Effective ways to generate B2B revenue, Importance of organic social media, and more

So this next episode is covering a portion of our Agency Owners Association 1.5-hour call that Neil and I did. So if you're an agency owner and, or if you're looking to just learn more about how to scale an agency, there are a lot of questions that we get from the community members in here. This is basically a sneak preview into how the group works and one of the major benefits of the group. So if you're interested, please listen. And without further ado, here is the episode. Here we go. So again, feel free to raise your hand. I'm going to start off with some questions over here and then Neil and I will kind of popcorn each other. In fact, Neil doesn't— Neil's a rarity here. So what we're going to— I'm going to get you to talk more, Neil. So why don't we start off with— I'm going to start off with Chris Schneider's question over here because I think it's a broader question. So the question from Chris is, if you were starting long-form content in hopes to drive more business leads and establish expertise, For a marketing and advertising agency, what's your preferred long-form medium? Blog, podcast, or YouTube?

Neither. Long-form content on LinkedIn, breaking down case studies. Okay, you could consider that a blog, but that is one of the best ways we've found to generate B2B revenue. The next form of marketing would be awards. The next one would be RFPs or inclusion in things like Gartner, Forrester, et cetera. They all help really well in most B2B categories.

Yeah. So I think the answer for me is, it's an annoying one. It depends. For example, if you're selling short-form content or creative content, for example, I see a lot of people posting to Twitter and they're getting tons of business that way. And it just, if your audience is hanging out and they're expecting something on one channel, you can post there. But in general, if we're to broaden it out, it would be Neil's answer. So That's just how the world is today. Like we would not start with blogging today. And even though Neil and I both come from a blogging background, it's too saturated, it's too difficult, and the attention's not quite there as much anymore because it's, the attention's so spread out now. So marketing 101, you want to focus on where your audience is hanging out. And then marketing 101, your job is to, you know, the job of marketing is to bring people to the point of sale.

And remember you guys asked where we would start out, not necessarily the channels we would include. We would eventually do blogging, we would eventually do social content and all the other channels. It's more so we wouldn't necessarily do them first if it was B2B and generating revenue through marketing for B2B.

And actually, Neil, I want to give you an example. There's a guy, he's a kid basically, he's only 21 years old. So he graduated from Columbia, super smart guy. His agency, I think they're doing like $2 million a year right now already. And he's gotten all of his business from just giving creative feedback or posting his creative work that like ad creative work to Twitter. And that's worked for him, right? So your mileage may vary. Just keep in mind, like there's nuances to this at the end of the day. So Chris, does that help? Chris, are you even in here?

I am.

Thank you for that.

That was super insightful. Cool. All right, next one. Let's continue moving. And then basically when you guys raise your hand, I want a live question so I can, we can just call on you so people from the podcast can hear it. Right now I'm just going to read dictate these out. So Matt asks, how do you approach building strategic partnerships or collaborations with other agencies to expand capabilities? Are there any sort of industry standard revenue sharing or commission models?

Wait, repeat the question again. Is there any—

All right.

So how do you approach building strategic partnerships or collaborations with other agencies to expand capabilities? Are there any sort of industry standard revenue sharing or commission models?

So the first thing is when you're doing partnerships or building relationships with other agencies, you got to find ones that are complementary services. For example, if you only offer SEO, you want to find someone who offers pay-per-click advertising, for example, because that's easy to cross-sell. And you can either do it on a rev-share basis, you can end up doing it on a white-label basis, or you can end up even doing it from a standpoint of you just give people customers, they give you, and no one takes any money. The last one is what I actually prefer and like, but you're going to have to just meet these other agencies through networking, communication, talking, and you got to find the ones that offer services that you don't and vice versa, or else it doesn't work as well.

Yeah. So one, to Neil's point, they got to be complementary to you. So for example, if we're— if we focus on SEO and focus on paid media, then if we go to a pure design shop, for example, that might make sense. And ideally, They're either your size or maybe 1 or 2 steps ahead of you. And you want, because you ultimately at the end of the day, you're looking for a symbiotic relationship. And sometimes what we try to do is we try to start a little smaller. It's like, oh, can we do like a, like maybe like a co— you can, back in the day, it's like you, you might do a guest blog post or nowadays you might do adding value first rather than asking for something. Because psychology, right? If you guys have read the book Influence, the whole idea here is that once you give someone something, they feel like they owe you. So that's why I give Neil a lot of gifts, because he owes me a lot.

All right.

Wait, what gifts do you give me?

Nothing.

So you owe me nothing. So actually, no, I actually do have a gift for you. I'll bring it when we record next time. Adam has a question and then we're going to move over into— I'm going to call on you, Marcos, next, and then we're going to continue to read through some of these questions. In fact, Neil, I'm going to make you read some of these questions so it's not all me. So Adam asks— so Adam says he read an article on how paid SEM will become slightly more important as organic gets squeezed by Google SGE, search Generative Experience. Question, what do Eric and Neil think about this shift and how can we act on it? So I'll start first. It's no longer called SGE, just for semantics here. It's called AI Overviews now. And then Neil actually has some numbers on that before I pass it to you. But basically AI Overviews, BrightEdge shares some numbers around this, but the number of AI Overviews has gone down quite a bit. That's not saying it won't come back. So I wouldn't worry about it too much right now. But I will say that— We did an episode on Marketing School a couple weeks ago. I mentioned that I think the value of organic social is continuing to rise just because if you publish something really good, it can get millions of views. Like this, this week I got lucky with, with 2. There's, there's one video where we have like 6 million views on it, and then another one where we have 2 million views on it where Neil and I are talking about Loro Piana. Is that going to get us customers? Not necessarily, but it does keep us top of mind, right? I actually, from one of the videos, A CMO from a multi-billion dollar company, a crypto company, reached out to me and said, hey bud, right? It's one of those, hey bud messages, how are you doing type of thing? And it's, I'm looking for those, I'm looking for the organic social to kind of tee up opportunities, right? And it just creates serendipity at the end of the day. So that's a long way of saying not too worried about the paid piece, the AI overviews piece. But I will say that I do think organic social is a nice opportunity for right now. I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

Yeah, so we looked at a lot of data and averaged out client data from before and after the AI overviews. What we saw is impressions were down 1.98%, clicks were up 1.32%. We haven't— we've yet to see a decrease in traffic, even if you fast forward to today. So when you're talking about the importance of paid, I always do think it's important for paid. Do I think their goal is to get more people to click on paid? Of course. Do we see that AI Overviews is decreasing SEO? We haven't seen it since its launch.

Interesting, because I had one client who was talking about how they didn't want to invest in SEO because how AI is going to take it over. So this, the macro trend of AI and search just makes people feel wary about investing for the future. At least that's what I've sensed from a couple clients. So that's some good data that just shows like the effect today is there's hardly any effect.

Yeah, so this data was analyzed from over 400 clients in the United States. So you can— it's on my Twitter somewhere. If you just go to the media section, you'll see the chart. It looks something like this, but it pretty much just breaks down all of the total clicks and impressions and what the change was.

Good deal. Great talking to you, Face to face here. I first found out about you and Eric in the Marketing School Podcast, like 2016 or something. I was like, wow, 4 minutes of marketing fun. And it's cool to meet you.

Wow. That's when we first started it too. That's amazing. So you stuck it out with us.

There's been like a few years of a gap, but yeah.

Yeah. Hey, hey, before we move on, Adam, do you think the new format's better or the old format's better?

I only know the old format with like that music. I listened religiously for probably 2 years.

Oh, so you don't listen to it now? Okay.

Got it.

No, not at all.

Okay.

Got it. Got it.

The new format, I've been listening since 2016 and the new— I like the new format better.

All right.

You're letting Neil talk a little more finally too, you know, so, but now I know where Neil buys his suits from. So, you know, Beverly Hills, right? So I gotta go there and check it out.

Yep. Um, all right, cool. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna call on Marcos and then, um, we're gonna, we're gonna kind of alternate between the text questions and then the live questions. So Marcos, go for it.

Hey, what's up guys? Sorry if there's an echo and lightning. So my question is, we have a client who is on a percentage-based deal. We have some retainer-only, some performance-based deals. I run a Twitter and LinkedIn ghostwriting agency. And my question is, how do you guys manage a relationship with a client who seems to focus on the price even though you're performing better? For example, we just had multiple record months and it seems with each record month he is more resentful of the quote unquote expense, even though he's making a bigger profit. So I'm a little bit interested in how you guys would manage this relationship because from our end, crushing it, from his end, prices more even though they're making more. So that's my question.

I haven't really dealt with that too much. I usually have people look at the ROI. And I don't know how you're doing your reporting, but I think there could be an issue on how you're presenting the data. And yes, you can end up saying it's costing more, but they're making way more money, and your reporting needs to focus on the revenue and ROI growth more than anything else. And if they're just like, hey, we can end up— if we want to end up paying less, I'll just be honest. The more you spend, the more we do, the more it costs. And be transparent and show them your agency numbers if you need to, and your margins, and be like, look, let's say you operate at 20%, and you're just like, I'm charging you more, but I'm only making $2,000 a month in profit. You're looking at the 10 grand. You need to look at, you know, what I'm actually taking home. I can't do this for $5,000. If I did, I can, but you would just be spending less and you'd be making less money. So it's up to you on whatever you want to end up doing, but it's probably how you're presenting it. Most Larger corporations know that agencies usually operate somewhere between the 10% and 20% margin range. Some are higher, some are lower than 10%, but some are higher than 20% even. And companies are okay with it because if you're growing their numbers, things cost money. But there's something off probably with the reporting and how you're communicating this with the customer.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency, so NP Digital. So Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global, they're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. And Marcos, one thing I tell my team is like, guys, who can, like at the end of the day, if the customer is investing X dollars, they want to understand Y return that they're getting. If you can break that equation down for them, and to Neil's point, it's like, how am I supposed to do that, right? You can use that negotiation tactic, but I find it easiest when I just— when I can show a table and say, hey, okay, you're making this, you're making this much more, you're making exponentially more, and we're charging like a flat fee here. So that's a pretty good deal for you. And if they don't understand that, then it might be time to part ways, maybe in a couple months or so, because if they can't understand that, I wonder what else they don't understand.

Right. Yeah. From my perspective, I'm like, couldn't I get a competitor who will appreciate it and just do the exact same thing?

Yeah, we did this for your competitor. Okay, here are the numbers, right? Maybe you anonymize the data a little bit.

I don't know.

You don't, maybe you don't say who the competitor is and you just reach out to all of them. Someone's bound to take you up on it.

And then double the percentage, right? I appreciate it, guys. I'm going to improve my reporting and maybe my outbound sales. Thanks, guys.

All right, cool. Neil, do you want to read this question from Brian over here?

I don't even know where the questions are.

Oh my God. All right, here, I'm going to read it. So, so you're— so it's Brian's question is, I saw an ad on IG that Neil did about Google Ads. It said how there's, there's like trick to getting them to convert. Didn't click on the ad, tired and didn't have the energy, but was curious. Brian, do you want to elaborate a little bit?

Yeah, sorry. Basically, you were saying how a lot of agencies and Businesses spend money on paid media and it doesn't always work. And there was some reason for that. I'm assuming it has to do with the landing page and I wasn't sure what you were getting at. I didn't have a chance to look at it because I was just worn out that day.

You are correct.

It has to do with 2 things, the landing page and the second is the creative. Most paid ad campaigns, people are like, oh, I'm better at managing ads than you. And yes, some people are better at managing ads, But they have access to all the same tools and features and technology. The real difference is— the real X factor is your landing page and the creative that you're using. It's those 2 elements.

Thank you.