1320: Future-Proof Your Brand in the Social Media Era with Global Marketing Leader and Growth Strategist Carlos Gil

Robert Plank 0:00 Hey, we're here with Mr. Carlos Gil from get response. Carlos is a marketing leader, Best Selling Author at keynote speaker with over 15 years of experience helping brands and entrepreneurs cut through the digital noise. And Mr. Carlos is the US brand evangelist at get response. And he drives thought leadership at the intersection of AI, email marketing and social media. His book is the end of marketing, which is a no nonsense guide to building real human connections in the digital age. There it is, right there with a big old x. We're at the end. We're at the stop. It's time to do something different. So Mr. Carlos is going to tell us all about, perhaps what we could do to start over today with zero followers and no list about some perhaps big myths about marketing and how to monetize your expertise, all kinds of exciting stuff. Mr. Carlos, glad to see you

Carlos Gil 0:54 Robert, It's great to be here on the podcast with you. Thanks for having me

Robert Plank 0:58 Well, glad to have you, and so we did our best to introduce you, hype you up, but in your own words, what are you all about? What's your current focus?

Carlos Gil 1:06 You know, what? At this stage in my career, I tell folks, look, I wear a lot of hats. I've worn a lot of hats throughout my career. I would consider myself very much a digital OG at this stage, I've been working in digital and social since 2008 so you can do the math. I've been doing this for for a while now, but my background in I would say, really digital marketing goes back to when I was in middle school and like, I grew up with AOL and was on America Online, where I really learned about copywriting and engaging and marketing, like as crazy as it sounds, because back then I was in middle school, I wasn't, you know, formally working in marketing, but those early days of being on the internet as a youth really taught me at a fundamental level about community building and being a part of a community and how to stand out and how to engage and how to network. And it's just really been those principles that have followed me throughout my career. I've had an opportunity to work for some big brands, you know, on the inside as a head of social one of those brands is LinkedIn, and I've had an opportunity to also advise and consult for really large fortune 500 it's like DocuSign and Western Union and Hertz and many others. And that's really just one side of my career. I've had the honor of speaking around the world, speaking to 1000s of marketers. My style of teaching, and hopefully it comes out through this podcast. It you know, like I strip away all the jargon I like to strip away like all the corporate speak, and I pride myself on just being real, right? I've worked in the inside of brands. I'm a content creator myself. I've built a brand of my own, and I've also started companies of my own, and had success through what I teach corporate and brand marketers, which is humanizing your brand. It's being real. It's being relatable. It's not always making your content about selling. It's more so aimed to engage, and it's really why I wrote the end of marketing. Man, it's to help brands really future proof in this age of AI, that we're in this age of just digital noise. So again, man, I'm excited to be here on the podcast with you and share with you and with your audience as much as I can about this space and where we're going.

Robert Plank 3:28 Well, wonderful, and I'm excited to learn from you, especially from all of your adventures and travels. It seems like there's a lot of transferable skills at place, and the years pass and the companies change, and some things stay the same and some things are different. Like, you think about that nostalgia of back in the days of like, there was geo cities, and then there was MySpace and but there was still the thing that remained, were the people right, and that you had to kind of package things in a way that made sense and got attention. And, you know, kept someone on a page and kept someone reading and scrolling kept someone clicking that email opening in the inbox. But then, you know, the the trends and all that sort of stuff changed. And so I love this concept of future proofing, especially with AI coming out, because it's so tempting, right? It's so easy to say, give me 100 articles. Let me just whip out my whole email campaign for the next two years, and do it in five minutes, and then you're like, Well, isn't that just churning out a bunch of stuff that maybe is not going to be helpful, or it's not going to get your business where it wants to go. And so with all the the crazy stuff happening in the world, all the problems, all the difficulties, what do you see where people are maybe getting stuck and need your help,

Carlos Gil 4:45 you know? So I joined get response about a year ago as their brand evangelist here in the US. And for those that aren't familiar, get response is one of the oldest email marketing service providers in the industry. They've been around since the late 90s, but. And when I joined the team, was a little hesitant at first, to be honest with you, because my background is in social media marketing primarily, right? So get response, brought me on to help kind of steward this narrative in the US around email marketing. And my hesitancy came from a place of, if I start going out and beating my chest about email marketing and why you should use email here's how to be the best email marketer. Well, people that have followed my brand for years, they would basically call me out and say, like, Look, dude, like, you're not really an email marketer. You're a social media marketer. And I started kind of thinking about, well, how do I spend the narrative around that I can still be on brand for myself. And I say this coming purely from a place of you have to understand something. I've built a brand as an author and speaker, right? You kind of teed up earlier. So at this stage of my career, working with a company like a get response, or really any B to B brand, one of the reasons why a brand would bring me on to work with them is because of that thought leadership, right? It's not like hiring a traditional marketing employee. So in order for this relationship to work, I have to be able to connect the dots with who I am as a thought leader. So in working with get response, I was able to kind of help them see that look. First of all, everyone needs email marketing, not just email marketers. And they're like, there's a big segment that I believe, is being ignored, and that's your more traditional social media marketer, and it's also your content creator, IE or influencer community. So we've been working jointly on creating this narrative of what's called own versus rented. So rented land is, you know, all your social media channels, right? Your Tiktok, which you know, over the last few months, has, you know, kind of teetered with, is it staying? Is it going? You've got your so traditional social networks, your LinkedIn, your Instagram, your Facebook, all these social networks provide marketers with reach, but at the same time, you're continuing to build on this rented land where the algorithms are dictating whether or not your content gets seen. And then you have your own land, and that's email, right? So within email, yes, you can have a direct relationship with your with your with your audience. You can go direct to the consumer, so to speak, because you don't need to rely on algorithms. So with that being said, I'm spending a lot of time in the weeds, going to conferences, educating marketers on exactly that notion, like you need to use email, because all these social networks are on shaky ground. I know this from working on the inside the social network myself, spending time at LinkedIn, as well as spending almost 20 years of my career using email in combination with social that social media is great for brand awareness, but it's not the end all be all and social media, I want to actually go one step further. Social media is great to meet people. It's good to connect with people like at a very like, high level, even if you never posted a single piece of content on social it's a great directory, almost thinking as like Google, but for people, right? But you can't rely on social media to grow your business, and that's very much of what I've been teaching over the last 10 years. It's very much of what the end of marketing is all about. And you know, for your listeners out there, you might even be wondering, like, what do I mean by the end of marketing? Well, it's very simple, like marketing as we know it, is over. Right? The glory days, the golden days of billboards advertising, even early days of social all of that is gone, right? You have more noise than ever before. You have a lot of competition. You're not only competing against brands in your industry or in your vertical, but you're competing against content creators, influencers you're creating. You're competing against now AI that's making social and digital channels even more noisy and moving faster. So really, your competitive advantage goes down to people, right? Which is where social comes in, but it's where email comes in, if you can find that balance to where you're using social media to identify who's a potential advocate for my brand, who's the potential customer for my brand, or you're using emails away to keep your audience warm and engaged without really having to sell to them. Now that's the balance that you really need to put into your marketing mix in order to future proof your business.

Robert Plank 9:04 I like it so it's, it's not one extreme or the other, right? Email marketing is a component of what you do, and that this whole concept of rented land, I mean, it's been on the mind of all of us for such a long time, right? That, like, it's great that at one point, like, Facebook gave us a bunch of leads, LinkedIn gave us a bunch of leads, Tiktok, but then it, there's, it's, it's such an easy, come easy, go situation, and you're making me think about whenever I've actually made a purchase or signed up for a freebie or got some kind of access. Like, then I go back to my email. Like, as much as all these the the Googles of the world have been trying to kill email, like it's still there after all these decades. Like, if anything, out of the few things of the internet that have stayed all these decades, it is email, right? And so it's and you also make me think about when I where I go, when I like, go to my phone or go to my computer, like I do go to the link. In the socials, but I go to email up for something like serious, and there's, like, probably only a handful of people now who were like, emails soon as I see I open it, but like, it would be great if we, as the business owners, the marketers, were in that that list for some people, right? Or our best customers, went and opened, went to their email program to look for an email from us, and but we're in a more buying mood, instead of this sort of rented land stuff. And so where do you see, maybe the the difficulties or the pushback when you do your your speaking and your evangelizing, and you say, hey, you know email marketing, you're you're missing out on it. Like, what do the young kids say? Do they not take email seriously or like, what's the resistance?

Carlos Gil 10:45 Believe it or not. I'm so glad that you framed it that way. Believe it or not, the young kids the Gen Z years, even though they aren't actively using email marketing, they're very receptive, because they themselves know that their entire business model, and I'm speaking more so about creators, content creators, they know their whole business model revolves around staying relevant on a platform, and if that platform goes away, IE and Tiktok, that their entire business is gone, right? And we saw this happen before with vine, for those are old enough to remember, I know you know about 1015, years ago, behind was really hot. It got acquired. It went away, right? So there's a lot of creators that lost their livelihood and had to start over. Both. That being said, it doesn't really matter which social network you're using, right? You're susceptible to those social networks from one day to another, deciding you know what, like, your content isn't really over indexing. It's not performing anymore, like we're going to de prioritize your account, like all these things happen on the back end. So youngsters actually are open to it. I would say it's more of the you know, Gen Xer, millennial marketing audience that views emails and antiquated system, because social gives you immediate gratification. I don't even want to say immediate ROI, because I would not consider a like or a follow or an engagement ROI. It's not the same category as actual dollars generated from a campaign. But because social feels instant, because you can touch it right. We're using a lot of these apps with our phone. We're constantly checking throughout the day. We're checking in, checking out. I believe that feeling that FOMO, almost from a marketer's perspective, they view it very different than email. They view email as being an antiquated system. They view it as it takes a lot of work. It's not as instant, it's not as sexy. But I think what's happening is the pendulum is starting to swing back over in the direction of email. Email, as you know, Robert, I'm not sure how old you are, but email, you know, as I'm sure you're aware, you know, was a core component of the early days of social media. You would log on to AOL, and the first thing that you would hear was, you got mail, right? So, you know that was, that was, you know, the early days, early ethos of social. Um, so I think again, what has really helped, at least in the last few months, is with Tiktok, potential ban happening, starting to make marketers aware that you can't rely on social media. You need to have a backup plan, that backup should be email. Quite frankly, email should be your priority. I don't just say this because of my relationship with get response. I say this because, like, Look, dude, I have a brand, just like you have a brand, and I've spent now almost 20 years collecting email addresses. So for me, this is nothing new. Um, people ask me all the time, like, if, if your social channels went away tomorrow, like worst case scenario, you get hacked, you lose everything. What would you do? And I'd tell them, well, first of all, I'd be good, because I've now have spent years ensuring that every speaking engagement have systems in place, even if it's like an ebook or some sort of lead magnet, I have systems in place. I've gathered and collected email addresses. I've also collected phone numbers as well. So if I had to start over, what I would likely do is just focus all in on email. And I honestly probably wouldn't even waste my time at that point with social,

Robert Plank 14:12 very nice. So you have the database right, and that you hear that a lot with some of these companies that get acquired. Like, sure they want like the website or the traffic or the brand, but like so many times, they just want that customer database, because that takes such a long time to build up. And it's not relying on these other platforms where, like you said, they can just go away instantly, just that quick anchor went away recently, all these people with podcasts gone right, like you say, Vine, uh, Periscope, right? It's like these, these platforms that there's the window of time when you're like, Oh man, this is the next big thing. This is the next Tiktok. And then now you have to start from scratch. So it's like, well, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. You build your email list as well. And I'm glad that you kind of circled back a little bit to your personal brand and what you've been doing, because I want to make sure that there's time for that we may. Question a little bit about how, like your your stick has evolved, right? You said, Well, hey, I'm social media, and now I'm kind of working the email part in. And as far as where you've had those hiccups, the hang ups, the difficulties, the struggles, what do you have to share with us about just where you've had failure or stress or uncertainty to help us get through that. You know, all the entrepreneurial roller coaster, where have you struggled?

Carlos Gil 15:29 I'm so glad that you brought that up, because I went out on my own in 2017 and one of my mentors told me early on that entrepreneurship is a roller coaster, and you just use the word roller coaster. So that's always the analogy. Whenever I'm mentoring and coaching young entrepreneurs, let them know, like, look, you're gonna probably have more lows than your highs, right? It feels great to close a deal. It feels great when the check cashes. It feels amazing, right? When you're on top, but you're not always gonna be on top, and you learn mentally how to process the lows along with the highs, right? It's about having that balance right. And just know that there will be lows. You will lose clients. You will have people that bash you like you're gonna have bad days. It just happens. So I went out on my own in 2017 I was independent. I say independent, running my own marketing agency for years, and then my book, then the marketing, came out right then in 2019 and like, life is good, dude, like 2019 was a strong year for me. I was on the road just about every week I was on the road, I want to say like 50 out of 52, weeks and 19, all over the place, major conferences like the Carlos Gil brand was like sizzling hot. And then COVID happened, right? 2020. Rolls around Dallas, momentum. New Book, best selling book, get ready to go speak all over the world, South by Southwest. Like all these huge events, COVID happens and completely wipes everything. It doesn't just wipe out. Speaking engagements. Wiped out my entire agency, like business model, and had to pivot and start over from scratch, and in doing so, I started my own first commerce business, and that was exciting. It was a mask business, go figure. And that business took off like a rocket. And all the lessons I'd acquired from working a corporate job, everything that I had, I taught marketers throughout the years, for like, the first time in my career, I was able to actually apply it into my own business, and not have to be in front of a camera, right? So my business partner and I, we use Tiktok grew, you know, using Tiktok, business scaled, sold a lot of product, and then, as you, I'm sure, can imagine, as we started coming out this pandemic, and people weren't needing masks anymore, well, like, the business very quickly, like died, and we found ourselves having to pivot again. I think you know what happens when you're an entrepreneur is you're you're just built different man, like, you have this DNA where you know, like, when things start to go south, and you sense it like you're in like, fight or flight mode, and just start doing what you need to do in order to survive. So my partner and I, we started a sneaker resale business, and that was, like the pivot from the mass business. And now this is a brick and mortar. And I'll be honest with you, man, like I didn't know what the hell I was getting myself into. I've when I was a kid in high school, I worked for a shoe store, but like, the actual like, day in, day out, as an entrepreneur at a retail store, brick and mortar, it's very different than E commerce. And no matter how much you love marketing, there's so much more to running a business than just marketing. Like, there's operations, there's product acquisition. There's a lot to it. So first year, the business, we absolutely crush it. We are all, you know, organic marketing, organic social, all word of mouth, completely crushed. It. Did a million in sales. And then year two, I started to feel worn out. And personally, I'm not making the income that I'm used to making, because I'm not on the road like I used to. I'm not consulting like I used to, like my my core focus is my business seven days a week, sun up to sundown. And that started to wear on me, because I started realizing, like, damn, like the things that made me successful as an entrepreneur, I'm I'm not seeing that success in this business. So eventually, man, like I lost passion for it, uh, eventually this opportunity to get response, kind of fell in my lap, and I said to my wife, you know what? Like, I'm gonna go back to being Carlos Gil. I'm gonna go back to working in marketing, being the speaker, being the thought leader, and get paid to do the things that I'm used to doing. And, you know, again, once again, pivoted, went back into more of a kind of a traditional nine to five job, if you will, and honestly do like, I haven't even looked back ever since. My advice to entrepreneurs out there is that it's okay to go backwards in order to move forward, right? There's this, like, I want to say, the stigma that if you go work for. Someone that you aren't a good entrepreneur. And I think it's actually using this from the lens of, if you go work for someone now, what that someone is paying you, you actually now reinvest into your entrepreneurial endeavors without necessarily having to be stressed out and worn out from a job that really owns you seven days a week, and that's, you know, your own business.

Robert Plank 20:21 Well, very cool. Well, what an adventure you've been on, right? Mr. Carlos, and you've been through multiple lifetimes. And I love the lessons here, right? That you don't need to be afraid of failure. And I think there's something to the antidote of letting the ego get in your way, is going out and trying these experiences, and don't just say yes or no to something, just because that's what your imagination says. But, but go out there and make that brick and mortar business work, and that if something else makes sense, then it's not given up. It's, you know, you have this other opportunity that you can use to build yourself back up bigger. And so you have this excellent book we mentioned a few times, called the end of marketing, humanizing your brand in the age of social media and AI, and you're also the brand evangelist in the US for get response. And so as far as making sure that we cover our bases with get response, you mentioned it a few times, right? It's this easy, affordable platform that brings email automation, online courses and paid newsletters together, but much like a lot of these services, I haven't looked at it in like, years, decades. And so what's new with get response, and how does it stand out from all these other email marketing solutions?

Carlos Gil 21:33 So that's a really good question. So get response, in addition to email marketing, it's an all in one suite of digital marketing tools, right? So in addition to email, you can run your entire business from a digital marketing perspective using get response. You know, we got landing page builders, you know, we've got lead magnets, integrations with Shopify, right? If you have an E commerce business, you know, 1000s of integrations. You know that you can tap into using Zapier. What's really exciting is that in the last year, Get Response rolled out a suite of content monetization tools so you can create a course now using get response, you can have a paid newsletter. Using get response, you can even host webinars through get response. And everything ties back to email. So emails like the brain, it's the core of your Get Response account, and then all these other, let's just call them tentacles, all funnel into your into your email list, or your email you know, you know, lists I should say plural, that you create. So give me an example. I have a course that created Get Response completely free course, right? I give it away to everyone and anyone that wants it. But in order to sign up for that, course, you have to give me your email address, and now that gets funneled into my Get Response account, and then I've, you know, automation workflows set up to keep the audience engaged. And once I have them engaged and have their attention that I'm able to, you know, cross sell them, I can sell my book, or I can invite them to free webinar or a podcast like this, once it goes live, I can, you know, send it to them, right? So this is the easiest way to put it. Is think of email marketing today, using a tool like get response as not just a partner for email marketing, but it's a partner to ensure that your business is always on. It's always running. Great thing about is you can sign up for Get Response completely for free, no credit card required. You can use it for 30 days and you get unlimited email sends up to 500 contacts. So anyone listening to this right now, you know, go sign up if you need any help, kind of with that process, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm easily accessible, but actually, like use the tools click around. What I will say is get responses highly. You know, intuitive. It's easy to use. It has one of the easiest UIs from my standpoint, and I've used a lot of competitors in the past. And from a pricing standpoint, it's really affordable as well. I know price is one of those things that's always top of mind. You actually go to the website and you can you can put how many contacts you have, and it'll give you a quote. Um, but I'm on the road a lot, so I'm constantly hearing what people like and don't like from existing ESPs. I won't name them here, but oftentimes it comes down to price. It comes down to price and user experience. So I would say to get response definitely checks the boxes on both.

Robert Plank 24:15 Well, very cool. And so it's been a blast listening to all of these kind of scrapes and experiences you've been through. And I think that what we've been saying a lot is that sometimes you jump from thing to thing and the ground shifts beneath your feet. But what do you have, after all this to show for it? You have this customer list, you have these emails, you have these phone numbers, which now you can put anywhere now you put into get response. So now, no matter what the current businesses or what the current channel is, right, if you're doing the speaking or the podcasting or no matter what platforms come and go, you have your email list, you have your email marketing, and that way you can also monetize it, right? You have your landing pages and your paid newsletters so you use. Response to grow and engage that audience, promote and sell across channels, create and monetize content. You said that that website is get response.com where someone can sign up free, start using it, click around, and then now it becomes as part of your business. And you say, you know, I was always so stressed out about the comings and goings of social media, and will I get slapped, or will the algorithm shadow ban me, or will it go under? Will now I kind of have this extra fuel of on the fire, which is email marketing. We also mentioned they have this book The End of marketing, humanizing your brand in the age of social media and AI, the end of marketing revolutionizes the way brands, agencies and marketers should approach marketing. And as far as whatever next steps there are here, Mr. Carlos, you mentioned, get response. You mentioned the end of marketing. Am I missing anything here? Is there anything else we should plug as far as some links, some next steps,

Carlos Gil 25:58 links and next steps? Yeah, sure. You know, like you already mentioned, get response. Get response.com. Is the website and the marketing is the book. Let's connect. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm easily accessible. Carlos Gil Gil with L on Instagram, you can hit me up at Carlos Gil 83

Robert Plank 26:16 very cool. So Instagram, Carlos skill 83 LinkedIn, Carlos Gil online. Mr. Carlos Gil with 1l is a global marketing leader. He's a fractional cmo and growth strategist. He's currently the US brand evangelist for get response. He has this excellent book called The End of marketing. And as far as the very end of our show here, Mr. Carlos it's time for the scary part where I try to put you on the spot and I ask for a quote or lesson that has served you that you can pass on to us? So what comes to mind for a quote or lesson?

Carlos Gil 26:47 You know, when I was younger, I played football, when I was when I was, like, in middle school, in high school, and my mom gave me this, like little statue of the football on it, and had a quote from the great Vince Lombardi, the harder you work, the harder it is. That's a quote that's always stuck with me, because I think in life, you know, things get challenging. You know, regardless of if you're employed, self employed, married, not married, like life is hard, right? It's not really all that easy. But as long as you're always working towards a goal, and you're getting better at your craft, and it really becomes hard to give up. And I think that just the harder you work, the harder is the surrender just has so many parallel means in life. So I would say that would be my go to quote.

Robert Plank 27:33 I love it. The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender. So get to that hard work. Hard work doesn't mean you have to suffer or that it's harder than it needs to be. It's just that life is short there. It's jungle out there. There's competition, and so you owe it to yourself to give it your all, do your best, leave it all out in the field, as they say. So let's consider that as we add Mr. Carlos skill on LinkedIn and check out the end of marketing book, as well as, most importantly, get response.com and thank you for being here, Mr. Carlos. I appreciate you info dumping and giving us these inspiring stories. Thank you.

Carlos Gil 28:07 Thank you so much.

Robert Plank 28:10 All right, super great.