How to Acquire More Customers for 2019 (Q+A)
Eric Siu shares customer acquisition tactics, from in-person dinners that hit 20-21x ROI to LinkedIn organic engagement and cold outreach via personalized video. He stresses picking one high-ROI channel first, then repurposing that content across blogs, videos, and newsletters.
Chapters
Hello, hello. If I can move this thing. There we go. There's my face. Can you guys hear me okay? We're gonna wait 2 minutes. Well, I'm treating it like it's a webinar. Let me just make sure all the settings are working. Can you guys hear me okay? If you guys can hear me, type something into the chat. Say hello, where you're coming from right now. This is the first time we actually scheduled it. And we're doing it, doing it from my home over here. And let me just double-check that the settings are all good. Can you guys hear me? Network. Check, check, check, check, check. Hey Derek, how's it going? Perfect. You can hear me. And then we have Keisha. I can't even pronounce it. Tell me how you pronounce it. Raj, hello. How's it going? We can actually get started now because it's not like it's a webinar. So today I'm going to talk a little closer to my mic. We're going to talk about just any questions you have around what's working in customer acquisition today and how to make it better. Because here's the problem with customer acquisition. Hello, Adrian. How's it going? We have regulars now. I think once you do it past like 9, 10, or 11 AM, Adrian will come in, Rosh will come in. Brian, nice to see you. And so anyway, going back to customer acquisition, I think we'll jump around here. This is meant to be more of a Q&A. And if you guys actually like this, I'm probably gonna do more of these. We're just gonna see how the engagement is going. But overall, like the problem with customer acquisition is that there's too much new things coming out all the time. It's like, you gotta try this thing, you gotta try this thing. There's this chatbot thing you have to try. And then there's like this direct messaging bot you have to do. And then it's just like, it gets overwhelming, right? And so, you know, what Neil and I have talked about on the Marketing School Podcast is just to really figure out what you're good at, what's actually performing and what you can double down on. So I'll give you an example. In terms of customer acquisition, I'm not just thinking about marketing, I'm also thinking about sales too, right? So if I look at the time we spent going to conferences in the last, 2, 3 years or so, I did an ROI analysis and our return on investment was about 20x. Okay. So it's like, okay, if that's working, why not do more of it? So if you find something that's working, if you find something that's growing, why not do more of it? Right. Hello. Nice to see you. And you're welcome for the email reminder. I think, you know, maybe I might do these once a week. So let me know if you guys want to see these once a week. So look, focusing in on one area and you find that it's working, that's great. So I'll tell you another thing that's worked really well for me. Just to start things off in the first 2 minutes, it's barely 11 right now. The hello first metric, we got a return on investment in the last 3 years on doing dinners. The return on investment is about 20, 21x. Okay. So that to me, it's like, okay, if anything's positive ROI-wise and it seems like it's a good investment of my time and I know that I'm also building relationships, I'm probably going to do it. Right. And you're probably thinking, Eric, like, That's not very sexy because you're talking about offline things. Well, sure, I'm talking about offline things, but offline gets you business, it gets you relationships, and it allows you to do things like collaborations with people that have large audiences to go online again, right? So offline and online, I wouldn't even try to separate them. I think it's trying to figure out, you know, how can you get the two to play nice with each other? Okay. Um, so correct, Rosh, both things are meeting people in person. Uh, Mama Mamacita Free. Mamacita Free, you're welcome for the invite. Christian, hello, nice to see you. I really like these lives. People are so engaging. People are so nice. I'm just waiting for the audience to grow bigger so that I can have some haters coming in too saying like, Eric, you got fat. Eric, this, that. I love it all because people are engaging. It doesn't matter to me. Well, what matters is you people are actually getting value. Okay? So the other thing I'm saying is this, our team, we are Putting a lot more effort into not just going live, but it's actually engaging with people, right? So if you guys follow me on LinkedIn, you'll see that I actually comment and my team actually helps comment too. And that actually gets us a lot more views, right? So what was happening before with LinkedIn, LinkedIn organic reach is still very strong. We would post something like the marketing school. And by the way, guys, ask whatever questions you have. Like, what about this? What about this? This is meant to be a Q&A. I'm just starting things off right now. Totally. Tell me where you're coming from too. But with LinkedIn, we were auto-publishing Marketing School episodes every single day. And we were only getting like maybe 100 to 500 views or so. Okay. So it's not that great because I have about give or take 10,000, 11,000 people on my LinkedIn. Now what started happening was when we started, when I would make like short 5-minute videos and I'd ask people a question and be like, hey, like, you know, how are you guys optimizing your sleep? Here are a couple of things that I do. Right. And then a bunch of people would start leaving comments, would tag people. And then what would happen is one organic post would get 4,000 or 5,000 views on it. And we still have posts that are, that I put up a couple of weeks ago that are doing pretty well still, you know, a couple of thousand views on it. So instead of going from, you know, 100 to 500 views, you're going up to about a couple of thousand. I saw someone else, I showed my team the other day, you know, they took something from a football game and, you know, lo and behold, it gets 150,000 views, right? And I think the views are valuable because You know, people need more than just 7 interactions now. The live I did yesterday, I was like, look, the rule of 7 might need to be like the rule of 14 now just because people are so busy, right? So take that into account. Even with these, the live I'm doing right now, I'm actually looking at the comments right now. I think some of my team are in here. Like, we're figuring out how we can engage with you better and do a better job. Thank you, Dustin. My feet, Michael, my feet definitely smell. This is why I only go barefoot when I'm at home. I wish I could show you my feet right now, but see, I'm not even flexible, so I can't stretch. So Brian says, how many lead avenues do you guys do at once? I'm thinking of Facebook ads, LinkedIn, podcasts, and a blog. Is that too much at once? So I'll give you the boring answer. The predictable answer is you want to focus first on what's working. And then it also depends on what stage your business is at, right? If I were starting out Single Grain, my marketing agency, and by the way, guys, if you want to talk to the marketing agency, if you want to learn more about product services, whatever, you can go to singlegrain.com/live and you can feel free. My team can talk to you and then just figure out where to point you to, whether it's to somebody else or whatever. But when I was starting out at Single Grain, again, 4,000 visits a month to a blog. So I came into the company, I took it over, right? And we just focused on creating longer-form content, better content, and our traffic started to grow more and more and more over time. And then I didn't try to do anything else. I didn't say, Facebook ads, let's do Facebook ads, let's do Google and all that. We just focused on the blog. Now, when I think about the Growth Everywhere podcast, the channel you guys are subscribed to right now, the first year I just focused on the podcast. I didn't try to do anything else. I didn't try to sell ads on it. I didn't try to promote it on Facebook or whatever. I just focused on the podcast. Excuse me. Because I knew, I knew that I needed to get more reps to improve. Okay? So that's one of the key things. You get more reps in the beginning, you suck. And then the cool thing is when you suck in the beginning, nobody can find you anyway. So it's okay. And you've— but you continue to keep going and eventually you start to build an audience, right? It's the same thing with this YouTube channel too. It's slowly growing over time. We're starting to get volume now. We're about 15,000 subscribers. Yeah. Want to go for 100,000, but it's going to take time because some of the people I've talked to, really popular YouTubers, they have a couple hundred thousands or millions of subscribers. They all started from zero too. And then what they told me was like, look, Eric, once you get to about 10,000, 20,000 subscribers or so, it's going to grow a lot faster. You're going to have a community. You're going to have an audience. Those of you that are hanging out with us right now, I really appreciate the fact that you're in here. And it's about cultivating that community and building it up, right? But I wouldn't have done live in the beginning. I would've just focused on videos before I started to add in all the bells and whistles. So hopefully that helps. Playing devil's advocate, if you focus on one and it works and then something happens and it stops working suddenly, that's what worries me. Yeah, I need to be patient. So that's a very good question. And guys, feel free to put in more of your customer acquisition questions. I'm going to continue to answer them. If I lost the— if you try to do too many things at once, what happens is this, right? So let's say you do, here's one thing, here's another thing, here's another thing. If you do them all at once, you grow slower. But if you focus on just one, you grow a lot faster, right? So even if you lose that one, it's okay, right? Because maybe Facebook decides to ban you or whatever, right? But you got the experience up and you can just focus on one more and grow it up again, right? But if you try to do too many at once, it's going to take you a long time to rise up. Versus just one. So you get one up first, get it going, and then you can start to diversify into other ones, right? Then you can start to grow the other ones. And then what happens is you can get the most leverage by growing a team, right? Growing a team and then delegating things out so your team can tackle it. Then you get true leverage because you're able to, even if everyone else can do it at 60 or 70 or 80% of what you can, that's no problem because that's still better than you putting in your time doing 100%. should be working on other things. Okay. But you know, that's a whole nother topic. Building a great team, that's a whole nother topic. And that's, that's much harder to me than any like marketing tactic or any hack that I can give you, right? Or any strategy I can give you. I think building a team is probably the strongest thing that, that you can do. So Damien says, uh, why did you take over Single Grain instead of starting a brand new shop? So for those of you that don't know, Single Grain is the marketing agency. And we mostly work with software companies, e-commerce companies, education companies too, one blockchain company. So the reason I decided to even come into Single Grain in the first place, and maybe this is a lesson that might be helpful to you guys, is the company I was at before, Treehouse, I was leading marketing over there and we had a great product. We had great people. We just didn't have a great marketing process. Okay? So me coming in, I was just like, okay, we need to do this. We need to do this. We need to do this. And I said, and then a month later, the CEO pulls me aside and says, if we don't hit numbers this month, we're going to have to let you go. So I said, okay. And I just took all the data I got from YouTube ads and I bet the entire company on YouTube ads. Okay. So me, gambling background, bet the entire company, we'll see how it goes, right? Thankfully it worked out. So the challenge was coming into Single Grain was the services we had no longer work. So the Penguin and the Panda update hit. So Single Grain was previously an SEO company, just focused on SEO. We still do SEO. But the work we were doing no longer works. So the product and the service was invalid. Okay. Which meant the people that were doing the work probably weren't the right fit because the work was invalid. So you didn't really have a business at that point. Right. So I went from having great people, having a great product to, uh-oh, we're in trouble on those 2 fronts. Can I turn it around? Okay. So it was much more of a personal thing. Like if I can turn this thing around, you know what? I can do anything I want. So even if I completely failed right now, I know that because I was able to do those 2 things, that I would— I have insurance for the future. Okay. It's like focusing on this one company, right? And then not losing. Well, here's the thing. When I focused on Single Grain, everything grows a lot faster, right? During Single Grain, when it was going badly, even when I took over, I tried to start this other company that was completely unrelated and that went poorly. Okay. And I had to shut that company down. But every time I focus on Single Grain, I just find it grows a lot faster, right? Because my background is around marketing. I'm in the market. Like I kind of teach marketing, I guess. I speak on marketing. So short answer to your question, just to kind of bring it back a little bit, is I thought joining Single Grain would fast forward me. Okay. If I were to go back in time, I probably wouldn't have done it. I thought I was free rolling and I was, but I would just probably start my own if I were to go back in time. So that's what I would recommend. Okay. Thoughts on simply cold emailing, offering a video analysis and sending one to those that reply? Not exciting, but has worked in the past. So Dustin, That's a really good one. So Drift, D-R-I-F-T, they actually send me videos from Vidyard. So Vidyard, I'll drop it in the chat right now. So you can use Vidyard. I actually had him on the Growth Everywhere podcast. You can search at Growth Everywhere Vidyard. You can find the video interview when I spoke at SaaS Stock. And what they do, you can use Loom too. So here, I'll drop this in the chat. Use Loom. You can just make videos. And what I recommend is show your face too, right? Show your face because it's personable. Maybe you don't want to show like your apartment like this. I'm only doing this because we're doing a webinar right now. Maybe show it in your office. Do it like when you're in a working environment because like, you know, when they see like alcohol like that, don't worry guys, I don't really drink that much, but I have all the alcohol over there because it makes me look cool. But anyway, so where was I going with this? Oh, okay. So when you're going to reach out to people, show your face and then give them like 1 or 2 minutes of analysis. Okay. What I used to do when I was first trying to start my shop when I was 24, 25 years old is I would, And I think I still have some of the examples of all the analysis that I did. And I think I pulled them up last week, but I would spend 20 to 30 minutes doing a free analysis for each website I wanted to work with. And I would do 20 to 30 of these a day. I would be really tired and people would open them. I think we got a couple of clients from them and it does work. Okay. So I would recommend that you use Mixmax. So I'll drop that in the chat as well. Someone said volume is really low. Can you guys hear me better now? Yes. Are you guys having trouble with the volume? Type something if you guys are having trouble with the volume. I'm going to speak really close to the mic now. Is this way better or is this better? Okay. So I'll speak closer. So when you email someone, okay, keep it short and to the point. So, you know, one person said, they said, hey, look, they might just put my name, right? Eric, E-R-I-C. And then I'll say, Eric, you know, I noticed that you're really into SEO. I wanted to share this one video on how you can win a Um, you know, Uber as a client, right? And so, but you keep it short to the point, you keep it customized. I didn't give you like the best example, but if you want to see better examples from Alex Berman on the Growth Everywhere channel, um, I'll type this in as well. Alex Berman, um, he actually, we did a collab on our channel about how to write good cold emails. He's actually got some good templates. And one of the people, persons, uh, that works for him actually cold emailed me, emailed me last week, gave me a good offer, made it customized to me. He said, The title was Big Fan. And it said, Eric, I really enjoyed this episode that you did with so-and-so. I really like how you talked about this. Feeds my ego, right? If you can feed their ego and you can show that you actually consumed or understand what they like, great. And he said, look, I do so-and-so for Alex Berman. I thought you might be interested in this as well. And here's some examples of what I did. I was like, great. Silly bad. But he got me to open the email. to respond to him. And then we got the deal done that day. Okay. So if you customize it, you keep it short and to the point, show some examples, maybe even make a video using Loom or using Vidyard, you should be able to get people's attention. Okay, cool. Thank you to probably Yue or Hannah from my team for dropping the links in. So they're actually helping me respond as well. And so let's see what else, what else do we have in here? How do you find content that your customers potentially search for, for blogs? Okay. So Puneet, thank you for that question. What I would recommend is you can use a tool like BuzzSumo. So that's B-U-Z-Z-S-U-M-O. BuzzSumo actually helps you find content around your niche and it shows you who's scoring high. They have this thing called the Evergreen Score, which shows you how evergreen it is. Was it published beyond a month? How many links it has? How many social engagement it has? And if it's above like a 2, You're in a good spot. Okay. That's going to show you some trends. I'd also recommend using Neil's Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is like a free keyword tool and he bought it. And by the way, here's the benefit. My failed senior living business got him to buy Ubersuggest. So now that Ubersuggest is like completely like, he keeps ramping it up. That's something you all can use because of that failed business. Because I told him, here's the story. I said, hey, I said, hey Neil, I bought this senior living website for like $10,000. Okay. And all of a sudden I have the rankings for it. So here's a little SEO lesson. We got the rankings basically kind of transferred over. And he's like, oh, that's interesting. So a week later we're recording the Marketing School podcast and he's like, oh, you know, I went ahead and I bought Ubersuggest for $250,000. I was like, Neil, I never told you to do that, but okay. I wish you the best of luck on that. So that's the story on that. Okay. Those are just a couple of examples. And I would also recommend looking at your Google Search Console. Seeing how you're doing there. Okay. Nexus Growth Coaching says, Brian, that's why it's important to layer in other funnels once you get the first one running effectively. Totally agree with that. And by the way, guys, I recommend reading DotCom Secrets from Russell Brunson. That's a really good book on how to get you kind of, you know, introduced to funnels. But I would say don't try to do too many funnels. Just make a simple funnel in the beginning. A funnel could be, hey, you know, welcome to our email list. You know, here's what we're all about. Here's what we do. Da da da. And then send them value, right? In our general nurture sequence, we send them evergreen episodes of Growth Everywhere interviews because they never expire. All the stories I do with people, they never expire. By the way, if you guys want to see me do more of these, let me know in the chat. Just type in live into the chat. Then my team can take a look and be like, maybe we should invest more time into these lives. And if you guys actually enjoy them, because I'm actually enjoying this right now and the engagement seems to be much better than any webinar I've done so far. So I like that. So, oh, next is growth coaching. Okay. I didn't see the next line. So Hannah asks, Hannah from the Single Grain team, she says, hey Eric, do you ever get nervous before meeting a high-profile client? If so, how do you deal with that? Yeah, I think this applies for any kind of, it could be like a high-profile client. It could be like someone that's very influential. It could be like a date, right? A date. And you're always nervous. And I'm still nervous. Like, even before I go on stage, I'm nervous. But you get over it when you realize that you're trying to help them solve a problem for the most part. Not on the date though, because the date is really like you're trying to solve each other's problems. So it's a little nerve-wracking. When you take the attention off of you, it becomes way easier, right? Like, even in this live right now, I'm like, okay, how can I continue to provide more value, right? How can I solve people's problems? It becomes much easier like that. And I do less uhs and ums when I don't have to think that much, when I feel like I'm just giving value, giving value, giving value. Okay? So hopefully that helps. How do I deal with that? Nerve never goes away, at least for me. For some people— you know who doesn't get nervous? For those of you that watch American football, so Bill Belichick, he coaches the New England Patriots and they've been to the championship game 9 times out of 18 years. Okay? So that's 50% of the time they make it to the championship game. Wow. In any kind of sports, whether it's soccer, whether it is basketball, whatever, when you make the championship game 50% of the time that you're coaching, it's a pretty good number. Okay? And so for him, he says, look, I still get nervous. I still get nervous for the conference championship games. There's a lot on the line. There's a lot of people that you have to please. And there's a lot of nerves, which is why you see a lot of people when they play a championship game in the first opening minutes or first quarter or so, there's a lot of nerves and they just suck. Yeah. in the beginning. Okay. So what else do we have? This is really helpful. You're doing such a great job. Thank you, Tiago. And then First Metrics says, how do you find good folks that can take long-form content and convert it into multiple pieces of other types of content that can be promoted? That's a really good, that is a really, really good question. And by the way, we created this video and we're going to continue to double down on this methodology, which we call, we're calling the Content Sprout method. The Content Sprout method just means, you know, we're taking a live like this. This live, honestly, this can become multiple blog posts. This can become a super long 4,000 to 10,000 word post. Okay. So to answer your question, what I would do is I would go, if I'm looking for writers, I'll go to ProBlogger. So jobs.problogger. You can put a job posting up for like $75 or whatever. AngelList is also really good. One of our writers that came to me who now works for Gary Vee, by the way, Shout out to Raghav. He came out of college. Okay. He's like, look, I'm going to travel right now. I'm going to travel Asia, but I'd love to work for you. And he writes this 8,000-word blog post for me. He's like, here's what I would fix, whatever. Bear in mind, he's only 23 years old at this time. Okay. And he writes like someone that's really experienced. And so when he came in, we got him in and he was writing 4,000 words per day, 4,000 words per day. So you can find great writers. If you're in America, there's a lot of journalism majors that are suffering right now in terms of finding jobs because a lot of these media companies are just getting crushed. So that's another lesson I can talk about another time where advertising on your site is not the best way to make money. So yeah. And if you're looking to find designers, I would recommend checking out Dribbble. That's Dribbble, D-R-I-B-B-L-E. Behance is also very good as well. And just audition to people. Give them a test because most people, they can't follow the directions. When you put a job posting up, they can't follow directions. I would also recommend using a tool like BuzzSumo. Go out there and then find people that have written great content, blogs that you admire, and just look at the authors and look at who you can hire there because a lot of these authors are available. They're looking for more work, okay? So those are just a couple things you can do to try to sprout this, to grow this thing out. And look, if you're just starting out right now, you don't have the budget, you don't have the time, That's okay. Do what you can do in the beginning. Because look, I started from somewhere, right? Single Grain was basically— our online presence was nothing when I first started. And I was able to get something going initially by myself. It might not have been the greatest, but eventually I was able to get some traction and recruit people around me. And it's the team around me that makes everything great, okay? And we're always getting better. We're always thinking, you know, how do we improve? So hopefully that helps. Uh, let's see. Let's see. Live, live, live. A lot of people said live. Thank you. Proof new sales. Haji. Haji says, Haji, you know, I used to remember I used to watch, God, what's that show called? Haji from what's that cartoon called? Johnny Quest. That's it. Johnny Quest. I used to watch Johnny Quest and his best friend was Haji. Anyway, so Haji says, how many lead avenues do you guys do all at once? I'm thinking of Facebook ads. Wait, I think you asked that question already. So I think I answered that already. Laquisha asks, what about creating a community around your product? What is the best source or technique? Okay. So here, I'll tell you something that works. Here's the community right now. Okay. But you know what works really well? Facebook groups. Facebook wants you to stay on their platform. So if you create a Facebook group, even our little Marketing School group, and by the way, we can link to that in the comments, I hope. Check that out. Subscribe on YouTube, subscribe to our Facebook group. Facebook groups are very engaging because people love to— they're kind of— Facebook's favoring the groups right now. And I always see posts from groups that I love, that I'm a part of. So Young Entrepreneurs Council, that's a paid group I'm a part of. War Room, that's a group I'm a part of as well. And people are always contributing there. So I think if you're looking to start any type of group at all, what you need to do is you stay engaged for the first 2 to 3 months. And by the way, I actually suck at this. We need to do more engagement in our group. But if you're able to do that, the group will be able to self-perpetuate and the group will grow on its own because the Marketing School group grows on its own. So I would recommend using that as a way to build community. And your argument might be, look, I don't want to build on someone else's platform. I think if you're able to siphon that off and then maybe eventually get people to join a webinar or a live and collect their email address, then you can control that. Because I do like having the element of controlling your email list, because all the other stuff is kind of like a crapshoot. Okay. Even though he won't play me heads up in poker for a backlink from Single Grain if I win. I don't remember you asking me for that, Poof New Sales. But, you know, I would like to know what you're offering from your side. You can feel free to message me on Instagram or whatever. If you'd like to play heads up, let me know what you're putting up and, you know, we'll see what we can do. All right. So Rachel asked, for the Marketing School Podcast listeners, do you have a list of top 20 tools for marketers? I'll tell you what, Rachel. So we do a lot of these episodes in the Marketing School Podcast. So those of you that don't know the Marketing School Podcast, we're on track for about 1.2 million downloads in a 30-day period. So, um, which means, which means the event is actually going to happen in downtown LA. Okay, so we'll, we'll update you on that. I'm actually going to see Neil tomorrow recording podcasts. Um, but going back to Rachel's question, she says, list of top 20 tools for marketers. Okay, so we do a lot of these Top 7 tools for this, top 7 tools for this, top 7 tools for this. Okay. So you can see a lot of them. If you just go to marketingschool.io, you should be able to search all of them. If I'm going to give one tool right now that I really love, one tool that I really love right now would be, I mentioned it earlier, I like Loom. So use Loom and Loom or Vidyard doesn't really matter because I'm able to do screencasts with my face. I'm able to show people, explain to people really quick. And I'm able to communicate a lot faster. Okay. I would also say Gong is a great sales and marketing tool because I can learn what my people are saying and what my customers' objections are. So then I can figure out how I want to message to people. I'll give you a third bonus too. A third bonus is here's a marketing tool that's free for all of you. If you're looking to figure out your messaging for people, especially if you're selling consumer products, why don't you just go to Amazon, look at all the reviews, look at all of the 3-star reviews of like a book Book or it could be a three-star. Look, if I'm looking at let's say I know for a fact people have written sales books. Okay, why don't I just go look for the sales books on Amazon and say, "Hey, you know what? What are these people saying that are critical about these books?" Okay, because these book it means the books haven't solved that problem. Okay, it's like well this book could have talked a little more about prospecting. This book could have talked a little more about this. I you know I really would have appreciated appreciated learning about account-based marketing. Right, so. That just tells me, okay, maybe I should write about account-based marketing. I should include this in my book. Okay. That gives me competitive research. Or let's say I'm selling, let's say I'm selling, I don't know, AirPod cases or whatever. Okay. What's bad about this case? Okay. What can I— I can also use this for product development too. They don't like this about this case. Oh, I totally wouldn't have thought about that. Right? That is going to allow you to move a lot faster and it's free information and it's valid information because people people are actually taking the time out of their day to write a damn Amazon interview. Like, I don't know about you. I think the only time I ever write Amazon reviews are only, only when my friends ask me to help them with a book. Okay. That's the only time. So you have to have a lot of incentive, at least for me, to write an Amazon review. It's like the pain has to be enough for them to write that. Okay. So who do we have next? Rachel, Damien. Damien says, I lost so much time with setting up complicated funnels. Usually the simpler, the better. Eric, do you have a specific strategy to test your entire funnel? Yes. My strategy is create your funnel, general funnel, okay? Drive, spend maybe $100 or $200 worth of traffic to hit that funnel. See how it performs. Okay? See how the email deliverability is. We're having some trouble with our email deliverability, by the way. If you guys have any thoughts on that, or if you guys know a specialist, we're actually looking for one right now to get that up. Okay? What is the best way to get SaaS CEO as clients? Well, I'll tell you what, Hanji, the Growth Everywhere podcast, I interview a lot of SaaS founders. And then that has allowed me to go speak around kind of SaaS conferences too and get to kind of break bread with these people. That's a way to get around it. Or I talked about a little earlier, like dinners are a huge, what, like a 21 ROI for us, 21x ROI. So try to find SaaS founders around you. I don't know where you are right now. But whether it's a podcast interview or some type of collaboration, doing some work for free initially, there's so many SaaS companies popping up. And the idea is once you start to get to work with a few SaaS companies, you build up the experience, even if you're working for free, you go to other people and you say, look, we specialize on working with SaaS companies. Okay? So hopefully that's helpful. Yeah. That's so interesting. Brian, I was like, I thought I saw exactly the same question. And then Haji asked it. So anyway, I don't know if you guys have like a bromance or whatever, but Thiago says, Thiago says, how often do you record your podcast with Neil? And do you have any lessons that you learned the hard way that we could avoid when starting up? Okay. So what I'll tell you is make sure that when you record, even this mic right here, this, make sure you have good audio quality, right? You don't need, this mic is a little more expensive, but you can go buy a Yeti, A Blue Yeti mic. It's like $100 or $200. Okay. Or you can buy like, you can even buy like one of those, you can buy, just buy a mic. Okay. Buy a mic. Be the people that are listening to you. It's in your best interest to do a good job of creating the best experience for them. Okay. We've had people, I was looking at our reviews and they said, I, you know, the content was really good, but the sound quality was so bad that I had to unsubscribe. So Neil and I, in the very beginning, we would record In his hotel, not his hotel, in his condo in Las Vegas. So he lives at the Mandarin Oriental. It's a really nice place, right? The problem with Vegas was in the summertime, it was up to like 110, 115 degrees. Okay. So, you know, me, my skin was drying up and, you know, the AC was too loud. So we had to turn the AC off and we would record a couple sessions and it'd get really hot where we're both sweating and my hands, you know, my hands would get sweaty. My feet would get sweaty too. Yeah. It's just like our sound quality was terrible. We were sweating our asses off. Okay. But that was what it took in the beginning to get going. What I recommend, if you're going to get started, have good sound quality, have a good mic, record up to 5 to 10 episodes at a time. If you can, do daily podcasts. Okay. Most people aren't willing to put in the work. This is why I'm so happy to say this stuff because I know most people aren't going to do this stuff. Okay. But this is exactly what we did. We did an everyday podcast. And we would record, in the beginning, they were 10-minute episodes each. So they're pretty exhausting. And now kind of our sweet spot is like 5 to 7 minutes or so. And we'll record 15 to 20 at a time. So tomorrow we'll knock out 15 to 20. And we often, we used to do it where like right now, like I'm doing this remote, right? We would do it where he's traveling. We would do it where he is, you know, where sometimes I'm traveling too. And the sound quality was just really bad. Okay. So I would take that into account. The other thing I'll say is this. We've done over 906 episodes now. We haven't missed one. Okay? So that means we're on track to do 3 years of episodes where we haven't missed one. It doesn't matter when I'm sick. It doesn't matter when he's traveling. Even in times where there's events where Neil and I are both speaking. So we're in Brazil, in Florianópolis about 2 years ago. And we're like, we got to record. So what we did was we broke into a conference, like an empty room, set the mic down, sat next to each other, And then we just recorded. And that's the kind of work that you have to put in to make something like this happen. Because Neil and I, we're like, how are we going to get to 1 million downloads a month? We're kind of stressing about it. Not really stressing, but worried about it in December. We're like, there's no way. Because we just kept averaging about 787,000, 797,000. And look, these numbers seem big. They seem unattainable. But I'm telling you, look, if I can do it, you guys can all do it. It just takes time to get it going. And so just think of it like you're plateauing. That's the key takeaway here. Okay. I don't want this to be not relatable. But because we stuck with it in January, New Year's resolutions, everyone is so excited to learn whatever. And all of a sudden, boom, uptick. All of a sudden it's like $40,000 a day, $37,000, $35,000. It just keeps going up and it stays around that range. We're like, wow, this is going to trend. And now all of a sudden it's like, okay, now we have to throw this event. Right? So it's— and here's another story, like, or another lesson. It's like each and every level you get up to, when you level up to the next level, you have a completely new set of problems. Your problems will never go away. It's not like, oh, when you make 6 figures a year or 7 figures a year or 8 figures a year, your problems go away. No, you just have a new set of problems. Right? What do they say? They say new levels, new devils. Okay? So hopefully that helps. Rosh says, I'm going to skip around. So let's see. Sorry guys, if I don't get to all your questions. By the way, I love all the questions, guys. This is really good. This is super fun. So Ryan asks, or Rosh asks, would you start with FB ads to your group? I would. I think if you don't have an audience, I think one of the easiest things you can do right now is to Go live on, especially on Facebook. Because if the live goes really well, you can just drive traffic there, right? And then you can just retarget people that have watched a certain portion of that live video or that ad, and then bring them back, say, hey, join the group. Okay? So you can do that. That's what I would do if I were starting from scratch today. I wouldn't be like, because if I try to compete with blog posts today, it's like there's millions and millions of blog posts being produced every single day. It's like you got to figure out where is the path of least resistance. Okay. What my thoughts are on account-based marketing for B2B? Is it still relevant? It's not discussed much on Marketing School or other marketing influencers. I will go ahead and answer that for you. So maybe that can be another blog post for us. Wow. This is getting bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger. I like this. Keep it going, guys. Keep the comments going so that maybe YouTube will show this more. Anyway, so account-based marketing. Is this account-based marketing instead of just, let's say I want to reach out to Coca-Cola. Okay. I'm not just going to, let's say I'm a marketing agency. Okay. And I want to reach out to Coca-Cola, but I know that maybe it only makes sense for me to reach out to the VP of marketing because they have, they can make the marketing decisions or maybe the CMO, right? Usually like there's one person. Account-based marketing, the only difference is that you're targeting a net of people. You're targeting the entire marketing division, okay? And you're marketing to them. And what you can even do too is I like account-based marketing because you can do account-based marketing on LinkedIn ads. You can target that company and target specific titles, which I really like. You can also, there's like a bunch of different retargeting programs you can use to just target those specific companies. What else can you do? You can do something crazy with, there's like a whole, I need to find the blog post for you, but there's this program called Hull, H-U-L-L. And if you, if you Google Hull Reveal Loop, okay, let me type this in the chat right now. Hull Google Reveal Loop. That's going to be account-based marketing for your website. So let me give you an example. Our website, we're approaching 200,000 visits a month, and that's a lot of visitors, right? What this will allow me to do is basically identify the company that came to my site. So by IP address. Okay. So let's say Coca-Cola visited my site. And then what I can have happen is Clearbit, which is another kind of like an enrichment tool. Enrichment. I sound like a, like a fob. Enrichment tool. Okay. So you take that and then what you do with that is Clearbit will find not only the VP of marketing, but the entire marketing team. And you can even set it to send an email out automated, right? I wouldn't recommend automated. Just Get all the contacts and maybe send out a personalized email. That's one way of getting account-based marketing going. And then here's the other thing. This is not really kosher, you know, against kind of, you know, ad policies and all that. But if you have the email addresses, guess what? You can retarget those people. Okay. But, you know, it just depends on the country that you're in. Okay. So United States, you can't really do that. You kind of have to disclose it. But when I was hanging out in Ukraine a couple months ago, All the guys in Ukraine are like, yeah, doesn't matter. You know, they just, they just skirt around it. Doesn't matter. Okay. So it depends on what country you're in, but I would say most countries, if you're watching this right now, probably matters. Okay. Uh, so what is next here? Uh, Brian, Rachel says, yay. Poof New Sales says, I'm a content marketer. I got you with— wait, huh? I got you with free blog posts for 2 weeks. 2K words, highest quality, free content if you beat me, heads up. Let's get it. Oh, okay. So that's the challenge to me. You know what? Email me and we'll figure something out. I want to see Poof New Sales. By the way, if you guys want to do some deals here, great too. But if you can, if you guys, Poof, show me 3 examples of your best content marketing work and maybe we can talk, okay? Cool and congrats. Looking forward to coming and joining you in LA. James, we'll let you know in the Marketing School kind of the upcoming episodes. how we're going to do this moving forward. What's the best way to drive traffic to a services-based funnel? Is FB ads still the best way and what's a realistic budget? I don't think there's any best way, quote unquote, for this. I think it just depends on where your people are hanging out. And by the way, you might be paying a lot more money to get people into your webinar from LinkedIn. You might be paying like $10, $20, $30 or whatever, but if they convert at a much higher rate, the numbers still pan out at the end. So don't just think about your friends. Would you be able to speak a little on the sales pitch question earlier? How would you start your sales pitch? Did you talk rankings, conversions? What are great qualifying questions? So if I'm doing a sales pitch, if someone's talking to me, all our— so here's, here's a little difference for us. Like, I'm going to reframe this because all our leads are inbound. Okay. So if I were reaching out to someone, through email, I want to make sure, okay, here's an example. Someone got in, uh, someone got really bad press. Okay. There was a very popular venture capitalist, got some really bad press about maybe, you know, they were, um, maybe there, there's like some infidelity going on. Okay. So basically this person might, might've been cheating on someone else. Okay. Now what happened was someone I knew reached out to this person and said, hey, you know, um, negative press. Okay. That was the headline. So it might say negative press and it might say, hey, look, hey, Hey, so-and-so, look, I saw the press that you got recently. How would you feel if we're able to get rid of this completely? Would you be interested? If you keep it short and to the point like that, that's like an extreme example, but you know that person's interested in that, that person's going to become interested. And then what you're trying to do is you're trying to get— in any kind of sales thing, you're trying to get the conversation. That's what you're trying to do. So I can float something that's interesting to them. I can also Create a new tool that again is interesting to them, and that's going to get a conversation going. Okay. This is why people pay so much money for booths. This is why we're spending so much money on booths this year, because we know that we get conversations going. There's a good likelihood that people are going to work with us. Okay. Whether it's through our software, our education stuff, or the agency. And by the way, if you want to talk to my team about getting the right products or services recommended to you, just go to singlegrain.com/live and you can apply for a call. And then my team can figure out the best way to help you, okay? So First Metric says, as a follow-up, if you get folks to create multiple pieces of content, do you give them byline credit, for example? Yes, absolutely. I give them byline credit. I used to not give them byline credit, but I figure if these people are working hard, I want them to be able to kind of grow their own thing too. So I want to be able to give them the byline credit, okay? And I think that's fine because you're building goodwill and it's not like you're trying to take all the credit for yourself. Here's the other thing. If you're taking all the credit for yourself, like every single post I had said Eric Siu on it, like that doesn't seem realistic first and foremost. And it also makes your company look smaller. Okay? So if you're trying to work with really big clients, take that into account too. You got to think about your image. Okay? Scrolling down a little bit. Manav says, sorry. I'm like, Manav, don't be sorry. I'm amazed that you're here because it's probably really late for you right now. And that's great. Brian or Raj says, Blue Yeti, $100, great mic. Awesome. Thank you. That's super clever. Sorry guys. James Isaac says, go to events, SaaStr. I will actually be at SaaStr, James. So feel free to come by our booth. And what else we got? Toyoshi says, hello. For a brand new startup that will be offering services to clients, which Facebook ads would you recommend to draw traffic? By the way, guys, If you guys are looking to get more clients or you guys are looking to build your agency, we actually, I'm going to drop a link in here. We actually have something called our Agency Accelerator Program, only for people looking to build that service. Okay. So I'm just going to drop that in a link. So whatever, if we have the right products or services, whatever, I'm just going to drop it in here. So which Facebook ads would you recommend to draw traffic? I'd recommend video ads. I think video ads are great. And I'll give you a quick story real quick. And maybe we have like, If you guys want me to keep going, say keep going or whatever in the chat. But video allows you— actually, let me see if I have the book. I have the book. Give me one second. This book right here, Breakthrough Advertising. This book is no longer in print, or you could try to buy it on Amazon. It might be a couple hundred dollars. But here's the idea. Whenever you're doing any type of advertising at all, I'm like a book model right now. Whenever you're able to do when you're thinking about advertising, you are taking people, and I got this from Digital Marketer, you're taking people from unaware to problem aware, to solution aware, to aware of your solution, and then you make an offer to them, right? You show them like a deal, okay? The great thing about video is that you can take them through all stages of that, okay? Now, in other scenarios, like, oh, you drive them to a blog post and you got to build more of a relationship with them, you can just get to the point with the video. You know what I mean? I mean, I recommend reading this book. I try to read it at least once a year, try to reread it. There's always, you know, good reminders in there, but check out Breakthrough Advertising. You know, understand that a video is going to be able to take people from top to bottom because you're building a relationship with them. You're building trust with them, just like I'm building trust with you guys right now. Okay. So First Metric says, most of your Marketing School podcasts are about 7 to 10 minutes in length. Do you find that to be a good length or should podcasts be 30 minutes longer? Okay. This is perfect. This question is perfect because my Growth Everywhere podcast, people stay about 30 to 45 minutes or so. And the retention is extremely high. Okay. Now with Mark, it's about like 80 or 90%. Now with Marketing School, now with Marketing School, the retention is about 95 to 100%. So people go the whole way through. So I think there's a case for both of them. If we're looking at watch time or listen time, both have their merits. So, which is why I like doing both of them. Okay. Rachel asks, is there any way to view my competitors' Google reviews somewhere to just plug in their URL? I think you just need to Google their name and then just, for the Google page. I don't have the most experience on that, so that's all I know around that. Do you need a certain number of subscribers to do YouTube Live? I don't. I don't. I think you actually do. I think you do. You might need to Google that, by the way, because I don't have the answer for that. Because I know when I go to my personal account, I cannot go live on it. Oh no, no, I can go live. Never mind. I can go live. That account only has like 156 subscribers. So I think anybody can go live at this point. I have hopefully solved that for you. Haji says he'll be at SaaStr. Okay, that's great. So see you at SaaStr. And then what else do we got? Rachel says she wants to come to LA from Toronto for the live show. You know, I actually might be in Toronto to meet some of our clients there. Okay. And Haji says, is blogging worth my time to grow my brand? and get clients, how we can stand out in this crowded blogging world? If you're just starting out right now, I'm going to be honest with you guys. I wouldn't start with blogging. I'd try to start with like what I recommended earlier. Start with like going live on YouTube and you're trying to drive ads towards it. And because you can drive ads and build an audience that way, right? And then get people to get people on your email list. Okay. I know you used to work at Treehouse. If you're involved in an education company right now, how would you get new students? Okay. That's actually what we have right now. We have an education company. Focus on training people on marketing. And I would, I mean, look at, and I recommend again, look, if you're looking to build an audience, like look at what I'm teaching right now. There's no way I haven't built some goodwill with some people in here that they aren't willing to, at least if they're at the right frame of mind and they want more marketing education, they can go ahead and do that. Right. So we're building that out right now. And those of you that want to see, um, Neil and I do some marketing education right now where we're basically going to have quizzes, certifications, team training, And it's basically curating all the content we've created, plus we're going to create some new content. Let us know that you'd like— just type training into the chat. And I just want to see the engagement on that in here. So that'll give us a little more kind of ammo to move forward on it. Thank you, Laquisha. And Praneet says, any tips on getting freelance writing jobs? So that one, Praneet, I answered a little earlier. I'll just check out AngelList or I would check out ProBlogger. Those are really good job boards and you can find people there. Anil says, we charge minimum $1,000 for a customer. Is there any marketing agencies that you can hire low budget? There's a company called Boostability. They do low budget, lower budget marketing. And what I would recommend, honestly, if you're doing lower budget, is just to figure it out yourself or maybe hire an intern. And that you're probably gonna get more bang for your buck that way. But Boostability does great work too. Okay. And thank you all for saying keep going. And let's see. What else? I'm going to start wrapping this up. Any other questions you guys might have? I'm going to stay for maybe another couple of minutes and then I'm going to go off because I have another podcast interview and I haven't had a drink of water for 43 minutes. So let's see. Breakthrough Advertising. Ryan Mason says, what would you say the best way for new agencies to gain clients? Cold emails, cold calls, or networking events? Ryan, honestly, I think in the beginning, because you have more time in the beginning, You should do all of it, right? So cold emails, I'm talking from a sales perspective because you aren't sure what's going to work for you. And I don't know what niche you're in because if you're marketing to like hospitals, you might market a different way, right? So I don't know what works for you necessarily. So you might need to try a little bit of each, right? Because for me, we mostly focus on working with, you know, software companies and e-commerce companies. We kind of know who to reach out to and who to hit. And it just so happens that a lot of people listen to podcasts and a lot of people consume content. And a lot of people are at the events that I speak at. Okay. So it depends kind of answer. Okay. I plan on joining your course. See you at SaaStr. So yeah, look, if you guys have any questions on the offerings that we have, whether it's products like education or services, again, singlegrain.com/live for a call, or you can go to singlegrain.com/joinagencyaccelerator for the agency stuff. Okay. First metric, that question is very wide, so I don't know if I can answer that. But the question is, what is the ideal size company to work with Single Grain? Oh, you mean with us? So for us, we're looking for companies that are doing at least $5 million in revenue, probably ideally $10 million in revenue, or they've raised at least $10 million. Okay. Trevor says, if you find yourself in Westlake Village, our agency would love to learn from you. And I'm sure our CEO would love to collaborate in some way that would be win-win for everyone. Trevor, I actually was in Westlake Village when the fire started. I was at a hotel and we got evacuated. So I actually got a lot from that event too. But anyway, Westlake Village is very nice. I will let you know if I'm ever back there. And Damien says, I started mine with cold emails only. Great. Cold emails are awesome. Manav says, Eric, if someone is new, what can he really share on YouTube? That's a really good question. I think if you're starting out, it's like, what can you share? I think if you're literally just starting out, like you're a student coming out, you're going to have to take a licking for the first year or 2, start to get some experience, and then you can share. Because at that point, then you can start sharing experience for people that are 2 years behind you, right? So you got to get a little experience first before you can start sharing. Because for me now, it's so easy. Like I'm just, you know, 48 minutes, I'm just continuing to riff on this stuff because it's just like, there's this story over here. There's this experience over here and I can just go on it. Yeah. So once you have like a year or 2, you should be able to share more stuff with people, okay? If you find that you're struggling to share with people, you probably might not be that experienced in the beginning. So you've got to gain some more experience, all right? What's your favorite landing page CRO test recently? Natasha, one of my favorite CRO tests recently is actually we added this Drift bot. That's a conversational landing page, which is what they call it. And it collects a lot of leads for our education kind of program. We're collecting leads for that right now, and it's done really well. So I would recommend checking that out. How can I learn marketing myself? Any course? I would recommend checking out Marketing School if you want something for free. And then if you want to check out kind of our individual and training programs, you can, you know, just check it out when it actually comes out. But the free stuff that we have coming out of Marketing School and this YouTube channel, that should be more than enough. Let's see, what else do we got? Yeah, so James recommends the HOTH. I mean, that's what I recommend for, I guess, those SEO reseller stuff. Favorite growth channel for B2B2C e-commerce company now aside from video? So B2B2C, let me think about that aside from video. I do like Facebook Messenger. And so what you can do with Facebook Messenger is you can drive people to your bot collect their email inside of the bot. So you have their subscriber on Messenger, you have their email, and then you could also get them to click on a link to go to a thank you page. So then you can retarget those people. So that's what I like doing. That way you can hit them across all the different channels. Okay. Thanks for your time. Appreciate that. And Trevor says, that would be awesome. A bunch of people here would love to see what you had to say, provide some value. Yeah. I mean, that's it for today. If you guys would like to see more, I mean, definitely open to doing more of these. This was really fun. And I hope you all have a good rest of your evening. For those of you that are listening from, you know, kind of Europe, Asia, India, and I guess India's in Asia. And then for the rest of you, have a good rest of your day. See you later.
