Evolve Your Lead Generation Strategy with Referrals & AI

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Peck, welcome.

Hi, Austin.

Hey, um, did you want to jump in actually, uh, and maybe just tag team on, on David's question here, which is, um, where your most recent clients or, or leads have come from? We're getting ideas about like, you know, different forms and sources for, for leads and clients.

Sure. Um, I seem to can't get away from just referrals, so we We just try to reconnect with folks. I was recently in Vegas for a business trip for our team offsite, but during that, we allocated one day for having a dinner with the friends of our company. And we came away, you know, invited— I think we invited like 10 people and we got 6 people to show up. And then out of that, we got 2 follow-up action items. So that, you know, it's like for the price of a, you know, 4-star, 4-dollar sign dinner, you know, catching up with some folks. So that's our, one of our go-to motions now is if I'm traveling for business, we ahead of time build a list of like, who do we want to reconnect with in that city or town? So like, I'll be in Austin later In a couple of months and we're already starting to plan like, okay, who do we want to invite to our dinner? And that's always been fruitful.

It's like it's coming full circle, went digital and now everybody's back to dinners and old-fashioned networking.

Yeah.

And Pep, and good, thanks for, you know, scheduling that meeting. So hopefully connect in person there.

The The people you're inviting to those meetings, are they people you already know or are they cold?

They're people. Well, we tried actually inviting some cold people in Vegas and they didn't RSVP. So I think the way it works out in reality is the people that we already know. The last meeting that I had before this one, I had a local Bay Area one. One was an old client, one wasn't a client yet, and one was thinking of engaging with us. It was actually an old client that had potentially new work for us. So by having an existing client as well. So I've seen— I just took this playbook from Twilio. We were a Twilio partner, and what they would do is arrange you know, lunches and dinners, and they would bring a client, they would bring someone who's kind of Twilio curious, and then they would bring partners because if they needed a partner, you know, it's like, oh, here's a partner. And I would go to these. So, so yeah, it would— I was like, let me borrow, you know, I call it R&D, rip off and duplicate this playbook. Actually, my, my idea now is It takes a lot of work, event planning. So I'm actually, you know, going to outsource this to someone like an event planner, and I'm writing the requirements right now. But the idea is I just want to show up, have an RSVP list. You know, I'm happy to just like whip out the credit card and pay. But, you know, all that stuff leading up to it, like, oh, food preferences, allergies, blah, blah, blah, RSVP, what's the best time? Like, all that is so much work. So I'm just gonna have an event planner do this monthly like clockwork and the idea is I just wanna just tell me where to show up and just I'll pay for it. Don't worry about it, you know.

And you know how you can upgrade the dinners? Now I thought about it just now. If you find an agency that does complementary services to yours, both of you invite both of your clients, you do together a dinner. And now you're overlapping clients that are new to each other.

Look at you!

I love it.

Did I just share that away?

And then, and then you split the, the dinner too.

And you split the dinner too. I should have thought of that earlier, but this is— came to mind as, as Peck was talking. I was like, man, that's a good idea actually.

Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Are you guys on the map? Do you know there, there's a map in the community I can I'll show you there. But yeah, if you haven't, I'll make a post, just like put yourself on the map, and then that way you can see where everybody's office is and you can connect that way too. Oh, cool. That'd be pretty sick. Cool, guys. Thank you. Thank you for the input there. Does anyone else have a challenge or something that's top of mind that they want some input?

I can ask a question. I don't know how relevant it's gonna be to half of the group though, but I welcome the ideas. I just put a tool in the chat and it's HubSpot's new tool, AI Search Grader. And so if you run your companies through that search grader, basically, you know, you give it a name, you give your company name, you give your industry, the size or whatever. And then what it comes back to— comes back with is AI sentiment. And then it comes back with AI. Now let me look at the screenshots. I was just showing it to the client. Anyways, it comes back with AI information, how AI understands your brand, whether it knows about share of voice, right? So it comes back to share of voice and sentiment, and that kind of got me on a path of thinking, right? So as we, let's say most of us kind of start with one service and then we expand into multiple services. When you talk with When you deal with AI and when your company, your clients start to wonder how to be on top of mind with AI models, it gets so much more complicated because AI takes information in from various different sources like social media, reviews, websites, right? Newspapers, media publications, video, audio, basically every single source out there. And so now when you just focus on one service and the future of digital marketing is essentially AI, whether they do it through Google or something somewhere else, it doesn't really matter. How do you position your services now to encapsulate that overarching presence that someone has to create in order to be on top of mind in AI model? That makes sense. Is that too broad of a question? Let me know if that makes sense at all. Like, it's not enough to be a social media agency anymore. It's not enough to be just an SEO agency. Like, PR is required, video is required, and Most of the clients are not doing all of that stuff. And if they're not, how many of them are going to fall behind with AI providing answers if AI doesn't even think about them?

Yeah, actually I brought this up with another company. It's like SEO just on Google is not going to be good enough soon, and you have to have a search strategy for AI.

Yeah, and I even— I don't even think it's— I think they labeled the tool wrong. I don't think it's supposed to be search, like AI model grader or something like that. But yeah, Google is not gonna go away, that's for sure. But just like Facebook was the king and it got smaller because now TikTok and Instagram and everybody took a share of voice, it's gonna— same is gonna happen to Google eventually and just other platforms will be equally important. And it's like your attention is now distributed and there is no hope in the future to just rely solely on Google. It's not gonna be enough. And that's like—

Can you link to the tool in the chat? I would love to. Oh, I think—

Yeah, I put it there.

Yeah.

Okay. So funny story related to this is one of our prospects, leads found us through ChatGPT. They said that they asked, you know, they put in like, hey, here's who we are, here's what we're trying to do. Who's the best agency? And they said our name came up. I was like, are you sure? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, that's how they found us.

Did you try to replicate the prompt?

They didn't give us, you know, we're not that close. Ultimately, unfortunately, they didn't end up going with us. They found they were interviewing a couple agencies, but they said that we were very close. We're like the final 2. And then ultimately they went with someone who had like direct relevant experience with what they were trying to build. Ours was a little adjacent, but it was funny that that was how they searched. Like, to your point, People are not using Google anymore. They're just, you know, hey, you are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, trying to do this, you know, what software development agency would be best for this? And like, now it's not about search anymore. It's about asking a large language model, right?

Sorry about the emoji. I don't know why I showed that.

Yes.

Yeah. And that's the problem. It's very personalized and customized, you know, depending on a prompt in the future, not even So much right now. Some of the articles it scrapes is just a best of something and it just scrapes out information. But in the future, it's going to get so much more sophisticated and it's like, how do you offer a package where you can actually influence the AI sentiment in a way that there's a PR, there's influencers, there's everything happening that cohesively makes an impact? Neil Patel is probably positioned the best for that. He's been at it for a long time. Yeah, that's my question.

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 Ollie, and 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 get at marketingschool.io/agency and we'll see you inside.

As far as like, Scott, let me just make sure. Um, did, did you have that question answered or would you like more feedback from the group?

No, if anyone has any feedback, more than, more than happy to hear it. If not, then we can move on. Yeah, it's a bit of a loaded question and not necessarily something that's easy to answer, I guess.

So if I understand the question, I was just gonna say, if the question understood the question, I might not have understood it fully, but Is it's not enough to just have more niche services within the realm of all the services in digital marketing? And what are people doing to expand that? Like, can you help me get on track?

Well, if AI is the future and AI is going to be part of everything, right, whether it's search platforms or social media platforms, And AI takes into account such a greater variety of sources in order to have certain sentiment about the brand as well as to have a— understand the share of voice of the market based on the information they consume. If you do just one small part, the impact that you're making is no longer going to be as large as it is right now because while SEO and Google is big, it's relevant. but if AI is now a bigger, you know, it's everywhere, it's not gonna just look at search results no longer. It's gonna look at so much more.

Yeah, no, I do have an opinion on that. So in a nutshell, Kevinology. So I'm very involved in AI, AI adoption, AI deployment. I follow a lot of the AI thought leaders from Sam Altman all the way down. But there's a great, just for as a resource for Fellow agency, there's the AI Marketing Association. If or I think it's association, but AI Marketing Association, they amazing podcast. But when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it took almost 30 years for light bulbs to be fully used in society. And so what we're seeing right now with AI is. high interest, low adoption. So it's still in the hype mode in a sense. There's a lot of hype, people are fearful of it. The average, I mean, millions of people went and signed up for OpenAI when it came out. They have less than a 10% like super user from that initial use base basically. And so there is definitely early adopters and innovators using this and creating use cases for it and doing this. The average consumer, though, has no knowledge of what AI can do for it still. It's moving so fast, too fast in a lot of cases, that even industry leaders can't. So back to, you know, what I've been hearing, and then I have my own opinion. What I've been hearing, because this comes up in a lot of these conversations amongst thought leaders, things like that, is will um, AI replace Google for where people search. And right now Perplexity probably is the best solution that— and Google is trying to copy what they're doing. If you're not familiar with perplexity.ai, I would definitely, uh, go there. It's free. There's a paid part of it, but, um, it's fabulous for, uh, AI, hybrid AI, and what we're used to with Google. You still get all the citations, all the backup, etc. So that being said, if you look at Perplexity's model, they're still using all the search engine results for Google to populate the results of the answers they give you when you ask it in an AI format with the citations, links back to those websites. And so I think that's the future. I still think that the SEO— and if you're not visible on Google, you're not going to be suggested in these tools that are citing best places. Now, you're right, if somebody's saying what's the best restaurant in Toronto or Mississauga or Markham or wherever, you know, uh, ChatGPT is only as smart as it were collected that last time it ran in 2021, or if it's current or whatever, what was popular back then. So people aren't trusting the results of a lot of the current models until they're still trying to figure out if they trust it. Is that the best, right? And so the practical use cases of search engines and local and all that still rely heavily on what Google has. So I think we're 5 years out before— unless they just totally replace what's there with something new and we have— we're forced to swallow the pill there, or the— what they're giving us. So that's my— that's just Kevinology theory, you know, um, the way I see the future. Because I'm having this conversation with a lot of my clients that are SEO clients. They go, should we continue to invest in SEO? And I take them through that story I just told you, and they go, yeah, that makes sense, man, let's keep on going, you know.

Yeah, I don't think the concern is about the present. The present is the way it is. And there's no concern. It's more about how do you innovate your services to fit into the AI futures, essentially. That's what the question is. If it's so drastically large to process so much information, do you have to offer more services to become more effective as an agency? That's where our mind is.

Right.

We're not worried that Perplexity is gonna take away the share. It's not. But like, if you guys watched Neil's and Eric's last episode, I think they were talking about investment into AI by various different platforms. organizations like Facebook and Google.

Yeah.

It's $180 billion or something. It's like, and it's just drastically increased. So adoption is one thing, but when these companies feel the pressure to innovate, they're just gonna push it, shovel it down your throat to actually, what do you call it, to— oh, Austin dropped out and I became a host. And then basically, yeah, if they have to, if they feel pressure from the competition, adoption might not even be a consideration. They might just go and just push it into the market just like Google did with the AI reviews and it was full of failures. But yeah, it's just, it's more of a question around services rather than the actual concern around, you know—

Yeah, I think you definitely, like I'm winning deals, like I start with the website, we get SEO, They need leads now, so we get paid advertising. They need email marketing to nurture those leads. They need, you know, like, so we definitely offer the whole thing. And if I, and I had, didn't always do that. I always had a partner who offered. I said we offered it, but now we do a lot of this in-house. Once I got enough business, I brought in-house. But basically you want to have those solutions, otherwise they're going to look somewhere else for it, you know, kind of thing. And then back to the AI thing, you know, I think You know, like crypto, like blockchain is something new. There's a company out there called Shipping, I think it's called, and they do reward tokens for engaging with brands. So like if you go and eat at McDonald's a lot, you get tokens on, you know, but they learn about you. It's a lot of sharing. That's the future, I think, things like that where there's reward risk, you know, Honey. We got all these ways people buy things now and they're getting information they're willing to share to get rewards. You know, the tokenization of things is, in my opinion, some of the future stuff, but it's not here yet for sure. But I'm always— I'm kind of, you know, the 80/20 rule. 80% has got to be tried and true. 20% is innovation, you know, and our methodology. And so by talking innovation with our clients, it keeps them close to my— to a trusted advisor. And but we're doing the practical stuff, like we're rolling out AI chatbots for a lot of our clients right now. They love it, but they were still— they took— it's been 6 months, you know. They— what is it? How does it work? Let's try it out. Let's do it side by side with our, um, customer service agents. And, you know, they're getting leads from it now because the AI is just feeding, answering all the questions somebody has that they wouldn't ask a human. And they come exhausted with all the questions. They go, I'm ready to buy, can someone call me? You know, kind of thing. And where they didn't get before from a regular chat, uh, relationship. So anyways, I, uh, that— those are a lot of the things I, I saw from your question. Hopefully that helps.

Thank you.