In this wide-ranging episode, Jay discusses key marketing trends and strategies for 2024. He talks about what to expect in the first few weeks of January when marketing performance tends to dip, how to account for depressed performance during the 2024 election year, and shares some chaotic personal stories.
Main Discussion Points:
– First 2 weeks of January see low marketing performance; don’t expect much from webinars or high-number lists
– Back in stock and massive discounts work in early January
– Unsubscribes remain high in early January
– Good tactic: Email existing contacts about new hires and request adding them to your lists
– 2024 is a presidential election year which brings high noise levels and depressed marketing performance
– Jay’s events company moved its November event earlier to avoid proximity to election
– Chaotic personal story about awkward dinner conversations
And MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!
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Transcript
Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers.
Jay Schwedelson: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.
Jay Schwedelson:are going to be talking about:e, you know, seven trends for:I'm talking about what's going to happen right at the start of the year and things that we may need that we need to be aware of because this is a very odd time of year. So this app is going to be all over the place. Not all my episodes are all over the place. This one's definitely going to be all over the place.
Jay Schwedelson:So the first thing really to think.
Jay Schwedelson:About is the first two weeks in January. You are going to flip out.
Doesn't matter if you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, but I'm telling you right now, your marketing, especially your email marketing, is going to be in the garbage can those first two weeks of the year. So January 1st, this year falls on a Monday and that first week is shot. Forget about it. The second week is shot.
You're not going to really start to see kind of a normalization of your marketing performance until around January 15th or 16th. That's the case every year. So think about it for yourself.
Do you want to sign up for a webinar promotion that you get in the first or second week of January? No chance. Do you want to be buying anything on the consumer side the first, second week in January? No. You're broke. You spent all your money.
No chance. And the reason we need to know this is that there's an internal management of expectations that we need to be aware of.
So you got to think about what it is that you're promoting those first two weeks, if anything, and know what will and won't work. So webinars, forget it. Will not work. Do not try to do webinar promotion there. What will work are quick tips.
ngs that you need to know for:It's where you say the three things that you need to know. So actually, anything five and under will do well in terms of content digestion.
Anything over five things, the seven things, the nine things will not do as well because it's about our mindset. What can we quickly consume that won't make us feel like we're adding chaos to our calendar?
On the consumer side, the only two things that work those first few weeks of January are back in stock. There were certain things you wanted to buy that were just sold out and back in stock.
None of these do particularly well because nobody has any money left, but back in stock does well. And then massive discounts.
The one thing that we all look for is, all right, these companies made too many of these sweaters, so they're trying to unload them. This is what we all think happens. The company that we buy from, they just made too much of something, so they're going to do this massive discount.
et, get sales orders for that:Another thing that happens at the start of the year that bleeds over from the end of the year is unsubscribes remain super high. Super, super high. People are still in the mode, as you had in those first two weeks of January of being like, listen, I got to clean out my inbox.
I don't have time for the chaos. I'm unsubscribing from this, that or whatever. And consumer and business unsubscribes are really high.
On the consumer side, unsubscribes are crazy high because people only subscribed over the holidays to get the holiday discount. On the business side, people are trying to start the year out fresh. So they're unsubscribing in a, in a big, big way. So don't be turned off by that.
By the way.
I know that this is all over the place, but I wanted to kind of almost do like everything that's, that you should be thinking about that's all over the place that can actually impact things. A tactic that I don't think that marketers think about enough, especially on one to one emails is.
And a lot of new hires happen at the start of the year. You know, you get hired, you start at January 1st, started the year. That's where a lot of the new hires happen.
Something you could email out to all of your existing clients, especially on the business to business side is a one to one email from your salespeople, from, from you, from whoever. And you say the subject line being new team members at.
New team members at the company name that you're sending to new team members at Acme company of whoever it is that you're about to email to and with a question mark. And then they're saying, I saw that you're adding lots of new team members to your team this year.
Wanted to make sure that we had everybody in our communications database.
Can you either reply to this email and CC the new team members or let us know, or let me know and reply this email with who they are so we could add them to our databases and whatnot. You, you will be shocked about how many replies that you get and how many people will say to you, yeah, please add these people. Yeah, thanks so much.
We did add a couple new people to our company, to our team, to our whatever. And it is a great positive dialogue to have with people that you're, that you're communicating with. So think about doing these emails.
ur. And another big thing for:t's just pain in the butt. So:But why does that matter for marketing in any presidential election year, especially one where it's a, you know, pretty contested election, everyone's going to be kind of on two different sides, all this stuff. There's going to be an incredible amount of marketing that goes on surrounding the election. Just, just an incredible amount on all sides.
It's going to be on radio and tv. Email is going to be wild. Social media is going to be wild. Why does this matter? We see it every year because of all this noise.
It depresses the performance. It brings down the performance of regular marketing, business and consumer marketing.
It brings down the performance of our social media ads or of our social media posts of our emails that we're sending out. They respond, we get less of a response, less of a click through. Why? Why does this all happen? This all happens because we're sick of it, right?
We're sick. We can't handle it, right? We just, we are inundated. So two things occur.
One is our messaging gets drowned out because there's Just so much other noise. The other thing is that wearing our recipient hat, whether you're a business person or a consumer person, you. You are just, you can't stand it.
On all the different screens that you interact with your, your phone, your computer, your tv, your radio, whatever it is, you can't take it. So what do we do? We try to turn it off, right? Like, all right, I'm going to go and do something else.
And you almost turn off your access to seeing all this because you just can't take it. And so why does this matter for marketing? Well, two things.
tuff that you're charting for:I mean, I have two businesses. I have my agency business and then I have my events business. And for one of our big conferences, guru conference, we normally put that on November.
We're putting that on in kind of early ish to mid October because we don't want anything to do with the actual election date.
And so what you'll see is after the summer, really, when you hit like August 1st and then through all the way to November, that's where things are going to really start to not act like they normally would in terms of performance.
ing about the moving parts of:So before we get into since you didn't ask, now since you didn't ask, is where I talk about chaos. I don't even know what I talk about about stuff.
I just want to share with you, though, before I get into that, this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. And you're like, what's a Marigold? What is a Marigold? I'm going to tell you what a Marigold is. A Marigold is an awesome platform.
It's a platform I use Marigold. When we were starting to really get our email going, Marigold was there and we weren't sending out a lot of emails. But you know what?
We built up, the company built up, my agency built up and we started sending out more and more emails. We, we send out billions of emails now.
And Marigold is an incredible platform for, if you're a small business, a growing business, medium business, a large business, and it's easy to use, your team is going to love it. It's great for loyalty marketing, relationship marketing. If you don't know Marigold, you should check them out@meet marigold.com.
i strongly recommend meet marigold.com. all right, so let's get into. Since you didn't ask what is going on, I'm going to tell you what's going on. And this is terrible.
And I hope nobody that I hang out with listens because I'm going to come off as a horrible person. Oh, no. So I don't make any of the social plans when I go out, Okay. I don't, I don't make social plan. My wife makes social plans.
And generally speaking, we go out with couples where, you know, she's friends with the lady with the woman and then the other dude is okay. And I probably know them, but they're not like one of my type people. And this is who we go out with for dinners or whatever.
That's, that's what happens. It's fine. I don't want to make plans.
And the reason we don't go out with the people that I just say, let's go out with these people is because if it was up to me, I just wouldn't go out. Right. So she makes the plans. Fine. But what happens every time, yeah, every time this just happened, this is why it's on my mind.
We go out to dinner, okay? We go out to dinner and she winds up talking to the woman. They're talking about, whatever.
And then I wind up talking to the dude, the guy, okay, the husband, and.
Jay Schwedelson:Which is fine.
Jay Schwedelson:But it's literally me having a one on one conversation with this dude for like, I don't know, two hours. And I don't care, I don't care about what he's saying. I don't care about what's going on. I don't care about that person's opinion.
It's, I'm obviously not a good person. I mean, this, that goes without saying, but it's just like, I, why am.
Jay Schwedelson:I spending my, my weekend night, having a one on one with a random dude.
Jay Schwedelson:I don't know, I don't know what to do about this. And then once in a while I'll try to be like, I'll do this maneuver. I'm like, hey, what are you guys talking about?
You know, try to kind of bring everybody into the fold and it's a fail. They'll look at me like, what's wrong with you, dude? Nobody does that. Stick, stick with your team over there. I don't know.
I don't know what any of this means. I don't know how to solve for this. And oh, here's my disclaimer. This has nothing to do with anybody out with this weekend. Even though it does.
Because, like, if you're listening, then you know it's you and that's bad. Then I'm in real trouble. So it's not you. But by the way, it is. And that's it.
All right, so hope you enjoyed this episode and find out more about all this stuff@jschwetelson.com and guru events.com and I hope all things in your world are awesome and let's not go out to dinner.
Jay Schwedelson:You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.
Jay Schwedelson:Subscribe to make sure you get the.
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Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond John, Martha Stewart, and me. GuruEvents.com check it out.