How To Be Trustworthy in the Age of Robots And Grifters.
Problem: the marketing foundation you’ve built a career on is shifting beneath your feet. Tectonic plates moving like a Nat Geo time lapse and you’re afraid of finding yourself standing on a deserted island.
It’s the perfect storm. The blog posts you worked hard to write in 2017 are getting less traffic than ever before. The traffic has been squeezed, mashed and vaporized by AI overviews and LLM results.
The Facebook followers you meticulously curated in 2014 are all but lost to the whims of the algorithms.
And nameless, faceless competitor websites popping up: opportunist technologists that can spin up a website in a day: cool gradients and all.
Solution: Nobody Ever Named a High School After a Robot.
Do impactful things. As an individual. As a team. As a company and organization. Do it because life is about impact … not about likes, shares or agents. You don’t have to have a high school named after you, but I promise it will be more rewarding than watching your agent write a social post.
Example: As an entrepreneur first, I’m always looking to solve problems. Specifically problems I encounter in my day to day life. Contorting my entrepreneurial brain to think outside of “problems I can solve that also make money” has been an evolution.
Thinking back to when I was starting out, I don’t remember a lot of great internship opportunities.
But with some experience comes maybe a little wisdom. Thinking back to when I was starting out, I don’t remember a lot of great internship opportunities. Defined as experience you can gain that halves you later in your career. So … why not set a goal and make an impact through offering rewarding Missoula internships.
Something we do to make a local impact is hire interns, pay them real money, and coach them up from entry level to professional level in quick order. Interested in an internship with us? Reach out to team@pintlergroup.com!
For Lead Gen: Build One Page to Rule Them All:
I get it: you have seven different forms across your websites all serving different purposes. The different fields and tags align perfectly with your CRM labels and custom fields.
That was then.
One page. One Form. One Goal. This is now.
I once heard a perfect metaphor about goal setting that applies to lead-gen marketing:
imagine you’re standing on land looking at an island on the horizon.
That island is your goal. You set a plan and begin building the bridge. The action toward your goal is the bridge building.
The bridge you’re building is made of steel.
But then you think, ya know, what might work better is copper. So you start a new bridge.
What about a hybrid: some sort of combination of steel for support, plus concrete pillars. A third bridge begins.
Before you know it, you have four bridges, all of them are 25% built. Even though the sum is 100%, it does not get you to the island.
Stop Building Multiple Bridges
Start with one bridge: the audience or target that is most impactful and provides your business with the most amount of leverage.
On your website user experience: focus your energy hunting antelopes, not field mice.
Showcase Your Team:
Today, right now, a picture of a team in a room building something is a differentiator. This is really hard to replicate in a zoom meeting. A full and robust “about us” page is an appreciating asset.
The Human Edge:
We hosted a first ever Montana Marketing Workshop and invited 25 influential marketing leaders and innovators from the Missoula area to attend. One of the presentations given by Ana Crites, “The Human Edge” highlights brands that are counter positioning. Could co-work send automated thank you notes: yes. Can you build trust and avoid a bland carbon-copy existence by actually hand writing said thank you notes.
Yes.
Have an Original Thought: Hit Publish.
This happened to me last year: I was listening to things like Acquired, Lenny’s Podcast, increasing the velocity and variety of reading books and articles. And I’d absorb the ideas I was reading and repeat them back to our team and to our clients.
If you operate on the frontier of your industry: outside of the whirlwind, you likely see things very few other people see. You learn things from experiments that have previously been untested. Those are the seeds for original thoughts and ideas. Write them down and hit publish. You’ll make connections and all of the sudden, you’re the hub instead of an AI generated spoke.
Avoid the Mediocre Middle:
Spend 90% of your time on the stuff that works and you know works. Spend the other 10% of time running experiments (low downside high upside) so you can continue adding to the 90%.
But then you there’s an island: that’s your goal.
When we built GeoFli, a software that personalizes website content based on location and UTM parameters: we set out to solve a problem we were having. It turned into an incredible differentiator for our agency. We run experiments and test new platforms to generate leads for the software.
Build a marketing focused landing page:
Landing pages are the arrow in our marketing quiver that we’ve seen have the highest leverage. Build a page that focuses on your one goal: the one thing you want users (and even specific users) to do. Make sure it applies a proven framework (not hand wavy or something that looks cute but doesn’t convert). We use Lander, a tool our team built based on over 5 million website sessions: aggregated into the one landing page builder to rule them all.
