In this episode, host Jay Schwedelson dives into the transformative power of unscalable marketing tactics. He shares his personal “90-day handholding” strategy, which focuses on building human connections in an era increasingly dominated by automation and AI-generated content.
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Best Moments:
(00:40) Unscalable tactics and their importance in standing out in a highly automated marketing landscape
(01:20) The over-reliance on automation and AI can lead to a loss of personal touch in marketing efforts
(02:15) Jay explains his “90-day handholding” approach, a personalized strategy designed to nurture relationships and guide clients through the early stages of engagement
(04:00) How these unscalable tactics can lead to significant business growth by fostering deeper connections with customers
(05:43) Examples include sending personalized video messages, curating handpicked content for specific clients, and even sending birthday notes to enhance customer relationships
(06:54) The impact of handwritten letters in creating memorable, personal connections with clients
(08:42) Jay shares a personal anecdote about his texting habits and maintaining Snapchat streaks with his children, showcasing the importance of staying connected in both personal and professional life
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Transcript
Foreign welcome to do this, not that the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.
You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson.
Let's do this, not that we are back for do this, not that presented by Marigold. And usually on this podcast, I just fire off some quick stats to make an instant impact in your marketing.
But I wanted to do something a little bit different today and share a quick strategy that may even have a bigger impact on your company's growth overall. And that is unscalable tactics.
So often people marketers, they avoid doing certain things because it's not scalable, it's not something they're able to keep doing. It is hard to do. And what do we all try to do with our marketing and all of our outreach? We automate things, right?
We do as much automation as possible because we want to reach as many people as possible. And when you do unscalable things, you can't do that. It's hard. But you know what?
Those are the things, the unscalable things that if you do them, and I'm going to share with you, specific ones that I do and ones that work, they can transform your business doesn't matter if you're a consumer brand, a business brand doesn't matter if you're a small company, a massive company. You know, we live in this world of AI garbage and the AI garbage is going to become an AI garbage dump over the next year or so.
It's going to get worse and worse and worse and it's just going to be all this generic stuff. So what's going to stand out is the humanity of everything.
So I want to share some unscalable tactics, things that are impossible to do at scale, that are impossible to keep going, but that you should and that work.
All right, so one thing that I do and I call it the 90 day hand holding, okay, so what I do is every 90 days I take about 30 contacts, prospects, current customers, and I do my best to send those 30 contacts, super useful content. The way I position the communications and what I email out is that I'm selling them nothing, asking them to register for nothing.
I'm not sending them even to a landing page of any kind. I am trying to share with them interesting things that I am seeing. And it's literally me Writing the email saying, hey, this is really cool.
I thought you might find this interesting. Or I just saw this stat. Isn't this wild? Or here's this person I'm following on social. I think they're doing a great job.
You should check them out as well. And in my demand, my demand gen agency that I run out media, our clients are usually the director level or vice presidents of marketing.
So I try to share content or information or anything that I think will be useful for them.
And then over this 90 day period where I, I am focused on these 30 contacts, you know, not a day goes by that I don't spend some energy on these 30 contacts. Towards the end of it, I may hit them up and say, hey, let's do a zoom. Let's do a zoom for no reason other than let's just connect.
I want to hear what's going on in your world, what's on your mind, what you think about the trends in the industry. I am not reaching out to them to say, buy something from me, subscribe to something from me, nothing like that, okay?
And I cannot tell you how transformative this is. You do 30 contacts every nine days. You can do this. This is not that hard, okay? And you're like, wait, but I don't have time for this, okay?
I'm so busy. I this. That. Who are you kidding, okay? We all are busy. I got a lot going on. I do, okay? But this is how you really can grow.
And by the way, you meet cool people, you interact with them, you learn from them, and yeah, you probably will grow your business significantly. Now you're saying to yourself, yeah, I run a big direct to consumer brand. This doesn't make any sense for me.
I don't need a handful of, you know, B2B contacts or something like that. And that's where people just don't understand what it means to do unscalable things.
I don't care if you're Kim Kardashian and you're running skims, okay?
If Kim Kardashian takes 200 new customers, brand new customers to Skims, or 200 customers that buy every time they knew a new drop of a new outfit or something, and she sends them an email saying, I'm so excited to have you on board as a customer. This is really me emailing you and I just want to hear your feedback on it, want to hear, you know, what you think about it.
And by the way, we have some new cool stuff coming out and we just love to be connected. I promise you that I don't care how big your company is.
That feedback that you get, that connection that you make with your customers, big or small, it will transform the way that you think about your brand, the way you think about your marketing. You will meet the important people that you should know. This is a win.
Now there are other ways that you could do this without this 90 day hand holding thing that I'm talking about. You can send people personalized video messages, right? That's huge. On LinkedIn that works so well. Not just on LinkedIn but elsewhere.
Personalized video messages, not these ones that you're creating with some sort of tool that are automated, but straight up videos that you're making and send that to somebody. Okay? You could do hand picked content. You hand pick content, you say who's this perfect for?
I'm going to send to these five people and every single week you do handpicked content and you send it to them. Birthdays. I'm not talking about these automated birthday things where you send out this automated trigger birthday announcement. That's all fine.
But I will tell you there are a handful, handful of people in my career that have put my birthday on their calendar. And every time my birthday hits, it doesn't matter if I haven't talked to them in a year, they send me a note, Jay, how you doing? How's life?
And it's not automated, it's them. And they'll say, here's what I'm up to. I hope you're doing well if your family's doing well.
And I could these people in my mind, I could think of the people right now and they matter to me because they take the time to do that. Put all, put hundreds of people into your calendar right now. All their birthdays, ask people for their birthdays.
I am telling you, sending people birthday notes and it matters handwritten letters. Yeah, I know it's out of control and ridiculous. A little short handwritten letter. It goes so far with people. It really, really does.
So this idea of doing unscalable things, I don't know if there's anything that I've done in my business, any tactic that I've done in my business in the last 30 years that has had more of an impact on than doing these unscalable things because that is how you connect with other people. So I strongly encourage you. I know this is a little different than my normal, you know, put this on the subject line and you get this open rate.
But you know what strategies and sharing and what's Working this. This is what it's all about. Anyway, let me know you think about all this and try it out. So before we get to.
Since you didn't ask, which is the ridiculous portion of this crazy podcast, I want to let you know that this podcast is sponsored by. By Marigold. And Marigold is a great example of hand holding. Okay. They're my email sending platform. They are. And listen, this is.
They didn't tell me to say this, but this is the truth. They have done a great job of me feeling connected to them. Right. They don't. They're not just a vendor to us.
They actually asking how we're doing, how's our marketing programs going? What's your roadmap look like? That is what you want from your platforms.
Your martech stack should not just be a bunch of software and applications that you're paying monthly fees for.
If you're not thrilled with your email sending platform, okay, if you don't feel about your platform the way I feel about my platform, you got to check marigold out@meetmargled.com for email programs, loyalty programs, retention, marketing programs, you name it. Meet marigold.com small, medium and large sized businesses, business, consumer. Check them out. Great. Great company.
All right, let's get into, since you didn't ask, hand holding. That's the topic of the day. Handholding. Right. I was just thinking about this. I am the worst texter of all time. Are you a good texter?
not exaggerating. I have over:I have a text chain with my group of friends from college, and all day long they're sending the stupidest things. And right now, people have different political opinions in this text chain.
So somebody will send one thing about something political and then somebody will send their opinion on it, and then within like 30 seconds of these texts flying, it will get right into. Yeah, but when you were in college, you dated so and so, and that was a disaster. You're a loser. Right? And it devolves into this thing.
It will be like, hey, dude, you need to go to the gym. You look terrible. Like, it goes from one type of conversation into the meanest stuff you could possibly imagine.
And by the time I look at my phone at the end of the day, I'm like, what is this nonsense going on? And then what? How so? In My family, me and my wife and my two teenage kids, they're 17 and 18, we have a snap chain.
And the reason we do it on snap is that if I text my kids, they will not reply. They just will not see it. But if we snap, then we all reply all this different type of stuff. So I started a streak with each one of my kids.
And you're like, what? Yeah.
So you don't know on snap, if you send somebody a picture three days in a row and they send you a picture three days in a row, then you have a snap streak with them and you get a little thing that says you have a streak. So I have a streak with both of my kids that are like 400 days long. I'm very proud of this streak. But I did not know that when you.
When you to keep the streak alive, you can't miss a day. I thought because I'm a big idiot, that you need to send a picture of your face on the snap streak. That's the only way it's going to keep it alive.
So every day in the morning, I wake up and I take a picture of my face and I look horrible. I look horrendous every single day for like, hundreds of days. And neither one of my kids looped me in that you don't have to do that.
You don't have to send a picture of your face, because I didn't know. And so they keep saving the picture of my face every day. And I didn't know that that was, like, something that people don't do either.
But they've saved this whole album of of me looking terrible. And now they just, whenever they want to, they send pictures to, like, our entire family chain of me looking terrible.
I don't know why I'm sharing this. All I know is I'm horrendous at snap, I'm horrendous at texting, and I don't know what's going on. Listen, I hope that everybody has a great day.
I hope you leave this a review. I hope you email me and tell me if this was useful or not. Drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I don't know.
I don't know what I just talked about, but I appreciate you all. You rock. Thanks for being here. Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
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