The MEME LORD Talks about Making Millions from Memes and Shares his Best Memes

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, and you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the. Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Our guest today is Druby Wilson. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Hey Eric, Thank you so much for having me today. Grateful to be here.

Speaker 3: 1:08

Appreciate you making the time, and he has a company that has one of the best names that I've heard in a long time. The name of his company is Call the Damn Leads. That's fantastic, so you can talk with that.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Well, funny story. I used to own a marketing company at one point in my entrepreneurial journey and I was able to get a lot of clients, and I was able to get my clients a lot of leads. Unfortunately, if you've been in marketing any time, you know that that doesn't always solve their problem, and what I found is a lot of them didn't call those leads. So, as one of the frustrations I dealt with was just reminding them, hey, you'd be successful if you would call the damn leads, and so that's where it came from. Funny enough, I should put that on a shirt. I did. Here we are a few years later.

Speaker 3: 1:55

I can't tell you, as a marketing executive working in B2B tech companies, how many thousands of leads me and my teams have generated on the marketing side that the salespeople just never called. Some mornings I would go into the office and I'd get in the elevator and one of the sales guys would be there and he'd look at me and I'd look at him and I'd be like hey man, how's it going? And say the leads are shitty. Thank you for that constructive feedback.

Speaker 2: 2:27

Do you mind if I share a story, because I have one. That's aptly fitting, because this is really where this all started. Right, I had one client in particular who I think we were charging. It couldn't have been more than 1500 bucks a month, so it was like not a lot of money. Considering For him. It might have been. I'd take that back. It may have been a lot of money for him, but anyways, like 1500 a month. And he tells me we listed a condo for him. It got 100 leads in 30 days and he's like these leads are shit, no one wants this place. Like I'm out all this money. I picked up the phone myself, started calling the list. I had two signed contracts. Several people wanted to go and look at the place. Like I literally called the guy back and was like hey man, here's contracts for people that want to buy it, here's all these appointments that people scheduled. You need to call the damn leads. By the way, I issued you a full refund. Please don't ever call me again. Have a nice life. And then I sold my marketing company not too long after that and went into some other avenues which we could chat about. But like that's how it all started Because I literally was like bro, I don't know anything about real estate. I called your leads and have two signed contracts. Yes, I'll say I'm a great salesman. However, what are you doing over there, dude?

Speaker 3: 3:35

Well, I love my friends in sales and I work really hard to stay on the same page. But one of the best things that I did for one of the companies where I was a chief marketing officer is we had so much disconnect over are the leads good, are the leads not good? I'm not going to call them, but I actually had the people running the online advertising sit in the cubicles next to the people calling the leads so that they could actually be right there and hear some of the phone calls and there is ridiculous stuff. But there was also a lot of really good stuff and I think that sort of let them go on the journey together and that's one of the more interesting things I've done to drive alignment over the years. But before we get into your story, I do believe that you have a book by the same name. Is that crazy?

Speaker 2: 4:20

That is correct, sir. So I launched this back in January I think the third was the official launch date but I got a hair up my butt right around two weeks before Christmas, so I sat down and started cranking this thing out. Call the damn leads from clicks to contracts, revolutionizing sales and follow-up in the digital era. There's a lot of new techniques. There's a lot of old techniques. I like to blend them all up and use my you know New school style with some of the old school pizzazz and resume test to really get people dialed in and help them make more money and, you know, use that money to do the things they want to do with their life.

Speaker 3: 4:54

Awesome, so people can get this book off of your website, is that right?

Speaker 2: 4:58

Yeah, absolutely so. If you'd like to download a free copy no plus shipping offers, none of that fancy marketing stuff you see out there literally download it at. Call the damn leads, comm forward, slash free book offer. I just need your email address so I can send it to you.

Speaker 3: 5:14

Awesome. Thanks for for sharing that with the listeners. So let's get in your story. I understand that you also have a awesome nickname as the meme Lord. Is that right?

Speaker 2: 5:25

You know, eric, I am just dumb enough that I tattooed a meme Lord across my knuckles. So for those of you who don't see us on video, yes, I have meme Lord tattooed across my fingers on my hands because I have been using memes in my sales and marketing Process for the last five years to generate a little over 13 million dollars in sales at an average ticket price of $5,000. So it's not like it's just a one-and-done thing or I've got like you know what. I've sold a whole lot of products To a whole lot of people and I've really leveraged memes to be my differentiator from everybody else in the marketplace.

Speaker 3: 6:05

Wow, that is really epic. There's so many questions, but let me start with. What is your favorite meme? Is there a favorite meme that has made you the most money or that has been most profitable for you?

Speaker 2: 6:16

as a matter of fact there is. I will have to send it to you after the show in an email so you can share it if people want to check it out, or we can cut it in or something fancy. But there's one meme in particular that I use in my follow-up process. So typically, let's say, I have a conversation, we build rapport, things are going well. I decide, you know, let's send an invoice, let's work together. You decide, let's do it, I send you the invoice and then what happens? People go ghosts, they get busy life, whatever. So there's one meme that I like to send in that scenario that I can track back specifically to over ten million dollars in sales and it's a short gift or like a. The still shot is Matthew Morrison from the show Glee and he's poking his head out from behind a set of lockers and he's got like this big afro and he looks kind of nerdy and it just says you good question mark across the bottom and Eric on my son's life. And Plus million dollars in sales from using that as my first follow-up after I've sent someone an invoice and just waiting for the payment. Because, let's be honest, they hey. Did you get the invoice? Have you signed up yet? Have you checked out the thing? Did you want to buy my shit? Still like? Those are all very boring canned responses. That meme in particular it it crushes it.

Speaker 3: 7:35

That's awesome. That's great, yeah, so we'll share that in the link so that you can all see that $10 million meme. That's a great one. What else about memes has made them really remarkable in the marketing that you've been doing to drive that much in sales?

Speaker 2: 7:52

I love that and that's a great question, because a lot of people are like, well, memes, that doesn't make any sense. How does that really work? So I really like to nerd out when it comes to any topic that I get involved in. When I decided I need to understand marketing because, as a sales professional, the only way to make more sales was to have more people to talk to, I got nerdy with it and along the way, I've always just kind of been a unique out there kind of guy. And if you're listening, you probably in your phone right now have a thread with one person or a group of people in which you only communicate by sharing memes with each other, some of which you could not share publicly for fear of being shamed or fired from your job. So, like we know that everybody loves memes, here's what's interesting about them from like a deeper psychological standpoint and why they fit so well with marketing. The term meme actually dates all the way back to the 80s and is in reference to Richard Dawkins talking about Darwinism, and it's about biology, and a meme is really a transfer of information from one culture to another. So think about it like if you're on an island and one group of monkeys is using a rock to open up the coconuts and a monkey from across the island sees that thing happening and then goes back and teaches it to the other monkeys. That is memetic transfer of information. Fast forward to the 2024. We think of it as pictures from some scene in a movie or an event that someone else has put images or text over to change the context. So it's just a transfer of information between cultures. But how we're using it in marketing is a if we know in marketing our ideal client was busy watching the Super Bowl, which at the time of recording was just last night. We know there's a lot of things that happened that if we could capture that moment and put it in front of them they're going to have a snapback remembrance to. So there's an emotional connection and if we can immediately get their attention, that's what marketing is getting people's attention. And then what we do with it from there is up to us.

Speaker 3: 10:07

So memes are superior because they get people's attention much better than many other things.

Speaker 2: 10:14

I wouldn't say they're superior. They're just another medium for use because everyone's different. Some people might not see the meme as like the thing they may see. The text and what you say with the words is way more important than the image, but it's just another medium of getting someone's attention makes sense.

Speaker 3: 10:33

So what is the hardest thing about using memes to make this much money? It sounds easy, but it's probably not.

Speaker 2: 10:42

Yes, there's a two-part answer. One is don't overuse them. I know it sounds silly to see that from a guy who's literally making a living making memes and selling them as a service and a product, but also there's a limp. Yeah, you can share memes with your friends and you can communicate that way and that's fine. But from a professional standpoint, there's still a limit at which you can use them without it being too much. Just like if you were to call someone 100 times in a day, that would be too much. If you send someone 100 memes in a row, that's too much, it's stalker-ish. So there is a limit to how often you can use them, and that's really balanced by the relationship that you're building with your clients, and that's marketing 101. Are you building that no-liking trust factor or are you just feeding them over the head to get them to buy? And then also, it's really, really important and as a marketing expert and your audience should see this too you have to know your client, because if your client is a 20 to 30-year-old female who's really into cats, you can't send her dog memes and expect her to respond. So it's really important to just kind of going back to the basics of marketing is who are you speaking to and what is the intention of that communication?

Speaker 3: 11:59

Yeah, that makes sense. So if you found there are certain channels that make more sense than others obviously Instagram and TikTok might have more reels and more memes, say, than LinkedIn have you found certain channels work better with memes than others?

Speaker 2: 12:17

Honestly, they all work. It's just the nuance of what kind of content does best on that specific channel. So you probably recognize on different channels Facebook, linkedin, instagram there's certain content that's more popular reels. Right now kinds to take over on most of the platforms and yet on a platform like LinkedIn, it's really their blog posts and their long form content that gets the most engagement from those who are active on the platform. So it's more about understanding where the user is on that platform to make sure that the meme is being placed in the right location.

Speaker 3: 12:55

That makes a lot of sense. Well, this is very interesting. I never knew that memes could be that profitable, and I think the example you gave was awesome $10 million from one meme. So I really appreciate you sharing this with us today and inspiring the people listening to be remarkable. Are you good?

Speaker 2: 13:17

I am sir, Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 13:23

You've been listening to the Remarkable Marketing podcast. Our passion is to bring you the marketing rock stars who share stories about the best marketing they've done, how it delivered and how they handled all the challenges that go along with it. And we do it all in 10 minutes. We only ask two things. First, visit the RemarkableMarketingio website for more great insights. Second, this podcast has been brought to you by the Next Generation Social Networking app, workverse. You can download and use the Workverse app for free to build your professional brand, become a paid expert advisor and discover the best business events to attend. Download the Workverse app today. See you next time on the Remarkable Marketing podcast.