7 Things We'd Do Differently in Marketing If We Had to Go Back...

What do you wish you would've done differently with your own marketing if you could start over this year? So imagine it's January 2025. We already know what's happened for 9-ish months of the year, right? Because we're in October now, but 9 months are done. What would you have done differently?

If I can pick one thing only?

You can pick 3 things.

Okay. So this is not exactly marketing, but I wish we would just 20x our outbound. Like outbound's performing for us.

And you want to break down your outbound process because it's the gift cards, right? Yeah.

So it's gift cards. So the way what we do is we send $100, we offer $100 gift cards.

Sorry to interrupt and you can start again. This is marketing. That is a form of marketing.

I consider that sales, but, but you can call that marketing too. Marketing, our job is to bring people to the point of sale. So I guess you can argue it's marketing too, but semantics. So one of the things that we do is to, if I were to restart my marketing, is we would 20x what we're doing on the outbound email side. And basically our TAM, our total addressable market, is let's say this one's a B2B market, right? So there's 100,000 people, 100,000, you know, emails that we would send initially. But maybe we're trying to hit our TAM, our entire TAM, you know, maybe we're sending like 4 emails a month. So maybe that's 400,000 emails. My whole thing is it's been generating good meetings for us. And some of these are actually closing. And these are enterprises that have raised a good chunk of money too. And so I'm just like, well, why don't we just do 20x of it if it's already doing really well? And maybe the TAM can't go 20x, but we should be doubling, tripling down on whatever is working. And that shouldn't come down to— I mean, once we see it working, like someone should just be like, oh, let's just do that more.

Can you, can you break down what your process is so anyone listening can replicate?

So So we actually use an outside agency for this, but I'll break down their process because they actually reveal it too. So they basically will create 60, call it 60 to 100 inboxes. And this is interesting. So they use female names and specifically they use like female Latin names, right? So it might be like—

You mean email addresses? They create 60 email addresses? Yeah.

And they're all females.

Like at a random Gmail or at your corporate email?

Corporate email. But it might be like, singlegrainmail.com or singlegraine-mail.com or like, um, you know, goesinglegrain.com. So it doesn't affect our, our, our main domain, right? Um, 'cause you don't want to tank your main domain.

Oh, you're talking about it would be like lindsay@gosinglegrain.com.

Yeah.

So they're using a subdomain.

No, it's just lindsay@single— there's just different inboxes. These are brand new inboxes that they have to warm up.

I'm confused when you're saying it doesn't tank your Single Grain name, 'cause you said like go.singlegrain.

Not go. I just meant gosinglegrain.com as in one word.

Oh, they're not using singlegrain.com?

No, no.

They're using a different domain name that is a version of your own domain name?

Yeah, 'cause if you get flagged for spam, like across the board, like you want to protect the main domain, right? Which arguably, like, you know, I think The Single Grain was already flagged in the beginning, right? But point is they have, they create like 60 new inboxes and they have like, you know, brand new names and they'll be like, oh, you know, Leandra or something like that, right? And then they will warm these inboxes up. Right? So they'll use something like SmartLead or whatever, like send a couple emails or whatever. And then each inbox can only send maybe 20 emails a day. You ideally can send up to 50, but they try to limit it because they don't want to get, you know, ticked by any spam filters, right? Then once it's warmed up, they'll try 14 different sequences and I'll work with them on the sequences. And like, I'm just adjusting the copy for them. Like one offer might be get a free Karat demo. The other one might be free gift card. Other one might be like free AirPods or something like that, right? And then We'll test for like a week or 2, you know, 15,000 emails per sequence. Then we select 4 and then one ends up winning and then we just go to town on that one. But in my mind right now, I'm like, why haven't we pushed on that 20 times more? Because it's already working.

So is it mainly the gift card one that's working for you right now?

The gift card one is working.

And how much of a gift card do you give away?

$100.

Amazon?

Amazon. Okay. Yeah.

What's your cost to get someone on the phone?

Our cost to get someone on the phone, that's something we, it's too early to say right now.

Yeah. What's your cost for a deal closed?

For, we, by the way, we haven't closed anything yet. So it's like these, like 2 are about to sign.

So it's too early.

Got it.

So you think it's going to work. So you, you wish you would've doubled down on it earlier.

Yes.

And 2 are about to sign. How much have you spent so far on this?

Let's say we spent $10,000.

On the gift cards?

No, $10,000. And then on the gift cards, maybe let's put another $2,000. So $12,000 total for 2 that look like they're about to close.

So $6,000. And what size contracts do you think the 2 will be?

One's going to be, let's call it to start, maybe $144,000 for the year. So $12,000 a month.

Okay. And the other one?

The other one's, call it like $10,000. So $120,000 to start.

Okay. So $144,000 and then you said the other one's $1—

Call it $260,000.

$126,000 to $264,000. So then your costs on $264,000 is $12,000. That's really good. Why not just go all day? Yeah. All day. And then do you change the commissions to your sales team? Based on those kind of leads?

So not right now, but it's going to become a conversation, I think. Like you're going to have to—

The cost is higher, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I was just curious on that. What are the 2 other things that you wish you would've done differently?

Well, let's go back and forth. You go. And then that gives me time to think. So you go.

Okay. So one thing that I wish we would've done on our marketing is adjusted our messaging. If we look at the marketing that's really resonated, We've shifted to search everywhere optimization. And we've talked about this a lot longer than beginning of year, but it took us a long time to update our website. The moment we shifted how we're pushing stuff out from a messaging perspective globally, not just locally or not just regionally, like the United States, the moment we started pushing this out globally, we started seeing a different type of customer reach out to us and we started seeing more people who are interested in helping us be an agency of, or submit RFP for things related to like AI SEO or GEO and things like that. And the reason I say I wish we would've done it earlier, a lot of the companies we deal with already have agencies of record. So I'll give you a random example. We don't work with this company, but if you're Procter Gamble, you have an agency of record. So if you want to do something in the SEO space or the paid advertising space, you need to first go to your agency of record based on how your contract's set up. It's not as easy for them to just hit up NP Digital or Single Grain and just be like, I want to pay you guys for this because they have an agency of record. With this AI stuff, most people are not covered under their agency of record contract. It allows us to talk to these large organizations that already have a preexisting agency and nothing's really blocking us to get in. We get in, we do well, then land and expand. I wish we made the messaging change earlier on. And if I had to give a takeaway for everyone listening, Marketers think about how can I get more traffic? How can I boost your conversions? You should also think about what is trending that everyone's talking about? Is there a trend that you can ride that you think that trend will last for a while and it can impact your business in a positive way and make your marketing easier? That is in essence what we did with this.

Yep. Number 2 for me. So we're doing 3, right? So Neil already does a lot of webinars. What works well for us is sure, we do webinars internally, but we don't have the same list size that you have. And so doing partner webinars has worked out really well for us. We should, that's another thing I should be like, why aren't we doing 10x or 20x of that? These types of collaborations and people are down to do it. Like there's almost no times are people like, they're like, oh no, we're not down to do it. They're like very receptive because they're missing out on content or they're missing content. So I would say I wish we did that more. Like there's 2 things I wish we would've doubled down on, tripled down on, quadrupled down on.

Yeah. The second thing for me is if I go back in the time at the beginning of the year, and this has happened on a monthly basis, I would consider us a medium-sized business, small or medium, whatever you want to define. I would say most people look at us as a medium-sized business. I define large as a billion plus in revenue. We're not there yet. If you look at most medium-sized businesses, they typically operate with P&Ls. And you have forecasts and projections and budgets, and you typically don't want to go outside that. And even if marketing's profitable, people typically start with budgets. You can adjust your budgets, but you start off and then you expand over time. Some marketing, like content marketing, is a very expensive long-term endeavor that usually doesn't pay off in the short run, assuming you agree with that statement. I wish we did more influencer deals at the beginning of the year.

To drive leads for you guys?

No. So I'll give you a great example of this. I'll release a video in the next 30 to 60 days, a deal that I did with Intuit.

Okay.

And it'll say sponsored and you get some money for it. Whether you're a corporation or individual brand, there's a lot of people that would pay you for email blasts, Or they would pay you for, you know, social posts or, you know, a joint webinar to your customers, some sort of deal where you're doing like a partnership and you're getting paid for it and you're promoting them more than they're promoting you. And maybe you're just promoting them.

Mm-hmm.

The reason I would've done this earlier on, because let's say, you know, you recuperate extra few hundred grand from that. That's money that drops to your bottom line.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

And then you could, I could have taken that and done more content marketing with that money. And instead of saying, hey guys, you know, we're spending X amount on content marketing, I'm going to get pushback from my executive team, even though it's my company. If we spend too much, Neil, we're going to screw up our numbers. Like we got to have a balance here.

And they're right.

They're being responsible with my money. But at the same time, if I could have done influencer deals, and the reason I give the examples of like an email blast, any company can do it because even if you're a small company doing a million in revenue or half a million, you have customers, someone would pay you to do an email blast to your customers.

Yep.

And if you take that money and then invest it into marketing for your own business, I actually find that it causes quicker growth. And I wish we would've done that earlier. And instead, you know this, I would ignore almost every single person that emails me for influencer deal. I started responding in the last 30 days. Now I'm not going to take a lot. I'm going to only take enough for, call it, you know, I don't know, enough to like double up my video output per month and then have the cost covered.

So Neil has OnlyFans now.

It really is a version of OnlyFans for myself. I know that sounds bad, but like it really is.

I had one too, I'm OnlyFans myself this year too.

Yeah.

You know, for like Adobe and Snap and like TikTok hit me up too. I was like, oh, Snap did this, can you do this too?

I bet you I know who hit you up at TikTok.

It was a random person. It was like a—

I know, 'cause I got the same random person.

Okay, that's funny. Share it with me afterwards. But no, that's actually interesting because—

Here, I'm gonna give you their first name, look it up. This will be entertaining.

Okay. Okay.

Nah, let's see. Dude, I have so many emails.

Does it start with a D?

Does the company start with an A?

I don't know. I'll look for it afterwards. I couldn't find it right here. But going back to what we're talking about here, so that was the second thing from your side, right? Is that the second thing?

Yeah.

Okay. The third thing from my side, this is marketing. This is like basic marketing. So we've definitely innovated quite a bit this year with all the different things that we have going on, like within Karat or even ClickFlow too, like the time that it saves. And I just, I'm like, oh, sometimes I get ahead of myself. I'm like, dude, where's all the collateral for this shit? Like, there's no like sales collateral. There's no like, you know, how this data is performing over here, whatever. And it's just, it's such an obvious thing that sometimes we forget as marketers, sometimes the basic stuff. And so this one to me is not like a 10x thing, but this one to me is like, you're going to increase your conversion rate by a lot if you're able to tell a good story that aligns with what the customer is looking for. And sometimes that requires you to slow down, talk to your data analysts, maybe talk to your designers as well, get somebody together to tell a good story. So that's That's the third thing. What's the third thing from your side? Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side.

I just responded to the TikTok people because they wouldn't pay me the money I wanted and they're like, would you just do it for one platform? And I said no. And they're like, you know what? That's another like month of cost.

Let me tell you one more thing on the influencer thing. So YAP Media who helps us with the ads for this podcast, so this is interesting because this directly affects us. So they're like, okay, they have this whole deck, right? And then my, Maya, my former chief of staff, so she's still running this stuff, right? And so she's like, look, Here's what they're proposing. They'll pay like, let's say, you know, I'm not gonna give any numbers right now, but if we do a series or whatever, we will make 2 DreamHosts. Okay, if we do a series like 3 episodes, I'm like, I think Neil and I would be down for that. Okay, let's just— but the series matters, like what depends on what we make. They will also pay us, you know, like a 6th of a DreamHost if we do, you know, if we do, if we do like, you know, one little ad read over here. I was like, look, We can, we're willing to do these things, but right now the payout, this is for YAP Media, the payout, the juice isn't worth the squeeze right now.

Yeah, the juice has to be worth the squeeze.

It barely covers like our cost to like fund this thing, so we're like broke with this right now, yeah.

No, we spend more on a monthly basis than what we generate.

We do, yeah.

And I look at it as it's like, when it comes to like influencer deals or any of this, you and I don't like the idea of just taking whatever money people are throwing at us if we don't like the brand.

Yeah, we can't do that.

Because we've turned down so many brands, it would've been, we would've actually made a lot more money if we just took everyone. And the second thing is, is we don't want to continually just do stuff all the time because it gets irritating for us. It gets irritating for the audience, but doing every once in a while is worth it because it covers a lot. We just have to make sure, as you mentioned, the juice is worth the squeeze. Even like the TikTok stuff, they didn't offer enough where I was like, yeah, I don't want to end up doing this. And then they emailed back like, would you just put it on only your LinkedIn for this amount? And it was a good amount. And now I just said, actually, I will accept it if you guys are still open. I don't know why I said no.

Well, this is, this is also very interesting too. And then we can go to your third thing. But if you're going to an influencer, it's like, or if you're being pitched on these, they have to feel good to do. Otherwise it feels like work. It feels like work.

And good brands. If you don't like the brand, then it's just painful. I'm like, well, I don't want to shill this brand because I don't like it. So I think that's really important.

Okay. What's the third thing from you?

The third thing that I wish we did more of is right now when I travel to a city for marketing, I end up going and I end up going to different cities and we'll do in-person meetings with companies. We'll do even our own events for companies. And we've done that for a long time, but very rarely have I actually done podcast interviews with people when I travel. I did the Ahrefs one that you set up a long time ago. I had an opportunity to do one in Australia. You know the person.

Yeah.

I couldn't make the schedule. work out. They offered a car service and everything. They're like, we get over 100,000 views. I'm like, dude, I can't make the timing work out. And to some extent I want the views, but I got to optimize for revenue before.

Yeah. They're going to be back here in November anyway.

So yeah.

Yeah.

So what I ended up doing is, or what I wish I ended up doing was my team, I started having Marina on my end hit up popular podcasts for all the cities that I'm traveling to where I have availability on my schedule and set up interviews because it's a great way to get exposure within region and hopefully it helps my business grow faster. But it didn't hit me until the Australia guy, and I forgot his name. He's a nice guy.

Dane Walker.

Dane Walker. Because I was like, wait, we should be doing this everywhere. And it'll help us grow within region because Dane's like, Oh, if you make time, I can help introduce you to customers. I have a great Rolodex. Are you looking to meet? And it wasn't that. I'm like, dude, I don't have the schedule. And he's like, is it because I'm a competitor? I'm like, no, dude. I'm like, honestly, I do a podcast with Eric and we're both competitors and I still do it with him on a monthly basis. And I'm like, it has nothing to do with any of that. I'm like, I can't make the schedule fit.

Yeah. By the way, the competitor thing's not even a big thing because there's so much business for everyone. Like once you get into this world or any world, there's so much business for everyone, right? And maybe in our younger years, maybe we just want to like, kill every competitor, but like, you know, there's still competition for sure, but it's like, there's so much business for everyone. So, but by the way, we do this weekly, not monthly.

Yes.

Yeah. Go, what are you going to say?

Do you have a, what's your third?

I did give my third already.

Oh, so I gave mine last.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to give you a bonus one.

Yeah.

You and I speak at events. Some events pay us, some don't, but I would say the majority of us, Majority of the events pay. Sometimes we do it for free because they're friends or the audience is really big. One thing I wish I would've done earlier this year, if I can go back, I would've paid to speak.

Interesting.

Because the events that would've charged me money, they have so many of my ideal customers just sitting there in a room. And it's just like, some of them want $15,000, $20,000, even though I believe I would help draw some attendees, maybe not a lot, but I think I would draw at least some. At least all the conferences that paid me to speak tell me that I help out with it. Yeah. At least that's when I was in Dallas. They're like, you helped out a lot. A lot of people wanted to see you and we're really happy you came here.

Yeah.

'Cause I had to fly from Sydney to Dallas. That was a long—

Was that a straight shot?

Straight shot. 16 hours.

Wow.

Qantas? Uh, Qantas.

Wow.

Um, I should have done American Airlines though, 'cause Qantas doesn't have internet whenever I'm going after the pond. And then American has a base there and I didn't realize this, but I'm a concierge key.

Oh, that's really high.

I didn't know that. I don't travel American that often, but I fly so much. My not so often, you know, adds up. And plus I pay for first class tickets on every flight. So then the—

Oh, they love you. Yeah. You're not even using points. Yeah.

I don't ever use my points. It just sits there because almost all my travel is paid for. Right. So, uh, and even when it's not paid for, like if I'm going to New York for a meeting, I usually do American from here to JFK.

Dude, let me buy your points.

It's, it's a lay flat. But going back at it, I wish I paid to speak at events. I think it would've generated us a lot more enterprise business 2 to 3 years from now. And because I'll start next year doing it, I'm going to have to wait another 2 to 3 years after to see the results from it.

I think the next 5 minutes we have, the 6 minutes before we wrap up, we can talk about where we've changed our mind. Because a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, Neil and I were like, yeah, we're going to spend less time traveling and all that. You know, we're going to not do these influencer deals, da da da. You know, new information comes and things change.

Well, I've traveled less than last year. That for certain I know, because Marina tracks my hours and I'm not at 30% yet, but the goal was to be, actually the goal was to be like 50% less and I'm in the high 20% less than last year.

Yeah, but you were going to make it significantly less, but then you started ramping it. You're like, I'm going to do it again.

Because I thought the economy was going to boom this year and rip. And it didn't. So I had no choice but to get back on the road and do whatever it takes.

Yeah. And by the way, so like going back to it, so Neil, I would say you've actually changed your mind a little bit on this. So remember I had Gary Vee on my other podcast, Leveling Up, and his whole thing is I want all the views in the world. I want all like, you know, 8 billion people watching me, right? So you going on these wider TAM podcasts now, that is actually getting views.

No, no, you should go on wider TAM podcasts.

You said if you're going to reach out to, if Marina is going to reach out to people and places you go to, like what kind of podcasts are you going to get on?

Related to marketing and like, uh, ideally ones who have executive crowd.

How many of those are there?

There's actually quite a bit. They just don't have the views. So they're not going to get like 100,000 views. Because if you look at Dane—

Oh, so you'll do niche ones.

We'll do niche ones. Because if you look at Dane, Dane has his podcast from my agency.

From my agency podcast.

Yeah, it's related to marketing. So that's ideal fit. A great example of this is someone's like, hey, the next time you're in New York, I have a hospitality podcast and it's for executives who listen to hospitality type stuff. I would be down for it because I would talk about marketing related to hospitality. I don't know how many views they get. Let's say it's 1,000, 10,000 views a month or 5,000. But it's the right people. It's the right people.

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. But Like we're, we're not, we're not, we're, we're completely okay changing our mind once we get new data or once we think about things a little differently. Yeah.

Totally agree.

Yeah. And, and like, we're not to say that we're, we're right on everything. We're certainly wrong quite a bit.

So, and by the way, even though I traveled less than last year, I would've traveled more than last year if I was able to.

Mm-hmm.

Because I didn't want to travel as much this year because I wanted to be with my family more. And, but business, the economy took a lot of turns because a lot of things that we couldn't control. I'm not trying to get political. I'm not saying a president's right or wrong.

Yeah.

I'm just I'm saying tariffs had a drastic impact on our industry. Would you agree with this?

Yep.

Right? So things like that I couldn't have predicted last year when I was planning this year. And then when I told Marina, I'm willing to ramp up and do whatever it takes to try to get the business to grow faster, she's just like, a lot of the events were determined for us 6+ months out. So by the time I told her, it was already too late to ramp up travel as much as I wanted.

Here, let's cover the last thing here. So, so that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.