Impact of dubbing on MrBeast's YT is crushing, Each negative keyword adds 2.3% CTR, and more

Dude, do you know the marketing impact of MrBeast dubbing on YouTube?

No.

So you know what he does? He makes these videos now. He— so he was talking on a podcast and basically he'll make a video and he will have dubbed voices in like superhero names or something like that, right? Like it's a voice that you really know and it could be like a rapper or something like that, right?

No, no. He's very specific. In Brazil, he used Spider-Man voice.

Correct. So he'll dub in languages, but he'll also, I believe he'll also dub in English or for someone that's really famous, right? And then that gets a lot more views. So it might be someone that's a really popular influencer and they'll just dub in like, you can dub in Klingon, for example, which is like a Star Trek language, right? And so he will dub in all these languages and that will add millions and millions of additional views. And most people don't know that that's happening. So how is this practical for people like you and me? Well, that just means to dub in different languages, which is what MrBeast was doing. To your point, he did it in Japanese with the Naruto character's voice. So those of you that grew up watching Naruto, I certainly did, the anime, you know that voice and you know the Spider-Man voice in Portuguese. So dubbing at the end of the day is just going to get bigger and it's going to get you more reach. And so it's something to think about because I do believe YouTube's the next It's the biggest social opportunity for the next decade.

One thing that we've been doing that's kind of a little bit different, so you already know I create a ton of content in English. Instead of me creating it in France or German or Portuguese, we take the content that does well and we have our local team and different people on the team transcribe and translate that content and post it as their own because it was me, the company, who posted it in English and it's starting to build up the corporate brand more than just people's personal brand. And that's done wonders for us.

Dude, you know what you should do? Remember, so Neil had this commercial before where everyone looked like Neil and everyone had like a bald head, right? And everyone was wearing a white t-shirt. And so imagine if you had everyone do that for your commercials in different languages. So your Asia division, your Portuguese division, your German division, Because that can continue on the original commercial.

You know what's funny? That commercial did not do that well for us in the long run.

Well, I don't think you guys put a lot of money towards it. I feel like you guys didn't like go hard on it.

Crapload of money, dude. We were advertising on CNBC and Bloomberg.

How much did you spend?

I don't know the exact amount in the long run, but it wasn't like—

$1 million?

No, maybe like $300,000, $400,000.

Yeah, so I think you spent, that's a good chunk of money. I don't think you spent like millions of dollars.

No, no, but we did it on specific channels for our ideal customer. It was actually hard for us to spend a ton more money. Like the volume we were getting, sometimes we were getting our ads on each network played like 6 times a day during stock hours where a lot of our ideal executives were watching.

You get a lot of texts?

Tons of texts, tons of emails, a lot of brand recognition, but what's done better for us is like when Ad Age or Adweek covers us. We tend to get more RFPs from that than anything else.

So like when you guys write an article there?

We don't really write articles when they just cover us.

Oh, got it. So like some award that you win?

Yeah, like for example, Godin Campaign, we also closed Louis Vuitton in Asia, right? So it was like hand in hand.

That's actually a good point that we've never talked about. It's like, are agency awards actually valuable or not?

Eh, so I wouldn't say the agency award, like we do them. It costs money to do them, by the way. So a lot of them run them. And I'm not saying they're valuable or not valuable. What I found to be the most valuable to actually generate revenue is Forrester. You get in Forrester, they talk about you, you generate more revenue from that than anything else. From RFP standpoint, that's what we and other people have seen on our team. We haven't been in a Forrester Wave report yet because they haven't run one since we've been working with Forrester, but we've been paying Forrester for a while now and they include us in some write-ups and reports and no joke, it does help with RFPs. And you're not talking about like someone saying, hey, we have $500 grand to spend. You're talking about some of these people are like, we have $7 million a year to spend. Ah, you keep a customer for 4 years, that's $28 million. That adds up. Like that's what really moves the needle.

Yeah. And what Neil's talking about here, like I know, so, you know, for larger agencies, the game does become largely RFPs. And so those of you that are smaller right now, it's like, oh, should I do RFPs? You probably aren't able to even fulfill on those RFPs right now. So just, I wanted to give you the food for thought as well.

And one other important thing that people don't realize with these RFPs, so RFP stands for requests for proposal. If you're a big corporation, typically you have rules. You can't just hire an agency. You have to go and reach out to 5 agencies, 6 agencies, and run a process and give multiple people a shot so they can look at capabilities, case studies, pricing. They look at everything. Depending on the country you're in, some people have minority mandates, and if you're a minority-run business, it may increase your chance to get the business.

And has that helped you?

No, it has not.

Yeah.

We applied for the minority seal, like when we pitched Boeing and a few others, because they all say like, we're looking to spend X dollars with minorities. And we've been doing the program now for, call it 2-ish years. And we renewed it. No joke, we haven't got one deal from it. And a lot of the RFPs we get, they say, hey, if you're a minority, please let us know, include the certificates and all this, and we do it. No joke, it hasn't really made a difference.

How much does that cost you?

It can't be much. I know it's more than $1,000 a year, but I know it's less than $10,000 a year, so it's not much. Oh, that's not bad. So we keep doing it.

Yeah.

But the big thing that people don't get with the RFPs is if you pitch 5 deals, you're not going to close all of them. And the cost to pitch some of these RFPs is just so expensive. You also have to, Add that into the equation because for some of these deals, no joke, you know, for some of the RFPs and some of them we haven't won, we've spent probably like $70,000 to $100,000 and something worth of—

Not including your time.

No, no, that's including time.

Oh, including time.

Not my time, but people's time, internal costs. Like we've had some RFPs where we've probably spent around like $150,000 and then you're like, oh crap, we didn't win the deal. That sucks.

By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Dude, I want to give you some, some click-through rate statistics over here. So Noah Kagan tweeted something that adding the New York Times bestseller to his ads increased the click-through rate by 19%. So I'm going to share my screen over here. I have 2 CTR things to share. So let's look at Noah Kagan first and foremost, who's on his honeymoon, by the way. Congratulations, Noah.

Congratulations.

Yeah, he's got a— we'll just leave it at that right now. But love your feedback. Adding New York Times to book, thoughts. So this is like he's adding the seal over here, right? You can see New York Times bestseller, New York Times bestseller up top. Adding New York Times to the COVID of Million Dollar Weekend, which is this new book that came out, which I think he did really well with promotion on it, increased click-through rate by 19%. And it's a great book too. So go get it if you want to build a billion-dollar business.

Isn't that interesting? What's Million Dollar Weekend about?

It's about how you can build a million-dollar business in 48 hours, which is the weekend.

Got it. Oh, cool. Yeah, I can see it working really well for a book. The question I— so I saw that when you added it to the topic sheet, right? And I was like, adding a New York Times bestseller to what helps? Like, I'm like, is this for a coaching ad and be like, hey, I'm Neil Patel, I'm also a New York Times bestseller, pay me for coaching. You know, but it makes sense for a book increasing the CTR. I'm curious if it helps with anything else when you're selling at least products related to personal branding or, you know, an individual selling something.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global, they're worldwide. They have SMB services They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Check this one out. This one you're going to like. Okay, so Rob Henderson tweeted this. So each additional negative word in a headline results in a 2.3% increase in click-through rate. Most frequent negative words in headlines: wrong, bad, awful. This is— so Neil likes to tweet like, you're doing it wrong. So bad, awful, hate, war, worst, sick, fight, Scary hell, right? And you can see just negative, positive, right? The ratio. So basically this is just how it works, right? Human beings, we get entertained when we see conflict.

So— The one I like using is rude awakening.

No, you use wrong a lot.

I do too, but the word rude awakening, I've used it in a lot of my social content. It's done so well.

Really? I haven't seen that much.

Yeah.

Look, okay. In contrast, each additional positive word in a headline, I didn't see this, is a 1% decrease in click-through rate. Most frequent positive words in headlines: love, pretty, beautiful, truth, hilarious, amazing, save, funny, awesome, care. There you go. Food for thought, everyone.

What's funny is we've seen on sales calls, if you're too negative, it actually hurts with the close rates.

I believe that, but you're not, at that point, this is, you've got them on the call. You don't need to headline them into anything.

Yeah. And it's funny too, because like when we'll do like sales pitches, We're not big on, we've analyzed a lot of data because, you know, we use Gong and a few other tools for sales. We're not big on, hey, you know, this is all the stuff you're doing, you guys suck, and this is what could be improved. We think that's a really wrong way of selling. We more so look at it as like, here's the opportunities, and by the way, this is what impact we think it's going to have on ROI. It's up to you if you want to fix them or not, or adjust them, but typically this is what we see when you do this. This is what it results to in potential either savings or revenue generation. So speaking in more business language versus being just negative on like, you're wrong, or even super positive on like, you're doing a great job, right? And if someone is doing a good job, we let them know like, hey, these are areas that you don't need to focus on much. And these are the areas that are opportunities, but we found that to really help with closing rates. And I know that wasn't the purpose of the tweet, but still, you know, if you care.

Speaking of closing rates, so what's interesting is I believe you're still involved with pitches sometimes, correct?

I am.

Okay. And so when I spoke to Gary Vee on Friday, he's still involved with pitches, right? I'm still involved with pitches. And so I just continue to believe that we're trending towards a direction where Founders, again, I've said it before, you have to stay involved. The cool thing that you saw on Twitter a couple years ago where it's like, go hire an operator, go hire CEO, get out of their way, right? And they're going to grow their business for you. Wishful thinking.

Yeah. So you did an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk on the Leveling Up podcast. It ends up coming out, my guess is what, a week or two?

Yep.

What were the main, like, if you had to give, We have what, 4 or 5 minutes left in this episode. What are some of the main learnings that you ended up getting out or getting from them?

Yeah, we'll share a snippet of the podcast on this episode too. But basically, oh, so we had a mutual friend that asked the question and here was the question. It starts off with, don't give me the cliché answer. What would you do to market in a crowded environment in today's environment? And so then I said, it's a software company, right? So I was like, okay, I bet you Gary's just going to say content, right? He's going to be like, content, content, content, content, content, content, right? And then he actually gave a thoughtful, nuanced answer here. And so basically his answer was LinkedIn. And I was like, okay, so what specifically with LinkedIn? He's like, I would make 40 creatives a day. And I was like, so 40 regular posts or— because you can't do that because they limit your reach, right? No, but he's like, 40 ad creatives a day and I would go extremely hard there. on all the different ad formats and I would spend millions of dollars and then hopefully, you know, add 25 to 50% in growth. And we've just seen that work really well. And I was like, okay, that's actually a thoughtful, that's a thoughtful answer. So people can use that answer if you want, but 40 creatives per day, ad creatives per day is a good chunk. So—

That's a good chunk.

That's 1,200 new creatives a month.

Yeah. So what other things did you learn from him?

So basically, And I talked to you about this, but VaynerX is his agency holding company. And so I was like, okay, how do you plan on buying the New York Jets? Because that's an aspirational thing. And the Jets are valued at a couple billion dollars, I should say. And he's like, look, it's an aspirational thing, but my way of getting there is VeeFriends. And then it's VaynerX, my holding company. And then he wants to get into private equity. And so he's saying Carlyle Group, sorry, KKR and all these other groups, they don't really understand marketing. And he thinks he's going to be able to bring that advantage and he wants to He wants to go out there and buy, you know, SaaS companies doing $50, $100 million plus or so. And he thinks he can bring a unique advantage there. So I thought that was an interesting take. And you asked for one more, right?

Yeah, but on the software end, so we work with a lot of private equity and some of the bigger players and our agency does a lot in revenue from B2B. You want to know why a lot of private equity companies like Vista Equity don't invest as much in marketing? Why? Because they find that they generate way more of an ROI just investing in sales or buying other companies and cross-selling. Like from a math perspective, I'm not saying it's a wrong or a right approach. We're both marketers, Gary is as well. But in business, just in general, there's no right or wrong way to skin a cat, right? Like you got to figure out what works for you. For example, Gary's great at creating content, you know? So that works for him. Probably a lot of people at Vista or KKR, they specialize, they're really good at M&A and cross-selling and growing, you know, MRR through efficiency by just saying, hey, here's all this customers here, they buy X, all these customers here buy Y, they're the same customers that buy each other, we should just cross-sell everything, right? And that model has worked for them for years and that playbook, Has produced amazing returns. Like, I can't name the private equity firm, but one of them sold to a— one of their portfolio companies to a Fortune 100 company, a technically Fortune 50 company. It was a multi-billion dollar acquisition. In less than a 6-year period, the private equity company made almost 6x, not 6x fully, but close to it. That's amazing return, right?

Yeah.

Forget marketing or sales or anything. Who wouldn't want roughly a 6x return in 6 years? You're pretty much almost doubling your money. You know, each year you've made what you bought. Like, that's amazing returns.

I mean, the big takeaway, just to reiterate again, is there's no right or wrong way. It really is just what works for you because we all have different experiences growing up. The final thing I'll say is this, and I've told you this already, but Gary actually has a a chief, I'll call him, I think his title's like VP of relationships, I should call it that. But basically, I was like, Gary, he's kind of your de facto chief of staff for relationships because Gary's a very relationship-oriented guy, but he can't be everywhere, right? And he's always on the go and everything. So, this guy is based in Miami. I believe his name's Nick. Forgot his last name, but his name's Nick. And his job is to identify up-and-coming talent. Could be NFL talent, could be baseball talent, could be You know music talent or whatever, and then figure out how he can start a relationship with these people, take them out to dinner and everything. And then you have another person basically Gary's right-hand man to build relationships with up-and-comers, and that just gives him a lot of leverage at the end of the day. So I thought that was interesting. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and also go to marketing school dot io slash agency if you want the secrets to grow your agency faster. Want to go to seven, eight, even 9 figures. Go there, check it out, and we'll see you later.

Thank you.