Customer Acquisition Trends for 2019 & Beyond (Q+A)

You think about this mindset stuff too. So, we are gonna go ahead and hit preview. Great, it's working. Starting stream right now. Alright, so now we are live both on YouTube and Facebook. YouTube people, Facebook I started a little earlier, about 3 minutes ago. Let me pop out the chat over here, make sure everything is working. YouTube people, let me know if you can hear me. Let me know if you can see me. Let me know where you're coming from. Facebook people, so for the YouTube people, I was just basically saying earlier, I was talking about mindset. So, you know, a lot of people are thinking bonds, stocks, you know, homes are a really good investment. And homes are good if you're cash flowing it. But if you're— it is one of the biggest investments you can make. But if you're living in the home, it's not really an investment, right? Like maybe you're saying, oh, the home's gonna grow in equity. But if it grows in equity over time, Maybe the return at the end of the day is 5 to 8%, but business at the end of the day, maybe you're getting a 10% return or a 15% or a 20% return, sometimes way higher than that. You are crazy for being awake at this time. It's 12:30 PM. I don't know what time it is over there for you. So going back to mindset, okay, if you buy— okay, in the United States, let's say you want to buy a home. Maybe you're gonna put $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 down, maybe $100,000 down, but But that money, let's say you're starting in your 20s, if you could have put that money into business, it would have multiplied a lot more, right? So it's just you're playing a different game than other people because you understand business better than you understand real estate. So just because you have people around you, maybe you have parents, you have close people trying to influence you saying you should, you should do it this way, you should do it this way, it's just because it's their worldview, right? But if you have a different mindset where you understand that there's so much abundance with having, having a business and growing it that way, you're gonna take it a lot further, right? So That is basically a preview of what I'm going to talk about in a video. Just basically the mindset. And also the mindset is understanding that if you get a lot of experience in business, even if you do fail, net-net, the worst case scenario for you is that you can get a really high paying job, right? And I've declined jobs that would, you know, offer me, you know, high 6-figure salaries or 7 figures in bonuses and even up to 8 figures, right? And, but to me, I'm just like, that's a nice backup. Because I want to build my dream. So let's talk about this another time. Manav is, you're still crazy for making this at 2:00 AM. So guys, today we are going to talk about customer acquisition, what's actually working in 2019. Those of you that are just joining us right now, also let me know where you're coming from too. So, customer acquisition for 2019, what is actually working? Well, I'll tell you what. So, when we look at the data that's coming through your website, so let's say your site's getting a couple thousand visits a month, maybe 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 visits a month, Well, guess what? We— your site maybe only converts 1 or 2% of people into a lead or maybe even into a sale. Now, the other 98% or 99%, what are you going to do with those? Well, what you can do is you can enrich the leads on your site. So you can use a tool like Clearbit, you can find out what IP address they're coming from, you can reach out to their entire marketing department, you can find out what technologies they're using on their website, right? So let's say they're using Google Analytics and your tool helps Google Analytics people, You can enrich it. And then what you can do is you can use a customer data platform like Hull, hull.io, or Segment. You can use either of those and you can combine all your data coming from disparate sources into one area. And then it's much easier to say, okay, now I can see that they responded to this. They looked at this email, they visited 5 pages over here, they bought something over here. I know how to create messaging just for that person. So you can do so much more. You can take You know, people, let's say Coca-Cola visits your website. You can enrich the data, find all people that are on their marketing team, get their email addresses, and then start running dynamic retargeting ads, maybe on Facebook. So this is a little more advanced ninja stuff that you can do, but we're talking like we're going into the age of AI, right? And everything, I believe everything is is just we're just talking data, data, data, right? Google's got the data. Facebook's got the data. Even Apple's got a lot of data too. So But when you think about it, if you can have this data advantage, it's your website, you control it, then you're going to be able to be more effective with the marketing that you've done. Because you've already brought them to the point of sale, but you're letting a lot of them flow through your funnel, so that's a drop-off point that you want to address, okay? I have a call with your company scheduled at 5:00 PM New York time today. Actually, Martin, the call's with myself, so I'm personally taking that call with you. just to talk through your needs. By the way, guys, Martin is actually, I mean, he's interested in kind of growing his consulting or agency thing. If you guys want more clients, you can always go to singlegrain.com/live, that's in the lower third. You can check that out, apply for a call, that's exactly what Martin did. So, going back, that's one thing you can do that's unique. Now, you might be saying, Eric, well, I don't have any traffic at all. Okay, great. So, you know, what you could do is you can say, content creation, that's a piece of what works really well for us, right? So, if I were starting from scratch, today knowing what I know already, and if I had no audience, if I had nothing, but I had my head and I still knew what to do, I would go live. I would go live like I'm going simulcasting on Facebook and YouTube right now because that allows me, especially on Facebook, I can build an audience for people that watch the video maybe to 25 to 50% or so. I know they're interested. Then I'm gonna retarget them to an offer because then I can build an audience that way. I can tell them to like my page, whatever. I'm building I'm building a relationship with people at scale. With my YouTube channel right now, YouTube's a little bigger for us, about 16,000 subscribers. It's not like huge, like 100,000, a million or so, but it's good because this is— I'd actually prefer a smaller audience of engaged people that are trying to start a business or trying to do marketing versus having like a channel on, you know, how to pick up people, right? Or, you know, how to show off my car or whatever, right? So, that's another lesson too, it's how are you going to target the right people because bigger is not necessarily better. So going back to the lives, you can go live on Facebook and go live on Instagram. You can target these people, run ads towards them, run them towards an application for a call perhaps, and then that way you're able to create a sustainable system. And then later, once you have more revenues coming through the door, maybe you can reinvest that money into a content strategy, into a podcasting strategy. It's just gonna get better and better. Okay, so speaking of podcasts, if we talk about If we think about podcasts, I think in the last year there was a period of time where between a 1-month period where over 20 million new podcasting listeners came on. So podcasting is very underpriced attention right now. There's a site you can go to. I'll drop it in chat. It's called Chartable. Okay, so if you go to Chartable, you can see what's going on from a podcasting perspective. You can actually even see how the Marketing School podcast ranks and how the Growth Everywhere podcast ranks. Okay. So, I like going live. I mean, the basis is creating some form of content. I still don't think it's too difficult to get started with podcasts nowadays because even though the average podcast might get like 100 downloads a month, 200 downloads a month, I would say, look, if you get started with podcasts and you do a daily kind of thing where other people just aren't willing to put in the work but you're doing it daily, you're gonna be able to start to build momentum because, well, You're doing it daily, you're gonna build more volume that way. And with Growth at Marketing School, we started, we started right out the gate doing daily. And then with Growth Everywhere recently, I switched it to daily, kind of, you know, I took these videos, these live videos, and then just basically made them into podcast episodes. And we basically were able to double our number of downloads per month. Okay, so that in itself, podcasting, it's still in its nascent stages. The fact that advertising isn't even that good yet. But Spotify, look, they just spent like $300 million buying these podcast startups. So they're getting really serious into it. So think about podcast advertising. And if you Google podcast advertising, I think we have a resource out there that you can check on, you know, how you can get started with podcasting or podcast advertising if those are you that are a little further along. Because we do have some enterprise companies reaching out to us now for help with podcast advertising. So that is very much a thing. The attention itself, the fact that you're listening to me right now, and if I slid in like an ad, like the whole singlegrain.com/live thing, That makes it a little easier for you to stomach because I'm actually giving you value and I'm kind of just, you know, inserting these little ads throughout the video that we're talking through right now. So guys, don't feel like— don't be afraid to drop in some questions in terms of what you have, questions you have around customer acquisition for 2019, and I'm happy to answer your questions. So those are just a couple things that you can do to get started. LinkedIn, right? LinkedIn is going— they're going live now too, so you got LinkedIn Live, you got Instagram Live, you got YouTube Live, you got Twitter's Periscope, which not a lot of people use. You have a lot of different options out there to get started. I don't think there's any excuse not to get started. Yeah, Rosh, you know, what's interesting is Anchor was actually bought by Spotify recently. Big fan, one question. Do you think selling services in packages will help in B2B customer acquisition? Yeah, I think so. Because, and here's the key thing, like if you're looking to acquire, if you have a services-based business, I would say if you can package things together, small, medium, large, that's going to make things easier to digest. And if you are selling a solution, a transformation instead of just services, you're going to be able to go further than other, other companies out there or other service-based business out there. Okay. Now, if I think about what else works in terms of customer acquisition, well, blogging is difficult. You got 4 million new blog posts being produced every single day. How in the world can you fight? You can still fight because, you know, our blog, I mean, let's see, when I first, before I took over Single Grain, our blog was only getting about 4,000 visits a month. And then we kept doing the content marketing thing and we just realized that it's going to take, you know, like a 2 to 3 years, 4 years to really get it moving. And just recently, I mean, it really is starting to ramp. And I think in terms of overall sessions, not just, uh, uniques, about 240,000, 250,000 a month, and then, uh, uniques about 200,000. But it just takes time. So that's why I like— I would— this is why I'm saying, like, if I were starting out, I would— I prefer to go with the lives first. And then once I start to get some results, then I can start to deploy into other areas. Because if you try to deploy into too many areas in the beginning, you're gonna end up not starting anywhere because you're so stretched thin and you got to focus in on certain areas because the attention that you have, the resources that you have in the beginning are very finite, but you do have a lot of time in the beginning. So it's really more so about how you spend your time in the beginning, okay? Now, what else do I think works in terms of customer acquisition? Well, here's the thing. I think online to offline, talking about dinners, I think talking about live events. Neil and I were doing a live event in downtown LA. If you go to singlegrain.com/dtla, If you would like to go to the event, we're capping it at 500 people. It's going to be a group of exceptional entrepreneurs and marketers. But think about it this way, instead of just saying, oh, you know, come buy my product online, it's more so we will get to meet people in person and be able to take the relationship further because people like to do business with people. And if you just pigeonhole yourself into online only, you are basically taking away a world of opportunity. Because it's the people, when you have good connections with people, they're gonna introduce you to other people, there's gonna be this cycle, and eventually you're gonna find yourself doing deals with the most amazing people in the world, because you yourself, you are amazing. So, you know, think about how you can take these things, like we're having a little personal connection right now, but making it an offline thing is gonna go a lot further. And nowadays, I mean, like with the Marketing School live event, Neil and I, we're not organizing it ourselves. I mean, we are basically saying, hey, we're going to have an event organizer, someone that's good at doing it. We're going to make it an amazing event. And, you know, we're going to have sponsors cover the costs because that way we're not paying, you know, $50 grand or $100 grand out of pocket. By the way, the Marketing School Live event in downtown LA, Neil and I are actually doing a VIP dinner. And a couple of people in here have actually said they would be interested in the VIP dinner. It's not gonna be cheap. We're probably thinking around $2,000, but it's a dinner with Neil and I. And if you think you can get value from it, if you think you can get like, you know, 5, 10x value from it, great. I think for the vast majority of people, I think it's a steep price. I would not recommend it to most people, but some people have actually indicated interest in it. So, Martin says, that's crazy, $4 million a day. Yeah, $4 million a day, Martin. And by the way, like, let's use Martin's business as an example. So, you know, we think about Martin's business and You know, his is more so around photography, I think, correct me if I'm wrong. Now, that's a lot more visual, right? So, what are some visual platforms out there? Okay, great, you got Instagram, you got Pinterest, or maybe he's targeting interior designers, maybe you can throw something up on Houzz, and then more people can discover you that way, or maybe it makes sense to throw stuff on Dribbble, right? You just gotta think about where your people are hanging out, 'cause the general customer acquisition stuff I'm giving you, it only applies in certain areas. Now, if I am, If I'm a restaurant and I like local experiential marketing, a lot of the online stuff doesn't work as well. You got to think about local. How are you going to handle local? So a lot of it is more so thinking about too, where's my audience actually hanging out? Should I even be listening to this, this guy talking about these, all these random customer acquisition things now? Cause I'm just speaking in the sense of like, I get SaaS, right? I get kind of, you know, just digital in general, like blogging, podcasting, videos, all that stuff works well. Now, what I think works really well, what we're talking about a lot this year, is this whole content sprouting method, right? So, I drew this on the TV yesterday when we were making videos, but the idea is that you are seeding a piece of content, maybe like a video like this, right? Then you're sprouting it into multiple pieces, maybe like blog posts. So, you know, I don't know how long I'm gonna go for this video, but if I do live for this, I'm talking about like 5, 6, 10 different things right now That can become 10 different blog posts. That can become 10 different videos as well. And that can become maybe 30 different social posts. So that's 30 plus 20, right? 50, 51. So 51 pieces of content can actually come out from this one video that we're doing right now. And not only that, like, you think about the social posts, okay, you got Instagram, you got Facebook, you got Twitter. What else can you do with it, right? Maybe you could combine it into a giant pillar piece too. But you make it a lot easier for yourself to take this omnichannel approach or this content sprouting approach where you seed a piece of content, you sprout it into multiple pieces, and then you pollinate it, right? Which means you're promoting it. Maybe you're running ads, maybe you're promoting it to your email list, maybe you're promoting it to your social channels. But the idea is that you're taking a more holistic approach and you're not just, you know, a one-trick pony. Because I keep talking about this over and over, you know, you're not gonna— you don't just buy an iPhone. And then use it for a week and that's it. You want to make the most of this iPhone. I've had this one for about a year and a half now. I probably don't need to upgrade for another year and a half or 2 years, 3 years, maybe even 4. This is a really good phone. Like, I don't need to upgrade. So, think about how you can make the most of what you have, because that's the best ROI. Now, what else is working in terms of customer acquisition? Well, I'm going to take a sip real quick of tea, and I'm going to look at some of the questions. Excuse me. Lydia says, launching a site this weekend where people can download an interactive Google Sheet for $5.95 to keep track of immunizations and a weekly newsletter for health with health alerts, recommendations, and advice. Well, Lydia, I mean, I think, you know, for this, I'm hoping you have some kind of email list or some kind of audience to launch it to first. What I would do before launching anything in the beginning is I would get people to actually say raise their hand and maybe put in a link where they can PayPal you money. That's how I've launched stuff in the products in the past, whether it's courses, software product, where you just pay me, hey, we're testing this out right now. The course is going to be $1,000. And then maybe if you give me $500 right now, you're going to get it for 50% off. If you're interested in this, just PayPal me right now. People trust you already. They're actually going to do it. And we've gotten a lot of pre-sales that way, right? Because the problem is a lot of people are going to say, Oh, Lydia, that sounds like a really great idea. And what happens is they don't take out their money. They don't pay you, right? If they don't pay you, then like, you know, what's the point? So if you can get some presales to get going on it, great. I probably wouldn't recommend ads on it unless you need to figure out the lifetime value of your customer. If you don't know that, I would say, you know, start with your audience first, see how it goes, get some metrics first. And then once you have a formula, once you have like an Excel formula that where you can scale it out and make it more predictable, then you can start to think about these other channels. And that's the other thing with customer acquisition. In 2019, you have to think about how are you actually going to have a multi-touch attribution type of funnel, right? So, you know, people don't just look at you on Google and then Facebook and then maybe it's 2 channels. It's not really, it might be 7 channels, it might be 14 channels. A lot of people that buy from us, they catch us on the blog first, maybe they catch us on YouTube first, then they watch a live, then they watch a webinar. Then they meet us in person, then they listen to a podcast, and then there's like so many different touchpoints that they— and then maybe the timing's not right for them. They might not buy till 6 months later. So if you use a tool like Wicked Reports, it's, uh, I'll dump that into chat right now, wickedreports.com. It's good for small businesses. You're able to see, hey, maybe if your campaign doesn't perform in the first month, maybe they might perform 6 months later. And then you get the 6-month ROI instead of just giving up on the campaign at 1 month in. Okay. Da da da da da da. Let's see. So Manav says, "If you're starting again, no content left, no money to invest. How are you going to get your first two clients? What is going to be your first strategy?" So Manav's been smart about this where he's reached out to us to offer to work for work for free for a little bit. If you don't have anything in the beginning, if I had no content, if I had no money to invest, I do know. Okay. So the thing you didn't say, Manav, is I still kind of have my mini brand, right? I can reach out to people, offer to work for free for a little bit, and for sure, the deal— and I'll give them a deal. I'll say, hey, look, you know, maybe I work for free for you for 2 to 3 months or so, but the contingency is that we, you know, negotiate, you know, more of something that's like a retainer if I do good work for you, right? And you sort out how that looks. Because in the beginning, like, if you have nothing, what you do have is you have time. But if you have a lot of resources already, what you don't have is time. So, it's the balance, right? You go back and forth. First Metric says, is there any blog posts or content you have created that walks someone through step by step with a roadmap or to sprout content? We do have a YouTube video. We do have, I think if you Google content sprout single grain, you should be able to find the blog post. We do have a long-form blog post and it is kind of our, our kind of, it's the, it is the method we want to continue to talk about because, you know, just there's so many companies now that just Blog post, blog post, blog post, and they just give up. Blog post. It's like we tried the content marketing thing. Well, you're not doing it right. That's what we would say for a lot of people that we see that complain about it not working. At least that's our perspective. Chris says, how does your firm charge for developing and managing Messenger chatbots for clients? So Messenger chatbots, I would just say, look, you charge them a fee to build it, and then you charge them a maintenance fee too. 'Cause you might be paying ManyChat or MobileMonkey, Chatfuel, one of these tools, and, you know, let's say ManyChat charges you like $5 a month or whatever to manage it. Maybe you might charge, you know, $100 a month to manage it for them, right? Or $500 a month, whatever it is. You just gotta figure out what pricing works for your business, but I would say a setup fee first and then a monthly management fee. Maybe you agree that each month you offer a couple funnels. That's how I would do it. All right. So, we're going to work towards wrapping up. But guys, I know some of you in here are looking for more clients for your consulting or business or your agency. You guys can always apply for a call. Go to singlegrain.com/live and you can apply for a call. My team will talk to you. Or sometimes I might even talk to you. You know, like I'm talking to Martin in about an hour or so. So, just depends on like if it's the right timing for you. And we'll be really direct. If it's not the right timing, like we'll tell you. So, but like, what else is working? Well, let's go back to the traditional stuff too. If I look at some things that have worked really well, I also look at the not even having to sponsor conferences, but actually attending conferences where your target audience hangs out. Because, and by the way, like, I know, like, you know, for me, I'm introverted. I really don't like hanging out with people, like, for an extended period of time. Like, I need to recharge. I need to get home. But nothing moves things along faster than the in-person stuff, which is why I think if you have no network, I think conferences are a good place to start. I think if you, if you are starting out, like going to local conferences, local meetups, those are good, right? When I got those recommendations in the beginning, I kind of dismissed them. I was like, I don't want to go to local meetups. Everyone else— I'm just making excuses for myself. No, you know, they've been in business 10 years longer. They got so much more experience. They got so much more connections. Then I started asking myself, I started saying, You know, Eric, how many more excuses are you gonna make for yourself? Like, why don't you just go out there and do it? And yeah, sure, you suck in the beginning. Nobody wants to talk to you in the beginning. Nobody thinks they can get anything from you. But, you know, how do you think all these other people got started? Like, there's no excuse. So, if like, if you're watching this right now, it does mean you want to get better. Or maybe, you know what? I used to watch YouTube videos just to make myself feel better. It's like, yeah, yeah, but You know, what's gonna set you apart from other people is if you actually take action on it, right? So, whether it's going out there, networking, doing the things that you don't want to do, building relationships with other people, that's gonna go way further than just saying, I'm gonna stay online, I'm just gonna try to run ads. And, you know, the tricky thing about ads is actually making a machine that works for the long term. It's not as easy as you think it is. Sometimes it might take a couple weeks, a couple months, or it might even take longer than that to really start to ramp it up, because you're trying to build a formula. Now, if everyone could build a formula that works, well, guess what? Everyone would be really rich, everyone would be really successful, and things would be a lot more competitive. But there's a reason why— there's a reason why not everybody is super successful. So, think about that. Look, there's so many different things we can talk about from a customer acquisition standpoint. I'll talk about some more new things next time, but hopefully this is enough for this time. Now, guys, One thing I'll do again is when I'm doing these lives, I'll give you the formula real quick. I do a live on YouTube. I do it on Facebook. Then I run ads on Facebook towards people that might be interested in the Agency Accelerator program, which is what we have. And then this becomes a couple of different podcast episodes. This might become different videos. This might become different blog posts as well. Maybe I said that already. But it just goes so much further and it makes my life so much easier because I can just talk to you. I can answer questions. I can build a relationship with you. So it goes so much further. So anyway, guys, that's what I want to leave you for today. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe and I will see you. I will see you next week. But by the way, guys, next week I'm actually gonna be at a conference. So I'm probably gonna be going live on the go. I'm aiming to go live usually every day, weekdays, 8 AM Pacific. So look out for that. Mark your calendars. I'm gonna make it— try to make it more like a TV show. 'Cause it is the lives that are driving our content production. Also my team too, my team is just, they're pushing everything forward in terms of the blog posts, they're just making everything kind of operate like a machine. So maybe I should talk more about my team in one of the next lives if you guys would like that. So that is it for today, enjoy and see you on Monday.