Jerry Seinfeld’s Guide to Marketing Mastery

“I know you think people are going to be interested in this, but they’re not.” Jerry Seinfeld spends a lot of time on something that means absolutely nothing (according to him). “But that’s what people want me to do — is spend a lot of time wastefully. So that I can then waste their time.”

 

Consider that the preamble to Jerry Seinfeld’s marketing manifesto. Sort of.

 

Jerry has given some interviews that pull back the curtain on his creative process. And it blew me away to see how much he has to teach marketers about our own processes and best practices.

 

So here’s Jerry Seinfeld’s marketing manifesto for B2B companies. Or, what would be his manifesto, if he actually had one.

 

Quotes come from his New York Times interview in 2012 and a recent podcast interview on Smartless.

The Opening Line Has to Be Funny

As a comedian, if you don’t get the audience laughing immediately, you may have lost them already. “So now, let’s find another way, a better way, to bring this subject up. Maybe a funny way,” Jerry said.

 

“For example: ‘I see the Chinese are hanging in there with the chopsticks. I’m sure they’ve seen the fork.’ I don’t want to say ‘Hey, you ever notice that we use forks and the Chinese use chopsticks?’”

 

Same goes for marketers. Your audience is in need of a solution to their problem, and they’re not going to hang around out of charity. If you don’t deliver value to them in the first couple of sentences, they’re out.

 

Grab attention from the very start. Make a statement that promises value. Say something that inspires…

 

• Controversy — “Nine out of 10 experts agree — we’re the one that doesn’t.”
• Surprise — “James Bond can jump onto a runaway train in one well-timed leap. You’ll have to figure out how to do the same thing with your clients.”
• Curiosity — “The gig economy isn’t just for side hustling anymore.”
• Laughter — “Ever try to drag race through Chicago’s Loop during rush hour? Can’t be done. I mean, not that I’ve tried — because I absolutely have not tried that.”
• Suspense — “As the new Infrastructure Act rolls out, contractors are celebrating over new opportunities. But there’s a downside, as well.”
• Relief — “It’s time to start taking vacations again.”

 

…Or so many other emotional responses!

 

DON’T be click-baity. Your opening should be related to the topic, promise value that will be delivered in the content, and be more than a shock-value statement. Don’t play with emotions simply to hook, but to create emotional engagement that has a payoff.

Don’t Wing It

Will Arnett asked Jerry, “How long did it take you to learn how to craft the joke, and not be like, ‘Well, I’ll just go up there and talk’?”

 

“One set,” Jerry said. “I did one set, and it was a total disaster. And I realized, Oh, you gotta have this all figured out in advance.”

 

He wasn’t kidding (no pun intended). Jerry spent two years writing his famous Pop Tart routine. Two years! On a three-minute bit.

 

 

Apparently, comedy takes a lot of planning and crafting. It isn’t as flippant as it often seems.

 

Marketers can’t afford to be flippant, either. I see a lot of companies that take a scattershot approach to their marketing efforts. It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole with a blindfold on.

 

• “TikTok is real popular with Gen Z. We should create some TikToks.”
• “Competitor X has a podcast. We need to get on that train, NOW.”
• “I heard email has a huge ROI. Let’s start an email campaign.”

 

You won’t get anywhere if your marketing efforts are based on tactics. Instead, you need a smart strategy that’s based on who you are as a company, who your customers are, and what your competitors are doing. Do an audit of your entire online presence and see what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s missing.

 

Once you’ve got a solid strategy in place, you can identify the right tactics for your business.

Tell a story

From the Pop Tart routine:

It was the 60s. We had toast. We had orange juice frozen decades in advance. You had to hack away at it with a knife….We had Shredded Wheat, it was like wrapping your lips around a wood chipper. You had to take two days off for the scars to heal….In the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Kellogg’s Pop Tart appears.

 

“They always laugh there,” Jerry said in one interview, “because that indicates, ‘Oh, he’s telling us a story.’”

You need to connect emotionally with your audience. So many B2B marketers rely on conveying data — stats, ROI, proven processes. Who cares? Really, who cares?

 

No one cares, because human beings don’t make decisions based on data. They make them based on emotion. Then, after they’ve made their decision, they use data and logic to back it up.

 

Says who? Science!

 

So you need to connect emotionally with your audience if you’re going to win them as customers. The best way to do that? You guessed it — tell a story. People inherently love stories. Stories trigger empathy, because we place ourselves in them and experience them vicariously.

 

In other words, your customers envision themselves using your solution to fix their pain. Who wouldn’t take advantage of that?

No one ever says, “Oh please not another story — just show me a spreadsheet.” And no one ever said, “That slide deck was a real tear jerker.”

 

But a good story can yank your entire perspective inside-out.

 

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Take the first step towards seeing real results from your B2B marketing.

 

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Give the Audience What They Want

“Comedy is a very self-correcting environment,” Jerry said in an interview. “Nobody laughs at a reputation. You go up in front of 3,000 people, you’re either really funny that night, or it’s silence.”

 

He also said the most judged human in the culture is the comedian, because they get a grade every 11 seconds.

Marketers should have it so easy! Your visitor forms an opinion of your website in a mere 50 milliseconds. In that time, they’ve decided whether or not they’re going to stick around.

 

And if they do stay? The average time on a webpage across all industries is just 54 seconds.

 

Your blog isn’t about your business. Your case studies aren’t about your services. Your marketing campaigns aren’t about your product. All of your marketing content is about your customer — not you.

 

No one cares about your company or your product. They care about solving their pains. If you can do that, great! If not, they’ll move onto the next guy.

Stick with Your Legal Pad

Jerry Seinfeld wrote the entire Seinfeld series using a yellow legal pad and a Bic pen (blue). In longhand. That’s his process for everything. “I don’t like that cursor flashing, looking at me like, ‘So? Whaddya got?’”

 

You can’t afford to take two years crafting a joke (or a blog article). Your marketing engine has to keep running like a well oiled machine. Whether you’re facing the blank page or launching a website, frequent slowdowns can put a kink in your pipeline.

 

Find a process that works for you — and not just you, but your whole team. Document your process and work at refining it over time. Hold people accountable to it, or you could end up off the rails more often than not.

Don’t Be Boring

“Audiences are bored stiff sitting there, and you have to unbore them,” Jerry said. “It’s not as much fun to be educated by a comedian as it is to hear about someone’s insanity….I think we need that more than the data.”

 

Your industry may be boring. YOU should never be boring. You don’t have to be an entertainer, but your brand should have a personality. Be funny, or snarky. Have a little bit of a pottymouth, or show your nurturing side. Whatever authentically reflects who you are as a brand, be that.

 

If your visitors are bored by your content, why would they be interested in you?

Save the Biggest Laugh for the End

You can’t have the big laugh in the middle, Jerry says. Especially if it’s a long bit. There’s gotta be a payoff. Your audience has to be glad they’ve come along on the ride with you.

 

You have to give them something of value to walk away with. In comedy, it’s a big laugh. In marketing, it’s an offer — a reward for sticking around till the end. A bonus that takes your content to the next level.

 

We call this a call to action (CTA). A CTA is simply an invitation to take the next step towards becoming a customer, whether it’s subscribing to your blog, downloading a whitepaper, or requesting a demo. But whatever it is, your CTA offers greater value that builds on the content your audience has just consumed.

 

It offers a big payoff: “You think THAT content was good? Wait till you check out THIS one!”

 

Every piece of content should have a call to action — otherwise, your audience might not take a next step with you. They could go back to Google and find your competitor instead.

 

Marketing Like a Comedian

When you think about it, marketing isn’t all that different from stand-up comedy. Like so many things in life, you can learn a lot from other disciplines — and steal what works for them! Take these killer nuggets of wisdom from a comedy king and use them to boost your own marketing success.

 

By the way, you can see the entire Pop Tarts routine on Netflix’s comedy special, “Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill.” Also watch for Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s full-length movie based on the Pop Tarts joke, coming to Netflix in late 2022.