10 Years, Marketing Really Kicks in After That

How long have you been doing Single Grain for?

Oh, I actually looked at it on LinkedIn. It says 12 years, 9 months.

All right. And I have this topic here, 10 years, that's how long it really takes for marketing to kick in. Assume you're consistent for all the 10 years and you're trying hard. Okay, if you looked at your business, you weren't there from day one, but you have a lot of the stats and data.

Yeah.

You were there what, year like 3, 4?

It's Single Grain started in 2009. I didn't join until 2012 or '13, 2013.

So yours was, you guys had a reset.

Yeah.

So let's, let's call it, you started when the—

I took over in 2014.

Okay. So it's been a little bit more than 10 years, 11 years.

Yeah.

And you, you agree the company pretty much just reset from there?

Yeah. I've had to reset the company twice.

No, but when I mean reset, it was really tiny back then.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And you, you grew it from pretty much nothing.

Yeah.

To where it is today.

Yeah.

You agree with that statement, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So you're pretty much starting all over.

Yeah.

When you were going through it and starting over at the beginning, how'd you get your customers?

SEO didn't kick in yet. A lot of it in the very beginning, you're talking about with or without you?

When you took over in 2014?

When I took over, just to make it clear for everyone, Neil generated a lot of leads from his old blog and he actually sent the leads over to Single Grain because Single Grain was started by Neil's cousin, Sujin. And when I took over, I think at a certain point even before that, we stopped the Neil Patel lead flow, right? Yeah. From what I remember.

I believe so, but in general, the business didn't work out. People didn't want to be part of Single Grain anymore. Eric wanted to take it over. I think we gave you our shares or maybe for a dollar.

Legally I had to buy it for a dollar.

Yeah.

So you basically gave it, yeah.

Yeah, I think other people sold you their shares.

Yeah, I bought you—

Like real money.

And Hiten's shares for $1.

Yeah, 'cause we didn't care.

The rest was through profits.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, so then, and I don't think we took profits. I think we just gave a dollar.

You just gave it. Yeah.

Uh, and Eric was starting over at that time. How were you generating revenue?

So we had customers already that we were holding onto, but, um, I would say that some of it was word of mouth and then some of it was through SEO.

Yeah. But when you had customers, I don't think it reveals much. Your revenue was, we can always cut this out if you don't want, but you're talking about sub-million bucks. It was really tiny at the time. It was nothing. Yeah, it was very little. So back then you were getting some through SEO, some through word of mouth. Okay, go back or then fast forward 5 more years. Go to like around 2020.

Well, if we fast forward 5 years, yeah, let's go to 2019. 2019, let's go 2019. Okay, so by that point, when I first started at Single Grain, we started doing a lot of guest blogging and there's a period of time for 3, 4 years where we started ranking number 1 for digital marketing agency. And that's what allowed us to get all the leads to hire the people that we needed to hire to grow. And it wasn't, so this gets a little complicated, I don't know if you want this in here, but like 2014 to 2015, it wasn't until really 2015 to 2017 or so I really started to focus on it. Because even the first year when I took it over, I made it go from bad to worse, remember that?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I made it go from bad to worse, we dropped all the way down to 1 employee, and then thank God the rankings kicked in, and then we started getting all these leads, and then we were referring the leads to another agency that we're both referring to, And then eventually we were able to—

Oh, back then. I think it was the San Diego agency, right?

Yeah, the San Diego agency, yeah. But then I would say, and Noah was part of this, probably, Noah, 'cause you joined in 2017 or so, '17 to 2019 was like the most fun like ever, right?

Yeah, the office in downtown San Diego.

The office in downtown, like I loved everybody, it was great. And then the growth—

And Eric was a 6 at this point on the scale of 1 being really easy to go, 10 being— He said I was going up.

Hard. Towards the end, that was going up. Okay. Well, but, but you didn't, you didn't leave until 2021 where things were, things were, you know, we, we had a lot of cleanup to do at that point. Yeah.

Okay. So, but, so how were you getting your business around 2019?

Majority through SEO.

All right.

Yeah. Now fast forward to 2024.

Yeah.

Okay.

10 years.

You can even say now. Yeah. You can say now it's the same thing.

Yeah.

How are you getting most of your business? Honestly.

Honestly, there's still a good chunk from SEO, not nearly as much. Before it was like 80+% from SEO. Now it's a combination of referral and then people consuming content from different places and referrals. Did I say referral already?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What would you say is non-ranking? How much of the business do you think is from people just knowing the brand at this point?

It's tough to say because—

Give me a range.

It's not 1%, it's not 50%.

Let's say it's like, 15 to 20%.

So your brand is kicking in where you're getting customers.

Yeah. And because a lot of them say like, I either follow Eric or I've known Single Grain for a while.

Okay.

Yeah.

And those customers, are they tending to pay on the lower end of your—

Those are down to pay more.

And so they are the higher end, middle?

I would say middle to high. Yeah.

Yeah. And what's the churn on those customers?

They stay longer.

They stay long. By how much longer?

Tough to say right now. 'Cause we had such a reset in the last few years. Yeah. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Would you at least say 10, 20%, 50%?

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

So, In other words, your brand's getting out there, it's kicking in, you're getting better quality customers, and they're staying longer. And this is why I tell people it takes 10 years for marketing to really kick in because you start getting a lot more word of mouth where that doesn't really kick in in the first few years unless you're lucky and you created this AI tech that just does everything for everyone and it's easy and it's really free or cheap.

Yeah.

But in most cases, marketing does not kick in as, or word of mouth marketing does not kick in, which I believe is the best form of marketing until really 10+ years. You do see traction going up to it. Yeah.

But after 10 years, that's where it really starts growing. And from years 10 to 20, that's where we see great lift. We did a study on this and I think it was something like 18% or something like that of Your ideal customers should know about your brand roughly around year 10.

Ah, there you go. Yeah. And the same for you guys.

For us, we haven't been around 10 years yet. I think this is year number 8.

But you've been marketing for over 10 years.

Yeah, but our agency is starting to get known.

And when I ask our team members, keep in mind, we have data analytics, we track. The hard part with the marketing agency, Unlike most fields is if, in most fields, when you're selling to someone, you're selling, at least on the enterprise end, you're selling to a C-level, you're having a direct conversation with them, you know how they found out about you. The marketing category or the marketing agency world is a little bit unique. When you're selling, you're typically selling through procurement.

Mm-hmm.

And procurement reaches out. This is specifically for enterprise. And when procurement reaches out and you ask them how did they learn about you, Almost always they don't have the answer.

Nor do they care.

Nor do they care.

Yeah.

And typically people who are in charge of sales for us will ask, but when someone says, oh, I don't know, it's either a referral or employee mentioned it or award, or we heard about you, or maybe Google's website recommended you, and they go on and on and they give you like 6 or 7 examples. You know, at that point they probably don't know. They're just rattling off a lot of random things. Like they're like, it could be a conference that we saw you at. You don't want to keep pushing them to find out how they heard about you and why they included you, because if you bug them, they may exclude you from the RFP and just be like, screw you. We don't want to work with you guys. You're irritating.

But that makes sense. But how about that's the enterprise side, but what about NPXL, your small business division?

I would say it's less than 20%. I would say it's closer to 15% that are referrals now. Partnerships probably make up another 12, 13%. So I would say, and then if you exclude ads, so the rest are ads and inbound.

Yeah.

Like from rankings and ads.

What percent do you think come from ads?

Maybe 10, max 15. I'm 99% confident it's at least 10%. I'm 99% confident it's not 15%. So it's somewhere in that band.

Yep.

Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's funny, yesterday I was recording this new style for my short-form content. So I got all these scripts, right? And one of the scripts was around like X years to see success in marketing, X years to see success in the podcast, X years to see success in business. A lot of it's like years and years and years, and that's how long it takes. I was like, oh, that's a good format.

It's a good format.

By the way, I'm going to try this out, but the way they scripted everything, it was like 24 pages of scripts for short form. I'll send it over to you. Like, I do think if this works out— first, I was like really hesitant. I was going to record yesterday. I was so pissed off. I was like, I have to do these new styles, all these things. I don't even like— I have to do these clone videos. Some I'm standing and then I'm behind a green screen and all this stuff. I don't want to do any of this, right? After I did it, I was like, Yeah, I think this will work. So I'll let you know. And then you should work with these guys too if it works.

How much does it cost?

It's cheap.

Less than $1,000 a month?

Less than $5,000 a month.

Okay.

It's a good deal.

And they create the scripts?

They create all the scripts. It was 30 scripts. And I was like, this was really—

Manually or they're using AI?

I actually think they're doing it manually. You know what I did afterwards? I took that 24-page script and I made a Gemini gem from it, right? Because you can just take the doc, it's like a custom GPT, but Gemini's connected with YouTube. So I took our Longform podcast. I was like, hey, I want the same level of scripts from this 80-minute podcast. And it actually did a good job.