Don't Ignore These Top Marketing Channels

Let's talk about the top marketing channels. I know you have a tweet on this one. I believe it's from Alex Hormozi, right?

Alex Hormozi said, organic ROI measured for us through book sales. And I want us to give our numbers because I wanted to contrast, right? So number 1 is email, 800K subs there. Number 2, YouTube, he has 2.8 million subs there. Number 3 is Instagram, 3.1 million subs. 4 is LinkedIn, 450K. 5 is Facebook, 200K. 6 is podcast, 41K average download per episode. 7 is TikTok. He has 1 million followers there.

But okay, so he's not ranking them based on emails or subscribers. He's ranking them in order based on what's driving the most revenue. Is that correct?

He's ranking them in revenue, but he's also giving his sub count.

And does he give the revenue for each channel or no? No.

So here's what he says. He says, these are rough. My books are also free on my podcast. I don't sell courses. I don't teach M&A.

Use if useful. We're just speaking marketing channels, not like employee referrals or anything like that. I would say number 1 channel by far is Google. SEO. Number 2 is email. If I had to pick a channel, number 1 is SEO, number 2 is email. And a lot of email is driven from SEO traffic or social traffic eventually subscribing, but it's actually mainly SEO traffic because we track where we're getting a lot of our emails from. And a lot of it just comes from organic search traffic. Number 3 would be social. If I had to pick, I would say LinkedIn, we're doing better these days than YouTube because we're going more upstream.

How many impressions are you getting per week on LinkedIn? Do you know?

Right here, 3 million post impressions.

Yeah, 3 million in the last 7 days.

Yeah, so 3 million post impressions on LinkedIn.

You have what, like a couple hundred thousand followers?

Let's see, 684,000 followers.

Dude, so we can put a pin in this one, but I only have like 46,000 followers and last week I got 1.1 million impressions.

Wow.

So we can talk about that in a second, yeah.

And I would say LinkedIn is really effective, but the key that we found with LinkedIn is it has to be very specific content for your target audience. Like I got a lot of impressions for talking about Hailey Bieber and how many—

I saw that.

Her smoothies.

800 grand a month.

Doesn't drive any revenue.

Of course not.

But on the flip side, when I do charts on like, you know, I just put out one today on form field conversion rates. You know, what's your conversion rate? What's a conversion rate on average depending on how many form fields that you're collecting?

Your charts have gotten better. They're actually useful now.

That kind of stuff doesn't generate the impressions, but it generates leads. So we focus on that because we look at, at the end of each week, what is actually driving leads for us? And I recommend to anyone, don't optimize for impressions, optimize purely for revenue because you're just wasting your time if you optimize for impressions unless your goal is branding or to be famous. And after, I would say LinkedIn, if I had to pick another channel, I would say it's webinars. But webinars, a lot of that comes from email and social. is actually roughly half.

Did you try the Hala strategy, the DMs with the LinkedIn for webinar signups?

It's too much work.

We hire people.

Yeah, I know, but we already get so many webinar signups.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're good.

I go, how many webinar signups did we get this week? And he's like, oh, we got 12,000 for this webinar. I'm like, all right, what are we going to do, message a lot of people, get extra 300 signups?

Yeah, you're good.

And we already get enough big corporations on them. But when we do our webinars, no joke, roughly half the viewership Comes from streaming live on all the social platforms. Yep. Wow. So the webinars are not all—

And you're just using Restream for that?

Yes. And when I say, let's say if we get 12,000 signups on a webinar, that's 12,000 signups pre-streaming. And then when you're streaming live, 24,000? No, cuz even on the 12,000, they don't all show up.

Oh, you get like 2,400 that show up, maybe 3,000 that show up, right?

On a good webinar, we get like 5,000.

Oh, that's a lot. That's including the people that are just watching.

On both ends.

Yeah, that's a lot. So anyway, your mileage may vary. Um, I thought I'd just call this one out. Um, high level, same, same for us. SEO would be one, email would be close second. Those are probably the main ones for us.

My top marketing channel, Patrick, I had to look at it. It's none of those. It's— It's your referrals. And it's, it is, it's how you want to categorize them, but they're in these 3 buckets and I don't, I forgot what order they're in. RFPs, Employee referrals and client referrals. Those are our top 3 channels. And I don't know how you want to combine them. We just lump them to one, but that makes up the majority. And when I say majority, over 50%.

Yep. And that's, that's, it just comes down to your product at the end of the day, right?

Yes.

And so a couple years ago, you know what our churn was? Oh my God. The, the, the, the, the retention for one of our service lines was 17% annual logo retention, right? This year it's 91%. So I'm like, you, if you improve the product, You're going to get referrals. And then a lot of those people leave and they don't want to look like dummies when they go somewhere else. They want to hire someone that they can rely on and they're going to go somewhere else and they're going to hire you.

Well, what was the churn numbers again?

It was 17% retention, annual logo retention. This is a couple of years ago. Now it's 91%.

So 17%.

Yeah, 17% retention.

So that means 83% churn.

Yes.

Okay.

And now? Now it's 9% churn.

9% churn a year.

Yeah, annual. This is for one service line. So it just, it comes down, a lot of it comes down to hiring at the end of the day, right?

Totally agree. So dude, I did an interview today and the guy was asking me, you know, SEO questions, agency questions, and general questions.

Podcast interview?

Uh-huh. Yeah, I forgot the podcast name. Apologize, but I do so many of them on a weekly basis. So he was just like, what's the biggest thing you've learned like from running an agency when it comes to just like growing an agency and how do you grow fast? Because he asked me, did you ever expect your agency to have 1,000+ people? I was like, no. And I'm like, a lot of it's It's luck and timing. Sure, I worked hard, I executed, I've been doing this long enough, I've been persistent, but I do believe me getting into the industry early really helped solidify, right? And I think like Gary Vaynerchuk jumping on social media early helped him out. A lot of that's luck and timing. He was smart to spot the trend though, right? So it's not all luck and timing, and I'm not trying to take anything away from Gary. He's amazing at spotting trends and one of the best I've seen on the web. And so he was asking me, what's the key to like really growing agency? And he's just like, you know, most people would assume results. And I gave him an example of what we did for CNN. We won awards for it. Did you know in a year period of time, we drove an extra billion page views to CNN through organic traffic, SEO? A billion just from our efforts, trackable. That's a lot of Freaking pages. You agree with this, right?

Yeah.

That's a crapload. And do you think we retained that account after we did amazing results?

Nope.

Nope. You want to know why? Account manager didn't build strong enough relationships with the key decision makers. And I was explaining to him like, you can have the best results in the world, but if your account managers aren't great at building relationships, and I'm not trying to badmouth our account managers or anything, like we learn and some of the executives as well, including me, that need to do a better job. If we built better relationships with the key decision makers, they would stick around instead of giving it to someone else.

Because you're not just a number anymore. You're someone that they care a little bit about.

Yes. And this is why you got to do more face-to-face and get to know people personally and business-wise. But yeah, you know, when we look at all of this, we're just like, man, we wish that, you know, the big thing, the lesson for me, and it took me many years to learn this is You can have the best people to do the work, but if you don't have great communicators and account managers, at least in a service-based business, you will lose a ton of revenue over time.

All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. Want to talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com— grain like rice— so singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. It's interesting because I put up a post last week on LinkedIn just saying Agents, there's a lot of agency people out there that are such great talkers and they don't know how to drive any results at all, right? But you kind of need some of these relationships. You know, I was going to say schmoozers, but it is schmoozing at the end of the day, right? You just, that's a skill in itself. So everyone has their uses.

Totally. And the other thing I learned too is we, throughout our years of running an agency, I used to believe the person who's the best at selling is going to win the contracts. Forget relationships and who you know and all that kind of stuff. Like, oh, the person who's the smoothest at talking and a really good salesman and know these special skills, you know, like on how to close and put pressure. When you go up to enterprise, none of that matters. They look at de-risking and they look at how much is this going to cost? What is the ROI going to be? And can you prove to me you can actually generate the ROI before I sign the contract? And if you can get, if you can do a better job than everyone else, because it's hard to do that 100%, Right? No one really does that 100% in a service-based business. There's no guarantee. But if you can really prove, not just with case studies showing that your people's experience who are going to work on their account, showing them things like what you've done for other competitors or other similar logos over time with case studies that are public. Of course, you don't want to share private data. That's the kind of stuff that wins a pitch and just getting super technical instead of being like, hey, you know, Use this sales tactic to close people and you'll see your sales double or triple or 20%. And I used to get these pitches so much. Hey, if you let us take over your sales, you'll generate 20, 30% more revenue. I was like—

A lot of it's from the internet marketing world.

Uh-huh, and I was like, I doubt that you can take over my sales. And I'm not saying we're the best, but I'm like, it's not about being the smoothest talker. It's about knowing your client and being super technical and explaining to them how you're actually going to produce the results for all that money That they're spending.

Yep. Yep. That is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. By the way, that price keeps going up. It just doubled last yesterday, actually. So yeah, go check it out and we'll see you tomorrow.