How To Build A Successful Brand on Social Media | Sell & Scale Summit 2022

at the end of the day buying and selling stuff still gets me going in a way that boggles my mind as many of you know if you follow my content going to a garage sale is still the most exciting thing I could do in business closing an eight-figure deal for Vayner is nowhere on the same scale as going to a garage sale and finding a sixty seven dollar stuffed animal for a quarter I'm really excited to be here for uh many different reasons I even asked to do more q a in

this talk because I know you've been consuming a lot of content and I think q a always brings out the most value so please if there's anything I touch on or if there's anything that's been on your mind start thinking about that because we'll get to that in a little bit I think most of what excites me to be here is that at the end of the day buying and selling stuff still gets me going in a way that boggles my mind as many of you know if you follow my content going to a garage sale is still the most exciting thing I can do in business like closing a nine or closing an eight-figure deal for Vayner media is nowhere on the same scale as going to a garage sale and finding a sixty seven dollar stuffed animal for a quarter and I think about because I'm really saying it no [ __ ] like it's really where my chemicals are and it's funny where I was in my career when the aggressive reselling on Amazon and other platforms happened kind of put me in a place where I wasn't able to like fully go there because I was so deep in operating multiple things at the time but one of the great regrets of my life is that I didn't have eBay and Amazon and other platforms as such when I was in junior high in high school and had unlimited time because a I wouldn't have graduated high school and I think that's kind of cool and B the amount of learnings that you get from scaled reselling I think is pretty profound and has a huge impact I believe selling things on the internet actual physical things and or working inside of a retail store and interacting with tons of people from all shapes and sizes are really the two great training rounds for a framework of a very successful business because there are many things that I focus on in HR operations Finance but the concept of creating demand is a very very interesting one because it sits with so few people when I think about the room and panel content that's been spread demand creation excites me and will always excite me as a matter of fact it's the framework of what I think I want to talk to you about today which is as I think about the majority of the room because I know a lot of people here do different things I always try to think about what is the one connective tissue that the room may have so that what comes out of my mouth is actual value while I'm on stage and is universal and comma is potentially the thing that is not being focused on the most as a matter of fact the young lady that was just up here I grabbed her right before I went oh there she is like I grabbed her and I said look that Tick Tock thing you just said was really good and it's really good because it's really real and it's really at scale and what I know and I'm making this assumption so please during the Q a the best practices within the ecosystem is where a lot of the content will come from in a conference like this and what you are consuming and what you know what I get excited about is what's the best practices that are not obvious within the platforms meaning the Amazons and the Walmarts and the other shopifies and things of that nature what could you be doing for me one of the things that's so interesting is Global pandemics are going to obviously create curveballs for supply chain right so I'm aware of that but I think about what is consistently going to matter to every single person in here for the rest of their careers and that consistent thing that I want to focus on today is underpriced attention is very important and underpriced attention falls into two categories math and art what I mean by underpriced attention is which ad product today is a good deal I built my Daddy's Liquor Store like you saw in that video because I have 90 open rates on an email newsletter that had a hundred thousand people on it in 1997. let me say that nice and slow for everybody in the back 90 open rates that's unheard of that's not real in today's world that 90 went to 50 in the first two years not because we were bad at it but because the world had started using email marketing and people were getting tired of it but when I was doing it nobody was doing it and it worked I bought Google AdWords for the store the day Google AdWords came out and for the first year I owned the word wine for five cents for four months and then for 10 cents when they raised the price it used to be a five cent collect for the first few minutes there and then obviously it had to be Cabernet and then it obviously had to be Silver Oak Cabernet and then it 2016 Cabernet and a lot of you in this room know that the math part that you play to win in the ecosystems of where you sell are toll booths and that's fine they deserve it Amazon warmer others they deserve it they have the attention you're paying for it that's right I love when people get mad at social networks they're like [ __ ] Zuckerberg [ __ ] me the algorithm and I'm like it's free it's [ __ ] free the audacity of people is fascinating the platform's free for every selling marketing person here everybody the concept of something that's free that can sell stuff is insane of course net it's not free got a production company things of that nature but most people when they start should only be doing it themselves on their phone and it's free so the math part is something that doesn't interest me to go deep on because my intuition is a lot of people play Within that framework you're not at this place if you aren't relying on some level of math you understand that the part that I want to focus on is why I got so excited about what she had to say which is the art part as many of you know iOS 14 5 update hurts some folks there's a lot of other things coming down the pike in moats that are going to continue to hurt and what does that mean it means that as math plays out its game on the internet and the big corporations play their politics with each other and play when I think about smaller businesses and I'm talking about businesses doing under 100 million a year in Revenue under 50 or 25 or 10 we may included must really understand the art part of underpriced attention for our businesses this is all fancy jargon for one simple thing the single thing that can change

the majority of businesses in this room is an obnoxious and I mean obnoxious commitment to organic social media creative as an opportunity to take advantage of the tick tock of vacation of social media that will be the next half decade in The Tick tockification of all social networks is the biggest opportunity for everybody in this room what is happening and will continue to happen is these platforms are going to reward the creative not your ability to build the following this is exciting for everybody in the room if you heard me loud and clear because many people here have not made the commitment to a masking Community as a personal brand or even for their brand when I tell you that you could have never made a piece of content in your life and tomorrow for your business your product or you however you want to play it both preferably that you can post your first post on a YouTube shorts or a tick tock and if you know what you're doing a lot of good things can happen for your business is exciting the problem is it's daunting for a lot of people in this room like math it's predictable it's black and white they hate art it's gray as [ __ ] and you have no idea what the [ __ ] is going on the problem is the math will continue to get commoditized and will be leveraged against you and the art is your moat branding instead of math-based digital sales and marketing and content and creativity are a Battleground that this room must take much more seriously than it has in the last decade because it will be the protection to allow you to have the margins you'll need to sustain your business because what's actively happening is the math is being run to take all your margin let me say it nice and slow the math is being run to take your margin when you don't sell product within your own self when you sell somewhere else the data is being collected this is good they deserve it you brought no customers to the table they brought all of them I just need you to know the opportunity in front of you what does this mean it means a couple of things one this Tick Tock a vacation of all social is a huge opportunity for many reasons one back to how many of you try many different products I would argue in Social based on these Algos is the greatest insight to what your next product should be the concept of guessing your next product is crazy in a world where you can literally create samples at scale create content against it and get incredible qualitative feedback if it's interesting not the math but the comments and the insights at scale from free distribution because of organic virality because that's where social is going this is a profound shift in Social at a time when social is hitting scale of complete and utter consumption patterns besides streaming services besides gaming and streaming services the attention of society is living within these 10 platforms this is a I really hope the tenor that I'm bringing to it which is a little more serious than my style normally is landing for some of you because the stakes are so high because it's pure offense again in simplest terms I genuinely believe that every single business in this room needs to go home and substantially and I'm talking two four Thirty X their creative output per day for context how many people here are putting out five pieces of social media creative for their business a day please raise your hands please stand actually if you don't mind

the [ __ ] disaster thank you for these Pioneers good [ __ ] thank you this is actually can you keep these lights on because I want to see the crowd thank you so much this is huge for me personally I come to talks at this point in my career singling for the email that I get in three years from some of you about that this was the talk that made you do the thing that made the thing happen to have an audience of this level of skill in this category of business and to have such an extraordinary low percentage of people that are even putting out five pieces of content today in a world where if you're doing two million dollars in revenue on your business you should be considering 10 a day is just a massive opportunity again what we're talking about is something everyone should fully understand which is social media is where brand is built social media is driving an extraordinary amount of sales it's also changing in a way that it hasn't for 15 years the reason I'm personally so excited about it is in 2006 my life changed because I took all of my savings all of them and I invested in three companies Facebook Twitter and Tumblr obviously I'm rich now but the moral of the story is not that the moral is when I invested in Tumblr I called my brother AJ and I said Tumblr is going to be the biggest one of these three thank God I wasn't making videos back then Tumblr did sell for a billion dollars to Yahoo but let me tell you why I thought Tumblr was going to be the biggest in 2007. even back then there was something in my Spidey senses that understood the social media social graph was following each other and because it started young and I watched my brother go through it because he was the first class in college and by the time we even started vaynermedia half the people he was following he wasn't friends with they had different interests already I understood there was vulnerability in it just being about who you followed but Tumblr I'm 46 so for the 30 year olds 32 year olds in here 35 that remember tumblr's rise when they were in junior high Tumblr was based on what you were interested in and I saw stickiness there that I really was dumbfounded by that has now been manifested if you look back and you Google my name with the word musically you'll see four or five years ago me screaming at the top of my lungs that you need to get on musically when it was I mean I thought I was going to go to [ __ ] jail because it was only 13 year old girls on there dancing I remember my team's like you sure you want to post this I'm like [ __ ] it but I knew what I was looking at with musically really mattered to everybody in this room and was going to at some point obviously Tick Tock bought it is now what is tick tock if you are not active on this for your business just going to tick tock right now if you download it today for the first time in five weeks because you're curious about what I'm saying or what you said earlier if you just searched the hashtag tick or maybe because it hit every news cycle maybe the Ocean Spray story Ocean Spray cranberry juice has been around forever the single most effective commercial marketing campaign in the company's history was a man going down the street on some sort of skateboard drinking it and listening to Fleetwood Mac in its history it is impossible for me to be able to communicate to this room how big of an elephant in the room what I'm talking about is for reselling there is a collision course that is happening between math and art and the greatest way for you to extract value is to bet so much more on Art in the face of it not being as interesting to bet on as math the day-to-day tactics of what I'm

saying you take your product and whether through reaching out to influencers at scale and paying which can be very underpriced or overpriced depending on your skill set of understanding what you're buying and you should put some real homework into it but more importantly your ability to create internal production capabilities to produce ungodly amounts of short form video content is important not just because it goes viral and maybe you'll sell some stuff but there's so much more complexity to it and I'd like to share it with you let's just use the boots with the rubber thing you take the boots you make a [ __ ] boot video I don't know put poor champagne in it and drink something out of the boot like my old Russian uncles used to you make the video if the video catches lightning and my prediction is that these platforms are about to go more extreme actually how many people here are producing social media content for their business at all like once a day forget about the five day like at all as a driver for their business raise your hands all right a little bit more but still quite a few not which is just great like I'm pumped about this right now because about half the room or maybe we're just lazy this morning but about half of them doesn't I just want to update you on how it's been for the last five years on Instagram and other platforms your views were basically in the same pocket except the occasional thing right they were in the same pocket it was so based on who follows you that's a consistent understanding in Tick Tock you can post something and get 600 views the next one 90 and then the next one's 400 000. I actually think that extremity over the next decade is going to get more extreme on every platform because it's in the best interest of the people on the other side so I think those numbers could get as Extreme as in three years from now we're getting videos depending on how good you are at it where you're getting 7 20 50 30 94 million why is this important today if you take action this week on this talk as we clarify through q a which is why I wanted to do more because I'm sure there'll be questions and you say [ __ ] it I'm going to do this when something goes viral there's a very substantial thing that has to happen one and very few people are doing this at this point you have to talk turn that brand piece of content into brand formants so you take the viral post and you re-jigger it you edit it slightly or you change the copy you change the url potentially even in your profile and you take it and you run ads against it as a performance ad driving to your Amazon your Shopify your own site or wherever you are you turn the brand piece of content because consumers have shown you that they're interested in it and you turn that into the creative ad these creative ads matter because they're very different than intent based ads or retargeting ads because they have a different feeling it's the reason someone buys your product that really matters in this scenario and what the value of that customer is versus somebody you may submit in a pre-ios 14. 5 World on the 17th retargeted ad and they bought it I mean I know people who buy stuff just because they got retargeted so much they just wanted it to stop and they just bought the [ __ ] thing that's not a good relationship but also it's the insight one thing that is happening in this community when I watch it when I see a lot of you talk with each other on social when I get the emails in detail when I talk to my friends that are in it

one thing that we don't spend enough time in this realm is I'm the consumer insights from the comments on the creative a as we could tell by the room we're not doing enough creative B we're not spending time in the comments have all the insights this goes back to the r d or what could be the single Insight that leads to the campaign or the product advancement that actually takes you to the next level within your business many of you are playing such strong great Arbitrage that you're looking for the next Arbitrage without realizing the Arbitrage you currently have is the play you just have to build it in a slightly different way to a different scale that comes from the marketing side art consumer insights side so when the post goes viral the ability to turn it into a direct response ad that I know will play for this room is important but the ability to understand how to then make a twenty thousand dollar video that takes the insights you got from that one piece of social media ad and have the ability to turn that twenty thousand dollar video into a bidable streaming service ad as a commercial Hulu Amazon Prime what Netflix is about to do is the way that a lot more businesses in here on that single product go from a million dollar a year business that's running math Arbitrage on showing up first in a search result within a platform to becoming a 57 million dollar a year business on its own Merit that is not at the mercy of the toll booths to me that is the most significant moat and opportunity of the next half decade for the profile of this room understanding that if you can get religious about social media creative by creating and I'll take it I'll go even more tactical you've got a product you step back you decide we need to make this product relevant for 50 different consumer segmentations 18 to 22 year old dudes who skateboard on the west coast yoga moms in the Pacific Northwest DieHard Jets fans who grew up in New Jersey and on and on you create these targets that then helps you make the content it gives you a framework of like okay because you know what it is right I know like what am I going to make it's like 10 a day [ __ ] you know when you have consumer segmentations you kind of understand why you're doing it you can start conceptualizing to whom and what you start making this creative and you let the algorithms work in your favor everyone's boo hoo about algorithms because they wanted a couple more likes this room can build their absolute Empire on the back of algorithms they're empty pipes they either beat you or you beat them and I feel like this is a room that wants to beat them I really do I don't think you're at this conference for kicks and giggles I also think this room is full of [ __ ] like every room because they talk about grinding and doing things but they tend to stay on the things they like we all do I do too and I really understand how awesome it is when you understand Quant and math and all these things and you understand the platforms and how they work and best practices the problem is that's a commoditized piece of information it's just this and of course you can be outlined in this and that the bigger problem is the platforms decide when they want to be more profitable let me say that one nice and slow the platforms decide when they want to be more profitable so what you need to do is you need to be able to build demand across all platforms so that you're not one-dimensional and you're stuck most people have one punch you need to mix it up and no question the biggest opportunity buy a country mile for this room is to get way more serious about social media let me tell you why social media marketing is important for everybody in this room do you know what sales is like sales DNA then I'm so proud of that so many of you do in here digitally it's just bad marketing sales is transactional these [ __ ] didn't show up first when I searched sneakers they didn't retarget me all over the Internet nobody knocked on my door and said would you like this I'm buying this you understand no question the biggest opportunity for this room is to make the product that you want to sell something that people want to buy forever forever thank you I uh by the way I know I produce enough content that maybe there's something that I've been putting out that you're interested in that I didn't decide to touch on today you could go anywhere with the Q a but I really appreciate you guys and I really I hope the tone antenna is uh is understood by those that know me in this room this is a very serious opportunity like it because it's a double one it's kind of like when I called all my Russian my dad's Russian Uncle friends in La when Uber came out because I was an early investor I was like this is going to be a problem they laughed at me and I'm sure that there's some people in here doing seven million dollars a year all on math all one-dimensional that are not laughing but are dismissing what I'm saying I'm telling you this is a double bubble what a double bubble is this trend is going to happen for the next five years and it's where all the offense is and if you stay doing exactly what got you to this room in the VIP at the event it's going to get harder and worse it's very clear what's happening please pay attention don't get high on your own Supply as soon as you feel like it's going well you're in trouble