The Power of Pull Marketing: Email and Lead Gen Insights from Mark Herschberg

Jennie Wright [00:00:02]:

Hi. This is the Acquire podcast from the Odd Phonic Podcast Network, and I’m Jenny Wright. This is the podcast that delves deep into the world of list building and online events designed to empower entrepreneurs and marketers with the knowledge and strategies to master these essential business growth tactics. So welcome back to the show, everybody. Today, we have a true pioneer in the field of marketing, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Mark Hirschberg, thank you so much for being here.

Mark Herschberg [00:00:30]:

Thanks for having me on the show. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Jennie Wright [00:00:33]:

Absolutely. And I’ve got a little intro that I wrote about you, so I’m just gonna pop into that because there’s so much to tell about you, which I think is incredibly interesting. So you’re a multifaceted individual, an author, an entrepreneur, and the brain behind the Brain Bump app. He’s a mastermind in leveraging essential skills for success, all of which he’s penned in his own book, The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. Mark’s journey spans the corridors of MIT, where he’s a genius, I’m sure, and the trenches of startups and Fortune 500 companies where he’s launched ventures and solved complex challenges. His repertoire includes pioneering digital media, crafting online marketplaces, developing cutting edge authentication systems, And even some intriguing work tracking elusive characters on the dark web. It was a very interesting chat about this. He’s not just a tech wizard.

Jennie Wright [00:01:25]:

His strategic maneuvers have generated leads worth 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. And today, we’re gonna dive into this thought provoking discussion about the evolution of marketing strategies. And we’re gonna transition from push to pull marketing, I find this fascinating, and the dynamics of nonlinear Context dependent content. Alright. That was a lot, and I really am excited to talk about this. 1st, I think we should talk about what push And pull marketing is, and sort of define that.

Mark Herschberg [00:01:57]:

Most media we tend to use today is Push Media. If you think about an email list, you are blasting it out to your audience, hoping that it lands with a few people. The same thing with our social media. It’s 3 o’clock on a Tuesday. I’m gonna put out some advice on leadership. Great. Blast it out to 10,000 followers. The problem is Half those followers aren’t even on social media today because they’re busy.

Mark Herschberg [00:02:24]:

And then even the ones who see it say, Yeah. That’s wonderful advice, I’m sure, but I don’t have a leadership issue right now. I have a sales issue, a hiring issue, a fundraising issue. I’m going to ignore that because it’s not relevant. We’re doing the throw it against the wall, see what sticks. Now 3 months from now, once they get the sales and hire the people, Oh, now I have a leadership challenge. Is anyone saying, well, let me look through all your old social media posts. Let me go back Through all those emails, because, of course, I saved every one.

Mark Herschberg [00:02:53]:

I’m gonna diligently read them. They’re not doing it. And so what happens is You get this vicious cycle. Well, I need to stand out, so I need to post more. That means you need to post more. We’re all just throwing things out, hoping the more I put out, the more Just the small piece might stick, but I just have to do more and more and more. That’s very costly to us as creators, and it’s costly to the audience who’s just Drowning in noise.

Jennie Wright [00:03:20]:

I completely agree. Early on in my, career with this, I would send out emails on Tuesday mornings at, like, 9 o’clock, thinking that my audience would just be dying and ready to receive my emails. And, of course, you have this lack of open rate or whatnot because you’re not thinking about when your actual people are online. And that’s that’s the wrong way to approach it. And we talked about this in our in a call where we were sort of setting up the interview for today, and I was telling you this that, you know, I don’t think we’ve gotten there completely about making sure that we we’re able to schedule these things at a time when people are out there. But there’s a lot to discuss here, and I really wanna get into, a little bit more what we can do with pull marketing. So how can businesses, entrepreneurs, online Marketers effectively transition from this push to a pull strategy without losing their audience and actually maybe gaining more.

Mark Herschberg [00:04:20]:

So pull marketing is where we let the audience pull to them what is relevant, when it is relevant. Now this is the essence of, for example, a web search versus a magazine. Yes. I’m old enough to remember back in nineties. We’d get the magazine, we’d get our trade journal, And, well, here’s the article this month, which may or may not be relevant. But when we switch to a web search, this is what I need right now. Now if you think about our content, we traditionally put our content in podcasts, in books, in talks, But it’s hard to carry around. So my book said, well, there’s all these tips in my book, and I know people are going to forget my content Within a week or two of reading it.

Mark Herschberg [00:05:05]:

Realistically, you’re probably going to forget most of this episode within a few days of hearing it, And that’s unfortunate because I know your episodes have so much value.

Jennie Wright [00:05:14]:

True, but it’s gonna happen. I know.

Mark Herschberg [00:05:17]:

And especially when you think about where are you listening to this episode while you’re off jogging or on your way to work, and then you finish the episode, And you do some contact shift. You go and take a shower, then pick up the kids, or you go into work and jump into your emails. That’s not helping the retention. What if we could give you this information when and where you need it? So we’ll take my book as an example.

Jennie Wright [00:05:40]:

Mhmm.

Mark Herschberg [00:05:41]:

Read that sitting at home. Where do you need, say, networking tips? 2 minutes before you walk into the conference, and you’re saying, I’m supposed to be networking. What am I supposed to do again? Mhmm. So what if get you that content right then and there? And there’s multiple ways to do this. Now I created the Brain Bump app, And this is one small example. We’ll start with that. We can talk about other examples. With the Brain Bump app, we’re taking the key ideas from books, blogs, Podcast, classes, and talks.

Mark Herschberg [00:06:11]:

So imagine something you’d highlight in a book or a quote from the show, something typically around 2 to 4 sentences. They all go into the app, but they are tagged by topic. So think hashtags. They’re not or ordered chronologically. Mhmm. So now as you’re walking into that conference, you open the app and you tap networking as a topic. Well, there’s all the networking tips, and you flip through them. Or maybe you’ve created your own saved favorites list.

Mark Herschberg [00:06:38]:

Say, okay. These are the ones I wanna flip through. Maybe, for example, you are a new manager, and so you read a book, my book, or some other great management book. How do you remember all that? Well, if we can remind the person of these tips we know spaced repetition works. That’s why we all use flashcards and read the book over and over in school, but as adults, we don’t do that. So imagine if you set a reminder, And the app is designed to do this. 9 AM every day as you walk in the office, you get a management tip. You don’t have to open the app.

Mark Herschberg [00:07:09]:

It’s a little push notification. You look. 2 seconds. You read it. You swipe it away, but that keeps it top of mind. And maybe at 6 PM, you get a marriage tip because your marriage is on the rocks. The key is that you got the management tip at 9 AM as you walk in the office and the marriage tip at 6 PM And the networking tips right before you go into the conference, you get what’s relevant when it’s relevant. For the audience, this is a huge win.

Mark Herschberg [00:07:37]:

For you as a brand, this is also a win because your audience is now getting value from you When and where it’s most relevant. They get repeated exposure to the brand, so that’s building the brand trust. We know that it takes multiple touch points. They can’t just hear you once on a podcast or they read your book and forget, but if they start to see your brand over and over and in the Brain Bump app, We have the branding with it. Say, oh, you know what? Jenny has always given me such great advice exactly when it’s relevant to me. And, of course, this is all hyperlinked. This is the other great thing because those of us who produce evergreen content, again, no one’s looking at your social media posts from last year Unless you said something really bad, and now they’re digging for dirt. They’re not looking for your old episodes, your old blog post, But by ordering them not chronologically but by category, which is what the Brain Bump app does, but you can do it other ways that we’ll talk about, you can now drive traffic to your back catalog because it is relevant for that person today.

Mark Herschberg [00:08:39]:

They can pull the relevant media, the relevant content from your brand When it’s relevant for them, and that creates better value for everyone.

Jennie Wright [00:08:48]:

Okay. That is it sounds and I’ve been looking at the app, obviously. I do my due diligence before I do an episode. So, I have it on my iPhone and was looking at it in terms of things like Content libraries and the notifications and stuff like that just to sort of understand how this could all work. And so I think there is a little bit of dedication to wanting to use a system like the Brain Bump app, but I think that in terms of the results, you get a little bit more information sort of at your fingertips. Is there plans for expansion on different things that you wanna add to the app and things that would, like, even add more functionality?

Mark Herschberg [00:09:31]:

There’s a number of things. So if you’re an iPhone, at the time we’re recording, you’re seeing the 1.4 version. The 2 version is rolling out This week or next, this is late November. It’s already out for Android, coming out for Apple. That allows a number of things. We work with content creators, the authors, speakers, podcasters who put tips from their content into the app for their audience. We know, however, we can only add so much so quickly. Audience members, the app users, can now, in the 2 point o version, add their own tips.

Mark Herschberg [00:10:06]:

Maybe it was 1 you didn’t include, or maybe it’s for a source we don’t yet have. Mhmm. They’ll be able to add that and create their own sets of content. We’re doing finer grain notification. So in your version, you can set when you get, but you either get every day or not at all. In the new version, you can set weekdays only Or just Wednesdays at 2 PM. So the app user has a lot more control to always get only relevant content Only when they want. This is very important.

Mark Herschberg [00:10:33]:

We don’t want to. We, Brain Bump, and we, content creators, don’t want to annoy our audience by just Blasting them content over and over. So laying them control when and where to get is key. We also allow in the 2 point o version The upload of Kindle highlights. So even if you don’t put your content on the app, but someone’s read your book in Kindle and made some highlights, They can turn those into notes on the app for themselves.

Jennie Wright [00:11:02]:

I found that part interesting, actually, the whole Kindle piece. I read a lot of books on Kendall, and I’m always trying to I have a really bad memory. But if it’s not written down, I don’t remember it. And I love the idea of being able to sort of notify something like, you know, highlight that piece in in the Kindle app and then having it saved, I think that’s great. I wanna transition in the time that we have left in the episode to talking a little bit about, because you know I like to get into the back end of things. I wanna talk about brain bump, but more on the side of How did you, you know, how are you getting this out in front of users? What what does that look like, and how are you retaining people on an app? I know that some of the people that listening to this Podcast might wanna make an app, or just kind of interested. We love getting that back end sort of view. So how how is that working for you? What what are the challenges that you’ve sort of faced there?

Mark Herschberg [00:11:57]:

There’s a whole number if you’re going to build an app.

Jennie Wright [00:11:59]:

I know.

Mark Herschberg [00:11:59]:

1st, there are technical challenges. I am an experienced CTO. I’ve done this before.

Jennie Wright [00:12:05]:

Mhmm.

Mark Herschberg [00:12:06]:

Be very wary if you’ve never built technology of going down that path. It’s very easy for A company will say, no. No. We’ve got it. We can build it for you, and you wind up with a money pit. The other challenge is you have to Promote the app. You have to get people to install it, and that’s very important with consumers. One thing we looked at now I go on shows to talk about my book, And I’m sure many of people in your audience do, and you can see the numbers.

Mark Herschberg [00:12:34]:

You say, hey. I’ve got a great book. I’ve got great whatever, and you might sell a handful of copies per episode. Now with an app, it’s presumably free. My app is free for everyone. Obviously, if you’re paying, that’s another barrier. But even a free app, you’re asking for mindshare. It’s, do I really want to download another app? Mhmm.

Mark Herschberg [00:12:54]:

One thing we looked at, I first did a version of the app just for my book, the career toolkit app. It just had tips only from my book. That was the pilot. We saw that worked well. Then we thought, what do we wanna do next? Because maybe I create one for your book and her book and his podcast and her talk. But then we’re asking the audience, oh, install this app and that app and another. And so if you look at Kindle, for example, Kindle said it’s not just for this book. It’s a container for any book, and that’s the path we went because we knew the hard part was getting someone to install the app on their phone.

Mark Herschberg [00:13:32]:

Once we’ve got the app on the phone, now it’s easy to add incrementally, here’s another book, there’s another book. We can tell people here’s the new stuff that’s out.

Jennie Wright [00:13:41]:

Nice. So that’s a really that’s a that’s a big strategy. I’m trying to think about how involved would be it sounds like it would have yeah. That sounds like a really in-depth strategy to try and get people to get that mind share, obviously, because I’ve got, what, 6 or 7 pages of apps on my phone. Getting me to download a new one is definitely gonna take some some doing. How are you How are you making that a success?

Mark Herschberg [00:14:10]:

The approach is recognizing, as you pointed out, 6 or 7 apps, and there’s a lot of mindshare competition. Petition. One of the hardest pieces is getting on the phone and getting that mind share. So there’s this combination. It’s that long tail concept that if we all band together, I’m not Stephen Covey. I don’t have his sales numbers or name recognition. But if I get together with a bunch of other people like me And we all get together on the app. All of a sudden, this app becomes more valuable.

Mark Herschberg [00:14:38]:

The app that was just my book content, there’s some value there. Anyone who might be interested my content will get it, but that’s still relatively small. But now when we have my content, your content, everyone else’s content, You get this stone soup effect if you remember the parable of stone soup.

Jennie Wright [00:14:54]:

I do.

Mark Herschberg [00:14:55]:

And so each extra person can now come, and together, We have a much louder voice. We can get much greater mindshare. It also allows for discovery because someone may come on the app because they heard of me. At the end of my talks, I have a QR code that drives people to not just the app, to my content on the app. When you join the app, you have this awesome QR code. So at the end of the talk, I’m sticky.

Jennie Wright [00:15:20]:

They go You are.

Mark Herschberg [00:15:22]:

But then they come and say, okay. Well, I want Mark’s tips. I just heard him speak. What do you think they do the next day? They start to explore, and they discover your content. And so now I’ve brought some people to you effectively for free, But I know that when you do a podcast or you do your talk, people are gonna come and get your content, and then they’re gonna search around, And they’ll find my stuff. So we’re all banding together to help each other.

Jennie Wright [00:15:48]:

Okay. There’s Oh, okay. I’m gonna need a longer episode for this. There’s so much here. It’s really, really good. I wanna ask you and one of the things that you’re really, really good at is email marketing. And, you know, one of one of the big things that I was, so impressed with was how many emails you’ve sent and how many 1,000,000 of dollars, you’ve been able to get with those. What is the if you could look at your crystal ball for 2024, and this is coming out this episode is being being recorded in late 2023, but it’s coming out in 2024.

Jennie Wright [00:16:21]:

What would your crystal ball tell you for what email marketing is going to be doing in 2024?

Mark Herschberg [00:16:28]:

Sadly, what’s going to be doing in 2024 is what’s done in 2023, 2022, and the prior year.

Jennie Wright [00:16:35]:

Okay.

Mark Herschberg [00:16:36]:

At some point in the future, there will be a few changes. Actually, one big change for 2024, finally finally, Google and a few other companies are saying we are going to help reduce spam.

Jennie Wright [00:16:49]:

Mhmm. And

Mark Herschberg [00:16:50]:

I haven’t gotten into the details of how the algorithms changing, but it’s going to be that much harder for bulk senders to appear in the inbox, which has a consumer and also a cybersecurity expert I’m happy about. Even as a marketer, I’m happy because, again, we’re all in this race to just throw out a lot more noise hoping we rise above the din, And I’d rather it be more targeted. What we need to do is be more targeted. Consider the following. We’ve talked about doing Context dependent marketing. The idea is that they can get my tips when they want it. Imagine if you just if you don’t wanna be on the app, you don’t Wanna do what I’m doing. That’s fine.

Mark Herschberg [00:17:29]:

You have a talk. And after the talk, instead of just you’re going to sign up for my email list and get whatever random thing I’m sending out this week. You put them in a sequence that says, here are the 5 takeaways from this talk. And in the next 5 days, you’re going to get an email a day with 1 of the takeaways from the talk. And so now you finish the talk, let’s say, on Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, they get an email from you. They’re expecting that email from you. It is a 100% relevant.

Jennie Wright [00:17:59]:

Mhmm.

Mark Herschberg [00:17:59]:

Your Email for that week may or may not be, but you know these 5 things are because they like the content from your talk, and they opted into that. Now you can do that in addition to putting them on your list because you want Build. But now you’re being context dependent in terms of what you’re delivering.

Jennie Wright [00:18:16]:

That is a I love that strategy, and I wanna I wanna get into this context dependent sort of content strategy a little bit deeper. So the idea being, like you said, have a talk and then deliver relevant content over a a phase of time to stay, you know, front of mind. Does that mean that the weekly newsletter email that’s just kind of like the the dump, which a lot of people do in their their newsletters, do you think that’s on its way out? Does It does it need an overhaul?

Mark Herschberg [00:18:48]:

It still has its place. Let’s think about the buyer’s journey And what the marketing funnel looks like.

Jennie Wright [00:18:54]:

Mhmm.

Mark Herschberg [00:18:54]:

Someone hears you on a podcast, sees you on a talk, however they first get into it. And you know that From now until the future, it’s going to take multiple touch points. So simple example, I can go on a show and sell some number of books. They hear me on the podcast. They say, hey. He sounds like a smart guy. I’ll buy his book. Now Listen, Lee.

Mark Herschberg [00:19:15]:

I’m not a career coach. I’m not an executive coach. I don’t sell coaching, but let’s pretend I did. Coaching might be a $5,000 package. No one’s going to hear me once and say, oh, I’m gonna write mark a $5,000 check. We know we have to build up that brand trust, And that means I get them to follow me on social media or the email, and they see over and over that I deliver value. Now, again, we know the challenge is I’m throwing stuff out left and right or if that was my strategy. I’d be throwing all this noise, and we know a lot of it doesn’t land, and I’m just playing a numbers Gabe.

Mark Herschberg [00:19:49]:

But if instead I could do fewer emails or fewer touch points that have higher relevancy, Then we’re getting a better ROI. Now still, I don’t know when someone is buying. They might need that thing this year. They might need it in 2 years when they’re trying to get to the next level or losing a job. So you do need to keep them on that long term conveyor belt, which is your core Email marketing. And, yes, that’s a lot of people, and so it will be a little bit of a general blast that has limited relevancy to any one person. But if you can supplement that, instead of doing that, for example, every week, if you did once a month but you had more targeted sessions, You’re going to deliver higher value. Again, these target sessions can be automated.

Mark Herschberg [00:20:36]:

Mhmm. After it all, it’s the same 5 emails you send out, and that’s just all automatic, But now you’re adding more touch points with higher value.

Jennie Wright [00:20:47]:

I’ll I always talk about segmentation and list building, And it can go in a good way, and it can also backfire. I’ve seen people say, yeah. I’m all aboard the segment you know, the segmentation train. And they’ll send out their weekly newsletter, and then they’ll also send out segmented content dependent on the you know, what people have opted in for or the topics they’ve identified, and it gets to be a beast. Right? You have multiple sequences and so on and so forth. And you know what? It some for some people, that is like candy. They love doing stuff like that. But for the majority of people, that seems incredibly labor intensive.

Jennie Wright [00:21:25]:

And so where we could create this this 5 email sort of Seinfeld sequence where you’re gonna get an email per day, and I like that, How do you keep that going after those 5, you know, those 5 emails are over and they would redundantly go back to being your once a week or your once a month newsletter. And how do you keep it so if you have, like, 5 different segments, maybe you do 5 different things, Five different segments that you’re not creating 5 different emails every single week.

Mark Herschberg [00:21:56]:

The key to segmentation, the example you’re talking about is people say, Within my larger audience, I have these sub audiences.

Jennie Wright [00:22:03]:

Yes.

Mark Herschberg [00:22:04]:

And so this week, I’m gonna write about something in the news. Well, now I have to pick Five different things in the news for each segment are the same thing, but write it 5 different ways. That’s a lot of work. Now I have Had email list where we’ve had millions of people. We’ve sent out hundreds of millions of emails a year, and we did have segments because people opted in. But at that scale, It wasn’t just me. We had a team of people generating that content. We had engineers who could help manage that list.

Mark Herschberg [00:22:32]:

If you are a solo practitioner or you might have An assistant or 2, this is probably going to be too much for you. But we can segment not based on Overall interest with permanent segments, we can have people subsegment into specific paths that are fixed, Temporary reset paths. So the idea, of course, with this talk is you say, hey. Did you like this talk, this talk? Click this QR code or hit this link. You’re going to sign up. You’ll get the 5 follow-up emails, and you will sign up for a general list. Talk number 2, different link. You’ll get a different set of 5 emails and then to the general path.

Mark Herschberg [00:23:17]:

It takes me a little time to set up those 5 emails, but then I’m done. Now depending on your email system, you might need to create a subsegment this talk, but that should be a few minutes of just copy from your template, create the November 2023 talk. Whoever goes into it goes into it, and they roll to the the other one. That’s one way to do it. Here’s another simple example. On my website, I have a blog. Now the blog, it’s unfortunately ordered chronologically. That’s how blogs work, but I also put in categories.

Mark Herschberg [00:23:52]:

Every every article I write has a tag. Again, think hashtag. Now in my case, the tags I have tags that correspond to the chapters of my book, so it’s on brand. But you can go to my website. Instead of trying to search through all my 100 plus posts, you can say, I just want the negotiation posts. And you click that, and you get to about 15 or so articles easier to skim through. And so what we’re doing there is we’re segmenting in a different way. We’re letting the audience determine their segment by just using simple tools to slice and dice and show different views of our larger content set.

Jennie Wright [00:24:31]:

I bet with your skills and abilities, you’ve probably looked at the way blogs are set up on WordPress sites, and you’re probably wishing you could do something about it.

Mark Herschberg [00:24:40]:

There should be a way you can do this In WordPress, I don’t use WordPress, but I believe in the CMS, you can actually tag things by topic.

Jennie Wright [00:24:48]:

Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. I just know that when I’m loading, because I, you know, obviously have my own blog or whatnot and so a lot of people listening, I know that when I’m loading it and and doing my, You know, my categories or my tags or whatnot. I’m always thinking, is there a different way that I could do this so that people could kinda do, like, a choose your own adventure, thing where they can you know? And I know you can do that with the the different categories in one moment, but I always wonder if there’s a different way of, like, approaching it. We’ve especially with things like websites, nothing really has changed fundamentally, in the way that WordPress works in that way. Do you know what I mean? So I just it was just something that kinda niggled on my brain while you were talking about it, so I wondered.

Mark Herschberg [00:25:29]:

Well, let’s let’s jump into that larger concept because I used to choose your own adventure analogy when I do a a full talk on this because we wanna let people pick from our larger corpus of content. Now a simple thing will take my book. I have 10 chapters, 10 skills. Even the way the book was written, you don’t have to read this start to finish. You can say, I wanna get better at networking and jump right to chapter 8, And that’s okay. I designed the book knowing people might pick and choose as needed. Now It’s a little hard with a book. Obviously, this doesn’t work as well for fiction books unless it’s choose your own adventure.

Mark Herschberg [00:26:08]:

But with a book, there’s still that kind of linear Concept. Even with a podcast or with a TV show, we still think linearly. We think start to end. But imagine if you took your content, All the content you have, your books, your blogs, podcasts, talks, and you chopped it up into smaller pieces. You had the little Lego blocks. Well, here’s one of the concepts, and here’s another concept. And many content creators do have I’ve got my core area, and then I’ve got Four different talks that all kind of say similar things. It’s just how I orient it.

Mark Herschberg [00:26:42]:

Maybe I use 3 in this one and 2 plus a different one in that one. If you can do that with your content in other ways, then you’re going to let people if you can create the tools like the tagging in your CMS, you can let People pick their own adventure. They can jump to that chapter or even the smaller equivalent. Again, that’s that was all concept behind Brain Bump that we get down to, Here was that key takeaway from the talk. There might be 10 things they wanna remember, and here’s they can select the 6 that are most relevant to them, or they can do all 10, And they can pick when and where it’s relevant.

Jennie Wright [00:27:16]:

Alright. So this sort of evolved way of looking at Marketing and content and content creation or content consumption is evolving, and this is where apps like Brain Bump come in. This is where systems where people are, you know, doing different things in terms of their tagging. I know, like, you know, if you on TikTok and you wanna save a video, you can We create categories of your different saved videos and things. That’s a, you know, a method of people trying to make sure that it’s there when they need it. I think you’re sort of leading a little bit on the charge on this push pull marketing side, and I’m really interested to see where it goes. And I’m really keen on seeing with the marketing how people are going to really look at making sure the content is available at the time that people want it. I have 1 more question for you.

Jennie Wright [00:28:06]:

It has to do with social media. How would we integrate this into, say, a social like, social media post? Because those At least I don’t know, and I’m hoping you can enlighten me. How are those gonna work in this push and pull When people are posting, you know, and we and to see a to see a post on Facebook or Instagram, you gotta scroll. How would this potentially like, how do we do this?

Mark Herschberg [00:28:32]:

You don’t because social media is not designed for this. No. And let me talk about why, and we’ll touch upon something you mentioned a moment ago. Okay. Social media, Its goal is not to make it easy for you to find something. Its goal is to get you to scroll and scroll and scroll and stay engaged. And if they made it really easy, and think, for example, Vegas Casino. You can’t just walk in and out.

Mark Herschberg [00:28:56]:

It’s supposed to be a maze, supposed to distract you from the time and everything else, or stores where they put the things you want in back so you have to pass other things to get there. That’s different from, say, a convenience store where everything is right there. In fact, the design of brain bump is very much the opposite of social media. Social media, you have no control over the algorithm, and they want to keep you on there. Rain bump for your audience, for the general audience that we have, it’s designed that they can get the information they want within seconds. It could just be they don’t open the app. They get that daily push that they want at, say, 9 AM. Or it could be they open the app.

Mark Herschberg [00:29:35]:

They select networking or whatever topic they’re looking at, get the tips, Get off or click the link to go through to your podcast or blog post. We don’t want to keep them on the app Because then we become attacks. This is a tool. And now the key thing what you alluded to before, you can save posts in social media, And you talked about you take copious notes on your book. What I found, I take lots of notes on books too. But how often do you go back and look at those notes?

Jennie Wright [00:30:06]:

Not often enough. Probably forget about the ones that I made, and, yeah, It’s not efficient. Key.

Mark Herschberg [00:30:13]:

There’s lots of note taking apps, and most things allow you to save favorites. The key is we don’t go back and look the notes or look at our favorites often. That’s where the cost is. And if something is costly because in theory, I’ve got all the notes in my Google Docs, and they’re accessible by my phone. So why don’t I just open up the Google Doc before I walk into that conference or We’re we’re walking to the office each morning, but it’s still a pain. It is tens of seconds, possibly 30, 60 seconds, and that’s a high cost. The key is to make your information retrievable, accessible in under 10 seconds, ideally under six or 5 seconds. Because if it’s not a low cost to get, people will not do that.

Mark Herschberg [00:30:58]:

And so when you think about poll media, You have to create it in a way that people can quickly grab it, and social media is designed for the opposite.

Jennie Wright [00:31:07]:

It sure is. And it’s not, they’re not making it easy. They definitely want the doom scroll for sure. You get sucked in by that, hoping that you’ll Find, like, the next video or next post you see will be exactly what you need. And then, also, you completely forget about it 5 minutes later. So there’s that. Kinda makes me sad that the content I’m putting out on social media is probably so quickly and easily forgotten in a minute, especially when you’re trying to post about your podcast and trying to get the news out there. But I see I see your point.

Jennie Wright [00:31:40]:

And having different methods, brain bump, and, you know, whatever else seems to work for people as well, but I I mean, Checking that out was probably not a bad idea, and seeing how you can integrate it, I think, is sort of the way things are going.

Mark Herschberg [00:31:54]:

This is where Brain Bump does work well with social media in one sense. Mhmm. If you take your show, and you’re probably gonna take some show notes, a few quotes, and takeaways, Yes. Put on social media. I’m not saying don’t do social media. That’s still where a lot of people are, but you take the same quotes and you put it into Brain Bump. So now you’ve got the social media catch. But once those tips go into Brain Bump, what happens is now forevermore, those tips are available when someone 2 years from now, get your content brain bump, and they say, I have this challenge now.

Mark Herschberg [00:32:29]:

You’ve got tagged for that challenge. Your content pops up again with no additional effort. The key differentiation with Brain Bump is on social media, you have to just keep feeding the beast. You have to say, oh, I haven’t posted in 3 days. Go back. With Brain Bump, often people first come up, there’s a little more up front work. If you take your book, for example, or a talk, say, okay. I’m gonna take an hour to pull out the quotes.

Mark Herschberg [00:32:53]:

But then once you’re on Brain Bump, they get surfaced over and over again with no additional effort. Plus, Once you’ve already put them into the spreadsheet that we use for upload, well, you now have it organized in a spreadsheet, so you’ve got your next 100 social media posts already organized. Just pull out of and feed the beast as often as you want.

Jennie Wright [00:33:14]:

Feeding the beast. That makes that That makes perfect sense. I hate feeding the beast. Actually, a good friend of mine has what she calls the 4 post strategy, and she only posts Four posts a week. That’s it. And she’s seeing a, actually, more relevant and better outcome come by posting less because there’s less for people to have to scroll through. She still stays front of mine, but she doesn’t have the continuous. Okay.

Jennie Wright [00:33:41]:

I gotta put a reel up. I gotta go, you know, do this and that. And it seems to be creating quite a stir, in in social media that we can post less and do more, like get more, have better business, and I think that’s really cool. Oh, okay. We could keep going on this. I do need to wrap, but I do wanna say that I’m incredibly intrigued, and everybody listening should be intrigued between Push and Pull Media. And I know we’ve been talking about Brain Bump. This is not an endorsement for the the app, but it’s definitely a cool thing to talk about.

Jennie Wright [00:34:10]:

There are other ways obviously to do this. And if you’re interested in figuring out ways to do this, and push and pull, then you can take a look at it, but also So just take a look at the ways that you can make your content more relevant. I think segmenting and creating segments within your email list is essential. I always have. If it feels like a lot of work, the the the start up of it can feel like that, but, honestly, you can just copy and paste and change details out with things like your 5 email sequences or, the landing pages or even confirmation emails, all of these things. I I take all of my In ActiveCampaign, I I take the campaigns, and I literally will pay like, replicate them, change out the relevant details, and now the job is done. You don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel, and that’s important because it can feel overwhelming, but I think having those segments is essential. It’s also good to know that newsletters aren’t going anywhere, that they’re here, and I think that we can just do a little bit of a better job on the content that’s gonna be in them.

Jennie Wright [00:35:10]:

So that’s a thought too. Mark, I just wanna thank you so much for all of your insights and sharing all this information. It’s been really eye opening, and it’s really making It’s making me think. I hope it makes everybody else think about the relevancy of their content.

Mark Herschberg [00:35:26]:

Thank you again for having me on the show.

Jennie Wright [00:35:28]:

Absolutely. And if everybody’s listening, where can they go and find you or find Brain Bump?

Mark Herschberg [00:35:35]:

I’ll give you 2 websites. There’s my personal website, the career toolkitbook.com. You can follow me on social media. There’s a contact form there. And for those curious about the book, Learn more about the book. For Brain Bump, it’s a free app on Android or iPhone so you can find it in your stores, or go to brainbumpapp.com. And there you can see a 92nd video that shows how the app works. There’s an FAQ section and links to the stores.

Mark Herschberg [00:36:01]:

And for those interested in finding out how they can get their Content on there, there’s a form at the bottom so you can get in touch with me, say, here’s what I do. How could this work for my content? So all of that is at We’re in bumpapp.com.

Jennie Wright [00:36:14]:

Perfect. Thank you so much, Mark. And as always, the Acquire podcast is produced and edited by Jason Wheeler. And if you found this episode valuable, please don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you so much for being part of my growing community and consider joining my Facebook group where I’m excited to keep delivering content that empowers entrepreneurs and marketers with list building, lead generation, and launches. And, again, the Acquire podcast is brought to you by the Odd Phonic Podcast Network. Thank you so much.