do you think you have strategies for listening or considering the customer feedback to deploy empathy I would say my number number one strategy is something I've done my whole life which is before I start talking I listen and you know obviously as a personal public figure it seems like I'm always talking because that's also what I make in my content but almost everything that comes out of my mouth has been predicated on me doing a lot of

hours of listening social media's greatest power is the ability to see what people are thinking now listening to people on social media is a little bit different today than it was 15 years ago because now people know that others are listening people are definitely virtual signaling people are being strategic about what they're saying a lot of people are consciously or subconsciously pring themselves so I wouldn't say everything you read is as pure as it was a decade ago on social from humans about opinions of products or services or Trends but no question at Vayner media

at my advertising agency we have a function a job in the strategy Department called PCS postc creative strategist their job is literally to read all the comments of every single comment based on the stuff we post on social and the comments of competitors products and posts this is one big game of listening we are living in the Golden Era of consumer insights because of social media you were able to extract all sorts of hypotheses and ideas and understandings of consumers and so I have a strategy it's been the strategy of my life it's listening on

the internet at scale to as many different opinions and thoughts around products and services to then form better Innovations and adjustments of products and services when you're taking the insights how do you use that information to inform your strategy well that's you know taking what you read on social media and layering it into strategies becomes a talent game the human or humans that are consuming that information they become the variable it's like Big Data I'm sure it's a term many people have heard big data is beautiful you can know everything about everything about everything about

a consumer or a million people or 100 million people the question is what do you then do about it so as you can imagine there's different skill sets in the world there are people in the world who are able to read a lot of insights and listen to a lot of people and then form ideas of what to do with that there are others who can just amass the information and categorize it but unable to come up with a strategy or idea of what to do with it for me that's the million-dollar question if you

know that everyone is trying to eat less heavy right and not just from a calorie standpoint but let's say from a clean eating versus the alternative the question is what do you then do about it do you change the formula of your product or do you make your messaging allude to the places where you're scratching that itch or bringing value to that audience that is a skill set set creatively that is needed to take the insights and form them into an output one thing that stood out to me during the research of this was also

listening to people's pain points can you speak to that you know maybe it's because I was an older brother and was told to watch out for my siblings maybe it's because I've been managing a retail store since I was basically 15 um but I've always looked for pain points friction things that people don't like so yeah I think you know I think the best businesses in the world are fixing something that everyone's complaining about but hasn't been fixed yet I'll give you a good example historically driveth through fast food people value time and obviously someone

eventually along the way probably in the 50s 60s 7s said you know what instead of making them Park and walk in and wait in line and get their burger and fries why don't we just let them drive through and be able to save those seven minutes that was a very strong Innovation a good idea other times it was the benefits of the product maybe taking out an ingredient maybe putting in an ingredient this is what you do through focus groups historically this is what you now can do through social listening at scale um paint points

are much more exciting than kind of wants you know a pain point like I will not use this company because of this that's a pain pain Point kind of wants are I'll keep buying from this place maybe I'll buy a little bit more if they do this and so pain points are huge business and if you can find ones that haven't been found yet that's when you're talking about Eureka can you define to me what segmentation is and how can I use it for my business I believe every business needs to be thinking about consumer

segmentations in a much bigger way so a segmentation is putting a group of people into a group that you're in this scenario targeting so segments could be very large you've probably heard this if you're listening 18 to 35 that was a big one for television they loved for 40 years talking about 18 to 35 I always found that humorous because as I went from 18 to 35 I couldn't imagine a human being more different than someone at 18 and 35 you're literally growing up during that era so I get why TV did did that we

had less Target ability uh it was a different era I'm sure there's some academic grounding in that but segments are creating groups of people that you want to go after with a message I like narrow targets and I like doing a lot of narrow targets because I believe the more narrow you are the more relevant you can be to that person with that message thus rendering them to consider what you're talking about or what you're selling so as you can imagine if I'm trying to sell this sweater which I like um which is why I

wore it uh if I'm trying to sell this to 18 to 35 year old males I may come up with a very general guy statement if I'm trying to sell this to 21 to 24-year-old highly wealthy individuals that grew up in a wealthy family that live in the suburbs of London who are into football as the world calls it or soccer as we call it in America well you can imagine the ad the message has just gotten much more narrow I may say this is what you need to wear after you played football all afternoon

with your buddies and you're going on a date or a business meeting so you go home and you shower and you put on this nice sweater I can say that because I'm I know who I'm targeting and I could say it maybe with a British accent in the scenario that I used I believe that segments are imperative to advertising and I believe in the social media world in the emerging AI world in the emerging metaverse World we're going to have more and more narrow seg and so I think about it as 18 to 35y old

males is a boulder and instead of doing that kind of marketing have 20 to 23y Old London Suburban High net worth kids 40 to 42y old males who've gone through a divorce in Middle America 22 to 25y Old under $100,000 income males who live in Saudi Arabia you're starting to get very narrow and you can imagine the pictures the videos the slang the copy and everything else of that copy creative and advertising is going to look very very different even though I'm still trying to sell this green sweater and I think the world of advertising

for the last 70 years has been the first version 18 to35 Boulder try to make it work for everyone my argument is we now live in a world where we have to have a thousand Pebbles make a boulder instead of one Boulder why do you think we need more narrow segments with the Advent of AI well I think we'll naturally have more narrow segment with the Advent of AI because AI will help us make more narrow creative it takes time to make the ads I just talked about if you got to make 55 ads instead

of one ad that's just going to take more time but I think we need it because the messaging is too vanilla when we try to make one how has the landscape of the internet and social media evolved in the last decade and how do you think the volatility of that is impacting marketers today the last 10 years of Storytelling has evolved tremendously we are no longer in tribes sitting around a fire telling a story and it takes eight years for that story to make it 100 miles down the road the world of the internet social

networks mobile devices that travel with us I think anyone who's watching this realizes news Cycles are now 12 and 24 hours not 12 and 24 days so the speed in which keeping attention of consumers has changed dramatically the ability to exploded there's not a person watching this who doesn't have permission now to tell the world their story as a human or their story about the business or organization nonprofit or whatever other body they're working with to the world the skill set required to tell that story though has become incredibly and increasingly challenging meaning do I

believe it is harder today to pop on Facebook Twitter Snapchat Instagram YouTube shorts Pinterest and all these platforms than it was a decade ago I do because it's a supply and demand game almost everyone I mean I can't think of many 12 to 18 year olds who haven't thought multiple times about being famous on social media that is just now the occupation of choice not to mention almost every business in the world unlike 15 years ago when I was yelling about all this stuff now has a social media strategy whether they've abandoned it or have

deemed it too hard or not they have had the ation they have made the effort the skill sets required on both the media side AKA spending advertising dollars to make your message heard but more importantly in my opinion on the creative side what pictures what videos what animated gifts what copy goes along with that what time do you post how long is the video what kind of video audio video lighting I mean this has become a profoundly complex game and that's why I continue to stay so challenged and enjoying the day-to-day day trading of being

good at it so to sum that up in the macro it's never been easier to tell your story you don't need an editorinchief you don't need the local newspaper you don't need someone at the TV network saying that you're allowed to be on camera and talk to the world that's gone democratization of being able to tell a story is fully here now with the fullblown scaled internet on the flip side it's never been harder you're competing with the entire world and the ability and what you need to do to do it well every day the

form factors are changing quickly here's the good news for everyone who's scared by how hard and fast it is a great story will still find its way even if you don't know the best practices of had a post on YouTube or Instagram or Tik Tok you will be stunned how much a story can find its audience if it's just told from the heart in a pure form however and the reason I even wrote day trading attention if you're actually good at the thumb nail and the title and what time to post and the words and

all the best practices across all the different platforms you will reach more people can you describe the big picture of the concept of day trading attention the main concept of day trading attention is trying to use the concept of day trading which is really a on the second of the day trading buying and trading stocks second to Second buying a stock and selling it a couple minutes later very different than buying a stock and selling it a year later day trading trading daytoday like transacting second to Second moment to moment and laying that on the

concept of attention so the concept of where are the eyes and ears of society more and more Tik Tock and Spotify less and less the radio in your car and network television by creating that framework day trading attention I'm able to give the thesis to everyone that I'm living in which is the people in the world who most understand where the attention of people are AKA these 10 to 15 social networks and streaming services that are eating up a vast majority of attention and layering the ability to be good at it day trading AKA how

do you make ads for it or content for it and how do you spend media to amplify it and recognizing that it's changing day-to-day week to week month to month so you can't just have a good strategy today and then think it's going to work for the next year sets up my thesis in a real way and more importantly I'm not guessing this is what I've been living for the last 15 years this has been the landscape for the last 3 years postco of every single business in person around the world from China to Sydney

to Vancouver to Brazil and I think that people need to recognize how big the stakes are because the ones that don't know had a day trade attention going forward will continue to lose market share can you unpack the idea of underpriced attention what does it mean to be underpriced you know it's funny I debated calling this book underpriced attention not just day trading attention but day trading attention I think captures the macro thesis more when you double click into it one of my favorite things in day trading attention actually let me phrase the thing that

I have spent the last 15 years on every day is finding underpriced attention underpriced attention is exactly what it sounds like it's you're getting more attention than the efforts you're putting in or the money you're putting in to achieve that attention against everything else you can do so for example always in social media because of the way the algorithms work there are opportunities for underpriced attention at the moment of this recording one of them is Tik Tok live not posting on Tik Tok but going on Tik Tok live because of the way that product works

which is the longer you're on more people discover you which is the reverse of how Instagram works because when you go live on Instagram everybody who follows you is notified they all come on which means 5% of your audience usually and then they start to leave because it's hard to keep people's attention forever and there's real no mechanism to share your live so easily so you're not achieving more people Tik Tok you go on the longer you're on the more Tik Tok sees that and showing you in people's feeds even people that don't follow you

rendering you to find new audiences that will probably change over time Tik tok's doing that right now just like 5 years ago if I made a video on Instagram that had a white border at the top and a title and a video that was under a minute more people would see that it was a tactic creatively that rendered the opportunity the cost of that attention was zero in media dollars and I kept working it to make the cost of making those videos lower and lower hence that became underpriced attention the organic reach of an Instagram

video post under a minute the organic reach of going live on Tik Tok there are many versions of this on LinkedIn for high value B2B clients the media even though it has a set floor of how much it costs is still an underpriced attention because the value of a B2B client is very high and the ads on LinkedIn if you do LinkedIn well to reach a B2B client is a very good deal versus buying a $100,000 booth at a trade show and trying to get those same clients underpriced attention influencers there are very famous influencers

who would cost $100,000 to do a post for you and you may get a thousand, customers in that same sector you might find an upand cominging influencer who costs you $1,000 and gets you a, customers as well because their audience is emerging with them they've never seen them promote an item and thus your influencer ad with them was underpriced basically every single action a business does to get customers or a human does to get attention is either properly priced overpriced or underpriced as you can imagine it is my great Obsession both personally and for the

clients I work with to be great at underpriced to stay away from overpriced and to round out underpriced with appropriately priced what are some questions that I should ask myself if I want to start day trading attention and what are some of the strategies to do it there's so many ways to attack this and I know for a lot of you it might even be the first time you're grasping these Concepts and I think you take a step back and I actually think the first thing you need to do is focus on self-awareness you know

if you don't know yourself you're going to probably struggle with this complex framework meaning how do you find underpriced attention how do you get good at day trading well you have to first decide how are you judging it so before you see how many followers you get or how much reach your post get or how many people buy your product you have to make the leap yourself before the action meaning you're going to make the video or the picture and then the thing's going to happen so you're not going to know now the question becomes

do you think you're good at judging this or are you not if you're not that's actually good one of the tenants at being good at day trading attention is humility I've been doing this my whole life and professionally for over 20 years and refined for 15 and yet every day when I post even though I look at all the math all the Quant all the qualitative feedback every day that I post I know that I might not be right and many of the posts on social or the ads that I wrun for my businesses whether

in the wine business for my family or the businesses I work with at Vayner or for my personal brand or for friends and companies many of them don't hit work it's the humility to know that's okay and I can learn from it that is really the massive part of the strategy having the humility and the process to make as many ads and this is not spray and prey and throw against the wall and see what sticks this is understanding which segmentations you're going to make content for do the best you can lower or mitigate the

risk on the costs and the media and then look at the outcomes and decide what to double down on or triple down on or what to eliminate so humility is at the centerpiece of being great at day trading attention the other thing that's at the centerpiece is creativity are you creative enough to have new fresh ideas and that's where humility comes in don't be scared of a wacky idea or something that's never been done before or a sentence that's never been uttered those may be the exact things that unlock the opportunity and then more importantly

have you put in the hours to understand the craft do you understand the algorithms do you understand the best practices you know the times to post how long to should the video be thumbnails things that you know I think more and more people can look into and are realizing are more important than maybe we realized in the past and so making a commitment to the craft these are the real tenants to a good strategy once you understand them one of the reasons I always get scared when people try to Outsource their marketing or this behavior

is if they themselves don't understand it how are they going to be able to judge their employees or their agency partners that's why I get compelled to write books like this I want to get people at least at a ground level of understanding because these are complex new terrains why do you think branding is more important for companies to focus on than sales when I talk about branding and sales I always enjoy this because people are incredibly passionate on both sides of the aisles and I'm obsessed with being a marketer branding and I associate and

equally obsessed with my enjoyment that I'm into sales I like it I like selling baseball cards and lemonade and wine for my dad and everything else in between and so I think both are incredibly important that's first and foremost that being said one man's humble point of view the reason branding is more important than sales is because I did not buy this sneaker because somebody knocked on my door and sold it to me or I landed on a a website that explained why I had to own this I had to own this on my own

accord because this swoosh matters and allows me to communicate who I am and why I knew I wanted it without anyone telling me why I needed to buy it there was no conveying there's no persuing there was I wanted to be associated with this brand this is a brand I want to be associated with brand is more religion than anything now I believe that sales is what you do when you're not great at Brand you know branding it comes to you sales as you go to them both are important I know I made a big

statement there I will say it again some of the biggest companies in the world are fully sales organizations that actually do a terrible job branding very common in B2B sales and very common believe it or not in cpg in consumer goods there's a lot of organizations that are great with their infrastr structure with the retailers but their marketing misses the mark so this is a very big issue and opportunity but I will say that every influencer that has come up in the last decade has won on branding they've won on reputation personal brand we don't

call it personal sales we call it personal brand and so do I believe reputation or how one thinks of something matters I sure do of course that can be achieved in a minute when you're selling someone something but it's a heck of a lot better and more importantly converts a lot better when they're coming to you versus when you're coming to them what are some of the metrics that one should pay attention to when it comes to branding versus sales look I I say something pretty controversial inside my company that drives everyone crazy which is

you can't measure brand because I do think it's like measuring God or love or like it's very lofty I can't measure the ROI of my mother yet I can sit here in front of this camera and tell you every single thing I've achieved professionally is directly attributable to her right and so there's some things that are you struggle to measure good parenting how do you measure that right it's hard um so the industry of marketing has come up with a lot of ways to try to measure brand how do we if we spend a million

dollars on this and there's no direct call to action for sales how do we know it's working I'm empathetic to why we're trying to measure it it's hard to spend money and justify spending money uh you need a framework so the industry has measured brand forever the way I like to measure brand is by is ironically by measuring sales I like doing brand work things that bring awareness to you um in silos where we don't do anything else and everything was consistent and we have consistent data this is how it's been going this is how

it historically here's a good example the last three years of our company Black Friday sales have been exactly the same this year we're not going to do anything but we're going to do a Thanksgiving giving parade marketing effort in New York during the Macy's day parade and we're going to hand out flyers or hand out our product to everyone before the before we get kicked out well if you then a couple days later look at your site and for three years it's worked the same way and your sales have been down 3% all year you

can expect a 3% decline but you're up 8% that day or that week you could start saying did we have an impact on that stunt of Gorilla Marketing we did or or what's even more fun running a Super Bowl ad which by the way is underpriced attention a Super Bowl ad at $8 million is underpriced attention you're getting 130 million Americans to watch a 30 second video that is unheard of and I can't buy it on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or anything else better than that to get them to actually consume it I can

get the Impressions but did they actually consume The Impressions anyway not to DBA too much if you do all the same things for the 100 days after Super Bowl that you've done for the last three years for 100 days you can start seeing the impact and there's a lot of ways to do this and the industry has done a great job when I say the industry the advertising industry has done a great job coming up with a ton of reports that will justify it but most of the people watching here are also owning small businesses

or solo entrepreneurs they're not just working at a Fortune 50 company and for you you can measure it by being patient and seeing and sensing in your gut common sense and intuition should not should not be put on the Wayside if you're doing 50 podcasts as a guest because you grew up a celebrity nutritionist and now you have a nutrition bar that you're selling and you're doing all the sales stuff Google AdWords and social media but if you then spend the same amount of money and again if you've had a consistent track of sales if

you then go do 50 podcasts for brand you'll be able to see if it worked at the end of those nine months you'll be able to see it your business was going a certain way and now it might be going a different way and so there's always wild X factors but there's ways to measure brand if you want to measure brand when it comes to branding how do we measure success along the way look it's incredibly hard to measure success along the way when you're building brand because that would be like you asking me or

the world asking me how do I measure if I'm a good parent the reality is I think we all know this you're going to get more insight in 25 years than you're going to get every day but there's going to be proxies along the way if a child is born and when they go to kindergarten at 6 and they punch everyone in class and they scream and run out of the classroom something happened along the way in the first six years that led to that right if at 15 they're beloved and they have a lack

of anxiety and they're smiling and they're always happy and they're beloved by everyone I'm going to believe that there was some good deposits put along the way for the 15 years to let that happen when you're building something meaningful like a brand like a child you're not it's very hard to measure along the way but there are proxies there is things you see at at 2 years old at four years old at 6 years old at 8 years old at 10 years old and you're looking at your child and you're seeing how the world is

accepting them and how their happiness is how their accountability is something we've lost a lot away you know and other things of that nature same with Brands you know when I was building my father's wine business the way I was noticing if we were building brand was based on the fact that I had to spend less money on Advertising every year but was achieving higher sales every year because after five or six years of good work I could see that the word of mouth and the reputation the brand was carrying the business and so you

know I think at the end of the day you have to measure brand based on business results but you've got to play the out for a long time the problem is along the way it's very hard to fully figure it out and so you've got to decide what your measurement sticks are I think looking at the business's Health every three years is very appropriate if I came in to do full brand for any business in the world big or small and the boss said she said to me Gary I'm going to measure you on brand

in one way is our business up in three years I can handle that of course anything can happen I can be selling something and then there was a big innovation the world might change there's things that can happen but usually they don't and within that framework if I'm getting three years I feel like I can play that game and of course we could put reports and justifications along the way but getting three to five years to prove it out that's really the punchline of of brand building just want to add that I really believe this

conversation more than anything we might touch on is very important and very challenging I am not confused that people that are in Fortune 500 land are like that's great Gary but but if I don't hit the mmm or the MMA or the way we measure brand internally every year I don't get my bonus and by the second year I might get fired respect I also want to tell all the entrepreneurs the creators the influencers the small business owners you're going to have to make those judgment calls on bu brand building in your gut in your

subjective opinion every Sixth and 12 months and I'm aware that many people have tried to do a brand exercise don't see sales results right away and never do brand exercises again never sponsor something again never do a commercial again never do social media again I get it but please understand the difference for all the smaller players the difference between brand building and sales can you describe the Vayner volume model the Vayner volume model is a term we use internally at Vayner media and it talks about when we do social media organic with paid and are

measured by sales what I love about this is you're building both brand and sales at the same time let me give you an example it's for $4.99 only to get to it's not like a QVC Crazy Eddie which was a this character in the 80s in New York that was like selling on TV it's not very promotion oriented it is more brand oriented talking about the value of the products hitting on emotional cues but it is in the copy that supports the video or picture and with the media trying to get you to buy the

sweater just not trying to get you to buy this sweater by saying it's on sale for $99.99 to today it's it's trying to get you to buy the sweater by maybe telling an emotional story story of this was my dad's favorite sweater and he's stuck at the airport and I miss him on the holidays and we try to play on that side got it so that's how we structured the Vayner volume model it's also the Vayner volume model this also means make lots I just gave you one that might have got you with the dad

being stuck at the airport for the holidays but I can tell you about cats and dogs and ants and Grandma's dying and sports fandom and rock climbing and BMX driving and Hip-hop music and any interest that will make this relevant to you but again all those pictures and videos is also supported by media with the intent of not driving brand AKA let's see if this works in 3 years no no no did we sell 98 of these sweaters today on the [Music] site