Digital Marketing Game Plan with Leveling Up Chairman Eric Siu

Eric, thanks so much for being with us. I'm really excited to talk to you about this. As I told you, as we were waiting, my mom is a small business owner. I have a lot of family members who are small business owners. And so I'm really excited to be a part of this today. So let's start with how can people think about M&A or mergers and acquisitions as a marketing channel? I think you told me that you wanna sort of strip away, you know, the big and scary acronym and sort of make it more relevant. Let's start there.

Totally. And thanks for having me, Rahel. So when you think about M&A, people are like, oh my God, private equity, maybe it's something that's not for me. Maybe it's for the big holding companies out there. But when you think of M&A, what you're doing is you're actually buying growth. And so, you know, actually the very first company that I— successful company that worked at was a company that I took over, which is called Single Grain, which is an ad agency.

Yeah.

And, you know, I learned the ropes of business, but then I also was got a lot of leverage around the business too, because not only did I, um, you know, take the revenues for the company, the clients and all that, but I also acquired a marketing channel in that they had a very strong blog as well, right? So I was looking at their marketing assets, you know, they had a strong blog with, um, you know, good amount of traffic. They had an email list as well. So, um, I encourage you to not only just look at the marketing assets, but look at what other assets you can pick up if you are acquiring a company. And I'll kind of just leave it at that. And we'll say, hey, look, if you're interested in learning more about it, there's actually a really good book called Buy Then Build.

Interesting. Okay. Always nice to have good book recommendations. When a company is thinking about, I know you just mentioned thinking about maybe one medium or one channel. When a company's even just thinking about their marketing strategy, what questions should they be asking themselves and what steps should they start off with?

Yeah. So they should be thinking about The number one thing when it comes to marketing is where's my audience hanging out? So they could very well be hanging out on a Reddit forum. They could be hanging out on Instagram. So I think it's important to understand where they're hanging out first, and ideally understanding that where it's very competitive from maybe an ad dollars perspective and maybe where it's not. So you're looking for a blue ocean versus a red ocean, and you want to go there first. And the reason why I wanted to start with M&A first is because, again, If you think about assets out there, ad costs from Facebook and Google are continuing to get more expensive. Where can you go buy an asset? Maybe someone has a Facebook group out there, or maybe someone has a good email list, right? Where can you go buy these assets? Maybe where they're under-monetized. So as an example, not to get too complicated here, you can go buy a blog that's getting a lot of traffic and maybe they're monetizing through Google Ads, right? So Google AdSense, they're running those ads on the site. That means they're under-monetized. You can probably offer them a good deal for it. And then you can roll them into, maybe there's an e-commerce site that you have and you roll your products into that. And that's a strategy that a lot of businesses that have been using. And I don't think it's just limited to big businesses. I think small businesses can do the same as well.

So let's take a step back. So, you know, let's say YouTube is your platform of choice or TikTok or Twitter. You know, there's one thing to choosing a platform. There's another thing to figuring out how to make it resonate, right? Like, I know with TikTok, I have 2 teenage brothers and they send me videos, and the things that really resonate on TikTok are things that are funny or interesting or short and quick. And so, you know, how do you speak to, or how do you sort of figure out what that special magic is or that special sauce is to make it actually land, to make it worth watching and listening to?

Yeah. So Rahel, that's a really good question. I think when you're writing or creating any type of piece of content, instead of creating for the people out there, think about what's interesting to you and creating for yourself first. And that makes it a lot easier. And I think also it's important to get the suckage out of your body, meaning that you have to be very consistent in the beginning and then you'll get better over time.

Yeah.

And that's what it takes ultimately. It's just most people give up too early because they're focused on the wrong things. They're focused on, Oh, I'm not getting enough views. Oh, not enough people are liking my stuff. But what they really should be looking for is, are they actually improving over time? And are there some people every now and then, you know, saying, hey, this is great, this has changed my life, right? You're not going to build an audience overnight or even in 3 months, 6 months. The truth is, you know, unless it's lightning in a bottle, it might take you 2 to 3 years to really start to build an audience.

I want to ask, on the one hand, it totally makes sense to sort of figure out which platform or which sort of medium makes the most sense, but also is there something to perhaps giving, giving several of them a try to figure out what you're resonating with most or where people— for example, there are YouTubers that I love that have millions of followers, and then when I go to their IG page, you know, they have a couple thousand followers. And clearly there's, there's not— it's not translating on one platform as it is, as well as it is on a different platform. And so I guess I wonder if you sort of pigeonhole yourself to Instagram, maybe perhaps you would resonate a lot better on YouTube. So is there something also to maybe figuring out where your audience really is and likes you the best?

Yeah. So I think it's really important in the beginning, same thing with business, you have to learn before you earn. And so you have to learn one channel first, get it down and you have an audience there and then you can move them around. Right. I think, Looking at Jake Paul or Logan Paul, they're big YouTubers now, but I believe they started from Vine first. And then same thing with Charli D'Amelio, started with TikTok and now she's big on IG, YouTube. So I think you nail one first and then you think about the rest. It's, I think it's too much cognitive load when you're thinking about 5 or 6 different channels, because you're not even good at one yet. Why try to spread out? And same thing with business, right? Apple started with one product first and now they have a bunch. So it's the same concept. Yeah.

Yeah. And also I know just, you know, from some of my friends in television, you know, sometimes, you know, burnout is real when you're on Twitter and LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook, you're just, you know, sort of all over the place. And so to your point, maybe it would serve you better and maybe your mental health better to just kind of focus on one.

Well, I like to say like success is like a sphere. So you start in the middle and success is on all the edges. And then you start, you go up, you're going to hit it. But if you keep going all over the place, you'll never get there. And to your point, I was actually talking to someone on the team yesterday. We just acquired a company. And so I was just doing like a quick 15-minute meet and greet. And she's like, well, I manage 15 social media accounts and they don't get much engagement. And I'm like, do you? I mean, there's no, like, you know why that is, right? Because you're doing too many different things at once.

Yeah. That's a really interesting question. While we're still on this subject, which platforms really have your attention these days, or what's exciting to you?

So Twitter is not the answer that people would expect, but Twitter to me is interesting because I do a lot of B2B work and some of the smartest people, smartest investors, smartest tech people are on Twitter. And if a post takes off there, a lot of the right people see it. So it's, for my audience, that's the right fit, right? But what I would say long-term is I'm most interested in YouTube. I think that aligns with everyone across the board, whether they're Gen Zers or people like myself, or you just, YouTube is just continuing to compound, I believe about 15% quarter on quarter. So, um, you, there's good discoverability there. And I think you can really build a brand there and build a business on top of it.

Another viewer question was, how do you develop a short to long-term marketing plan?

Yeah. So, I mean, there's like, there's 2 there, but short-term, I think it's, it's just figuring out what works. And like I mentioned, test a bunch of things initially, but don't try to do too many at once. Test one, move on to the next one, test, and then obviously set goals for it. Long-term with marketing, it's figuring out, okay, where can you corner the market? Where do you have an unfair advantage? We talked about the audiences that you can buy there. But beyond that, it's also hiring the best people at the end of the day. I used to think because I led marketing at a lot of different technology startups, that it was most important to be the best marketer. And then you realize as you get a little more experience with business, it's not about how to do it, it's about who can do it. And it's finding the absolute best people. And here's the— here's what I love about Twitter. You can see how someone thinks, you can see what they're sharing, you can see how they write on Twitter. And I generally look at Twitter as a— that's the resume now. I don't need a resume anymore. I can just look at who are the best creators, look at their Twitter, look at their Instagram, see how they think. DM them and then figure out how can we work together. Even if it's paying you a couple hundred dollars an hour for, for your time and then establishing a relationship there, that just goes way further because these people live on these platforms all day. There's no need to try to figure it all out once you start to get some more success with your business.