Chad Kimball @chadtkimball

Here’s a tighter version with the opinion question near the top: Which McDonald’s looks better to you? The old one had a soul. Red roof. Weird shape. Instantly recognizable. The new one looks cleaner, more modern, and more professional… but also a lot more forgettable. That’s the danger in “updating” your brand. A lot of companies modernize everything until they look exactly like everyone else. Cleaner website. Safer copy. Neutral colors. Corporate language. No personality. But sometimes the weird parts are the asset. Sometimes the color, character, nostalgia, and distinctiveness are why people remember you. Professional is good. Forgettable is expensive.

@Richard_YTS @VidCon have fun yall. wish I could have made it!

A full-time CMO is expensive. Random marketing employees can create chaos. The sweet spot for a lot of companies is CMO-level direction with a team that can actually execute. Strategy without execution is theory. Execution without strategy is noise. You need both. DM me if you want to hear more!

Everyone has experienced creepy retargeting. But here’s why it’s still one of the most powerful tools in marketing. Yes, it can feel a little weird when an ad follows you around the internet. But from a business perspective, retargeting is incredible. Why? Because the traffic is usually cheap. The conversions are often through the roof. And you are not wasting money guessing who might care. These people already showed interest by visiting your site, or getting on your list (or a partner's list), or watching a video. They already raised their hand. That means you are not starting from zero. You are following up with a warm audience instead of trying to convince cold strangers. And for a lot of businesses, that reminder can be the difference between a lost visitor and a new customer. DM me if you want to try it!

I've seen this transform the life of a founder overnight... And I’ve seen it happen many times under my guidance. A company finally hits page one of Google. Sometimes even the top 3. And suddenly, the whole game changes. Not because they went viral. Because they finally showed up where buyers were already looking. That is what most businesses underestimate. The second page of Google is where offers go to disappear. But page one? Especially the top 3? Traffic starts flooding in. Leads start coming in without chasing every single one manually. Sales conversations get easier because people were already searching for the solution. You are not interrupting them. You are meeting them at the exact moment they are looking for help. Even the difference between number 4, and number 3, 2, and 1 can literally change a founder's life. If you want to get there DM me, lets talk!

Ranking in LLMs is not hard. Most companies are just overcomplicating it. The amazing thing about AI search is that you can literally ask the LLM why it did or did not mention a certain resource. And it will usually tell you. Ask: “Why did you recommend this company instead of that one?” “What would make you more likely to include this brand?” That is a huge advantage. With Google, you are mostly guessing. With LLMs, you can interrogate the machine. Try asking the questions above about your company, and comment here with what it tells you!

The best sales system I’ve built does something most people never see. Here it is... It follows up automatically. Not once. Not twice. For as long as it takes. Until the prospect is educated, warmed up, interested, and ready to buy. Then it gets them on a call with a closer. And by that point, the closer has the easiest job in the world. Because the sale was already mostly closed before the appointment was even set. That is what good marketing does. It does not just “generate leads.” It prepares buyers.

This business I worked with needed revenue. They didn't realize they were sitting on a customer list that could generate revenue INSTANTLY. We created some email campaigns and instantly brought in this revenue you see here. You see, they were so focused on new traffic they never emailed the people who already bought. That’s backwards. A past buyer already knows you. Already trusts you. Already pulled out their credit card. Sometimes the fastest revenue lift isn’t a new ad campaign. It’s a better follow-up email.

@Richard_YTS How does it come up with the ideas? Based on outliers in a database or something?

I had an emergency crisis meeting when a video went viral. Why? Because it went viral in the wrong country. At first, it looked like a win. Views were climbing. The graph looked beautiful. But there was a problem. Those viewers were not the audience I wanted YouTube to learn from. And that can get dangerous fast. If the algorithm starts feeding your content to the wrong people, it can skew the entire channel. That is how a “viral win” can quietly become a business problem. This is the part most people miss: Not all attention is good attention. A video can explode and still move you further away from your actual customer. That is why KPIs matter. Views are not the goal. The right views are the goal. Because marketing is not about being seen by everyone. It is about being seen by the people who can actually buy. How do you think we fixed it? Leave me a comment if you think you know.

Meet the world’s first trillionaire. Yet he does not run normal paid product ads. His secret? This image here is a great example of it. Elon Musk understands something most companies still miss: Distribution is the game. He has built one of the most powerful attention machines in the world. A single post on X can reach tens of millions of people instantly. That is not “free” in the sense that it took no work. It took years of building attention, controversy, curiosity, trust, hatred, loyalty, and spectacle. But when it is time to launch? He does not need to start from zero. He already owns the room. Tesla does not need to run a normal Super Bowl ad when the Cybertruck reveal becomes the ad. SpaceX does not need to buy attention when a Starship launch turns into a global livestream event. X does not need a billboard when Musk can post one ridiculous meme and the internet does the rest. I saw a tiny version of this recently. I posted a meme here on LinkedIn that got 65,000 impressions. Some people loved it. Some people hated it. Some people missed the point entirely. But almost everyone who reacted helped push it further. That is the strange thing about attention: Agreement is not always required. Emotion is. This is why I keep telling business owners and creators: Do not just build products. Build distribution. Build an email list. Build an audience. Build a reason for people to pay attention before you need them to buy. That is the real asset. Not just the product. The attention.

In marketing, hyper-personalization almost always wins. Andrew Carnegie practiced this at an insane level. When Carnegie wanted to sell steel rails to the Pennsylvania Railroad, headed by J. Edgar Thomson, he built a massive steel mill in Pittsburgh and named it the **Edgar Thomson Steel Works**. Do you think Thomson noticed? Of course he did. And needless to say, Thomson bought his steel from Carnegie. Carnegie used the same instinct when he was fighting George Pullman for control of the sleeping-car business. Instead of continuing to battle each other, Carnegie suggested they merge. Pullman was skeptical. So Carnegie asked: “What should the new company be called?” Then Carnegie answered: “The Pullman Palace Car Company, of course.” Pullman agreed. That is not just business strategy. That is understanding human nature. People respond when they feel seen. They respond when the message feels like it was made for them. Which brings us to this Dairy Queen sign. “Now hiring” is easy to ignore. “Abby you need to show up for work” is almost impossible to ignore. Because it is specific. It feels personal. It grabs attention immediately. And that is one of the most powerful forces in marketing. A personalized email beats a generic blast. A specific sales pitch beats a canned deck. A landing page for one exact audience beats a vague website for everyone. The more your prospect feels like: “Wait… this is about me.” The more likely they are to stop, read, click, reply, book, or buy. Marketing is not just about getting attention. It is about making the right person feel like you are talking directly to them.

Here’s a LinkedIn post for it: Whether you like Trump or not, this is a great marketing lesson. A claim is not a competitive advantage. “Made in the USA” sounds powerful. It sounds differentiated. It sounds like something people would care about. But if the product cannot stand up to scrutiny, the claim becomes a liability instead of an advantage. I have worked with numerous companies where I asked: “What makes you better than your competitors?” And they had an answer. At first. But after a few clarifying questions, the answer started falling apart. “We have better service.” How? “We care more.” Can you prove that? “Our quality is better.” By what standard? “We’re different.” In what way that actually matters to the buyer? That is the problem. A real competitive advantage has to survive inspection. It has to be specific. It has to be believable. It has to be provable. It has to matter to the customer. Because marketing can make people pay attention. But once they start looking closer, your offer still has to hold up. If your main claim collapses after three questions, you do not have a positioning strategy. You have a slogan. And slogans are not enough.

“Email marketing doesn’t work.” I still hear people say this. Meanwhile, in high-ticket B2B, subscription boxes, DTC, and events, it is common for email to pull in 60%+ of the revenue. Even nationwide across all industries in the U.S., email marketing is still around 20% of online revenue. That is not a dead channel. That is a channel a lot of companies are ignoring while their competitors quietly print money from it. I’ve personally brought in over $10 million through email marketing. And I still use it to this day. Why? Because it works. Plain and simple. Not because email is magic. Because a good email list is made of people who already know you, already raised their hand, already bought from you, or already showed interest. That is not cold traffic. That is an asset. Don’t be surprised when the boring old inbox keeps outperforming the shiny new thing!

This is what happens when a product meets an extremely hungry market. In 2020, toilet paper did not need clever branding. It did not need a 47-step funnel. It did not need an influencer campaign. The market already understood the problem. The pain was obvious. The urgency was real. The buyer was ready. That is the part a lot of businesses miss. Great marketing does not start with asking: “How do we convince people to want this?” It starts with asking: “Who already wants this badly?” Because targeted leads are dramatically more powerful than random attention. A thousand people who kind of know you exist is nice. But find 100 people with the exact problem your product solves? Or better yet, create a product built around solving this exact problem. That is where sales happen. Because you are no longer trying to manufacture demand. You are stepping directly in front of it.

This restaurant closed after 45 years… and the final thing they left on the door was the sauce recipe. That tells you everything. People loved the sauce. The owner knew they loved the sauce. It was the thing people remembered. The thing people talked about. The thing they couldn’t get anywhere else. That’s a real unique selling proposition. Not “great customer service.” Not “high quality.” Not “family owned.” Not “we care more.” Those can all be true. But they are not enough. A strong USP means there is something about you that is actually different, actually better, and actually meaningful to the customer. Something people would miss if you disappeared. Once you have that, marketing gets a lot simpler. You are not trying to trick people. You are not trying to sound clever. You are not trying to manufacture hype. You are just making it painfully clear why you are better than the other options. The best marketing starts with a real advantage. Then it makes that advantage impossible to miss.

This dating profile is accidentally a masterclass in bad marketing. He has clarity. But it’s the wrong kind. He leads with: Demands. Disqualifiers. Suspicion. Risk. Conditions. “What do you bring to the table?” And somehow expects people to be excited. A lot of businesses do the same thing. Their landing page says: Here’s what we require. Here’s our process. Here’s our company history. Here’s our giant menu of options. Here’s a contact form if you feel like doing all the work. But it never clearly answers the customer’s real question: “Why should I care?” A good offer does not start by making the buyer prove themselves. It starts by making the value obvious. Who is this for? What problem does it solve? Why is this better? What happens next? Why act now? That’s the difference between attention and conversion. Because your website can explain your business. But your landing page needs to sell one clear action. The project sources hit this same idea: businesses often have people visiting their website and leaving because there is no real funnel or lead capture path. The fix is a clear landing page that turns attention into action.

Don't send visitors to your website! A website explains your business. A landing page sells one specific action. Most companies confuse the two and wonder why visitors leave. They send paid traffic to a page with: Too many links. Too many options. Too much “about us.” Not enough reason to act now. A good landing page does one job: Get the visitor to take the next step. Book the call. Download the guide. Buy the product. Join the list. Your website can educate. But your landing page needs to convert.

Approx 10% of the people who visit your website will buy. What about the other 90%? Those are the people your funnel needs to grab a hold of! Funnels work because people rarely buy the first time they hear about you. They need: Context. Education. Trust. Proof. Follow-up. A clear next step. A good funnel doesn’t pressure people. It helps the right person understand the offer, believe the promise, and know exactly what to do next. But traffic + follow-up + trust? That’s where the money starts to compound.

No one ever wants to see this message on their Youtube channel. But if you are in the "creator middle class" it will be much worse for you than others! The creator middle class is full of people with decent views and no backend. They look successful from the outside. But they’re still one algorithm change away from panic. Views are nice. But views without a product, funnel, email list, or follow-up system are fragile. That’s the difference between having attention… and having a business. The creator who wins is not always the one with the biggest audience. It’s the one with the clearest path from attention to revenue.