Part 2 will be posted tomorrow!
From neuroscience facts to marketing know how, Brandon truly has it all!
Today is part 1 of our interview, and I really enjoyed getting to speak with him. Tune in tomorrow for part 2!
Brandon’s bio:
“Better questions reveal better truth.” Founder and CEO of Words Have Impact, a content agency that creates thought leadership that humans love, and that AI remembers.
Also founder of Human Driven Understanding, a market research company that reveals how and why a company’s best clients buy so that they can replicate the journey and increase revenue.
Contact Brandon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandontowl/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:11.742)
Hi, so I’m here with Brandon Toll. And Brandon, so excited to have you on. So many of the things that I have heard you say when we’ve gotten together at different AMA events or things like that have just left a big impression on me. I’m excited we got some time to talk today on the Marketing Gateway. Why don’t you tell us, first of all, I always ask guests to tell us something surprising. So can you tell me something surprising that I’ve never heard before?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (00:35.374)
Surprising about me or surprising just in general?
Sean Jordan (00:38.642)
Surprising in general. Could be anything you want.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (00:40.906)
Ooh, that’s good. You know, I’ll throw this out. So it’s a little bit of both. My background, my PhD is actually in philosophy, neuroscience and psychology. And one of the things I sort of like to do when I was researching stuff is crack open myths about the brain. And so something that’s always surprising is I always hear people talking about being left-brained or right-brained, the left brain activity, right brain activity, different skills.
And I come to find out that a lot of that is really just misinterpretations of the data out there. There really is no such thing as a person being more left-brained or more right-brained. It’s really just, you practice certain skills? That’s what it comes down to. So if anybody throws that at you, just know that that’s not actually supported by the neuroscience.
And for the record the other one that’s always a big one and I usually heard it by guys in college who wanted justification for drinking more is the fact that you only use like 20 % of your brain. Complete urban myth, you use like 99.9 % of your brain. So if anybody tells you that, that might just be them using not all their brain, but brain matter is good and you use all of it. You don’t want to ever lose it. So I don’t know how that’s surprising, but it’s kind of interesting I think.
Sean Jordan (01:56.648)
To be
And if you’re ever going to not use part of your brain, it’s when you’re drinking in college, right?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (02:03.822)
Right, right. It was the justification. We could kill a few brain cells and who cares? And it’s like, brain is good.
Sean Jordan (02:07.656)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (02:13.054)
Well, that’s fantastic. I’m kind of an armchair neuroscience fan myself, and I always enjoy reading literature, especially when it comes to topics like there was a very famous study where they hooked people up to an FMRI machine, and they were trying to see what their brand associations were with Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And that’s one of my favorite studies, because it’s just so fascinating that if they knew what they were drinking, they changed their opinion. And it wasn’t just their…
words, but their bodies would change their opinion based on what they knew they were drinking. So it’s fantastic.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (02:43.714)
The one that’s very similar to that that I like is they actually did a study with sommeliers, right, who do wine tastings. And in one condition, so they got, you know, baseline of how do people describe the wines. And then in one part of the study, they took various white wines that were described a certain way and add just enough dye to make them look like red wines.
and saw how people change how they described it, right? So something that was more crisp became something more like full-bodied and stuff like that. But the argument that they made wasn’t that, oh, they’re so full BS or something like that, because there was a surprising amount of overlap in what they said. They said that actually seeing it and expecting it to be a certain way actually changed the experience of the Y.
so much so that they can tell the difference in flavor. So I thought that was kind of interesting that maybe even taste is multimodal like that, right? So.
Sean Jordan (03:40.094)
I think that that’s exactly what we see a lot of times in the neuroscience literature is that it’s not that people are lying. It’s not that they’re not expert. It’s just that their expertise relies on more than one thing. And so we have to take that with it. Well, so in this series on the marketing gateway, we’re really focused on the St. Louis area. So I know you’re not from St. Louis originally, but you’ve been here for quite a while. So tell me how you came to live and work in the St. Louis area.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (04:06.294)
Yeah, so as I said, I had that piece of paper, that PhD. So I came here for graduate school. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do, but I was really interested in theories of consciousness and stuff like that. I had my background in neuroscience and psychology and WashU had an interdisciplinary program. So that brought me here.
I like St. Louis. I ended up meeting someone here and you know, St. Louis has its own gravity so ended up staying here. So it’s now been about 26 years I’ve been in the area.
Sean Jordan (04:42.076)
Wow, fantastic. And you’re not in academia anymore, are you?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (04:47.438)
No, I ended up leaving academia, variety of reasons. I still like to keep up with, you know, obviously some of the friends that I met and some of the topics that, you know, I explored. But, you know, this chapter in my life is doing more of the content marketing and market research kind of things.
Sean Jordan (05:10.512)
And you know, when you’re thinking about St. Louis and all the things we have around here, what’s something about the St. Louis area that you wish other people knew?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (05:19.066)
I don’t know if it’s something that I want people to know, but I think an attitude change. think a lot of people kind of pass over St. Louis, and it’s because I think St. Louisians themselves are kind of a skeptical bunch and are kind of critical of themselves in some way that’s good, but it just makes for horrible PR.
So I’ll give you an example. was reading one of these kind of fluff articles by an online magazine that was kind of like 10 up and coming places to live, right? And so, and for every city that they identified or town, they had like somebody from the chamber of commerce or something like that give a quote.
and just about every town. It’s like, you we love South Bend and it has this downtown, it’s up and coming and people don’t realize what a gem we are. And then St. Louis is like number seven or eight on the list. And the quote from St. Louis is like, yeah, we have our problems and this place, you know, sucks. And I don’t know why people are coming here, but we’re on a list. And it’s like, my gosh, this is your one chance to be a booster for the St. Louis area. And you know, take it, I think part of it is that we have this kind of Midwest like,
It’s almost like this idea if we brag on ourselves even a little bit, then that’s going to like tempt the fates and they’re gonna come down on us. So we don’t do it. We only focus on what’s wrong. But I’m gonna tempt the fates here and say that I think what people need to know about St. Louis is just how much good there is here, right? There’s a lot of entrepreneurship. There’s a thriving tech center. It still remains a very affordable place to live, a great place to raise a family.
we’ve had less fluctuations in the housing market than other places. We’ve had a lot of both dollars in effort built into revitalizing downtown. We’re getting serious about getting crime under control. It’s gonna be like in another decade or so, like one of the premier cities, I think, of the nation.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (07:23.842)
but still people have this idea that it’s a dying city and it’s riddled with crime and stuff like that. And I’m like, my experience has been the complete 180 opposite, right? I think it’s very vibrant and I think there are a lot of people who care so much about it. As a matter of fact, I would say that one of the things that always astounds me is how many people move out of St. Louis to go to school or get their first job and end up moving back. They’re like, my family’s here, my friend’s here, there’s opportunity.
they go other places and say, no, St. Louis is the place I want to be, right? So if people are moving back to the city, then that means that there’s something here, right? And so we just want other people to realize that, hey, even if you’re not from St. Louis, there’s something here for you too, right?
Sean Jordan (08:08.442)
Well said and that was exactly my journey. I moved away to go to school at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and then wound up back here. Thought, I’m not going to stay here and here I am.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (08:19.084)
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, you just get kind of sucked in. And like I said, great place to raise a family. And I feel when you make connections in business, you actually make connections, right? And you get to know these people and see them over the years. So I think it’s great for all those reasons.
Sean Jordan (08:35.516)
Very true, very true. Well, let’s talk a little bit about you now. And, you know, one of the things that really intrigued me when we were talking and I was kind learning a little bit more about you is you have this, this phrase you use that you are the master of questions. And I absolutely love that being someone who asks a lot of questions myself, both, here on this show, but also, you know, as a professional researcher. So tell me a little bit about how you came to be so interested in questions and how you’ve used that in your marketing career.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (08:49.998)
Yeah.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (09:03.808)
Yeah, yeah. it’s totally interesting, like weird being here on the other end, right, having you ask the questions here. So I’ve got to kind of retrain my brain a little bit here to give the answers. But if I’m being honest, of course I try to be honest, but if I’m being honest,
I didn’t start out as a master of questions. When I was a kid, I was horrible at asking questions because I was one of those kids who was pretty smart, pretty good at school. And if you think about the way a lot of our institutions are set up, they’re not really set up to teach people how to ask good questions. So for example, in grade school, right, the format is the teacher asks the questions. And if you’re a good student, you have the answers. And the more you have answers, the more you get A’s and promote up and right.
When you go on a job, you know, to get your first job, you go for job interviews and there’s a small committee and they ask questions, they hold the power there, and you provide answers. And if you provide good answers, maybe you get a job, right? So there’s so many cases in which our success is built upon our ability to give answers, right? But I’m always intrigued by, there’s this quote by Pablo Picasso.
which fun fact, not fun fact, but he was alive up till about three years before I was born. He was alive until the seventies, right? So he was around for the advent of computers. And one of his famous quotes is that computers are useless. All they give us is answers. And that made me pause and think a little bit. And I think he’s right. In today’s day and age,
We have answers in plenty, right? We have an entire internet that houses all of human knowledge and almost anything you want to know is just a couple of clicks away or an AI overview away. And our ability to gather data, know, big data is a thing and our ability to do, you know, research is codified in so many institutions. So we’re at this weird time in human history where actually having answers is relatively easy.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (11:18.21)
But coming up with the right questions to get to the answers that we truly need is trickier and we haven’t really trained people to do that. So when I was younger, I was a horrible question asker. I have this distinct memory of working for the elementary school newspaper. And one of my tasks was to do an interview of the new gym teacher slash coach, right?
And I actually remember I was horrible at the interview. I just tried to corner him when we were out on the, you know, doing dismissal for the day. And I asked my set number of questions and I didn’t do any follow-up on my campus here. And I remember my mother telling me, it’s like, no, it’s an interview, ask follow-up questions, right? Dig a little deeper, just don’t go with what’s on the page, right? But I had never kind of learned to do that process. But the more I advanced in academia,
The more I got involved in my own work life, the more I realized that no, questions are really critical. And I saw that people aren’t very comfortable usually asking questions and they often, again, don’t know how, not because that’s a failing of them, even smart people don’t know how to ask questions sometimes. And it’s because we’re not really trained to do that, right?
I was lucky in that I went into academic philosophy where asking questions was much more the norm. And also lucky that when I went on my own to be a freelancer to begin with, I learned very quickly that I need to ask the right questions of a job or else.
I’m going to do a bunch of work and it’s not going to fit what the client wants. And so if I want to be able to make my hourly rate, I really need to ask good questions to kind of get from the get go what it is what we’re aiming at. So, long story short, questions was never something that I was particularly good at. I had to get good at it, right?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (13:17.838)
I had to kind go against my nature and sort of develop that skill of asking questions. And that’s what I think I would emphasize for any of your listeners that, yeah, some people might be good at it, but asking good questions is really a skill, and it’s a skill worth developing. Or if you don’t develop it, hiring somebody who’s developed it, right? So.
Sean Jordan (13:38.175)
One of the things I train my students on in the qualitative research class I teach is when they’re in a setting like a research interview, not to answer questions. Because if you’re asking questions and then someone turns it back on you and asks you a question back and you give an answer, then you’ve suddenly set yourself up as the authority as opposed to the questioner. And so what I encourage them to do instead is to turn that question back on someone. Because a lot of times when people ask us questions, it’s because they want to talk. They want to say something, but they’re just posing it as a question.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (14:07.353)
huh. Yeah.
Sean Jordan (14:07.954)
So I’ve run into that a lot, but I was thinking too, like science itself is really based on asking questions. It’s not just based on finding answers. Finding answers is the product of those questions. And I think a lot of times we get, think of science as being the answers and really the questions are the more important part to any scientist.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (14:19.639)
Yeah.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (14:26.316)
Yeah, yeah, correct, correct. even how you frame a question can often influence how you go about getting the answers and what the answers look like. And some of the best thing you can do is reframe the question sometimes. There’s a story I like. of fact, I’ve got this little thing called the Creative Wack Pack here. I’m not trying to do a plug or anything, but I like it because it’s kind of like a tarot deck for business and just has little short stories in it.
Sean Jordan (14:49.201)
I love it.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (14:56.978)
And one of the stories that had on there that kind of resonated with me was a story of a medieval town that has this weird plague where it makes people comatose and the symptoms look like death. And they realized after burying a few people alive that they need to do something about this, right? And so they put out a request like, who’s got an idea for how we can avoid this problem?
And one group of people came back and said, we’ll put a little hole in the coffin and tie a string around the person’s toe and attach it to a bell, right? And that was actually historically what people did. And then that way, if we accidentally bury somebody alive, they can move and ring the bell and we can go dig them up.
The other group of people designed a coffin that had a big stake over on the lid where the heart would be, Very obvious place. And why do you get such different solutions? It’s because they were answering two different questions. The first group answered the question, how do we make sure that we don’t bury somebody alive by accident? The second group was asking, how can we ensure that everybody we bury is actually dead?
Right? Two completely different solutions of different outcomes depending on how you frame the question. So that, of course, is a little bit of a hyperbole example, but it’s one of those cases where a story kind of brings into sharp relief the importance of that kind of framing, right?
Sean Jordan (16:25.598)
And we see it in the corporate world all the time. mean, very often, especially as a researcher, I’m called in to respond to symptoms of a problem. And if we don’t reframe the question to figure out, what is the actual problem? Sales are down. That’s a symptom. That’s not a problem. Why are sales down? That’s the thing we need to understand. do we already have a handle on that? I’ll bet we do. Then we can really go and begin asking the deeper questions that actually resolve it.
some kind of action as opposed to just, how do we make the number go up again? Because making a number go up is not an action that you can take. You have to do things to make that number go up.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (16:57.794)
Yep. Yep.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (17:04.534)
And asking the right question also kind of sequences together those things, right? So I was working with a client just the other day as a matter of fact, that they were interested in getting a bunch of thought leadership together. They wanted to flesh out their content calendar.
And so I backed up and started asking them questions about like not just who’s this for, but like, are you trying to do? And it turns out that the really place where they were kind of stuck in their sales funnel wasn’t necessarily in attracting new customers. It’s that they would get new customers in who would be really interested. They do a quote and then the prospect would ghost them.
I’m like, okay, that tells me that people know that you’re there, that they’re finding you, but there’s something about the process that they still have either some fear or they just don’t have the urgency, right? So what do we write that would allay their fear, but also give them a sense of urgency? And beginning to ask the questions in that way really made them rethink about what kind of thought leadership they were creating, right? And it changed kind of the topics that they wanted to tackle, right?
So that’s another kind of practical corporate world example where, okay, back up and ask the questions of why we’re doing this and what’s really stuck, right? Instead of just saying, okay, we need an X because we don’t have an X and everybody else has an X, let’s get more X, right?
Sean Jordan (18:27.769)
Right. Well, you know, speaking of customers, I know something that I’ve come across as a researcher is people are generally happy to send out these kind of faceless surveys that, you know, just show up in your email box after you have any kind of encounter with them. But a lot of times they’re really afraid to actually talk to their customers directly. I know that’s something that you deal with, something that I deal with. So what drives that anxiety and why is it valuable to make sure you’re hearing from your customers and not just the survey data that you send out?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (18:56.248)
That is a fantastic question. And obviously, you can’t answer this for any one person specifically, right? But there are number of very common reasons, I think, why business owners and business company leaders don’t talk to their customers.
One, think is a false sense of knowing what their customers think, right? I find this especially in founders. They found a business, they bring in the first few kind of anchor customers, and it usually comes from a pre-existing relationship or maybe a client they had a previous job.
And so they really feel like, okay, I know the customer base. I’ve talked with them, I brought them on, I know what they think, right? And that might even be true until it’s four, five, six years down the line and the market has changed and you’re still making assumptions about what your clients are like, right? From when you first found it. So I think some of that is just kind of mistakenly assuming that you already know your customers. Second, it can be fear.
afraid of what the customers will tell you or afraid just having a conversation that might put some seeds of doubt in their heads. Very rarely does, but sometimes people don’t want to talk to that customer because they’re like, we don’t want them rethinking the contract.
Sometimes it’s just a busyness thing. You think like, if all the 80 things I have to do for our marketing and business growth, talking to the customers is just low down on my list, right? They don’t realize how important it is and that really needs to be a priority. So yeah, I think there are any number of reasons why business owners don’t talk to their customers.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (20:43.254)
It can even be something as simple as thinking that they do when they don’t. So a distinction I like to make is, you everybody knows the difference between working in your business versus on your business. It’s supposed to be the trap that we’re all supposed to avoid. know, don’t spend so much time doing the work that you’re not actually building the business around what you do, right? But oftentimes I find that
business owners and company leaders will be talking to their customers, but they’re talking, working in the business mode, right? They’re taking an order, they’re asking questions for the next project, they’re setting a budget, they’re serving the customer. All necessary and all good stuff to do, but they’re never stepping outside of that to say like, okay, how would you find us? What was the buying journey? How did that go? How would you do it in the future? Those sorts of things, right? What could we hypothetically do better?
What product do you want? Right? And so they might say, we talk to our customers all the time, but they’re talking to their customers, but not asking the sorts of questions that will help them actually grow the business beyond whatever the next order is. So when you kind of put all that into a mixer, you know, take your pick. There are all sorts of reasons why it might not happen. I think the antidote to that is just having a little humility. Right. And also recognizing like, what are the
points in time where it’s most likely that you’re going to lose that track of the customer, right? So if you’re a founder and you just started the company and you just talked to a bunch of potential customers, okay, maybe you have a grab because you just had those conversations, right? If it’s been five years, maybe you need to revisit. Or maybe you’re bringing on more people into your sales team, right? You’re getting beyond the point where it’s just you and your co-founder doing sales and you’re hiring a sales team.
that’s a good time to do it because the conversations they’re having might be different, the connections they have might be different. When there’s a change in leadership is another good time, right? So oftentimes you get this, especially in family-owned businesses where one generation founded, you know, the company and now they’re trying to hand it over to the kids or the grandkids.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (22:53.07)
And that’s a time when, okay, the next generation is coming in with their own ideas. The first generation says, well, this is what worked for us, right? And sometimes that’s when you have a conversation with the customer because often what’s the best thing to do is a hybrid of the two, right? So I think being humble enough to recognize, okay, there are times in the growth trajectory of our business where it just makes sense to reestablish that contact.
customer and just being on the lookout for those.
Sean Jordan (23:24.743)
And you know, I tell my clients all the time, like as a third party independent researcher, I can go and talk to your customers and they’re going to tell me a lot. But wouldn’t you rather that you kind of had an idea of what they’re going to say so that when I go and talk to them, that I can ask some deeper questions than just how do you feel about the business? Because they can tell you that. You don’t have to have an intermediary provide that kind of interaction. It’s really more about what are they afraid to tell you? That’s what an intermediary can get. But I think that
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (23:38.168)
Mm-hmm.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (23:52.515)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (23:53.47)
I’ve run into this many times and I’m sure you have too, where the salespeople, the people who on the front lines, they know exactly what the customers want. And we’ll go and present research and the executives and the marketing directors and all those people will be sitting there going, wow, this is really great. And the salespeople will just be rolling their eyes. Like, why didn’t you just ask us this? Cause we already knew this. So, do you think that that distance between like you talk about the founders, like when they get higher up in the organization and they get busier, do they get insulated? Is that part of the problem?
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (24:00.492)
Yep.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (24:11.818)
Yeah, yeah.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (24:22.252)
Yeah, for sure. And especially if all the work you’re doing is behind the office door and not out there in the field having coffee with your prospects and your customers. For sure, that isolation can be a thing. And it’s a time thing too. So the longer that that goes on, the more you might lose touch with your market. It just happens.
I’ve had to even remind myself time and again, like, OK, you think you know what’s going on, but you need to go and talk to people and reestablish that baseline. And if I can’t do it directly, then listen to the people who are having those conversations. The other thing, too, I will say, you’re right. Most salespeople know that. The other trick, though, there is that
Sometimes salespeople don’t have the whole story. It depends on the relationship. A lot of times people who if you’re saying in front of the salesperson, yeah, they’ll be honest with them, but it’s always a little bit transactional, right? You know the salesperson’s trying to sell you something and that automatically colors the conversation. If you’ve got a third party like you or I coming in and saying,
look, we’re just doing this research, we’re doing report. I don’t care what you say, I get paid either way. So just tell me the truth, right? There’s a huge power in that because the person answering the question knows that they’re not being sold to, right? And likewise, the question asker in this case, is it necessarily gunning for a certain outcome, right? They’re not gunning for a sale to be the, right? So to be clear, you should…
100 % listen to your sales team. They often do have a good grasp of what the clients want. But I find when I come in as a neutral third party, that does give me a little bit of freedom, right? Because, you know, a client makes an offhanded comment, I could go, wait a minute, let me dig down into that a little deeper. I think there’s something there that’s important, right? And I’m not worrying about like, gosh, do they need future X? Because we’ve got future X, I should sell them on future X.
Sean Jordan (26:29.627)
And we see it all the time where sometimes you get this internal narrative that’s going on and maybe it starts with the sales team or maybe it starts with someone who has a, you know, they hear something from a customer and then that’s not really representative of what most customers think. It’s just what that particular point of view internally has become. And it can shape really bad decision-making. you this is where I think about, so research and strategy are a big part of marketing, right? I mean, we have to really make sure if we’re going to do any kind of marketing activity that it’s informed by not just.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (26:47.298)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (26:59.903)
spending a lot of money, but why are we spending that money? What is it that we’re hoping to achieve? And yet all too often, a lot of the actions that are happening in marketing really aren’t informed by either. And I know I’ve seen it. I’m sure you’ve seen it where people, they’re like, well, we’re just going to go out and do a big outdoor campaign because we want people to know about our brand. And it’ll be for a brand that nobody needs to know about. It’s a B2B brand or something like that where they really need to be focusing on personal interactions, not on billboard advertising.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (27:10.19)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (27:27.645)
When you’re working with your own clients as a researcher or content marketer, tell me a little bit about how you try to get them to think strategically and what research you really recommend they consider.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (27:37.294)
Yeah, yeah. And just to kind of double down what you said there, there’s a phrase that I’ve heard people use that I like, it’s chasing the shiny, right? So what’s the shiny object that everybody goes, oh, let’s do that, right? So like a decade ago, was social media. You had to be on social media. You had to get the attention of an influencer, right? Now there’s a lot of chasing the shiny with AI and things like that, right?
The caution here is not that you shouldn’t try out new technology. You absolutely should. But it has to be with the idea that whatever the new technology is has to ultimately make sense for your business. And you should not invest in it just because a bunch of other people invested in it, right? And so a good example of that is I was working with an IT company once that did manage services.
And they were like, we need to be on social media. Can you do social media management? Let’s get that going. And I’m sure that that was a chasing the shiny moment. They just saw everybody else on social media. And this was a number of years ago. And so finally, I got their trust enough to do some interviews with some of their best clients.
And so a lot of these people making the purchase decisions had titles like director of infrastructure, IT director, CIO, CTO. And so I’d ask them the question, so are you on social media for work? And I’d get answers like, hell no, they steal your data. Or I’m not on it for work. I just have a throwaway Facebook account to look at pictures of kids or something like that, right?
And so what came out is that they were spending all this money on social media and just talking to other marketers who are on social media. None of their target personas were actually using social media for work. But they did fess up to the fact that, when they have a problem, they enter into Google. So that means some SEO plays. And they are actually very into, maybe that’s not the word, but very open to cold emails.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (29:44.206)
So it’s like, hey, you give me a cold email. You’ve got about five seconds to grab my attention. But if it’s for some service or something of benefit that I can usually use, a white paper, an article, yeah, I’ll look at a cold email. So it’s like, you could take all the money you’re using on social media marketing, run targeted email campaign, dump the rest into SEO, and probably get 10 times the prospects than you’re getting now, well, not even 10 times, you’re getting zero through social media.
So that’s a case where I think, like, wow, imagine if they had gone a whole year, just continuing to dump money into social media. would have been thousands and thousands of dollars that went nowhere. Whereas by pivoting, they actually had something to show for their money, right? So I think that’s a good example of someone who kind of chased the shiny. But what they need to do for themselves and their audience to grow their business was something completely different, right?
And it took talking to their best customers and digging out that insight to realize that.
Sean Jordan (30:47.895)
And sometimes those shinies become dull after time. mean, think about Twitter. There was a time where it was good to be a brand on Twitter. I wouldn’t be on there anymore. It’s just not where you want to be unless you want to talk to bots all day. I’m thinking, too, I’m sure you’re familiar with the phenomenon of what are called zero-click searches, where basically you put something in a search engine and you don’t even look at any of the results because you get an AI summary, get a title card, and things like that. And that means that
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (30:56.802)
Yeah.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (31:07.395)
Yep.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (31:14.157)
Yep.
Sean Jordan (31:15.857)
all of those strategies about chasing, trying to be in top placement don’t work so well anymore because nobody’s even looking at the top results anymore. They’re looking at the title card.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (31:24.022)
Or work differently, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that’s the thing is that you’ve got sort of changing techniques here, right? And then on the other hand, too, there’s something to be said for sticking out of your category, right? An important part of marketing, I think, is that when everybody zigs, you need to zag. You need to do something differently. And the brand that I always bring up is Liquid Death, right?
Sean Jordan (31:51.859)
Ha ha ha.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (31:52.778)
They’re there. You laugh. You know them. You know who they are, right? And they started out the way that they started their creative is that they took a look at what the industry was doing. And industry was basically bottled water and it was all plastic bottles of a certain size and had pictures of either of
beach or a mountain spring or someplace very calm and relaxing looking and it said we you know it talked about its purity and how healthy the water is. Liquideath said okay what if we did the exact 180 opposite of that and did something different so they went with the whole like death metal you know feel to it it said we’re gonna put it in cans so it’s recyclable not you know more plastic bottles for the ocean.
And then we’re going to just make, you know, as much crazy creative around this as possible, really leaning into the brand. And, you know, if you had said five, 10 years ago, hey, we’re going to enter a crowded marketplace and sell water in a can, I wouldn’t have been like, why? Right. But now, like, everybody’s heard of this brand, right? And they’ve been hailed for their creative and the amount of money that they’ve gotten from
that marketing is pretty, you know, probably stupid and large, right? But it’s because they dare to do the thing that nobody else in the category was doing, right? And I think that’s when marketing does its best. It’s when people are saying, hey, how can we do the thing that nobody else is doing? How can we stick out, right? How can we be different from all of, if you’re copying everybody else, you’ve already kind of lost, right?
Sean Jordan (33:35.285)
And talk about asking the right question because you go and you learn about, what does everybody think of this category? And then the question is, how do we do the opposite of that? And that’s not a question that we ask very often, right? It’s something that could really help you in a way that, I mean, I remember the first time I saw Liquid Death, thought, man, that brand’s going nowhere. What are they thinking? And then I saw people like walking, looking for it, trying to buy it. And they were all people that had tattoos or…
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (33:44.705)
Right.
brandontowl-cifryh8kn (33:54.03)
Right, right.
Sean Jordan (34:01.537) They’re wearing Harley Davidson stuff or things like that. was like, well, there is a market for this, I guess. And, you know, it’s really taken off sense because as you said, they found a way to stand out in a way that was memorable where people know that look for it and ask for it that they wouldn’t have bothered with any other brand. I think that’s something that’s really instructive there.
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