Oct 20, 2021

Welcome back to 3-Minute Marketing, where we get the world's foremost marketing leaders & innovators to tell us their juiciest secrets to marketing success.

Today, I'm chatting with Brendan Kane, Founder & Managing Partner at Hook Point. Brendan's a fascinating guy & his "Hook Point" methodology has been the secret weapon behind names & brands like MTV, Taylor Swift, Yahoo & Mindvalley.

Brendan's specialty is helping brands harness the power of organic social to drive virality, build brands & generate revenue at a remarkable scale. Brendan tells me that 99% of marketers do this wrong... but the 1% that understand how the algorithms work are winning BIG with organic content.

My question for Brendan is:

"How can marketers harness the algorithms to get more reach & impact?"

Show notes:

• The purpose of the algorithms is NOT to get you to pay for reach... their one & only goal is to keep people on the platform (so they can serve you more ads.)
• There are 2 principles to master to benefit from the algorithms.
• Principle #1: Stop the scroll. The first signal to the algorithm is, "will this content the retain attention of users?"
• Principle #2: Hold the user's attention as long as possible, AKA dwell time. (Hint: Key to this is a powerful story that can retain the user's focus.)
• Case Study: A 7 second difference in user retention (28 vs. 21 seconds) resulted in an 18X increase in views on Tik Tok.
• Create content for what the platform you're posting on weights most heavily. Focus on content quality over length.
• The traditional "content calendar" model of designing content is flawed because it minimizes the impact of data on creative, is not opportunistic or agile, is completely reactive and is reliant on luck or external factors.
• Instead, start with research to identify the topics & formats that will drive results. Then base your creative hypothesis & iterate based on that research.
• Build one piece of content at a time, then learn & iterate vs. trying to plan all your content in advance.
• Want to get good at a platform? Become an avid user & student of that platform.
• If you want to target a niche with your organic content, still make the content accessible for a general audience so you don't get buried by the algorithms (example: Ryan Serhant)