Erik Huberman | Hawke Media
Erik Huberman’s company Hawke Media has audited and developed marketing strategies for more than 4,000 businesses. Over time, they’ve distilled their process, along with lessons learned, into a methodology for marketing they call the “Hawke Method”.
In this episode, he breaks down how the Hawke Method approaches what they call the “three principles of marketing”:
Awareness
Nurturing
Trust
We dug into all of this, plus the problem with using ROAS to measure advertising effectiveness, why TikTok holds so much potential for marketing, and more.
Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.
Resources from this episode:
Visit the Hawke Media website to claim your free marketing audit
Get Erik’s book, The Hawke Method
Connect with Erik on LinkedIn
Follow Erik on Twitter
Erik and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:20):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Erik Huberman, who is the CEO of Hawke Media. Welcome to the podcast, Erik.
Erik (00:32):
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Kathleen (00:33):
I'm excited to talk to you. You are a, the CEO of an agency that works with a ton of really impressive customers. You also have a book, um, and that's a lot of what we're gonna talk about today. Um, but before we dig into the book and the Hawke Method, tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and what Hawke Media is.
Erik (00:54):
Sure. Uh, background's eCommerce. So taking a quick step back, I feel like it's relevant. How I graduated in 2008, went into real estate and started a day before, or sorry, a week to the day before Lehman brothers and Bear Stearns went bankrupt. And the whole banking industry collapsed. So made 350 bucks my first year out of school and went, this is not sustainable to live in LA and started scrambling and ended up launching an online music company, uh, that I built for three years or sorry, for two years realized it was profitable, but not gonna be that big of a company and hired a CEO to take over and then was able to build and sell consecutively to subscription e-commerce brands. And was one of the first movers in subscription e-commerce after that, about nine years ago, started consulting and advising for a bunch of large and small companies on how to drive revenue growth.
Using marketing worked with Red Bull, Verizon, HP, a bunch of startups and kept running into the same challenge, which is frankly, when it comes to getting marketing partners, 99% of them out there are full of shit for like a better word. There's so many terrible agencies and terrible individual marketers. And the few that are good are really expensive and the agencies want long contracts, high minimums. They go at market. So it's really hard as a smaller medium business to find access to great marketing. And that became our mission and my mission. And so with literally the mission statement of accessibility to great marketing, uh, I hired a small SWAT team each with their own expertise. So a Facebook marketer, an email marketer, a web designer, a fractional CMO, went back to these companies and said, everything's a carte month to month cheaper than hiring in house.
But the idea is you can spin up what you need when you need it, and then ebb and flow and changes your needs change. And that's how we started. And fast forward eight and a half years later, where, uh, about 300 people, we have people all over the country. We also have offices in Asia and Europe and Canada. Um, and we continue to serve about 600 brands and growing, uh, around this idea of great marketing and being the best at what we do, but super nimble and flexible as we do it. And on top of that, we have a venture fund. We do a lot of investing in marketing technology companies, eCommerce tech, the tools that we use for our clients. And then we also have a financing arm where we actually can help with the working capital needs, for marketing, which we'll talk about, uh, for our clients.
Kathleen (03:00):
That's awesome. And you know, it's interesting, you and I, you and I did not talk about this before we started, but I owned a marketing agency for 11 years, uh, before I sold it five years ago and went in house. And so I would just say amen to everything you just said about agencies. Um, I sold it cuz I, I wanted to get out of the business. It was, I, I was in that moment of, we either need to go up market exactly. As you were talking about, or we need to niche way down because what we were doing was becoming very commoditized and I'm like, the last thing I wanna do is build a business that competes on price and hard to service the small companies and the big C you know, it's just like, it was this horrible, like in between phase and we needed to make a decision and my decision was I'm out. So kudos to you for staying in and figuring it out <laugh> cause it was not, it was not an easy thing to, you know, no
Erik (03:47):
It's face running an agency's tough, it's, it's a tough business, but you know, if you like the, I, I, we always say, and this is like actually one of our interview questions, would you rather be hectic or bored?
Kathleen (03:58):
Yeah.
Erik (03:58):
<laugh> cause if you'd rather be bored, you don't wanna work here if you'd rather because it's one or the other, I'd say you don't ever find a perfect fit. If it's exactly the type of work you wanna do, like it's either gonna be a little overwhelming or a little underwhelming. Yeah. And I'd much rather have so much going on. I gotta stay on top of it than like watching the crock.
Kathleen (04:14):
So yeah, for sure. That's awesome. Well, congrats on all your success with that. And I know that you've packaged a lot of the lessons learned into this book, the Hawke Method. Um, I'm interested in this because when you talked about it, you were like, it's our kind of way of consolidating how you should do marketing today. And the thing that I, that I find interesting about that is, you know, obviously there are certain evergreen truths to marketing things like make the customer the hero and, you know, I could go on and on and say all those different things, but there are also aspects of marketing that are constantly changing and you know, how, how you should do marketing five to seven years ago when I had my agency it's, if I were to do it again today, it would be very different. And so I'm, I'm psyched to break this down with you. So like give me the high level and then we're gonna dive into the details.
Erik (05:01):
Yeah. So the Hawke Method really how it developed is we part of what we do for clients. And like we work with about 4,000 brands at this point, like a huge number of brands and every one of them and every brand, frankly, even the brands we don't work with, we do an audit for, we have to look at what's going on in their marketing and quickly distill, where is the low hanging fruit and opportunity we're month to month. So whatever we're tapping into, we need to sh you know, quickly show results or at least show progress and tap into things that we can actually improve. So we had to be able to assess that and triage what's going on. And then it's an ongoing thing. Things change with that company. We need to continue to find ways. And so this naturally developed this sort of methodology of looking at marketing and how to assess marketing came from auditing thousands and thousands and thousands of brands, tens of thousands, probably at this point, um, and going, oh, there's a consistency here that we can really start with buckets.
And so we call those the three principles of marketing awareness, nurturing, and trust and awareness is everything you do to introduce new potential customers to your brand. So it's advertising, it's PR it's word of mouth, it's all these things, the top of the funnel, so to speak, then there's nurturing and what a lot of people miss. In fact, I think it's the number one thing I see CEOs and marketers, miss is the idea of a purchase cycle. Like everybody looks at their ads and they look at like what they spent today or this week on marketing. And what would their returns work? It's such a fallacy that, that stat is completely broken because the average person <laugh> the average person, uh, takes weeks to months to purchase a product or service. And like with e-commerce as an example, which is about half our business, uh, it's about three weeks for a $50, average order, five weeks or sorry, five weeks.
Yeah. For about a hundred dollars, average order, six weeks for $200. And then it goes again between two and three months from there, um, as it gets higher. And then after that, that's about the length of a impulse buy. So to speak after that, it's more of a need by, um, and so looking at that, you have to understand what is your company's purchase cycle. I know mine, and that is so critical. Cuz when you're measuring marketing, you need to watch that whole cycle. If I spent $10,000 today, how much over the next purchase cycle period that I have, let's say month, did I make off that? That's the real stat not I spent 70 grand this week. How much did I make this week? Which is by the way with Facebook's updates because of iOS in the past year, they're only reporting on the seven day window. Now it used to be 28. So all these people think their Facebook ads dropped through the floor and the truth is no, just the tracking's different. If I show you a 28 day window or a seven day window, the seven day window's gonna look worse. Right. So a lot worse.
Kathleen (07:30):
Well and you know, and not to distract, but I also, like, I feel strongly that you're talking about ROAS return on ad spend and I think, you know, yeah, it's great to track it, but I think if that's all you're tracking, you are, you could be totally missing the forest through the trees because if you're not looking at what I like to call net margin contribution.
Erik (07:48):
Yep.
Kathleen (07:49):
That's such a feel good metric, great top line revenues coming in. But what if it's something that's losing money? You know, it's like half the story
Erik (07:57):
And ROAS, doesn't take account LTV at all. It's first purchase. Yeah. It doesn't take an and again, it doesn't take an account of the whole full picture. Cuz if you're taking ROAS out of Facebook, you're seeing the first week, which if you have a three week average person cycle, it's gonna be so underreported that unless you're using it just to optimize cuz you want faster purchases, like you're using it for the actual, like what it's telling you, if you're properly using that data, you're gonna probably end up saying Facebook's not working, which is what we've seen with a lot of clients that we've had to coach them on that. And funny, I wrote the book two years ago, it was published in March, but it literally has a section called ROAS is BS.
Kathleen (08:31):
Oh my God, I love you. And how do I not meet you sooner? And did we not drink beers and rant about this? Because honestly, like we talk about this all the time and I think there's a structural problem in the industry, I think. And it's, I think on one hand it's so convenient for marketers to glom onto ROAS because it's a stat we can report on where, and we don't have to talk to anybody else in our company to do it and we can get it right out of our tools. And so it's easy and feels good, but it's also a problem because the age, a lot of the agencies are comped on it. And so there's this like very structural industry disincentive to, to move away from it. And it just makes me insane. <laugh> so
Erik (09:13):
Not anymore because ROAS is so under reported now every agency's, I mean, we're watching it, we have a big M and a practice. We buy a lot of agencies. I think we've done nine acquisitions today. Wow. And so with that, we look at tons and tons of agencies, numbers, and they're a lot of 'em are suffering right now that are on those models. Yeah. Because the reported ROAS is terrible. So, um, and it's it. And it's not real if, if every it's like consumer spending isn't down, like just bluntly, like people are still spending the same amount of money. It's not like
Kathleen (09:41):
It's awful.
Erik (09:42):
<laugh>. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, it's, it's not, and it's so funny. It's like you're reading this report. We, we see the same thing with attribution. Uh it's like people want this vacuum report that doesn't exist. It's not reality. Um, but
Kathleen (09:55):
You said the word attribution and this week there's a big attribution, like yeah. Crazy war on Twitter. We're not gonna go into that, but oh, I, but like, you know, it is it's, it's, I there's a lot of convenience to these metrics and I think it can feel good to be able to like check a box and say that you looked at them and you reported on them. They're getting better. They're getting worse. But it is, it is a house of cards. So carry on. You just, I just have to say that because you made me happy that you brought it up.
Erik (10:18):
I appreciate that. No. So to the point that second principle nurturing is all the things you do during that period of purchase cycle. So like from when someone first is aware of you awareness, then you go into nurturing and you do things like email marketing and SMS and content and all these things to bring people back and keep them coming back. So you can accelerate the purchase cycle and you can, uh, increase your conversion rate. And then after they purchase, use those same tools to increase lifetime value, which one big thing people miss on that is merchandising. Casper's a great example of this. They've had a shit show of a time because you buy a mattress and then you upsell into a pair of sheets. Like it's a huge CAC for a mattress. And then like your upsells are not great. Like it's a really hard business when you don't have ongoing purchases from your customers, cuz customer acquisition is expensive. So all that is
Kathleen (11:03):
Buy the HP printer and spend all your money on cartridges. Right?
Erik (11:07):
Yeah. Funny. I have one sitting here that I need to replace cartridges on. So it's, you know, that's in that model, everyone knows it. No one cares, like it's a great business model. Um, and you know, Peloton tried to do it, but the problem there part, then I think they'll be fine. But it, it, until they had the financing part, but spending $2,500 again, you're gonna have a really high CAC and a long purchase cycle. And then when their ongoing, uh, incomes like 40 bucks a month, like that's tough. That's, it's gotta translate to like, be equal to what it's gonna take to get someone to buy that. Um, so unlike Spotify, like these subscription companies, so that that's nurturing and then trust being the third principle, uh, basically 75% of people won't buy from a company that don't inherently trust what that means early on when you don't have any brand or visibility in the market.
It's third party validation, it's referrals, testimonials, word of mouth. Um, and yes, there's a lot of things fall into multiple categories, like word of mouth. Um, but yeah, testimonials referrals, PR word of mouth, um, even content cuz like starting to show what you stand for yourself can help build that trust. And then over time as you become consistent in the way you deliver your product, your brand, that becomes your brand. And so that becomes what you're known for people know that they can trust you. That's why you don't see. Not that it's necessarily positive, but like McDonald's doesn't need third party validation. They would, if they're trying to be healthier or something, but as long as they're okay with the brand that they have, they don't need to get other people to talk about how great McDonald's is. They can just say it themselves. Cause everybody knows who McDonald's is.
So as you build a bigger brand, you don't have to get that be as strong on that. But early on, it's super important. And those are the three pillars. Those. So what we do when we're looking at a marketing strategy all the time, we're looking at where are we missing? What is the lowest hanging fruit are we doing? Like how is awareness? Like? So if your conversion rate's great and your lifetime value of the customer is great. And see people seem to be converted. Everything seems to be working really well within the business. Then the idea is just build more awareness. Like it sounds like everything's working than just go like scale faster. And then if you see conversions down or something's there, that's when you start looking at nurturing and trust and where in those buckets am I missing? How's my email marketing. How's my SMS.
How's my content doing. And you look at, and we can get into the weeds on every one of these and how to leverage them. But it's like, that's the overall triage that we play is like, okay, where is the problem? And a quick story of this is back to the Facebook thing. We had a beauty client that we scaled from. I think it was 300 grand the year they came, like they came to us after doing 300 grand in revenue. Two years later, they did 15 million. So great quick growth, beauty brand. And that year what they hit 15 million. All of a sudden their Facebook ads started performing in an eighth of what they were doing. Like overnight just went like they're ROAS at the time. Um, and it was more 28 day ROAS was a little more accurate frankly with them. Um, we dropped to an eighth of what it was, it was super accept acceptable than not.
And I didn't hear about it till a few weeks into this. My team kept trying to change the ads, change things on Facebook and it was like, nothing was working. It wasn't fixing it. And I look at it and I go, what are the CPMs on Facebook? The cost per thousand impressions. And they're like, you know, it's whatever it was two bucks or whatever the number was at the time. And I'm like, what was it before this all changed? Same price. What's our clickthrough rate. Same, same as it was like. So we're spending the exact same cost per quick to get people to their site. They're like, yeah. I'm like, sounds like the problem is in Facebook, nothing's changed on Facebook. I'm like what happened to the website? And they're like, well the conversion rate dropped to an eighth. I'm like, okay, sounds like the problem is somewhere in there.
And I'm like, Hey guys, did you change your website? They're like, oh, we just made a quick update. Like, you know, what was it? Four weeks ago? I'm like, you mean on the day that this went south, like it's your website. And then I, we figured it. And so we went, okay, let's look at what changed. Oh, your site load speed is three times what it was before that little change you made. So now everyone on mobile is taking seven seconds to load each page on your site. No, one's gonna go get through the purchase cycle, like their purchase period. Like they're just gonna click, it's gonna take more than two seconds and they're gonna be like onboard. So that was the fix. We fixed it and went right back. So, and they, it took a lot to actually them to understand, like, I don't think it's the website. I'm like, no, no, here are the facts. <laugh> right. But that's a good example.
Kathleen (15:17):
Don't let the facts stand in the way of a good story.
Erik (15:19):
<laugh> right. But that's a good example of the triage that ha like, was it awareness? No awareness was costing the same. So it was nurturing. Okay. Where in nurturing? Oh, well, nothing changed on email. They have weren't it bought that many years ago. They weren't doing SMS, but oh, it looks like something might have happened on the website. What happened? Oh, there's a Delta. Got it. Now we fix it. So that's the idea is doing this on an ongoing basis for our clients. Is something really a big part of what we do. And we're actually, we acquired a software company. We haven't announced it yet, but we're working with them. They had built basically half the tool and now we're finishing it with them, creating an automatic benchmarking and monitoring tool to do this, uh, with software instead of people where it can just be like ping your, you know, conversion rates down, we think it's cuz of this, you need to do this. Okay.
Kathleen (16:02):
So that was gonna be my next question. You just gave me the perfect segue. Cause you have these three buckets that you talked about and you know, there's customers you've been working with forever where like you just described a perfect scenario where you see a change and that's like a red flag and you have to figure out what cause the change. But then there's gonna be people who come to you that you haven't been working with and you're starting fresh. So like you mentioned benchmarks, how do you slide, which of the three buckets to start focusing on? Do you have certain like industry benchmarks? Yes. You know, cause there's directional change, which we can all spot, but when you're starting out of whole cloth, how do you identify where the priority is?
Erik (16:36):
Well, and even when you're later in the business, uh, let's say Facebook's been over outperforming for you and all of a sudden it goes back to normal. Like I don't know that Facebook is where you wanna spend your time to try to get it back to this outlier. You know, like let's say you have an outlier for a period and then it declines to norm, you know, more, uh, stasis. That's not where you should spend your time. Fixing is trying to get this outlier again. You should spend your time finding new places and stuff like that. And just keeping that where it is. And so generally, and so yes, benchmarking is the answer and that's where we have again, thousands of companies, marketing data that we've anonymized and built and stored, et cetera, so that we can actually create industry benchmarking that we're gonna be tapping into a lot more. And that's part of what we're building out. But we're hoping to launch both LTV analysis and benchmarking with this new platform in the next, I have an update I think today or tomorrow, but I think in the next month, the, the, honestly I think the tech, our tech team there is amazing. The only thing that we're waiting on is we wanna rebrand it, do all that. Since we made this acquisition, do like a big PR announcement. So we're building all these pieces, software, getting that, uh, new branding done and then rolling it out.
Kathleen (17:40):
So if somebody's not working with you guys, like you talked about, you know, there's brands of all different sizes, some folks are gonna try to go it alone. I always like to ask the question like you have a proprietary piece of software and a system. Like if I'm just running my business and I wanna try to figure out, you know, use your method and apply it to my business, how should I look at those three buckets and decide where to begin?
Erik (18:03):
Uh, so I mean, you gotta know your industry know you have to have some industry knowledge to know what it should be. That's part of it or in a, we're actually gonna probably turn this into a SaaS product. That's accessible cuz that's our whole mission. So we're gonna probably let this be used by people outside of our client base. Um, I also believe that any business that wants to scale needs a partner, I, I like, I just firmly believe that it's like not having an accounting firm is a business too. It's like, you're not gonna like, don't build a CPA in a tax firm in, within your business. Like every company uses an accounting firm. Every company should use a marketing agency. Not completely. It's the, I think people get stuck in this, uh,
Kathleen (18:38):
All or nothing. Yeah.
Erik (18:39):
Oh or nothing. Thank you. Yeah. And so it's like, we're, we're going all in house or we're going all, we're outsourcing everything. It's like, no, neither one's a good answer. You need people in house and you need an agency and you need that forest from the tree's view, you need that outside perspective. You need a good agency obviously, which is where the difficulty can come in. But, uh, that, I think you need both to build a successful business. And I also think it's how ambitious are you? Like we always talk about like, we've thankfully from the like growth and marketing perspective won the super bowl. We've built many companies from nothing to multibillion dollars. Like I would say, that's the success signing Nike. We've also worked with Nike. That's great. So is, you know, hundreds of other agencies, but we didn't make Nike. We've made several multibillion dollar companies. So it's like at this point, if we're working with a smaller, medium business, that's where they want to get. If you wanna win a super bowl, build a team that's already been there and that's so look for, we're not the only ones look for an agency partner. That's already done the things you want to do. And at least, you know, you can spend a couple years plus on your growth trajectory that you want with a partner that has taken companies several times on that growth trajectory.
Kathleen (19:42):
So I feel like there's a million directions we could go from here because you have your three buckets and then there's a lot of like detail within each of those buckets. Right. Um, knowing that we don't have time to talk about every little detail. I guess what I would be interested in knowing is in the, in the world we're living in today, you know, where costs are rising supply, chain's all messed up. Um, we have, you know, privacy regulations, we've got platform changes. There's all kinds of like third party data issues in the world we're living in today. Are there certain things that you see a lot of businesses doing that, that are mistakes or that are areas for like quick wins that that folks should be looking at within their own business?
Erik (20:24):
Yeah. Number one, I'd say is take a breath because, uh, everything you just named is totally accurate and everyone who is dealing with the same thing. And I think that's the part that people miss is like we're capitalism is an, is a like playing field. Don't get me wrong. The economy slows and grows and that will hurt and grow businesses. But your competitors are doing with the same stuff you are. And so it's not like everyone else has this advantage and you have this pain point. So if you can just be the one to work through it better than others, you still win you'll survive. So I, I think it's about being the most proactive of your peers is where you win in these things and the most, you know, the best player so to speak. I think that's important also. I think in marketing, everybody chases the shiny object and it's like impossible to get people to stop, but like, it's so funny because the best marketing channels still to date are Facebook and Google in terms of digital still today are the best you can get good on TikTok, something on Snapchat, Twitter, like there's all these other platforms that you can do decently, but like Facebook and Google still crush it.
But, and with Instagram I'm including, uh, uh, and it's been a decade of that. <laugh> so like the idea that you have to like be like, it's always changing and it's rapid and it's crazy. We kind of do that to ourselves. The truth is like, you should be te like, it's kind of like managing a stock portfolio where it's like, you should have like 80, 85% in these anchor blue chip stocks. Yeah, exactly. And every, and the like 15, 10, 15% maybe, or even 20 depends how aggressive you wanna be, should be in all these tests and trying different things like TikTok and Snapchat, whatever the new platform you wanna test is. But yeah, you should be playing with that and that can feel hectic, but it shouldn't be a big piece of your business. And like, it shouldn't, it should doesn't need to feel hectic and like don't me wrong. I think TikTok is going to be the, is gonna win big. And I hate to say that, cause I hate that it's not an American company. Not that I'm that overly patriotic, but like, and it's like
Kathleen (22:11):
Disguised spyware
Erik (22:12):
<laugh> yeah. Basically it's spyware, but their algorithm is unbelievable. And I I've spent time on TikTok. I actually got stuck in Seoul, Korea airport for six hours in the middle of the night Pacific time. Like, well, I'm caught up on work. I guess I have nothing to do. I'll try TikTok. This is I think a couple years ago now and oh my, yeah. Almost three years ago now. And uh, we, and then I was like, once you start playing with it, you realize how fun it is. And like the power of it now with the usage is insane. The average user on TikTok is on it an hour a day. The average, like that's nuts. It's, it's competing with Netflix. It's competing with television now, like to gen Z and younger use TikTok. They don't watch Netflix. It's crazy. And so, and the algorithm's so good that the way it's built.
So this is actually I think a good note, the way it's built is different than Facebook and Instagram, which are similar advertising channels for the, in the way you were gonna reach someone. So Facebook and Instagram are built on a social network. They're built on a social graph. It's about what your friends and the people you follow are doing. And then it tries to see what you're interested in. And based on that, it shows you your best friends and the stuff you're interested in TikTok has nothing to do with who you follow at all. It's all what you're interested in. So depending on what you pause on and what you like and what you look at, it continues to show you and it updates in real time. So like if tonight I just was in a, on the snowboarder, I was in a snowboarding mood.
They show me a snowboard video, you know, one of the first 10 let's say, and I pause on it. They're like, oh, he wants to watch snowboarding right now. And he'll just start showing me a bunch of snowboard videos and keep throwing in other stuff to keep testing that algorithm. And what's crazy about that is because I'm not expecting it to be people I follow. If you slip in advertisements that feel native and, and have been filmed as like a TikTok video, it's, I'm perfectly ready to check it out. It's like the, the ability to target people and not annoy them is insane with TikTok. If you build good ad content. And so I think they still have to work on the clicking offsite. I think that's where they're still the clickthrough rates a little whacking, but it'll get there and their ad platform's gonna get better. And I think that's gonna be interesting that being said, that's the first time in a decade that I've seen something that's really compelling to shift a lot of budget to, and it's not there yet.
Kathleen (24:21):
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Now, one thing you said earlier, I, I wanna kind of like come back to, which is that you guys, and I experienced this one in my agency, especially when you're working on retainers or anything along those lines, you're constantly having to justify your continued existence. Right. And so you talked about needing to always show performance. Yeah. Um, and that, that, it was interesting to me because I, I do think in marketing, we like, especially times like this, where we're maybe facing economic contraction, like these are good forcing functions to make us really zero in on the things that are gonna produce results. Right? Like you have to get rid of a lot of the fluff, but at the same time, I do think in marketing that it's very easy for many marketers to err, on the side of being very short term focused mm-hmm <affirmative> because they're constantly trying to feed a lead machine or pipeline and they do it at the expense of building, uh, like a really strong brand.
And you talked about you, you alluded to earlier the power of brand and trust. Yeah. And I believe very strongly in that, like I was listening to a podcast interview earlier today and somebody said, nobody, I think it was ran Fishkin. He was like, nobody ever goes online and Google searches best ride sharing. They're like Uber or Lyft, like find me Uber or Lyft, or nobody says like best, you know, place to, to rent an apartment. It's like, show me the Airbnb. So they're branded search because people know like, and trust these brands. And so I, I would love to hear kind of your perspective on how marketers should be balancing the very necessary short term focus to contribute, to pipeline, to show results with the need, to always keep their eye on that long term ball of building a strong brand.
Erik (25:56):
Yeah. I mean, the answer is you it's, it's kind of like we talked about with the, uh, agency versus in-house it's, it's neither, it's both. You have to do both and welcome to being a marketer you have to. And that's something I think that early on set us apart a lot was that we do both. We look at how do we build your brand while also looking at how do we build that pipeline? Because listen, a business runs on cashflow. You have to have month to month sales. Cause you gotta pay your people biweekly. So like you have to be driving it. You can't just build a brand unless you're really scrappy and really, um, lean. And you can just wait, which a lot of like really successful consumer brands take years of just grassroots building and stay really lean. So they don't have to go for the quick sale.
That's one way to do it. The other way is you can build, uh, a direct response machine and then over time it becomes so big. You can start to build a brand. Generally. I don't like that business. It's a cashflow machine, but it can crumble really fast. And so the answer is you wanna kind of build both. I mean, we even do. We drink our own punch, like we're running tons of Facebook and search ads and LinkedIn ads, Hawke Media, we're doing a bunch of lead gen stuff, but we also dam out with a book. We host Hawke Fest and e-commerce week and tons of events. And we, you know, do a ton of PR and we do all these things that help build a brand. And I do a ton of public speaking and podcasts and things like that. So it's like, we constantly, we do both. Cuz I think over time they serve each other. They, the trust piece, you know, the most, the biggest metric to look at it, trust actually it's two metrics it's repeat purchase and it's uh, con lower or higher conversion rate. So if you wanna continue to drive your conversion, rate up, be more aware guarantee Airbnb from site visits has a very high conversion rate compared to its competitors. Cause it's like it's Airbnb be fine.
Kathleen (27:39):
Yeah. That's interesting that you talked about the metrics too. Cause my next question was gonna be, I think one of the reasons that a lot of marketers kind of shirk the longer term brand building is that it's harder to measure. Um, or at least it's harder to measure using traditional tools. Like we talked about like attribution tools and so well,
Erik (27:53):
And that's yeah, that's the thing is I think people are trying to turn marketing into too much of a science. I love data. I'm a numbers guy through and through. I literally you saw, I have two screens here with just, uh, charts and uh, metrics. <laugh> that, that's how I manage my business too. You want data, but you want data into inform decisions, not make them for you. And I think that's super critical because having, you know, knowing, I mean, this is a good example. Like we spent a lot of money marketing this book, sorry I say this, I know non-video we spent a lot of money marketing this book, um, and getting it out there and we've got over 30,000 copies sold and like, it's not like someone's like called me and been like, Hey, I read your book. I have a million dollar a month account.
And I wanna give you right now. Like we don't know that there's gonna be a direct ROI yet. We just assume there will be because 30,000 people are reading my marketing book, I think at some point will probably get enough business out of it and it'll build a brand. But sometimes you do have to be that sort of, you know, finger to the wind with marketing. You do like you, you have to know that you have a good business with good, a lifetime value. And that, that certain things are just going because you have a good cert product or service, getting it out there is going to work. And that was my last company, Ellie, the activewear brand. We basically, this was early, early, early in influencer marketing. I gifted a thousand influencers, which at the time were just bloggers like Instagram influencers weren't even a thing just yet.
They're just starting. Um, I gifted a thousand bloggers, a pair or an outfit from our company, which was 20 grand in product. Um, at the time you didn't have to pay 'em. So I was just like, Hey, we'll give you a product if you write a reviewer of it. And like, I just knew on average, these people should sell one product each, which will pay for the campaign. It should happen. We, and we monitored it, but we didn't know, like we didn't know if that was actually gonna happen. We had some metrics, but I mean, we did, uh, what was it? We did, we got to a 6 million run dollar run rate in four months. So it's like, yeah, I think that worked. Do I have the exact, you know, spreadsheet to show that? No, but do I have the overall metrics to that? Yeah, absolutely.
Kathleen (29:52):
So along the theme of like stories and transformation, I always love hearing examples. And um, you know, you talked about one earlier where you went from, I think it was like 300,000 to multiple millions. Yeah. Um, I'm sure you have a lot of examples along those lines. I mean, are there any more you can share and also like any advice as far as when you're in that process of optimizing what's the cadence and what I mean by that is like, how often are you? Is it monthly? Is it weekly? How often are you looking at these three buckets and sort of adjusting course? Cause I do believe there, there are certain things where you have to like, let those experiments play out. So I'd love to get some more on that.
Erik (30:28):
Yeah. So I'll, I'll do answer those latter part first in terms of how often we're adjusting, uh, we are looking weekly for sure. Because sometimes there are early indicators that are like, yeah, this just isn't working at all. Yeah. So like an ad, that's getting no click through. We don't need to wait to see how that performs. We know it's not performing, so we will adjust weekly where it makes sense, but it's exactly what you said, certain things you need to let play out and wanna play out. We, you know, depending on your purchase cycle for good ads, we need to look at how does it play out with that purchase cycle. It's gonna take whatever that is 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks to, uh, or months to actually see how that plays out and how those leads perform, et cetera. And then on a, and then on a quarterly basis, we usually do like a QBR quarterly business review of like, do we need to make any real adjustments?
Kathleen (31:12):
Yeah. And so it's,
Erik (31:14):
It's a weekly conversation. So it doesn't like we don't wait. It's just, it's all different for every business. It's like, we make the decision when we think we've got the right data to make the decision.
Kathleen (31:23):
And how quickly can, you know, if somebody's listening and they're thinking, they're gonna try this approach, like how quickly should they expect to see results in, in improvements in their business? And like in what order of magnitude. And I know it's probably
Erik (31:34):
Different for our, as you always say double your purchase cycle, because it's gonna take you to, uh, double your purchase cycle. Once you get things changed. So let's say it takes a couple weeks to implement whatever you want do. And let's say it's new ads. You want, you start running those new ads. After a couple weeks, you have to actually get in spin 'em up, make these new ads, do all the right targeting, et cetera, get that done, get it approved by the client. If they're working with us that gets done in a couple weeks, let's say those go live. Let's say your purchase cycle is six weeks. Well, so in six weeks, I'll know if those, how are those ads really performed? I'll really have good data around it and then I'll make adjustments and then I'll take another six weeks for those ads to perform. And that's where you're starting to see good results. So it's we always say it's about three months. And my favorite line came outta my business partner. Always thought it was his line. Turns out it was Warren buffet. Uh, nine women can't have it make a baby in a month.
Kathleen (32:20):
Yeah, <laugh> yikes. But one woman can make nine and nine months. Cause there is been nine. There was OME. And now there's somebody who beat
Erik (32:28):
Her. There is a nine. I was gonna say, I remember. OK.
Kathleen (32:30):
Which is a terrifying thought. So yeah.
Erik (32:33):
Now we have our first coming in 14 weeks. Yeah.
Kathleen (32:37):
Oh, congratulations. Life is about to change. Integrate. Yes.
Erik (32:41):
We're we're ready for it.
Kathleen (32:42):
<laugh> that's awesome. All right. Well let's shift gears. So I, you know, again, this is a big topic. I could talk to you forever about it, but um, I'm curious to get your take on two things that I ask. A lot of my guests about one is just, um, kind of keeping up with everything. So a lot of marketers, I talk to say that they're really challenged by like everything that's changing. And we talked a lot about some of those things earlier. Um, they, you know, a lot of people describe it, like drinking from a fire hose, trying to keep up with digital in particular. So how do you personally like keep up with it all stay educated, et cetera.
Erik (33:13):
Uh, couple things. So one I will say, and this is just critical. You have to have a good team. Like I thankfully have a team I can lean on there. I mean, we're about 300 people at this point. Like I there's no, absolutely no way I could keep on everything. Like I have to keep on top of our executives. And so that's number one is you just have to have people that are good, that you can rely on. And at scale when you're small, maybe not, but then just stay focused. So don't take on too much. Like you just can't, you can't spread yourself too thin. So that that's number one. Number two. <laugh> this just came from like literally starting in middle school for me. I hated studying reading. Uh, I, you know, it's like I loved reading as a young kid and then I think I still remember my, I think it was sixth grade.
They forced you to read. I went to the blue dolphin and I don't know why I hated that book, but I was so bored that I like lost my taste for reading. And then it was another book and I, and I just started, like I was done. So I used to ask my two best friends from child that I'm still good friends with. Um, they loved reading all these books and they'd spend 20 minutes, 10 minutes between classes just telling me what it was about or what the chapters we had to read. They'd just be like, yeah, this, this, and I learned to, like, I ended up with like a perfect memory when people would gimme a small synopsis, I could extrapolate a, not to be like, I get it. Cool. And so I almost became a spark notes,
Kathleen (34:34):
Cliff notes. Yeah.
Erik (34:36):
<laugh> like a, but it became a cliff notes thinker where it's like, give me the data points and I can, you know, fill in the details and understand it. And so why, why, why that comes to mind is my team will say little anecdotes here and there. Like yeah, we've seen, you know, yeah. A bunch of our clients are seeing much worse ad spend. We're seeing this kind of, because CPMs have grown 80% that will stay in my mind permanently. And so I'll know. So the next time someone's asking me, like, how's marketing going? I'm like, well, CPMs are up 80%. Like I'll those facts just stick with me. Cause I just taught myself to learn that way. So that's how I do it. And I think everyone has their own ways of how they have to build their business to work for them. But I've always, and I'm, I have slack going all day and I'm in all of our different teams' channels and I just click through it and I'll see anecdotes of like, yeah, we're seeing great results here because we did this, this and this. And now I know that's a new strategy we're doing on email that worked really well for few new clients. And I'll just spot it throughout my daily, like skimming what we're up to.
Kathleen (35:29):
Nice. Um, and I guess if you're a solo marketer and you don't have a team, I mean, for me, it's always been like find your community, right? Like yes,
Erik (35:36):
Exactly. A hundred percent network is
Kathleen (35:38):
Sub for a team. <laugh> yeah,
Erik (35:40):
Yeah, no. I mean, at this point we're at scale that we have so much of our own proprietary data. We can find these info out of ourselves, but again, that's where our tools coming in and that's what we're trying to help with is that, is that is a pain point. You gotta find a way to get access to that summit.
Kathleen (35:53):
Yeah. All right. Um, second question. This podcast is all about inbound marketing, which everybody defines it differently. I define it as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to you. So it's a pretty big umbrella. Is there a particular person or company that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer today?
Erik (36:12):
People coming to you? I mean person, I, he can't beat Gary Vaynerchuk at this point. That guy's inbound is insane. Everybody would wanna talk to that guy. And I we've done a bunch of work together. He's a great guy. I actually really like him, even though we're pseudo competitors in a weird way, we've done a lot more. We're actually working on a collaboration right now. Um, so I would say he's probably one of the better individuals at that where he just continues to make insane amounts of content. He's been doing it for 20 years now or so give or take and just keeps going at it. And it's a lot like, you know, running a podcast alone is a lot and he has, I think two and always content and everything else like that. It's a lot to do. But if you can create a really compelling message that makes people know what they want to come to you with, that's something I constantly work on too. I try to make it so that when someone thinks about marketing, they call me or email me that's I wanna be the marketing thought in everyone's mind. I feel like Gary's made himself more, the hustle thought than the marketing thought, but that's what he wanted to be. He's I think he's made more money off NFTs than he has off marketing.
Kathleen (37:16):
Yeah, exactly. He's now he's got a restaurant you can't get in unless you have his NFT. There's a whole nother.
Erik (37:20):
Oh, is that true? I didn't realize
Kathleen (37:22):
That. Yeah, yeah.
Erik (37:22):
Yeah. They had their event this weekend. I, they, he called me to buy crypto punk when it was 30 grand. And I was like, I'm not spending 30 grand on a JPEG man. Like I love you. No, they, they went up to like what, 500 grand and then <laugh> and then he called me and was like, Hey, get one of my NFTs. I was like, yeah, no, I'm going to, like, at that point I was like, yeah, I'll buy one of your NFTs. Let's do it. I logged on, I couldn't figure out how to use meta mask at the time now I figured it all out, but I would kind of, and I was like, eh, I'll deal with this later. Oops. <laugh>
Kathleen (37:50):
I know
Erik (37:51):
I mistake on that one,
Kathleen (37:52):
But same way for me, when I first looked at, uh, the crypto packaged goods NFTs and I was like, damn, that's expensive. And now I'm like, damn, it's five times as expensive as it was. So
Erik (38:00):
Yeah, I bought, I have a bunch that people have given me and stuff, but I bought one NFT and it's like, Forex, I think still. So like, cool. I'm never gonna sell it, like whatever, but yeah, yeah,
Kathleen (38:11):
Yeah. That's a, that's a, a separate topic that I'm super interested in, but uh,
Erik (38:15):
Yeah. Same something to be aware of back to the like shiny object, something to be aware of. I don't think it's gonna be the end all be all of marketing for everyone, but we are looking at how can we leverage this for marketers? We we're looking at different tools right now.
Kathleen (38:27):
Yeah. And I've been, I've done a series of three interviews on this and, and because I'm specifically, I think there's a lot of applications for utility NFTs for communities and things along those lines.
Erik (38:35):
Yeah. Hundred percent. And I think that's, that's what we're looking at too. Exactly.
Kathleen (38:38):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, alright. Uh, we're coming to the top of our time. So if somebody wants to learn more about the Hawke Method, they wanna get your book, they wanna learn more about your connector, ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that.
Erik (38:50):
Yeah. So the Hawke Methods easy you can buy it anywhere books are sold, Amazon, et cetera. Um, and then you can, if you wanna have Hawke Media run an audit on your company, it's free at Hawkemedia.com and then I'm on every social channel slash Erik Huberman. So should be pretty easy.
Kathleen (39:04):
And as always, I will put all those links in the show notes, which are available at kathleen-booth.com. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing marketing work, just tweet me at @Kathleenlbooth and I'd love to have them as my next guest. In the meantime, that's it for this week. Thanks so much for joining me, Erik. This was really interesting.
Erik (39:20):
That was fun. Thank you for having me.
