Blending Marketing Channels for Maximum Impact | Eric Eden

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Eric Eden, Co-Founder and CMO of Workverse, keynote speaker, and podcast host. Eric has over 20 years of experience in leading marketing teams for internet services and SaaS companies. His experience includes building great marketing teams, implementing marketing technology solutions effectively, driving demand, and driving growth. Eric, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Eric Eden: Thanks a lot for having me. Super pumped to be here. David McBee: Hey, as the host of your own marketing podcast, I hope that I can live up to expectations. Of course, your podcast is called Remarkable Marketing, which I love, and you get to interview some of the top minds in our space. I'd love to just hear what are some of the things that you see in common from those who are most successful at marketing? Eric Eden: Absolutely. So my podcast is all about interviewing marketing leaders and asking them to share a story about the best marketing they've ever done, because that's what I do when I go to events and I meet other chief marketing officers and other marketing leaders. That's how I get inspired. And people will often share a great story. I'm like, "How'd you do that?" And so really that's the concept behind my podcast. I've interviewed 150 people, and people have great ideas. Marketing is a super broad, functional area with hundreds of topics that can be discussed. And every topic, like advertising or media buying, you can't do one definitive episode on it because people have different approaches, people have different strategies, and people are very creative and they come up with ways to do amazing things that surprise me every day. So I really like to celebrate the top 1% of marketing because I think a lot of the marketing out there is pretty horrible, to be honest. When I get emails and I see ads, I'm like, a lot of it is really bad. So I'm celebrating what I think is the top 1% of marketing out there. David McBee: Are there any standouts that you can think of in your top 1% that you'd like to share with us? Eric Eden: There's so many great things that people do. I marvel when I have people on who have given hundreds of keynote speeches, have written 10 books or more. Some people have written 50 books. It's amazing, the content that people can produce, the strategies that some people use to succeed at advertising, like how some people use first-party data and get really high ROAS of 10X. And there's just lots of great stories to highlight and showcase, and it's always awesome also, to hear the leaders talk about it. And most marketing is really hard. Most people think it's simple. Everyone thinks they're a marketer, but most marketing is really hard. And what's really cool is to have marketing leaders say how they overcame the challenges, and then what was the impact of it. David McBee: Well, we're definitely going to have to check out Remarkable Marketing. All right, so for now though, for my show, I want to talk about where you see advertising and media buying going, specifically in a world where AI is coming along. What do you see to be the highest performing channels? Eric Eden: So I think things have been shifting quite a lot in recent years. I think Covid shifted the channel mix for a lot of organizations, and it's not been the same as pre-Covid since. And I think I look at marketing channels as which ones are more expensive and less expensive. And they all deliver results at some level, but having the right mix of that is what's really key. So I think online advertising is frequently at the most, more expensive end of the spectrum. But I would say one very interesting trend that I've seen from people that I talk to on my podcast is often people are able to make online advertising not the most expensive channel by blending it with other strategies, like blending online advertising and content marketing. Blending online advertising with influencers and user-generated content has made it 70% less expensive for some people. So I think there's an interesting way to think about how you use channels together to get the best results. I think, two channels that I'm most excited about, is podcasting, what we're doing right now. I think it's great because emotion comes through. You get to hear the inflection in people's voice. It's a really great medium. I think it's better than long-form content, for example, which emotion doesn't necessarily come off the page in the same way. And I've also been watching YouTube with some fascination because I think it's becoming more and more popular. The results that I see, some people get millions of views for videos they put out. They build up a huge subscriber base of hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and they get millions of video views. It's pretty inspiring to see some people killing it in the YouTube channel and some of the changes that have been made in YouTube. 100 million people a month watch podcasts on YouTube. That blows my mind, but it strikes me that YouTube is one of the top channels for podcasts, so I'm very excited about watching YouTube. I think people now with video, it's just gotten to a point where everyone has the ability to create videos with their phone that are pretty darn good quality, and so I think I'm watching those two channels really closely. I think there's 30 channels out there you can do, but those are two that I think are really growing in popularity and have a pretty good return. David McBee: I totally agree, especially on the YouTube thing. My 23-year-old son only watches YouTube, I think. Maybe a little Star Wars on Disney Plus. And then recently I was talking to a gentleman who said the only thing he watches is YouTube, and he's 87 years old. And I thought that was really interesting because often that age demographic gets lumped into still being on cable television or over the air. So are we living in a world now, do you think, where age doesn't really impact the online channels? Eric Eden: I think it goes across generations. I think that it's equally being adopted by multiple generations. I'm Gen X, and I love it. My kids are Gen Z. They love it. And I think it's also, the opportunity is there for people to blend strategies. With YouTube, for example, you can advertise videos, which is probably one of the more cost-effective advertising channels. And there is a specific type of SEO that you can do when you list videos that can get you thousands of viewers that is very specific to YouTube. And I think that you can do user-generated content and influencers and videos on your channel. There's just so many ways to blend things to make it a really effective channel. David McBee: How about AI? What are you seeing in the world of AI as far as media buying and advertising goes? Eric Eden: I think AI changes everything, including advertising and media buying. I think back to when the internet first launched. I was there in the dot-com boom in the mid-nineties, and it changed business. It changed marketing completely, and I think AI is going to have that same effect. We're talking about AI now as a topic, but I think we don't talk about internet marketing anymore. It's just part of what we do, and so I think AI is going to be like that pretty quickly. It's going to be embedded in everything, and we're going to expect all of the greatness that is possible within it. I think it's moving very fast. It's evolving. There's still a bunch of challenges with it. I think that it's great at doing everything in advertising, from coming up with great taglines and copy and titles to doing images, and I think videos will get there very soon. I think it's very interesting to see how it's all coming together, but I think it's worth noting that this has been in the works for well over 10 years. So still time to go, but I think this has been building for a while. David McBee: Yeah, it definitely has. Well, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate it. Before I let you go, do you have a favorite podcast, besides your own, or a book that you feel has been really instrumental in your own personal success? Eric Eden: Yeah, I listen to a lot of the marketing podcasts, so I like Marketing School. And I just read a book that is really great, Career on Course by Scott Jeffrey Miller, which is an amazing book. He's written seven books, and that's one of my favorites, recent favorites. David McBee: All right, Career on Course. We'll have to check it out. And what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you personally? Eric Eden: RemarkableMarketing.io is my podcast website. David McBee: All right. We'll check it out. Thank you so much for being our guest today. Eric Eden: Thank you. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi and follow us on LinkedIn for new episodes. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.