SPECIAL SERIES == Top Free Marketing Tools! 🧠 Spy Like a Marketer 🕵️‍♀️ <== | BATHROOM Break #57 COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That

Daniel Murray: Welcome to a new special series called the bathroom break. That extra ten minutes, you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both, but that's your choice.

Jay Schwedelson: This collab is gonna be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the marketing millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson, from the do this not that podcast and subjectline.com. Each episode in the series, we are gonna go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you wanna be in the bathroom, fine. Just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

Daniel Murray: We are back with another episode of bathroom break. I'm here with the number one marketing podcaster in the world, world, Jay Schwedelson, and I am Daniel Murray of the marketing millennials. I wanna get this started. Jay, you gave a keynote this this week. You're so

Jay Schwedelson: stupid. You you really have no brain. That's the problem. I did not give a keynote. No. My son just graduated high school and I was for a variety of weird reasons, I was one of the speakers. And it was I'm just glad I didn't fully embarrass him and yeah. That was a weird experience.

Daniel Murray: I heard from multiple people that it was one of your best keynotes. No. I was not. All I know is that afterwards, everyone was like, okay.

Jay Schwedelson: You didn't embarrass your entire family. But

Daniel Murray: Okay. That's good. That's

Jay Schwedelson: good. Embarrassing my family right now. Let's let's get into this thing. What we're talking about today is really how to reverse engineer, not either what your competition is doing or people in your category you think are crushing it. And there are certain things that you could do that are off the radar that there's very easy ways to kinda not steal their tactics, but kinda like see what they're doing and then use it yourself. So, Daniel, how do we do this? How do you reverse engineer stuff?

Daniel Murray: I think the first thing you need to do is just identify your competitors. And what one thing I always say is, like, like, people think that competitors are, like, the exact product you're competing with, but there's other versions of competitors that you need to analyze too. So there's category competitors. So, like, someone who's also selling marketing software, they're in your category. They might not be competing product or part of it. They might not be both email marketing, but they're also competing for budget for your in your category. And then there's one step deeper is, like, is attention stealers. So, like, you say your audience is millennials. They're getting competed against all these other companies, like hat companies, clothing companies. So you're competing with all these different podcasts, newsletters are stealing attention from your audience. So a couple of things that I like, you can use to look into this is one is SparkToro. SparkToro will tell you, like, who are the hidden influences, like who your audience actually paying attention to, like what podcast they're listening to, what news sources. So you can you could see where their attention's going. It also help you market on those those places. You can also do, like, exploding topics to see what topics they're interested. There's similar web to see what referral traffic you can look at. So there's a lot of ways to look at that. First, identify who is competing for your audience intention. And there's those three categories, direct competitors, category competitors, and attention stealers in those categories.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. And we're going to put the links to all these different tools. And the vast majority of them are free that you can use like what Daniel just mentioned. I'll mention a few other ones. There's one simple tool that I think is kind of fun and easy, which is any email you get from any company, any brand, anything, whatever. If you want to find out what email platform that they're using to send out their email, you literally just forward the email that you got to this email address, esp@sendview.io. And when you send an email to esp@sendview.io, within about three or four minutes, can email back and it tells you the exact platform that the person's using. And then the other one I would throw out there is, it's a really great use of ChatGPT. You can go to ChatGPT, the free version. And you could put a prompt in there or something similar to this saying, you know, analyze the marketing strategies used on these websites. And you put in, you know, two, three websites and summarize the key tactics. What is their content marketing, social proof they're using, SEO strategies, CTAs, and what should I consider for my site. And I will spit back at you a whole recap. So if you're not leveraging the free tools that are out there, think you're really missing out.

Daniel Murray: Another another two free tools I'll add is one is BuiltWith. So it's a plugin that if you go to any site, it will show you the tech stack that your competitors are using. So this is really useful because you can see what tools they're using on their website, what are their what's their forms, what their pop up using. So then you can learn how to reverse engineer what you should do for your site or if you're trying to start from scratch. Another really great tools is like Facebook Meta ad library. Library. Go to meta ad library. You could see what ads they're running. This is a great way to, like, look at other people's ads too. Like, go beyond your competitors. Go out in other industries because this can help you see what people are targeting. And I like to look at ads that have been running for a longer period of time because if they're running for a longer period of time, that means they're converting. So like the newer ads might not be converting, but if you look, it's been running for two, three, four, two months, three months. These are ads that have been running for a long time. So that means they're they're working and they're keeping those ads up.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. And in general, it's not like, oh, my competitor's doing this. I need to be doing this. You really want to look at the leaders in your category. They're leaders for a reason. And then I like to triangulate things. Like when I see, you know, the five companies are leading a particular category and they're all doing, you know, certain things, it's it's it's there for a reason. And that's really what you want to think about. Like another great site that's free, has a free version is spyfu, s p y f u Com. It's great because you could put in your domain, for example, of your site, and then it'll actually show you the competitors that it's finding that you're competing with, whether that's on keywords or organic traffic, and it'll actually show you the ads that are running. So spyfu is another great one that's out there.

Daniel Murray: Another thing that I mean, is a free thing, and I used to do this in mark when I was in marketing ops is they go through their their funnel. So they click the ad, fill out the form, see if an email is sent to you, see how long it takes someone to reach out to you, See what follow ups you get. See the retargeting of that ad on other channels if they're targeting you on LinkedIn or or Facebook or Instagram. Like, go through their funnel and click on an ad or click on a piece of content or and see every stage, and then you can reverse engineer like, hey. They're doing this. They're doing this. And what Jay said at the beginning is like, this is just for you to know what they're not doing and you're doing and how could you be better and how could you reinvent the wheel. It's not for you to copy their strategy because if you copy, you're just gonna fit in. It's for you to know so you can play on the same playing field of these people and actually know like their play it's like sports. You got to know their you got to watch film before you go play another team just so you know what moves they're trying to make so you can play a fair game against them.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright. So before we wrap up here, I'm super curious, something random. So Daniel, you've now you moved to Miami. You've been down here a few months now. What is your review of living in Miami now that you're down here?

Daniel Murray: I love Miami First of all, like because I live not in like Central Miami, like in Brickle downtown. I live in a smaller part of Miami. I I don't know if I can give a fair review yet because I haven't been through a summer yet of Miami. But from at least, like, middle October to, like, May, it's been not unbearable. I think people overly hate on on Florida for their heat when they shouldn't be over hating. What I mean, you've been living here for a long time. What are, like, your tips? Mean, you've been you've survived many summers, many hurricanes.

Jay Schwedelson: It's not the heat. You know, the what happens with a hurricane, and I don't wanna belittle a hurricane. It's very important. But when they they announce there's a hurricane coming, usually give you about a week's lead time. There's a hurricane. They show you way out in the ocean. It's coming. And then when they announce it, you should take it seriously, but the problem is everyone takes it seriously very fast. So all of the supermarkets like, oh my god. Get everything. Get gas. Get every and it's like chaos ensues. And I'm like, dude, we've been dealing with this forever and you have a week. Like calm down. So that's that's slightly annoying which you'll get used to because that doesn't start until a little bit later on. But the heat, who cares? We live in air conditioning. What are we talking about? It's a nonsense.

Daniel Murray: Yeah. That's why I'm saying you just go air conditioning air conditioning. Someone said to me, like, it's it's Florida's winter. Like, other people have, like yeah. Other people have snow, like, half the year, and they can't get they need to shovel stuff, like and you need to be inside in the heat. Like, what's the difference of being inside an air conditioner?

Jay Schwedelson: Alright. Another amazing bathroom. Listen, everybody. If you don't follow Daniel's show, you need to. The Marketing Millennials is the GOAT show. Leave him an amazing review too. He deserves it. Why not? And we'll check you at the next one. Daniel, on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. Alright. While he's still in there, this is Jay. Check out my podcast, Do This Not That for marketers. Each week, we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing, and I hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out. Back from my bathroom break.

Daniel Murray: This is Daniel. Go follow the marking millennials podcast, but also tune in to this series. It's once a week, the bathroom break. We talk about marking tips that we just spew out, and it be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you wanna hear. Peace out. Later.