Engagement grew on X despite controversy, Beverly Hills schools struggle to fill classrooms, & more

Did you see the campaign article on how engagement grew on X despite controversy? So it doesn't matter what Elon posted or what a lot of people are talking about or how political X is getting, uh, engagement on X has grown since Elon took it over.

By how much?

Uh, I do not know, and I don't think they actually have that publicized.

You and I are using it more. Um, I, I see politicians still using it quite a bit. And so I think it's one of the best places because one, you can— organic reach is still pretty strong there. I get better organic reach on Twitter than I do on LinkedIn. I don't know about you.

I get better reach on LinkedIn than X.

You know, I feel like I'm in LinkedIn jail. That's what it is. Because I'm so sporadic with posting. You're posting it like every day, aren't you?

My team posts for me. So my model is I just repurpose. I know. Yes, but no. And what I mean by that is I post on X. And I'll do that myself. Like while we're recording this podcast, one of my guys made a chart for me. I told him, you know, to make me a chart earlier in the day. Team gathered the data. I sent him the data over Skype. He's a designer. I'm like, hey—

He still uses Skype, guys.

Yeah, I love Skype. And I'm like, hey, can you design this? Team sent over the data and I just copy and paste what they sent me in email. So it's not like I had to type it out. He then ends up making the chart. I post it on X. I create the copy and I'll post once or twice a day. I then take the winners a few times a month. I'll record the video content here in the Mandarin in the different room, the one next door.

Yeah.

And then my team will literally post it on LinkedIn, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. Am I missing one? I think that's it. And what they'll do is they'll send me the edited videos. I approve them. Then they schedule them out. If there's anything urgent, I'll tell them. And what they'll do is they'll post a video and the text will literally come from my tweet word for word.

Oh, so they, they, they take the video, which is like a short, and they take the tweet and they just combine them and post it. Yeah.

And then the video, they have a teleprompter. I'm recording me reading my tweet that I wrote word for word.

That's pretty, that's pretty, it's simple, not easy.

It's simple, it works. We've gone from, our views have increased a lot, but we've gone from talking about more generic marketing beginner stuff to try to get it more specific and talking about more stats and data. We're not getting the view count that we used to get, but what we're finding is it's driving better quality, inbound leads. And when I say that is we don't have tons of data on it. But when we talk to people like, oh yeah, saw the social post talking about this data, we've been struggling with Facebook, and you shared some data. So we want to talk about how you guys can help. You want to hear something crazy? So my son graduated today.

Better be crazy.

We're figuring out where he goes to school next year. So in Beverly Hills, did you know their schooling system, they have money, like people literally The schools ask for donations, like you get this building named after you, half a million bucks, million bucks for this. So people donate crazy amounts of money. Did you know that they lack students for their schools in Beverly Hills?

They lack students, so they're low on students?

Yes, there's not enough people who live here with kids that are young enough to put them into the school system.

So what do you do?

So they're now doing something where if your grandparents or parents went to Beverly Hills school system and you live in a different area, you can come to the schools because they don't have enough students now to fill up the classes. And if they can't fill enough students up from that, they're going to start doing like, not an auction-based system, but what is it called? Like a lottery?

Yeah, right. Where they just start picking random people to see if they want to come to Beverly Hills.

Yes.

Wow. What do they have to pay?

No, the schooling is free.

Public school?

Yeah. Oh, wow. Amazing SAT scores for Beverly Hills High School for people who want to go to a private—

Fight every day.

Yeah, I think the average is getting close to like 1380 or somewhere around there. Now that's the average. Imagine all the people that are in GATE, AP, IB, their scores are probably 1400 or 1500 plus.

What'd you get on your SATs?

No comment. I didn't do well on anything. Actually, I did well.

No, you did well.

I did really well.

Yeah. You probably did really well on math. Not so well on the verbal piece.

I had almost a perfect in math.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, how'd you do on the verbal?

Decent.

How decent?

Decent enough.

You probably got like 600 on verbal and like close to 800 on math. That's my guess.

I only was 10 points off from a perfect on math.

So 790 on math, and then like probably 6-something, 650 on verbal or something.

Yeah, you're close. Yeah, that's right.

So just so everyone knows, Neil got a 1440 on his SATs.

That's good. But nonetheless, when you look at like a lot of the people in the school system, there's just not enough people. And why? Think about the house prices. Younger people can't afford the homes anymore. The older people still own a lot of the homes. But what's funny is I posted about this because we were talking about YPO and stuff like that. And a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I want amazing networking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think YPO is some of the best networking ever because you're building lifelong friendships. But if you just want to meet a shit ton of rich people, go rent a house in a neighborhood where everyone has a $20, $30, $40 million house.

Hey, Brad, listen to this. So, so he wrote this tweet, right? He's like, so instead of YPO or EO, you could just buy a $20 million home. And then someone's like, someone's like, well, no, well, what if we can't afford $20 million? Well, Neil's like, you know, you could just rent it for like $40 grand a month. And nobody can afford that.

And then I said, split it between entrepreneurs so you can have roommates.

Okay, that's a good one. If you led with that, that would have been fine. But many entrepreneurs won't do that. But actually, that's a good idea. If you're an entrepreneur listening to this, if you move to Beverly Hills and you get 4 people to split it or 5 or maybe 6 people, I don't know, just get a bigger home.

They're all big homes.

Then you can, you can do pretty well there. You want— it's still high rent, but it's— you're splitting it.

One of the homes that we were looking at buying was that credit card company. What's the startup credit card company?

Brex.

Brex. It was the founders of Brex for Renting. And I think they were spending $100,000 to $150,000 a month in rent. I know it was more than $100,000. I think it was less than $150,000. Let's round to like $120,000.

That's what happens when you raise a lot of money. You got some extra money to spend.

But they were splitting, 2 founders. Oh, wow.

So call it $75,000 a month?

Let's call it $60,000 a year.

That's $900,000 a year, everyone. That's $1 million. But you know, actually, the fact that you brought up—

It's technically $720 each.

Oh my God. It's too expensive, guys.

I did well on math.

But no, no, no. $75 times 12.

Oh, I was basing it on $60.

Oh, I was basing it on $75.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So the thing you brought up about Beverly Hills, so the numbers came in, and by the way, the government, they keep revising the GDP numbers. And so what was like 2.5% growth or whatever, I think got revised down to like -1.2% or something like that. So they're slowly like revising things. Um, and inflation is kind of, it's, it's, it's still kind of there. And, but the economy sucks right now. So what does that mean? We're getting closer to stagflation.

Dude. And, uh, Jamie Dimon was talking about that too. What's the Beverly Hills thing?

The thing you're talking about, like how no students are like, it's too expensive to live around here.

It's too expensive. I don't know.

People can't afford anything. My mom, I was walking with my mom 2 weeks ago. And then she's like, she's like, dude, she even feels like we're getting lied to. She feels like the economy sucks. You feel like— I think we all feel like the economy sucks.

The economy sucks.

Yeah.

And it's funny too, because it's like when you look at most of the people that live here, the homes were still expensive 10, 20 years ago. But 10 years ago, they're roughly half the price that they are today. People's income in many cases have not doubled in the last 10 years. And the people who can afford, call it $10, $20, $30 million houses usually aren't couples with kids that are 3, 4, 5, 10 years old. It's— they're typically much older in life.

Gotta own assets. That's the lesson for everyone here.

Or you gotta rent. You may become a resident of Beverly Hills in a few— 6 months.

I might, I might, I might. Yeah.

Are you actually or not?

I think so.

You are?

I think so. Yeah, I think I'll become a resident of Beverly Hills.

Let me know. I'll get that rental income, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude.

Speaking of rental income, we have, let's see, what else do we have? We have, did you see the MrBeast thing where his ViewStats is actually doing really well now? He's promoting it and he's charging $50 a month for it. It's like an all-in-one YouTube tool.

You're talking about the one that's like a Social Blade competitor?

Yeah.

I haven't seen that. I did see the Twitter post or X post that broke down his views per year since he started. His growth has been crazy.

Yeah. And dude, even if he has like 10,000 people paying $50 a month, that's $500 grand a month. That's a $6 million a year business. Not bad.

He'll get it to be much larger than that with his audience.

Oh, for sure. All right everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads. Share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside. And then there's actually another one here. Um, so this guy Cody Schneider tweeted this: friend, non-technical founder, SMB SaaS just hit $6.6 million in under 3 years, self-funded, only 6 engineers. They're all in India, only 5 customer service reps, 3 in Brazil, 2 in Philippines. Marketing solely YouTube influencer marketing, employees on contract. It's a new world.

High profit. I bet you they didn't release their margins, but I bet they're operating like at 60+% margins.

Yeah, but I mean, even on my YouTube channel, like I have, there's, there's like SEO software companies, we'll just call it that, that are paying me like you know, $7,500 for a video just to mention them, right?

Yeah.

And so like, and we're seeing like it's successful for our clients too. The influencer marketing stuff, it's just like, you know, wherever the attention is, try to get it underpriced. And I still, I think, I still think it's kind of underpriced right now if you're finding micro-influencers.

Yes, especially in B2B.

All right, look, if you're looking to hire additional marketers for your team, there's no better place to look than, well, hiring nearshore, hiring offshore. And we found that we've hired amazing creative people. We've hired amazing people that can help with execution. On the marketing side, whatever it is that you're looking for exactly, we are helping with that. We have recruiters from our side. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/hire. Fill out the information in terms of what you need, and then we'll have our recruiters reach out to you to help you with the placement. And it should be great for you at the end of the day because you're going to save a lot of money and you're going to get the help that you need. So you're going to get help from a cost standpoint and also an execution standpoint as well. So again, marketingschool.io/hire. And we'll see you inside. We should talk about the rise of inbound lead sales, right? So inbound lead outbound, or you could just call it warm outbound. But let me, let's start with this first. So your LinkedIn posts, if a CEO of a Fortune 500 company engages on your post, likes it or comments, do you have your sales team that's on top of it reaching out to them?

No.

So there's actually, Adam Robinson from Retention does this, right? There's actually someone monitoring it and they just constantly starting conversations with people. And eventually those lead up to demos booked and then it leads up to more customers. customers for them. So I think we're going to see this rise in talking about warm outbound because I think the problem, especially in B2B, is people are so focused on the 5% of people that are ready to buy now. But what about the other 95% of people that aren't ready to buy? And I think we're going to have to be nurturing more. We're going to talk about a lot more first-party data that you're collecting on people, enriching the data, and then reaching out to those people. I think going back to it, talking about YPO again, you got to establish relationships and for a long period of time. And so to me, warm outbound, there's all these like different playbooks you can use now. And, you know, for us, by the way, we're sending like 500 emails a day right now. And I think recently we got a couple of sales for an offer that we put together and it was cold.

Huh.

Yeah, it works.

We take the approach with social media other than posting the content that, you know, you and I have talked about or people see that I post. We actually try to mention companies and specific people and campaigns that they've done and break down what we love about it. And what we found is that gets people to start conversations with us on social media.

And then we'll build— Because you tag them.

Yes. And then we build relationships with them and then we try to sell them.

That's a good way. But oh shit, it all comes down to relationships at the end of the day. And people aren't willing to play the long game. And sure, we talk about all these tactics, but people want— like a lot of people want the quick dopamine hit. But it's usually the long dopamine hit that works.

But it's not even that. We go even one step further. So let's say I'm speaking at a conference in Brazil or I'm going to Netherlands tomorrow. A lot of times what we will do is, let's say I'm in Brazil and we know who's in the audience because we know.

They give you the list?

They tell us. They may not tell us all the attendees, but they'll tell us the people from different companies that are coming in.

So you're like, hey, don't pay me. I just want to know who are the big fish in the audience and I would like to have a conversation with them.

Sometimes we get paid, actually majority of times we get paid, but we try to—

I thought you took away your speaking fee.

Yes, but what we'll do is we'll charge way less and say, hey, set up a private event for us where we're going one-on-one, or don't pay us at all, but at least cover expenses. So we're getting money some way, we're at least getting expenses covered, and then we'll have them set up meetings. But sometimes they don't give you a list of all the attendees because there's rules and laws about privacy, which we totally respect. But they'll tell us like, here are the companies that are going to be in there, and we'll integrate some of them in our presentation. And we'll talk about case studies and what the CMO did that was amazing. And we'll highlight them and show pictures of them on slides. And no joke, most of the time they reach out to us, connect with us, and then our team goes, builds a relationship and sells them. It's been a very effective strategy.

It's the best. I think it's, again, it goes back to relationships. Even if people get a 5-second interaction with you, that goes much further than you just talking on through Yeah.

The hard part is, is if you don't have a platform, it doesn't work too well. Like if some random person mentions the CMO of a big company, they're not going to care.

You need to have some reach.

And if you don't have reach, the way to hack it is you just spend tons of money on ads and boost it.

And by the way, it works. I mean, we're running ads right now to our newsletter and we're getting like, it's like a $5 CPA, but it's pretty good. Because what we do now when they—

$5 per email? Uh-huh.

What we do, so work emails only, and then once they opt in, we blitz them in the first 20 to 30 minutes or so. Every 5 minutes we're hitting them with an email. Here's our YouTube channel. Here's the other YouTube channel. Here's our thing over here, right? We're just trying to overload on value. And then the very last email is like, by the way, here's what our company does, blah, blah, blah. So we're not trying to pitch too hard. And then they fall into our regular sequence where we're giving like we said, like 3 or 4 emails a week and it's just super value add. But doing that and also on our thank you page, we have like a free community as well. So we're just trying to overload on value and then because The first 20 to 30 minutes, there's a honeymoon period where they actually click your stuff. After that, they don't give a crap about you, right? But we're trying to get as many engaged people as possible. And then we'll take our email service provider, and then we'll take all the engaged users, and then we'll enrich them using like Apollo or something. And then the salespeople will jump on those people. So, but it all goes back to relationships again. You can do all these cool, like, you know, cute things. But just think about the relationships.

The strategy that we've been using that's been crushing for us lately. So we'll go into regions like Italy or France or whatever it may be, you can even do this in the United States. You pick companies that, you know, are more old school that need to adapt. And what we'll do is like, we'll do a private webinar or a workshop on AI and marketing and how to use it and integrate it within your workflows and your systems and processes. So we'll do the workshop, we'll invite companies manually and reach out to them. We make it 100% free, tons of them show up, as well as their employees and team members. We're then building relationships with them. And then we start selling them on our services.

So you guys are sending a lot of Emails in that region to get them into the webinar, right?

Yes, and we'll do it in specific regions.

And ads too?

And we what?

And you're running ads too?

No, no ads. We just manually do it, outreach, and we'll get like 60, 70 different companies for each one. Very effective because you're only inviting like large corporations that are publicly traded.

Yeah, and it's a small but highly qualified webinar.

Yes, and it's more like a workshop where you're answering questions, you're helping them out, you're being very— see, with the webinar, most people, talk for majority of time and they answer some questions at the end. We only have like 50, 60 people. We always keep it less than 100. Yeah, you can actually— people can ask questions specific to their business and you can dive in and help them solve problems.

Oh, so you do it Brady Bunch style where it's not like webinar where they can actually talk to you and then you can see everyone's face type of thing, right? Um, I think that's a lot better because there's interaction there. Webinar is like talking at versus talking with.

Yes, we do Brady Bunch style and that's been very effective for us because then You're building a relationship, you're selling people, and it's on a topic that's top of mind for them, but they don't have the time for it. And hey, this doesn't require any budget. Plus, you can invite all your team members that are underneath you in case you can't come. So you're not only building a relationship with the C-levels, you're building relationships with the VPs, the managers, the directors, the associates.

And your message is simple, right? It's just like, hey, we have this AI workshop happening, you know, we're going to have, you know, These types of companies being there, you know, feel free to come. It's going to be a— we're going to engage with you. It's not just going to be a talk-at-you thing. It's a very simple offer.

It is. And you actually mentioned the key thing. When we invite people, we let them know what other companies are going to be there. Because if they know that other big corporations are going to be there, they're much more likely to show up.

Yep.

And we also mention 2 or 3 times that it's free and they can invite their team members.

Dude, speaking of which, this is where I got to do a plug for the YPO Global Marketing Summit next year. So Not everyone needs to be a YPO. Here's my workaround here. I might get in trouble for this actually, but I'm the champion for this. So here's how it works. So let's say Neil and I were both YPO members, right? I'm planning to have the best marketing speakers there next year. Neil's going to be speaking there, right? And then we're going to have the head of AI or head of AI from a well-known company. I'm working on that one right now. We're going to have the CMO of HubSpot speaking there.

Cool.

And some others. But anyway, I believe it's the CMO. But, um, though, if you want to go to this thing, it's in Miami. You just need to find a YPO member and then ask to be their key associate. And then that will get them to— because you're allowed to bring key associates, right? You can be like 1 or 2. Um, that's how I'm inviting everyone to potentially come to this thing. Um, it'll cost you like $3,000 or so, just FYI, or maybe $3,500.

What hotel are you having it at?

Um, so we've narrowed it down. So this is a little peek for everyone. It's either gonna be at the St. Regis, Belle Harbor, Or it's going to be at the Mandarin Oriental in Brickell.

Isn't the Mandarin Oriental going through renovation right now?

They're going to demolish it the month, like 2, 3 weeks after that event.

Oh, so it's not as nice.

Yeah.

And St. Regis is new?

St. Regis is very nice. I've stayed there. We have a mutual friend. Whenever we used to go to Miami, we'd stay at St. Regis Belle Harbor all the time.

St. Regis for the win.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, that's, that's the one that I'm looking at. I was trying to get one hotel, but we're off on that one. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and also go to marketingschool.io/agency if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster. So that being said, we'll catch you later. Bye.