Eric Got 8.9 Million Views and Zero Leads

So Brian Johnson's wife, not wife, Brian Johnson's girlfriend manages his social media. So I saw a clip yesterday on Reels and I normally don't remember the clips that I'm watching, but she basically said like, F content calendars, like F content planning, right? It's like the main goal of social media is just to get content out there and just iterate and test and look at the numbers and iterate, iterate, iterate. And I think, you know, I'm not saying I agree with her completely on F your content calendar. I think if you're like a busy operator and you're creating content, you probably still need some sense of organization. But the way, if you're a pure creator right now, you're constantly just trying to, it's almost like ads. You're just trying to crank out as many ads as possible because each creative is like an ad and then you're testing rapidly and you're adjusting, right? And I think the world that we're going into today is, for example, today I was walking to the gym and I was like, I saw that one of my X articles didn't do that well, but I'm like, it's not a bad X article. I'm like, okay, I'm just dictating to my little Codex thing and I'm like, Can you just change the hook on this one? And can you change the headline and change the hook? I want you to delete this post and I want you to republish again. And then by the time I arrive at the gym, it's already done. And I said, hey, I want you to delete this YouTube video that seemed to flop, but I think it's a good video. Go ahead and repost it, but I want you to change these subtle images over here and change the headlines. And then, but like, because I have all these workflows now, I feel like I'm able to test more rapidly where I wasn't able to before. So I kind of understand what she's talking about. But I think it also depends on what type of creator you're like. If you're a business creator, you probably need some type of planning. If you're like a pure content creator, more on the creator side, you probably should be rapidly testing as if every creative is an ad.

Yes. What we found is with social, the moment we have people comment to become a lead, we find that to be much more effective than mentioning the company name from all our most recent tests because Every week on Instagram, LinkedIn, and all the social platforms, I put out 2 reels that promotes NP Digital, and I actually mentioned NP Digital. Okay, so I don't do it on the majority, but I do it on 2 reels every single week. So 2 out of 7. And what we find is it maybe it produces leads, but our sales teams typically ask people where they came from. We haven't seen too many, too much revenue from that. But on the flip side, we're testing this new concept. It goes against what I like doing, but my team wanted to test it. And it's a— I did one that got posted the other day. It has like 80-something thousand views and it was really simple. 37 places AI checks before recommending your business. And I just list off the 37 places and it's pretty quick. It has 83,000 views so far. It just got published, has 600-something comments, but I say, something around, most people only do 3 or 4. If you want to figure out where your business is losing out and where you're going to be beat by your competition, put audit and my team at NP Digital will send you a free analysis. And in essence, we're trying to collect leads from it. So I don't have the data yet because it's too new, but I'm trying to get very specific because I want global fortune, not even fortune. I want like global 100 brands ideally that I want to work with because that's where I see the future of my agency. And they're just like, let's just see what gets the most amount of views. Because people in social media, when they work on a social media team, I don't know what it is. It's really hard to get people to not measure themselves based off of views, comments, likes. They just tend to, no matter how many times you talk to them or how many times you switch out different people.

Yeah. You know what I think needs to happen? You know, you can have— every metric needs a pairing metric. And we've talked about this for years and years on this podcast. We've been doing this podcast for 10 years. And so sure, if someone comes into your social media, they want to join your social media team, it's like, hey, I want to optimize reviews. Okay, fine. But you're going to be held on views and the pairing metric is going to be leads. So if the views that you're driving aren't driving leads and maybe it's on the ratio or something like that, then, you know, you're not performing at the end of the day. Are you okay with that? Right? If you're not okay with that, you shouldn't join our company. So that should happen during the recruiting process. But I'm looking at Neil's video right now. One thing that Neil didn't mention is, sure, NP Digital works with a lot of enterprise companies, but he also has NP Excel too. So there's a lot of SMB leads coming through, they'll go straight to NP Excel.

Yeah, but we're mainly trying to push— that's right. So we do end up generating revenue from the SMB, but we find it easier to scale and grow our business focusing on enterprise than SMB. I know there's a lot more SMBs out there, just Enterprise businesses don't churn that much. SMB businesses can churn for the most randomest reasons that you can't control. Enterprise, it may take you 6 months to a year. Some of our clients like Heineken, I think it took us like 3 or 4 years. I forgot the number, but once you get them, assuming you do good work, they expand really fast and it's just much more stickier.

Yep. But looking at, by the way, looking at Neil's post over here, so I'm going to share it real quick. So if we look at Neil's post, Here it is. Okay, so this is just Neil reading stuff, right? Here's, uh, 37 places AI checks before recommending your business, right? Here's the thing. This is why I say the format's very important because this is a trending format right now. I saw some other people using it, but Neil doesn't want to spend the time figuring out formats. Okay. And now, now maybe his team's on top of it, but I just want to have the best formats. And so MetaMuse can just stay on top of the formats for me. And then if I'm Neil, And I might come across like this format that I really like that my team might have missed, right? But I just want the thing to send the formats to my team and that way everything's taken care of and that way I can just have everything gift wrapped for me so I can just sit and record.

Yeah, and you're spot on and I think it's great for that. My team takes care of it, but I do know they're using AI to help because they're looking at them. I think we track like around 60-something creators in the business and marketing space and they look at the most popular videos every single week.

And that's all you need.

Ideas for formats and all that stuff.

You need a format library because these things change so rapidly and the formats, guess what? All these B2B formats, they copy just the top creators out there. And so MetaMuse will help you with that.

Dude, you know, going back to enterprise, to give you an idea about specifics, we closed one of the biggest weight loss drugs. I can't say the name unless it's on our website, but everyone knows what one of— there's a lot of weight loss drugs, but I'm saying one of the biggest. Everyone's been using it.

Everybody knows this one. It's bigger than AI.

Yeah, everyone's been injecting themselves for a long time. All right. So we do their work in Brazil, did a really good job. And they saw some of the specific issues that we talk about that are very specific to a global brand, right? This is a large organization. I'm not talking about a billion or $5 or $10 billion, much larger than that, right?

Yeah.

We closed another contract with them. How many years do you think the contract is?

5 years?

I wish. 3. But still good, right? 3-year contract.

It's great.

And already after we signed the first contract, because they already started working with you in one region, now you're working in another region. Within a month or 2, it's actually less than 2 months, but within a month they're like, all right, let's talk about this other contract that we have now too. How can you guys get started on it? And what can you do over multi-years? That's the cool part about creating very specific content for big TAMs from a dollar perspective, but not necessarily an audience perspective. You can create stickier revenue opportunities and it just creates a more predictable way to grow. And the best part for me is it's not relying on my personal brand because I don't want our clients to know me. I want our clients to know the company and it would be really cool 5 years from now if people are like, yeah, we don't care for Neil Patel. He's useless. Like, hey, I'd be very happy to— I have an experiment for you.

Stop creating content for 90 days.

I can't. It drives too much for the SMB. It doesn't actually help much with the enterprise. Like, I know this for a fact. Most enterprises don't even care about me. The SMB division though, it feeds it. And if I stopped, it would hurt the SMB numbers a lot.

So you know the number of leads that you're driving from social for SMB?

No, no, no, no, no. Let me rephrase this. If you had to guess what portion of enterprise revenue is driven from my personal brand and me and my content that I'm creating, if you had to guess.

Single-digit percentages on the lower side.

It's around 6%. Okay. And that's the leads. If you actually look at revenue, it's actually much less than that. If I had to guess on the revenue, I don't have the number, But I'm pretty certain it's somewhere around 2 or 3%.

Ah, see, I'm right.

So it's, it's really low on the revenue perspective. If you had to guess, what percentage of the SMB leads am I driving?

At least 50 or 60%.

It's, it's north of 70. It's less than 80, but it's north of 70.

You know why I say at least 50 to 60? Because I know the types of leads we deal with, at least 60% know who I am.

Yeah. Revenue on the SMB side, I'm driving a little bit more than 50, so it's not as high. The reason for that is our SMB division gets large contracts that are SMB and aren't SMB really, and I'll explain it. And they'll find us from places like ChatGPT and places like that, or Google. It has nothing to do with my brand, but it's like we have a dental practice that has 200 locations in the United States. We're looking to expand into more locations and also looking to expand into Canada. You know, what's a good agency that can help us with these list of services, right? So you would look at that as it's not SMB, but if you look at how much they pay you per location, it is more SMB type, but total contract value is more enterprise type.

That makes sense. I think, I think it'd still be a fun experiment that you can do in a couple of years. We'll see, maybe 2, 3 years.

Dude, I totally agree with you. But right now I just know if I did that and I stopped producing content, we would see the hit on the SMB side. Because even with enterprise, what people don't realize is no matter how big your brand is and how well you're known, and I'm not saying I'm the biggest brand by any means, I'm not. And I'm not saying I'm well known everywhere. I'm not. There's more people in business like Hormozi, maybe even Ryan Deiss, definitely Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, et cetera, that are more well-known than me. What you end up— and Dan Martell now, right? He's getting tons and tons of views on social. I don't know if you see what he's been doing.

Mm-hmm.

But a lot of the enterprise companies, if you're ever trying to market to them, they have RFP processes, they have procurement, They just have processes in general, how they select companies and not select companies. And it doesn't matter who you are, you're either on that list or you're not. Or a lot of times people don't realize this. Did you know, at least in marketing, a lot of how the big marketing contracts are selected are through search agencies and they determine the shortlist and then they help the whole process and then they bring it to the corporation. So the biggest marketing contracts that you're seeing, like the Publicises, WPPs, et cetera, get, They're not actually reaching out to publicists. They're reaching out to a company, usually has no more than 10 people that go and just interview the agencies on their behalf and select who they want. And then these people who run these 10-person organizations, they do seminars and trainings on how agencies should pitch and all this kind of stuff. So if you don't pay for their stuff, you're less likely to get selected in the process.

Yep. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So here's the thing. Let me call something out real quick because you mentioned Dan Martell and you mentioned Hormozi, right? So I think they do a great job with their content. So for example, you look at Dan Martell, he's got 3 million followers, right? So if you look, so I guarantee, Neil, your team has Dan Martell listed as one of the format people to draw from.

They do.

Yeah. So like this is the format that Neil was doing, right? So the 30 skills that you're not using with AI, right? This one over here. And so this is wider TAM. AI tools that make $100K. Okay. This is wide TAM over here. Like 3,400 likes or 200,000 views, right? And then this tier list over here, keep, cut over here. So he's doing a really good job with his content. I would say it's wider TAM. And I think what happens sometimes too is like Neil, you just mentioned that, um, selling seminars and things like that. So you don't sell seminars. I don't sell seminars. I'm not saying Dan does, but Hormozi does actually sell seminars from my understanding still, right?

If I'm not mistaken, Dan has coaching and seminars or some similar stuff like that.

So that actually makes sense to go a little wider TAM with this stuff because you're, because if you're going to get someone into a seminar, you might, you might get them into like some type of ascension funnel first, right? So they might buy your books first. And then eventually, if they can afford it, they'll spend $1,000 or $5,000 or $10,000, $20,000. And then once you get to the seminar, then you get the privilege to pay for, I think for Hormozi's seminars, it's like $50,000 or whatever, or $30,000. I don't know what it is. Then you can go, you have the privilege to then go talk to him, right? And so there's multiple levels to this. It's just that for Neil and I, we happen to sell kind of similar things. It doesn't make sense for us to go that wide TAM. And the thing is, if I went super wide TAM, Dating, finance, all these things, it starts to become confusing. It's like, well, what is Eric Siu known for, right? Well, you did it.

You want to talk a little bit about your experiment? Because you went wide.

Yeah. So let me show you this real quick. So let me go to my YouTube channel over here. So let's go to Leveling Up. Let me share my screen. This is a good thing about being virtual.

So as he's pulling that up, I just went to danmartell.com. Humanity's biggest cheerleader, author, entrepreneur, coach. So, he is a coach.

Okay, there you go. So, okay. So, Neil, if I look at my most popular videos, okay? So, you can see Vivian Tu over here, which is great. Your Rich BFF, 731,000 views on that one, right? This one's Y-Tam, Ryan O'Toole. Look at the packaging here. Are Women Killing Relationships? Modern Dating Is Impossible, 490,000 views, right? And then, we do the second one over here. The thumbnail is All Men Pay for Sex, right? And this is not me saying this, by the way. And it's like, the truth is marriage isn't usually worth it. Of course, that's going to get views. You also know what happens? People fight each other in the comments. You have the men and the women fighting each other in the comments, right? It's not going to drive leads at the end of the day. And by the way, I'll say one more thing. I've been doing podcasts, like interview podcasts, for even before Tim Ferriss started doing it, right? And before I was just interviewing CMOs. So I tried to go wide, wide TAM here. And even when I do the Seth Godin one over here, 159,000 views, or, you know, this one, this one did well when we spoke in Germany. I don't know why it did well, but it did well, right? You and me here. But this Hormozi one over here, 132,000 views, right? Like these drive— these over here, Seth Godin, Hormozi, I would hear from other entrepreneurs like, oh, great interview, right? These over here, when I would go to business events, I would hear from the wives of people, of entrepreneurs. So that's the difference. None of these really drove leads.

And just to clarify here, Eric's not saying that women aren't entrepreneurs as well, but the people that we're thinking of—

Oh, definitely.

The people that were— because in his YPO group, he has quite a few females who are just crushing it. But he's saying the people who typically were hitting him up were spouses of the entrepreneur, not the entrepreneurs.

And sometimes, by the way, sometimes the spouses are men too, Neil.

Yeah. So do you want to click on Shorts and then go popular? Because I'm assuming you probably have more views on some of the Shorts for some of those topics.

Oh, for sure. Look at this one. See, I'll let Neil describe it.

How rich can you get on content creation? 3.9 million views. The next one, this will change your perception around money. 1.7 million views. This one, you know, I hate.

This one pissed you off.

Yeah, it just gets me mad. And this is, never stay at a job for more than 2 years. This is from Your Rich Best Friend or whatever it's called. 2.1 million views. If you want to stay at home, if you want to stay at home, wife... 1.7 million views. And it keeps going. Keep going after some more of the other ones. Why net worth? I can't, What was the top one?

Why network explodes after you make $100K or something like that.

Yeah. So some of these just have massive amounts of views and they're super wide TAM. And Eric tried this because the whole experiment here, and I thought it was a really good experiment, was if you create wide enough content, you appeal to the masses. Some of those masses own businesses, work at large corporations, and they may think of your business when they're interested in that service or product that you sell. If I'm not mistaken, Eric, that was your overall experiment, correct?

Correct.

And, you know, what ended up happening at the end of it?

I stopped it because it didn't drive leads and it took a lot of time. And honestly, if you're, when you're doing interviews and Neil, you've done interviews for a little bit, I knew the interviews wouldn't go well for you because you have to do a lot of planning actually. You have to do, it's harder on the interviewer to do it.

Yeah, I luckily my team did a lot of research beforehand, but even then I'm like, dude, I don't want to end up doing this. And it goes back to our recording session. I think it was last week where I mentioned, I'm like, dude, it's just easier for me to go buy the companies that offer the services that we're not as well known for and already get the big leads and RFPs and just merge them all in.

I'm like, well, actually, Neil, on that one, it's that, that's really what Neil's saying is that's, it's a distribution game at the end of the day. And he already has a distribution because they're a global organization.

Yeah.

And when you plug something in and you already have the customer base, that is higher leverage than having to create content from scratch. If you're starting from scratch, by the way, I would highly suggest that you create content. But when you have leverage, you have to think about what is the highest priority thing I should be doing with my limited time. And that is what Neil is doing fundamentally, right? And by the way, look, when Neil and I talked about the Laurel Piano place, 8.9 million views.

Wow.

The discount place on— you don't see it on the screen over here, but I changed these, the top 3 into marketing, the ones that I pinned. So remember when I told a story about the models? That one got 2.3 million views, right? Or this one, 8,000 people versus 1 chatbot. So maybe people call me an idiot in this one, right? And so these are good, but like, they're not necessarily going to drive views either. This is entertainment. Look, 8,000 people versus 1 chatbot. That's entertainment format. Subtle psychology of attractive marketing. That's entertainment, right? From 550 million views to 300 million 30 views. Yeah. million views. I think this one's a little better, but still they're not really leads drivers.

Yeah, no, definitely. It's all about finding out what helps you grow. Like for me, the simple marketing lesson I ended up learning, and it was through a specific acquisition that we made at NP Digital. I won't mention the company name, but we bought a company that specializes in something specific. A service that we weren't well known for. And we had their growth over many, many years. So let's call it the agency was growing at 10%, sometimes 5%, sometimes 15%. They had slow growth, but it wasn't slow growth because they were doing a bad job. And when I say slow growth, I'm not trying to diss the company. It's an amazing company, amazing team, amazing culture, amazing logos. It was more so, it's a niche, so you're only going to grow so fast because in that vertical, it's not like agencies make $50 million or $100 million a year or anything like that. So they were doing good considering how many years they've been around, and again, great product, and they were getting inquiries from bigger organizations. And what we found through this acquisition, and I stumbled upon this, this wasn't intentional, this was just I learned this and it was just sheer dumb luck. When we buy someone that's well known in a space that's been around for over 10 years, they already get big leads hitting them up, but they don't close as many of them and they don't close them as for big enough price points. It's usually for 2 reasons. One, it's their size. So other organizations are like, well, they're good at what they do, but we can only pay them so much because they have 40 employees or 50 employees or 30 employees or whatever it may be. And the second is, is they may not offer all the services that these big companies want, but these big companies hit them up because they do this one specific thing really well and there's not too many others that do that. So when we gobble them up, instantly a company will say, oh, you're NP Digital, you got 1,000+ people, you're in 28 countries. Sure, sounds good. We can pay you half a million bucks a year, $1 million a year, $2 million, no problem. The risk isn't that big. Like the old saying, you don't get fired for hiring IBM. I know Eric said that many times. We're not IBM by no means, but it's a version of that at a much, much, much smaller scale. And the second thing is they'll be like, oh cool, you can also do all these other services we need as well. So it causes these companies to, let's average it out to say 40 to 60% EBITDA growth in just 12 months of just buying them.

You know what I'll say to that too, Neil? I mean, as you're talking, I'm like, oh, you know what? There was someone that reached out recently and reached out for an investment to their agency, right? And they're listening to our podcast. So thank you for listening to the podcast. Now, it doesn't necessarily look like a fit right now, but it reminds me that the fortune is in the follow-up when you come to these things. Because Neil actually mentioned this before, the deal might not make sense right now, but the deal might make sense in a year or 2 years for you. And it makes sense. And the beauty of this is I use Superhuman as my email thing. And so you just ask the AI like, hey, who was I talking about with the, with the, you know, regard in regards to this deal? But you should just make a note in 6 months, come back to this guy. And the question I always ask when I follow up, I don't know what you do, Neil, but I just say, whether it's recruiting someone amazing, or whether it's an acquisition, I just say, hey, how are things going? It's always how are things going, right, Neil?

Yeah. Remember the guy you introduced me to at Inbound years ago?

Yeah. The Spanish guy. He actually texted me recently, the Spanish guy.

Yeah. So I ended up following up with him. He ended up selling his company to another one that was doing a rollup, but if he was willing to sell and it was going to be a normal price, I would've considered it, but I always follow up with everyone. And even when he sold, I still wanted to understand how things are going. How's the market in some of these regions? What are you guys seeing? Because even if you're not trying to buy them anymore and you know they've already taken someone else's money, you can still learn from someone, right? If you've been in a space for 20 years and someone's only been in it for 5 years, it doesn't mean that they can't teach you something that you don't know. So just always follow up, always maintain the relationships, and never burn bridges.

Yep. Thank you for that, Neil. And then I'm scheduling a message Right now, how are things going? And it's gonna go out in 6 months. Send later in 6 months. There we go. March 18th, 2027. If you're listening and this is you, it will come to you. All right, so anyway guys, that is it for today. We hope you enjoyed it and we'll catch you tomorrow. Bye.