Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog, page 24
July 24, 2019
Can You Teach Ambition?
There is no question that there are people that are naturally born with ambition and hustle. But the incredibly talented @KingBach posed a question for me the other day and asked if ambition can be a taught behavior:
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Gary Vay-Ner-Chuk (@garyvee) on Jul 23, 2019 at 12:32pm PDT
This is the classic “Nature vs. Nurture” debate and my simple answer to this is “both.” I think both factors play a huge part in whether or not you or someone else becomes ambitious.
Even if you weren’t naturally gifted with having the go-getter DNA, you can create this behavior through adjusting your environment and the people you hang out with.
I’ve often talked about auditing your circle of friends and cutting out 2 or 3 negative friends to add in 2 or 3 positive friends. It’s the same concept here: when you want to become ambitious and a go-getter, surrounding yourself with those types of people will eventually cause that behavior to trickle down.
One of the biggest impacts on my career was when I first got into the Silicon Valley world and started meeting people like Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick. All these people were so committed to creating an app that changed the world, and all of them eventually did live up to that ambition. These all became the Twitters, Ubers, and Facebooks of the world. And surrounding myself with these people pushed me to the next level. I was motivated and inspired by them.
It is so so important to make sure to surround yourself with people that are ambitious to succeed in life because those characteristics will eventually trickle down to you. I’ve seen people on my own team become more motivated just by being surrounded by motivated people.
It’s an incredible strategy that I think could help take many of you a few steps forward 
How to Sell to Small Businesses
I really think that my opinions and suggestions on selling to small businesses can add value to many of you because I lived that life – I operated and navigated within a small business environment for much of my 20s.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re selling to SMBs:
1. Highlight hidden costs
Small businesses tend to be very “literal” in the way they look at cash and their bottom line.
It makes sense. Many small business owners have saved up for years or decades to buy their businesses or they’ve spend years building it from the ground up. To them, cash is king – the cash that they can actually see going into the register or in the bank account every month. They can’t “see” hidden hosts, so it’s harder to understand.
For example, you can’t expect them to understand the cost of training employees, or the cost of lost productivity in choosing one tool over another. They can’t “see” it so it doesn’t register for them right away.
When you’re selling to small businesses, make it super clear what those hidden costs are and put a dollar amount on it.
A 4Ds attendee asked me a question along similar lines a while back and that’s exactly what I told him:
2. Make it an “ROI” conversation
Along the lines of the last point… short term sales matter more to small businesses than big brands because of issues like cashflow. There’s just not as much money to throw around and small business owners are just a lot more sensitive to it.
If you can make your pitch an ROI conversation – as in showing them that they’re wasting $200 a month on lost productivity and your $99 / month service can fix that – then you’ll help them see how your service can put more cash in their pocket in the next 1, 2, 3, 4 months.
3. Remember it’s about underpriced attention, not “social media”
A guy at 4Ds asked me a question I was pumped about – he said his company ran a test to get cheap attention by running banner ads in the concourse at the airport since he was targeting SMBs:
What I really care about isn’t social media or Facebook or Instagram – it’s underpriced attention. It doesn’t matter to me where it is, whether it’s online or real life. It only matters that it’s a good deal and ideally, you can see how well it’s working or not working.
The challenge with a lot of traditional media is that the measurement is done on “potential reach” – not actual reach or consumption. It leads to poor data and a lack of understanding of whether your media dollars are actually effective.
The advice I gave the 4Ds attendee who asked me a question was to put a phone number on the banner ad at the airport and ask people to text the number if they have a business problem. That way, they can collect data and get a sense for how many people are consuming and taking action.
4. Host in-person events using Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn ads
Leveraging Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and LinkedIn to create and promote in-person events is an unbelievable opportunity.
You can position the event however you want.
If it were me, I would do it around wine because that’s authentic to me. But you could host a dinner, a golf competition, or a number of other things.
Here’s a very tactical example of how you would do this if you had a business that sells to small dance studios:
First, run ads at a low cost by targeting an area where there are a lot of dance studios.
Next, record an authentic video straight from your phone or webcam talking about your event and what you’ll talk about. It could literally be something super simple, like a dinner at a local restaurant.
When you run the video ad, put all the information in the copy with a link to a Google Form – and in that Google Form, include an open ended question that gives you insight into whether or not you can convert them.
You can invite people who give the “right” answer to this question, and host your event with a captive audience.
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July 15, 2019
How to Use Twitter to Build Your Brand
Twitter is still an incredible platform to build brand.
It’s fascinating to me as a marketer because it allows me to initiate relationships with people 1 on 1. It’s how I built my brand in the early days from 2007 – 2011 when I was working at a wine retail store in New Jersey and had no name recognition. I replied to tweets for hours and hours everyday on topics I had opinions about.
Twitter gives you permission to jump into conversations and give your two cents in response to a hot take. In other words, Twitter’s the only “open cocktail party” on the internet.
And what people don’t understand is, the capability to add your two cents to the party is far more powerful than the “presentation capability” (i.e. sharing your own post) on Twitter when you’re starting out with limited following.
If you know my $1.80 strategy, these steps should sound familiar:
Step 1: Go to Twitter Search
Navigate over to the search tab on the Twitter mobile app or go to Twitter.com/search.
Step 2: Search words and phrases that matter in your world
For example, if you’re in the fitness space or the food industry, you could search something like “healthy food” and see what people are talking about:
Browse the “top” section to see which posts are getting the most awareness, or hit the “latest” tab to see a full list of the latest tweets on the topic.
For example, here’s a post from CBS News on “healthy food” that got hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes – posts like this would be worth engaging with:
Step 3: Add a thoughtful response that contributes to the conversation
Find posts where you have a strong point of view or reaction to what was posted. For example, if you’re in the healthy food space, you could share something someone could add to their recipe, tell them what they’re eating isn’t actually healthy, or something else.
Start with responding to posts that already have awareness – posts that already have engagement will make it more likely for your post to get engagement. That’ll bring more awareness to you and what you do.
Think of it like a real-life cocktail party. You’re sitting around the bar, there’s a group conversation going on, someone shares an opinion about something, and you have the opportunity to throw in your two cents.
Same thing applies on Twitter.
The biggest mistakes people make on Twitter:
Don’t spam out comments
“Lightweight” comments don’t hold as much value as thoughtful responses. Remember that the gaol here is to actually add something to the conversation – not just comment for the sake of commenting.
This isn’t about talking “at” people, it’s about adding value to the conversation.
Don’t be argumentative just for the sake of being argumentative
As this article is going out in mid-2019, Twitter has a reputation for being combative because of the political ecosystem and what’s happening there. But in my opinion, “co-signing” other people and telling them that they’re making great points that you agree with has bigger upside than creating a disagreement.
That being said, if you genuinely disagree with something or you believe someone is putting out bad information in your space that could hurt people, being on the right side of history and responding with facts can have a big upside.
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July 8, 2019
How a Beverage Company Systematically Grew Their Brand After 4Ds
As the CEO of VaynerX, it has been an enormous goal of mine to share our expertise and the stories of companies and entrepreneurs we have helped – from seasoned veterans to those just starting up.
It’s part of the reason we created VaynerMedia’s Digital Discovery+ Deep Dive (4Ds).
In 4Ds, we take attendees under the hood of VaynerX — both analyzing the work we do for some of the biggest brands in the world and showing how those tactics can help small to medium businesses.
Today’s interview is with Jaisen Freeman, co-founder of Phusion Projects, a beverage company with products like Four Loko in their portfolio.
He brought some of his team to 4Ds, and used what he learned to grow the company’s brand.
“What made you sign up for 4Ds?”
Timing.
We were in a transition from a marketing perspective. I was following Gary for a while, and of course he had a lot to say on the subject.
I wanted to get with someone who was cutting edge and could understand how the business and our team was thinking.
We saw what VaynerX was doing and where they were at. I respected what you guys had built and I wanted to get a peek under the tent to see how things are done behind the scenes.
“What was the most impactful part of the program?”
The whole thing was incredible.
The best part was understanding how your teams look at each of the platforms on social, from a digital strategy standpoint. We got to understand where we should be playing and shouldn’t be playing, and how we should be approaching those platforms from a strategic point of view.
This was very, very helpful for us for a couple of reasons:
One, it helped us grow our brand on social by understanding the value of each platform.
Second, we’d been working with a lot of agencies, and we wanted to get more insight into how those agencies think. We wanted to figure out whether we even needed an agency, whether we can do the work ourselves internally, and how to manage the agency we were working with.
Ultimately we saved a ton of money by taking a lot of those marketing processes internal.
“What kind of results did you get from the program?”
The biggest thing was that we brought a lot of content creation and distribution in-house. We don’t have the studios and resources that VaynerX has, but 4Ds gave us a blueprint of how we could still leverage the resources we had to distribute and create content.
Before 4Ds, we had a lot of questions about which platforms we should be on. We had questions like, “should we be on Snapchat?” “Should we be on Instagram?” “Should we be on Twitter?” We knew these platforms were important, but just didn’t know where our limited resources could best be spent.
An interesting piece of advice we got form Gary was to “own” one of the platforms and do really well at that, and then “test” other ones on the side.
Ultimately, we found that our customers right now are predominantly on Instagram. We don’t have a huge budget, so we focused on growing one platform instead of spreading thin with a bunch of other platforms. We grew our organic following too by producing content and commenting and engaging on other people’s posts.
We grew from 15,000 to 70,000+ followers on the biggest brands in our portfolio.
“Anything that surprised you about the program?”
For us, the biggest value that came from 4Ds was being able to bring the whole team in and get them engaged together.
Here’s why it was surprising.
When you bring people into a room and have someone else try to tell them how to do their job, they tend to reject it. People usually don’t like it when people tell them what to do.
But with our team, our people were extremely engaged and implemented the material they learned even a few months after we came back from 4Ds.
A big reason for that was the credibility Gary brought to the table. On top of that, the team at VaynerX really knew what they were talking about. It’s hard to say that anyone is an “expert” in this fast-changing space, but we felt Vayner had that credibility.
The experience was so different from working with other agencies who just wanted to get us in a room and pitch us for business.
“What did you think of the team?”
Everyone was very knowledgeable and deeply knew what they were talking about. They were respectful, passionate, and shared a lot of concepts that we hadn’t even thought about. People at VaynerX were clearly passionate about what they did and that went a long way with our team.
“Who do you think 4Ds is for?”
I think it’s for any brand that’s trying to break through on the social and digital sphere – which honestly should be every brand, no matter what it is. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a consumer brand or a commodity driven by interaction.
For us, we brought our whole team in. From our POV, it makes a great offsite for a team to come together and interact with people who do cutting edge things. Any CEOs, CMOs, directors of marketing, and anyone who’s working with agencies to understand how to work with them and manage them correctly.
For us, it gave us great validation on what we were doing well and what we weren’t doing well. It’s easy to get in a bubble as you’ve been working in your company for a long time and you get stuck in your world.
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July 3, 2019
Announcing WineText.com
Made a huge announcement yesterday to make it easier for you guys to get the best wine deals:
In case you didn’t see on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or my text community, the site went live yesterday (July 2nd) and we’re taking signups.
I’m always coming up with new ways to innovate and keep growing Wine Library – this text messaging service will bring greater convenience to the wine game by sending you the best deals directly.
The reason I’m sharing this post is A) many of you buy wine from sites with “Deal of the Day” concepts and I would love for you to support my dad’s business, and B) text-first is a really interesting new world for a lot of us. I think more of you should be thinking about text-first for your business and see how you can apply it, especially if you’re in retail.
A text message to your phone and a simple reply from you saying what you want.
If you drink wine or if you want to see what we’re doing and apply it to your business, take a minute and sign up here. So pumped for this
July 2, 2019
18 Moments To Explain Why You Should Post 100x Per Day
The challenge seems insane. The execution near impossible. But when you see and hear the reasoning behind Gary’s audacious presentation in Auckland, New Zealand from 2018, it doesn’t seem quite so crazy.
His statement is this …
His message is clear that if you are interested in building a business today, you need to seize the opportunity to capture today’s most valuable asset, attention, by creating content at scale. You need to think of yourself as a media property. And you need to deliver information that has value for your audience instead of traditional commercial pitches of the past.
Below are 18 video quotes from Gary’s 1-hour-37-minute keynote that convey the importance of this tactic that’s essential for anyone who’s trying to start or grow their business in 2019 and beyond.
So many of you posted once, somebody said something nasty and you stopped posting. I need to get you out of that, because if I don’t then you won’t post. The reason I don’t want to go deep into the execution is because you have something called Google.I public speak, but I’m not a public speaker.Everybody else looked at the past and put print and radio and billboards and direct mail on a pedestal.I need people to understand what’s actually happening, which is … This will go away! Not only do you have to make 100 pieces of content, you have to make 500 different segmentations.You need to take advantage of it. If you’re not winning during this era, you got big fucking problems.But If you’re not even starting, it’s game over.The attention of humans right now is the same way I feel about Manhattan 300 years ago.I’m desperate for everybody to understand that they are a media company. They should be putting out information, not commercials, information.But I’m serious and I know that most people here haven’t posted a hundred pieces of unique quality content this year.Every single person here should be running Facebook and Instagram ads regardless of what your business is.Everything great should be hard.Okay? If you want to reap the massive benefits of this golden era, you should put in the work.Anything you want to say to the world, you should say it a minimum of 13 times because you have to give context to the audience that’s seeing it.The No. 1 thing that binds everybody is that we all need the other person’s attention. Attention is the singular asset.I want to leave this conference and get some people here to start posting a hundred pieces of content a day. Maybe 52 of those are just single tweets, maybe 26 of them are Instagram stories.I know most people here haven’t posted a hundred pieces of unique quality content his year, so imagine how fucked I think you really are.If I said to you, you had unlimited money and could go and buy beachfront property all across this world for a penny on the dollar 112 years ago … would you do it?
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June 28, 2019
Flight Got Canceled But WE MADE IT! | Recap
If you’ve been following Gary’s content, you know that the one thing he really hates is wasting time!!
It was tough when his flight got delayed for 3 hours and eventually canceled at the Toronto airport. He had to drive 8 hours back home to New York, but he made the best of it. Gary sat down at the airport to do a live Q&A on Instagram and created some incredible content that will add value to many of you.
"Adjust, or lose." – @garyvee
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Here are some key moments from the video:
1:26 “Gary, how do you keep up on social?”
2:17 What most historical icons all have in common
4:00 Gary’s thoughts on dealing with “haters” or critics online.
7:18 Gary’s flight gets delayed for 3 hours
8:10 Gary uses a banana peel as equipment
11:35 Ryan Harwood (CEO of Gallery Media Group) talks about what surprised him about Gary.
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June 25, 2019
The Ultimate Advice For Every Business | Recap
The landscape of technology and venture capital has changed significantly over the years, and Gary sat down at Transparency ’19 to drop some brutally honest insights about it.
Gary says that “this is the greatest era for fake entrepreneurship,” and that most people are not starting companies to run an actual business but rather as a financial arbitrage machine. In other words, entrepreneurs are starting companies to sell in the future, instead of turning a profit in the present.
The tech company host, FreightWaves, asked Gary about his thoughts on his hiring strategy, culture and business, and the following:
1:07 – Why Gary opened an office in Chattanooga, TN
5:06 – Why Gary didn’t start a VC firm
13:48 – Gary’s thoughts on 8th place trophies
37:28 – B2B businesses need to act like media companies
45:23 – How to adapt to the changing rules of marketing
51:46 – The difference between a salesperson and a marketer
Check out the full vid here:
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June 21, 2019
Becoming GaryVee | Recap
Positivity and optimism have always been two of the big pillars of what Gary preaches in his content. You can see his passion for this conversation through his video “No one knew me 10 years ago.”
Gary shows a side that most haven’t seen — a more vulnerable and sensitive side. He shows how everyone, including him, have had to make difficult decisions in life in order to achieve success and happiness.
"When things are at their worst, I'm at my best. I eat pressure for breakfast." – @GaryVee
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Gary felt a lot of pressure to set a good example from his parents and younger siblings. This pressure built up a lot, since he wasn’t a good “role model” from an academic standpoint. But he was able to set an example by being a good, hardworking human being.
Even with high stakes (i.e. the outcome of his family’s business and being used as a “north star” for his siblings) he was comfortable in that adversity and even subconsciously created those situations for himself.
Listen to him talk about it in detail and with vulnerability at 7:51.
The kid who hated losing
16:03 Growing up, Gary was always the type of kid who was extremely competitive and hated losing. He was viewed as a “loser” because getting D’s and F’s in school were indicators of a complete failure to the people around him – but over time as entrepreneurial success became more accepted as a measurement of success in society, things changed.
At 9:58, he talked about crying as a kid when he lost in anything because he hated it so much .
But he didn’t let those outside voices get to him, and the word he uses to describe this feeling is discussed here at 16:50.
Starting over
28:36 When Gary started growing Wine Library rapidly, he started getting credit for a lot of the success behind the business. This created a pretty big point of contention between him and his dad, who owned the business.
He felt that he needed to take a leap and start over – one of the toughest decisions he had to make.
Listen to the podcast:
Watch the full interview:
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June 19, 2019
Why I’m So Excited About Entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia
I traveled over to Singapore in the first part of 2019 for the opening of VaynerMedia’s Southeast Asia office.
I’ve been there several times before and really enjoyed my time there
