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This show is made for B2B marketers who are tired of the same old advice. Ugi Djuric, CEO of ContentMonk and B2B Vault, sits down with some of the best minds in B2B to talk about what’s really working, what’s broken, and what nobody tells you about growing a company. This is the show where people share their deepest insights and secret knowledge they wouldn't otherwise share on LinkedIn.
Ugi Djuric (00:00)
How do you apply all the L &D techniques and strategies that you're talking about in your own team, especially the marketing department?
Barry Ryan (00:13)
Yeah, from like a first perspective.
Yeah, that's an interesting question actually, because obviously we're an L &D department, so how do we apply L &D to our L &D companies? How do you apply L &D to ourselves in that respect? Do we practice what we preach? Do we drink our own champagne? So yeah, I guess there's a few points that's worth talking about in terms of marketing. As you know, marketing campaigns change, well, marketing changes fast as an industry, no, never sits still.
It's always evolving. You know, the tools, the platforms, the algorithms, they're constantly evolving. You know, we have to sort of stay on top of that. SEO paid, AI is the latest one, isn't it? That's changing everything for us as marketing people, attribution models. So without regular learning, you're going to get left behind in the marketing space. And what worked last year...
isn't necessarily going to work this year, know, it's constantly evolving. However, SEO is a little bit different to that, which I'm sure we're to get onto later. It's kind of, it kind of stood the test of time. But in terms of like that, you know, that's the first thing. It's always be learning, always open to, always open to learning, always sharing new ideas. You know, we're only a small team here at first. But it's always like, shit, having a, having a platform, you know, like first.
to share your learning, share industry knowledge with each other, what's happening and having a central place to do that because obviously otherwise that learning is going to get stuck in your head, it's going to get saved on your computer, it's never going to go any further. So it's having a place to, it's having a platform or a place to share that information, click with each other because it is always changing and encouraging great ideas from everywhere as well outside of the marketing team. So obviously you can get sort of trapped in your little
kind of like marketing bubble can't yeah, and it's very easy to do that and not look outside of it. But you know, I'd always encourage like marketing to sorry, ideas to come from anywhere, know, if that's a CEO, you know, they're looking at it from a different perspective, you know, they're seeing things that I might not look at that maybe come, you know, look outside of our industry and look outside of B2B as well. You know, what are people doing in e-commerce? You know, what are people doing B2C, that kind of stuff, you know, for me, it's having that central place where great ideas come.
from anywhere. that's kind of the first part of the L &D. There's a lot of expectation on marketeers to be self learners, isn't there? Yes, you can go to university and study marketing, but what you probably learn then is probably none of that is probably relevant when you actually go into the real world. I'm not somebody who did actually go to university. I've met many people.
Ugi Djuric (02:56)
Yeah.
Barry Ryan (03:03)
in marketing, kind of, marketing found me or I fell into marketing. Digital marketing was taken off quite luckily, you Google was starting to take off. So I was kind of lucky in that respect that I kind of stumbled across marketing and 14 years later here I am. you know, a lot of my learning has been done on the job, it's through doing the work. So there's this kind of unspoken assumption that marketing people just figure it out. You know, I'm probably guilty of that as anyone, you know, whether it's YouTube or reading a blog or
listening to a podcast as the case may be more recently, you know, ⁓ or doing courses which I tend to find in all honesty are out of date by the time you've done them because it does move that fast. ⁓ But that is again putting it teams at risk of like uneven skills, knowledge gaps, burnout, wherever it might be. So encouraging that kind of sharing collaboration. ⁓ I think it's good to have that support network about it because
especially in a smaller organization like we are, effectively a startup, if you're a marketing leader in that role, you're gonna be wearing all the hats and I'm sure a lot of people listening to will resonate with that in terms of you're the paid ads person, you're the social media person, you're the content, you're the website, mate, you're product marketing, you're everything, aren't you, essentially? And it is very easy to kind of get just kind of stuck in that silo.
Not not sort of, you're doing the doing you in the weeds. You kind of, know, you're busy, but you know, not having people kind of out there to bounce ideas off or share things with. You know, it can you can become isolated quite quickly. So having ⁓ a place to do that, a platform to do that is really, really important and to encourage that as well and to create that that space where people feel that they can share share things as well. You know, spark ideas, etc.
Ugi Djuric (04:55)
So tell me about that kind of a platform for sharing these ideas, for sharing knowledge, trendy stuff and that kind of stuff. Is that something that you're doing at Thirst? Like is Thirst for that? for like... That is, okay. Okay. Okay. Perfect. And tell me, how do you, ⁓ from your experience, what's the best way to encourage people?
Barry Ryan (05:10)
But that is first, yeah, that is first.
Ugi Djuric (05:24)
to, you know, participate, to share their takeaways, their learnings, et cetera. Why am I asking you this? Because we often ourselves, we often, you know, see a problem where we can't easily, you know, engage our clients' teammates to post content on LinkedIn, for example. Right. So I would say these are like the two, you know, very, very similar things. So from the psychology standpoint, what is your like go-to-take? How do you encourage people to...
start sharing their learnings.
Barry Ryan (05:57)
I'm smiling, you were speaking because if I had the answer to that, I'd be a very rich man. You know, I wish I had the solution and I wish that I could, I could kind of bottle it up and give that advice out to everyone. ⁓ listening to this, I don't, you know, it is, it is really, it is a case of, you know, we're lucky at first because we have a platform that
⁓ facilitates that makes that easier but it know it's still the same process of you know you know asking people
and asking them again and then asking them again until it becomes a habit. Yeah. And then asking them again until it becomes a habit and then just do it without thinking. And it is that process and it is slow, you know, necessarily when you're, you know, it's slightly, I mean, we're a software development company. So obviously software developers are very different animals to marketeers. It is slightly easier when you're working with, when you're trying to get people to collaborate from a marketing slash sales perspective. I guess, I guess,
Ugi Djuric (06:29)
Yeah. And that's been them again.
Barry Ryan (06:58)
I guess our magic bullet, if there is one, is we're lucky that what we're selling is the solutions to that in a way. It is a learning platform, it's a centralized hub where you can share knowledge and you can share SOPs, you can share your workings, et cetera, your thoughts, your way of doing things with other people quite easily. And the benefit of that as well, guess, is that obviously if someone leaves an organization which happens, people leave the companies, don't they, for whatever reasons?
their knowledge isn't lost with them. So, you know, if someone does have a great way of doing something or there is a way of kind of putting a social media post together or there is a particular way of putting a blog together, for example, when that person leaves, if your company hasn't set up a way to capture that, then you just, you you're starting from square one, you know, someone coming in to replace them, he's sort of, you know, they've got one hand tied behind the back.
they're trying to of reverse engineer what someone's done. So that's gone. having, having a, guess, you know, it doesn't have to be a learning platform. You could do this in Google Docs or could have, have, you know, Slack, whatever it might be, you know, it's somewhere easy. It's easy to find that information and store that information and save it. You know, it's really important to have a place to capture that because of that reason, you know, you're covering yourself for the future really. And as well, it standardizes things, you know, there is a way of working and like I you can get lost in.
in your own head in terms of when you're doing, I guess, learning, development or marketing and you're right, you're doing stuff, but you're not necessarily telling anyone how you do that. And having a place to share that information is a way to sort of edge your bets and future proof your company and your marketing team as well.
Ugi Djuric (08:41)
Yeah. And tell me what about the gamification aspect of L &D and also onboarding the new team members? Like have you crossed around some really huge ⁓ data results, whatever, where like gamification drastically improved time to onboard for new people or like the productivity of people?
results like I'm talking about again, still like marketing department, like B2B.
Barry Ryan (09:20)
Yeah, I guess we've done it the way around where, you know, we've borrowed a lot from what the social media platforms are doing well. You know, there's no point in reinventing the wheel. You know, if you look at TikTok, Facebook, Twitter.
LinkedIn, which obviously when you know we're running a lot in our world, you know, if you look at kind of what they're doing well, you don't need to reinvent the wheel a little bit and try and come out of anything kind of that's out of the order. We know that their masters are spending billions and billions of pounds doing the research. know, Duolingo is one that kind of gets flagged up a lot in our industry as a go-to in terms of things that they're doing well and that gamification piece. And we pulled in bits from
those worlds, know, like shares, comments, leaderboards, ⁓ certifications, badges, et cetera. So we've pulled in the best from those worlds into the first platform. So it's all those things that you'll see, you know, day to day when you're using social media to kind of make it sticky. We use a lot of, I guess what's really worked for us in terms of making people want to learn and want to share.
I the platform is the AI personalization piece. So we've had that bait into platform from day one. And as you'll know from any marketing, you when you tend to personalize it, it tends to perform much better, doesn't it? And bringing that into first, you know, so.
For example, you know, you and I will learn in very different ways. You know, you might, might like to read a blog post or listen to a podcast and I might like to watch a YouTube video. Maybe we're going in the same, we've got the same interests and we're going in the same, same direction in our careers, but we like to learn in different ways. And what, what first does from our perspective is it has that AI personalization built baked in. you know, just like when you use delivery or Uber eats and you like particular types of food.
or you're watching Netflix, which is the one that everyone kind of knows, ⁓ or I'd like to think, you know, that, you know, your algorithm, you know, what you're seeing, your dashboard is personalized to you in your tastes, you know, the covers that you see in the movies that are recommended, the series that are recommended, and first works in that same way. So the great thing about that is and where we've seen the best engagement, although not necessarily gamification in a sense, but it is pulling you in without you realizing it.
is that every time you're logging into that platform, it's showing you something that you're going to be interested in. So it's showing you more podcasts. It's showing you more stuff about, you know, podcast marketing, whatever it might be. And that's what's making it sticking. That's what making you come back because over time it's learning more about you and your experiences becoming more personalized to you. And obviously I think marketing can take a lot and learn a lot from that as well and try to personalize stuff as much as possible and not just being kind of spray and pray.
Ugi Djuric (12:08)
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. ⁓ Let's, let's go to, marketing and growth for a sec. So I have like a very, very firm standpoint where AI made everyone basically a commodity, right? I mean, makes everyone a commodity, right? Like whether, whether from like content feature side, like you can build products fast, everyone can build features. Everyone can write decent content.
right now and everything is like 10 times faster, right? You can do more things with less resources. So if companies more and more like look similar to each other, right? From your experience, like how do you win in the market in like the second part of 2025 or 2026? How do you win? How do you stand out? What can companies do to win and stand out?
Barry Ryan (13:08)
Yeah, that's a great question really. And it's something I'm sure a lot of people are kind of struggling with because...
AI one sense is great, like you said, you can create things faster, you can churn things out quicker. It's a more level playing field, especially if you're a startup, now you can get to that place 10 times or more faster than you would have been able to get to sooner. The flip side of that, the challenges is again, as you said, that it's very easy to replicate, especially with SEO, which is one of my favorite channels, I love it.
⁓ you know, as I have always, which is my first love in digital marketing, probably it always has been always will be, but now it's harder than ever in terms of that. Anyone can just replicate a blog post. ⁓ you know, anyone can just look at what you're doing and copy that, you know, quickly as well. You know, it's not going to, it's going to take weeks. Now it's not going to take years, ⁓ to get to that point. So it is a, it is a real challenge for people. So I guess how can you stand out in terms of that?
people replicating it, one is in your tone of voice and your style. You know, the way that you're delivering that content, the way that you're speaking to your audience, et cetera. That's harder to replicate. So staying low to that and staying so on to your brand personality and style and tone of voice is gonna be key. However, what you might say to that is, well, with AI you could probably still replicate that anyway. ⁓ But I think people can see through that. You know, I think people can see who the originators are and who they aren't.
So I do think there's some merit in terms of sticking to your guns in that. And people are always going to imitate, aren't they? But I think people are still smart enough to see through that in lot of respects. But I think the thing for me and the direction that we're trying to go is that first party data and creating content that no one else can replicate. So if you are lucky enough to have a platform that has data, that has customer information.
⁓ and then you can use that to create a report, you know, a guide, a template. Nobody can replicate that. You know, gong, you know, as an example of people looking for references and says what they do with their gong labs and they pull out a lot of, a lot of data from their own platform. And then they spin that into sales data to help sales and marketing people. ⁓ I know Cognizant were doing a lot of that with their platform as well, the concept they're producing and we're trying to do that with, with, the stuff that we're doing with first.
because that is the stuff that no one else can replicate because you just haven't got that data. And I think that's where it's going to go is people being pushed down this first party data, your own data. It doesn't have to be your own platform. Obviously, you might want to link up with a research body and create a kind of a big anchor piece, a big anchor report. know, we've gone, it's pushed us more to go in that direction, which I think is the right thing to do. But then it's about, OK, we've done this report. We spent a lot of money, a lot of time creating it. It's then maximizing that.
You it's not just each kind of creating the report and then we're done and we're to see some leads come in. You know, you've got to push that out through ads. You've got to repurpose that across your socials, know, split into carousels, create smaller pieces of buy size content from it. Maybe another report comes off the back of that, et cetera. You bring in the influences. So there's lots of ways you can carve that piece of content. And that's, as I said, in the last sort of 12 months, we've really kind of gone down that road. the benefit has not been, you know, this is how you obviously sell it to your C-suite and your bosses and wellies.
It's maximizing how you maximize that is really going to set you apart as well.
Ugi Djuric (16:42)
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Let's talk about Thirst for a moment. And you're in marketing strategies and that kind of stuff. So you said that SEO is your favorite channel. as well. Mine as well. mean, SEO and content, I kind of buckle them up together.
Barry Ryan (17:03)
I put them together, I'm the same as you, I combine them.
Ugi Djuric (17:05)
Yeah.
So tell me, I know in the episode that you did with on the GTM tailspot, you said that basically your SEO strategy is ⁓ targeting like a low volume keywords, weekly content, you know, and you also mentioned that those SEO fundamentals like on-page SEO optimization, know, internal URLs, that kind of stuff still remain unchanged.
Can you tell me a bit more on what's your overall content and as you approach right now on Thirst, are you leveraging these kind of first, first part data that you talked about and overall, how does your overall strategy like, how are you winning with content?
Barry Ryan (17:56)
Yeah, I mean...
Yeah, SEO is my first love and the reason it is, you know, my kind of career has been mainly having to go into startups as the first marketer and you know, we're the best fully in the world unless you're very lucky, you're not going to start with a huge budget and you kind of got to prove the value and you got to start small and build from there, haven't you? So guess that's why, you know, SEO has always been a big, big sort of play for me and a big channel for us because it's something where you can start small, you can see incremental changes, but it can pound.
over time. ⁓
So we started our SEO strategy started before we even launched our website. And this is harder to do with any more established businesses admittedly, because you might have a website and you might already have some form of SEO slash content going on. So it's a little bit trickier, but you know, we started mapping out our content pillars and what we felt was important to our audience before we even built the website. that's a, that's a, you know, a luxury position to be in, but that's where we were in terms of before we even built that site, we launched anything into the world.
already mapping out who our customers were, what they cared about, and then trying to reverse engineer that and build the blogs and the keywords around that. that was our starting point.
Then when we were building the website, obviously we didn't have all the pages that we wanted, but we knew we had a really clean navigation structure. We knew we wanted to have fast load speeds, easy to index, easy for the search engines to understand what we're about. We didn't overcomplicate it. We were just making sure that the foundations were rock solid for future growth.
And that was our starting point. So before we even got into the keyword research and the tools, which I'm sure we'll come onto, that was our starting point ⁓ before we dived in. So we kind of had an idea of where we wanted to go in the next two or three years.
because sometimes you can get into a mess in terms of, you you start in the wrong direction or the website isn't good enough. And I've seen it, you know, many times in organizing, you you've ended up building two or three websites or you end up switching directions or whatever it might be. And sometimes there's good reasons for that.
But, know, I've seen, seen, you know, people get into it and get themselves into a bit of a mess early on. And it's very hard to kind of unpick that. So I guess my message is have a clear understanding of kind of where you want to go. And it will change. It will evolve. And, know, we've got a little bit kind of away from where we started because you have to do some of key phrase that you're chasing and who you're up against. And obviously your industry evolves as well, doesn't it? But I think having that understanding of mapping out your concept pillars.
where you want to go, what your audience cares about from day one gives you massive advantage and makes things easier as you go further down the road.
Ugi Djuric (20:41)
Yep, yep. Makes sense. Makes sense. Tell me, when it comes to AI, right? How are you leveraging AI right now for your own marketing or sales or growth? Are there some any ⁓ more advanced flows, automations or processes that you're doing?
Barry Ryan (21:04)
So do you know, I guess where I use it for mainly for SEO is ⁓ for helping me to do the briefs for our content writers. So, you know, I've always pride myself on trying to get that, you know, to help our content writers out in terms of. ⁓
you know, giving them a decent brief because I think the better the brief, the better the outcome is going to be. But a lot of that was in the past, kind of what was in my head or doing a lot of manual research. But I've been really able to, to one, speed that up to get a better understanding of how we can rank on the first page with what we're up against as well.
so you know, in terms of like the structure, you know, what the structure should be, you know, what we need to include, what we need to include in terms of helping it to rank for AI, which is, which is obviously something that's that you need to start to factor in now is how do you get those top of search for AI? You know, that's going to become more and more important as time goes on is how do get that kind of AI search snippet at the top?
So I've been using it to really drill down into kind of shaping our blog. So our content writers understand like the structure, what to include, the form, everything to kind of give us the best chance of ranking on the first page. And of course it's never guaranteed. But it gives us a much better chance and we've been seeing much better results by using AI and chat GPT is my favorite tool. It's probably a lot of people listening to this. You know, if you give it a concise understanding of kind of, know, what do I want? What do I need
to include in my article to rank on page one, what should the structure look like, et cetera. It'll give you some really good, really good outputs from that as well.
Ugi Djuric (22:42)
Yeah. So let's talk combined. Let's combine now like the AI and the SEO. Like these are like, G E O A E O, however they are called these days. Like, ⁓ that, that's still, I would say a pretty, ⁓
⁓ a pretty, you know, a territory where we don't have a lot of details yet. Right. And we still do not understand how everything, everything works. So tell me like, what are your thoughts on that? How do you make sure that you get mentioned in the AI and LLM search?
Barry Ryan (23:23)
Well, I think the first thing to think of is from a two things is it's...
You can look at it two ways, can't you? You can look at it as a big challenge. Everyone will be getting nervous about it. But you can also look at it with an abundance mindset and saying, look, actually, especially if we're an earlier stage organization, we've got a great chance. Maybe in the past we couldn't get in front of the hub spots of this world because they're so established and there's such an authoritative website, et cetera. But now as a startup, OK, yeah, actually, if you're quick to market or you're quick to a key phrase that's maybe new in the industry, you've got just as good a chance of ranking on the first page as anyone now.
I think you have to look at it from a positive perspective. What I would say as well is, my big one is don't use AI to write the content for you, because I think that is definitely a recipe for disaster in terms of duplicate content. I mean, you can even spot AI content a mile off, can't you?
You know, if something's written by AI, think you can see it sniff that and smell that straight away. And, you know, and so the search engine, if they're not already picking that out and penalizing websites for that. And even if you're not now and you're enjoying, you know, you enjoy a great rankings off the back of it, there's definitely going to become, there's definitely come a time when there's going to be an algorithm update that's going to trash you back to the penguin panda days of old when, you know, websites just disappeared overnight. I could see something like that coming soon.
Ugi Djuric (24:43)
Sorry for jumping in. There was actually last week an interesting article from Ahrefs where they like analyzed, ⁓ I think almost like a million websites or something like that. And there is no correlation in search rankings dropping. There is no correlation between that and whether the article is actually written.
By the AI or like the human, human, human article. So basically I would say that's very interesting take from the SEO standpoint. Like it's not intentionally punishing the ⁓ AI written style of content, but it's more like punishing the content itself. Like whether that content is like valuable or not.
Barry Ryan (25:32)
Yeah. And I don't think that's ever gonna, you know, the principles of sort of great content art are ever gonna change, either like making it unique, you know, making it relevant to your, like that isn't gonna go away. It's just gonna be, it's just gonna be harder to distinguish what, you know, which content has been written by a human, which one's been written by an AI. So that is the challenge. So in terms of how we use it for that.
We stay away from using it to write the content. That's just a big no-no for us because I just think that is just opening ourselves up to problems further down the road. But it's again, it is asking it, it is using it for guidance in terms of, you know, how can we use it to, you know, how can we structure our article? How can we create this article? What do we need to include to feature in these AI snippets? Because it's still a little bit of a black box in terms of people think they know but no one really knows. So actually if you ask...
ask chat GPT, whatever it might be, Gemini, whichever one you're using, how do we get those AI snippets? It'll give you the advice, it'll give you the pointers, and then you can use that to actually, you sort of shape your article and your structure to give you the best chance as well. And that's still a work in progress for us, but that's kind of the best, the most obvious sort of tip I can give people really.
Ugi Djuric (26:47)
Yep, yep, yep, definitely. Tell me, ⁓ how do you see the future of marketing in a few years from now, considering that it's a very fast-paced industry at the moment? Where do you think we're heading?
Barry Ryan (27:08)
That's a great question, really. I think I can see, I can see marketing has been expected to be able to do even more with less, in all honesty, which is, is, which is, yeah, even more with less. But in a way you're doing more with less with more, if that makes sense, because now, you know, I speak about it from my own perspective. You know, I'm in a small organization as a marketing. Yes, we use...
Ugi Djuric (27:22)
Yeah, that's all mate.
Barry Ryan (27:37)
contractors and we outsource some of our bits and pieces but know the majority of the day today is still being done by myself so I am still wearing all the hats but my job is a lot easier
than ⁓
It's saving me hours and hours now, you know, I wouldn't even be able to put a number on how much you saved me, but it's been incredible in terms of the difference it's made to me personally and what we've been able to do in scale at first, which just wouldn't have been achievable. It just wouldn't without it.
But as that becomes better, more efficient, smarter, you know, I think, you know, you could almost have your team, you know, doing your paid search, it's doing your socials for you, doing your, it's doing your, auto, marketing automation for you. And you're kind of the.
the one in the middle kind of making it all happen really, making it all work. So I don't know what that means in terms of your marketing role, what you become. Do you just become a kind of an operator and there's less kind of creative to it. I'm not too sure it's a challenge really because for me personally, I always liked the creative side. I know it's for that's the bit that AI can never replace.
But with the latest versions, I'm not even sure that's the case anymore. You know, it's getting that good in terms of creative, you know, that that box might be ticked as well. So it is it is different, but I can almost see marketing becoming more about kind of the operations and and having the bigger overarching kind of plan, you know, whether that's the campaign or the strategy, whatever it might be. But then being able to make sure all these these tools work.
Ugi Djuric (29:14)
Yeah.
Barry Ryan (29:33)
it to to facilitate that and to make that happen but at a lower cost and faster than than what was ever possible before I guess and I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing
Ugi Djuric (29:42)
Yep, yep, yep, definitely. ⁓
Yeah, I mean, from my standpoint of you, I would say definitely the things that we have a huge problem right now in the industry are ⁓ the standing out part that you already talked about, but also creativity. All of the brands look exactly the same. Also from like
design perspective, messaging perspective, like creativity. I think it's a very, ⁓ very important topic to raise awareness for, ⁓ but also more human-like ⁓ activities, personalized activities, going all that kind of a human first approach into building actual relationships.
These are, I would say that these are the things that are timeless, right? Are timeless and they are never going to change because people buy from the people they trust, right? But we tend to always forget that part. And I would say that now it's like becoming more critical than ever to focus on relationships and on the standing out part because you know,
Everyone kind of forgets that they get too obsessed with all new shiny things and all new shiny AI tools that they forget about like the relationships. So I would say that marketing, I see kind of a marketing more evolving, having a bunch of tools to handle operational tasks, right? While the actual human beings can focus more on that creative aspect and on the relationships, relationships aspects of things.
Barry Ryan (31:36)
think another big challenge is going to be that authenticity piece because like you said, like having your brand personality, standing out, being unique is kind of everything really, isn't it? Ultimately, you know, that's what people are going to do. They're going to buy the people, aren't they? The brand that they connect with the most. But even now with some of the stuff that's possible with AI in terms of creating video content that looks like humans and...
you know, the challenge is going to be how to even be even more authentic. Really, that's kind of the next wave, isn't it? And, you know, that's a big challenge. And it's be interesting how in the future, in the next few years, marketing overcomes that because I always I almost think there's going to be this kind of push against it as well, because you're getting these AI videos now where it's like, you know, the people talking to each other in the street and it's like, you know, someone's coming out of a marketing conference that you can create that kind of stuff now with AI.
So, so people don't know what's a, what's real and what's not anymore. So, so how you make sure you, you come across as real and authentic is going to become even more important than ever. So it's going to be interesting to see how, sort of B2B marketing chat sort of tackles that.
Ugi Djuric (32:46)
Yeah. mean, the thing about, you know, authenticity is that it's like, ⁓ really tied to originality, right? And like to be original with something you need to really think out of the box and be the first or among the first to do something. Right. So I would say it's all about, ⁓ and as soon as more people start embracing that originality that you create, then it's not like original anymore. Right.
You get a bunch of me tools, will quickly get a bunch of me tools, you know, doing the same things as you. ⁓ So, ⁓ then I would say it's all about coming up with new original things to do that are on brand, course, with you. But also, as you, as you said, like earlier, at the end of the day, can have, let's, let's have podcasts, for example, right? We, there are, I don't know, like.
hundreds of thousands of marketing podcasts out there, but only like 20, 30 of them got like 90, 95 % of all the listening downloads, right? So because they have the best content, right? So still I would say it's also coming back to what you talked earlier about that kind of a first part data that you have about your users, stories from your users, know, experience.
That's something that can't be easily replicated by others.
Barry Ryan (34:16)
I think what you'll find with those podcasts as well, without analyzing them, just thinking, I bet if you had to sort of sit there and look through them, like they'll all have something in common, like they'll know who they're for, they'll know who that audience is that they're speaking to, they'll have something interesting to say each week, and they're consistent as well, so they're always showing up.
It's like you said, some of these we try and overcomplicate things sometimes, but actually if you look at the three things there, it's like knowing who your audience is, it's having something interesting and different to say, and it's being consistent with it. You know, ultimately that's it, isn't it? That's the secret really that, you know, people overlook.
Ugi Djuric (34:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Barry, tell me, ⁓ besides cashvertising, what's one of your favorite marketing?
Barry Ryan (35:09)
Besides cash advertising. ⁓
have a think about that? ⁓ What should the ones that have the biggest influence on me that I go to besides cash for sizing? ⁓
can't remember the name. The one by Robert Cialdini and I can't remember the name of it now. Is it Persuasion? What is it?
Yeah, Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. That one, I'm not sure how old that book is now, but that's a psychology of persuasion.
No, he wasn't. He was his first, but let me just get the title right so people know which one to get. Is it? can't remember. He's done persuade.
Ugi Djuric (36:18)
I actually think persuasion is the one that I'm reading right now. Yeah, I always read like two or
three of them at the same time, but yeah, how to persuade.
Barry Ryan (36:28)
So
his first one, Influence, The Psycholy of Persuasion, that one, I must have read that about five years ago now, ⁓ probably around the same time I was reading ⁓ Cash for Ties in. And that, it talks about the seven psychological...
things that influence human beings. And this is the thing you made a great point a few moments ago about how, you know, the platforms change or the tools change or the technology change, whatever it might be. But people don't change, you know, in terms of what makes us tick, what makes us want to buy something, what makes us fall in love with something, what makes us not like something. Those things won't change, you know, cyclic, that's hardwired into the fabric of being humans.
And there's some great stuff in there. And it's almost something that we could probably all do with reading. And I could do a read with it because you do forget over time that actually when you boil it all down, humans will always be humans. And what they care about and what's going to make them want to purchase something or care about something, connect with something is never going to change over time.
Ugi Djuric (37:34)
Yep, yep, yep. Definitely. That's a one, Barry. That's a great one. Tell me Barry, the last question that I have for you before we wrap up has absolutely nothing to do with marketing, by the way. And it's something that I ask literally everyone on the pod in, know, real life. And I meet someone and someone, how do you win at the game called the life?
Barry Ryan (37:49)
Okay, here we go.
Ugi Djuric (38:04)
And what is that winning for you?
Barry Ryan (38:08)
do you win in the game of life? That's a profound question, that's a deep one. You've asked me that. How do you win in the game of life? For me it's...
Ugi Djuric (38:12)
Yeah, thank you.
Barry Ryan (38:24)
it's family really and just being around kind of knowing I guess it comes back to knowing what you want.
Knowing what you know, you start with knowing what you care about and then work backwards from that. So, for example, for me, was was, you know, wanting to spend more time with, you know, you obviously get caught up in sort of chasing your career, don't you? Chasing the next level, chasing more money, whatever it might be, more responsibility. You know, we're up as humans, you know, we kind of get lost in that a little bit, you know, better car, bigger house, whatever it might be.
And then it kind of started from kind of knowing what's important to you. So for me, was family, I had a young family, wanted to spend more time with them. So then I was like, okay, if that's the most important thing to me, how do I get to that and work backwards from that?
you know, so it wasn't necessarily chasing, ⁓ you know, bigger, but, know, bigger and better jobs with more responsibility and more hours, et cetera. It was actually how to find a really nice work balance and find a career in an industry that I love. that, that's how I ended up at first is that, you know, he's in it learning development. The people in the industry are fantastic.
Um, you know, we're a software development company. We have a really, um, great work life balance. You know, we finish at 1 p.m. On a Friday. Um, so I'm quite blessed in terms of being able to pick the children up from school. So I guess I got lucky in terms of, um, you know, knowing what I wanted.
or what was important to me, and then working backwards from that in terms of how I got there and finding the perfect role for me in terms of achieving that really. So that'd be my biggest tip. It's always like you can get lost and kind of chased in the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, but just start with actually what's the most important thing to you. Work backwards from that, put it out to the universe, and then everything will hopefully start to take care of itself once you make that happen.
Ugi Djuric (40:11)
Yep, definitely. Barry, that's the wrap. Thank you very much for being here.
Barry Ryan (40:16)
No thank you so much, been lovely to speak to you and thanks for having me as a guest, it's been a pleasure.
Ugi Djuric (40:21)
Thank you, thank you.