Is TOFU content useless for SEO?, Meta cuts VPs, Eric & Neil's strategy to get enterprise accounts

Dude, something that's worth talking about too, speaking of things getting harder. So my friend Gaetano posted this on LinkedIn. So he says this, he says, I've always said top of the funnel content marketing is a waste of time for B2B SaaS, and I was right. Google is wiping glossary pages and broad searches off the map with AI answers. Aleyda Solis put together an excellent analysis of queries triggering AI snapshots, and it's garbage searches like, what is SEO, ROI meaning, CRM, influencer marketing, et cetera. Marketing teams are being forced to do better and it's about damn time. Everyone's got to step up. And I like that. I like that quite a bit because it used to be a cool thing to make these glossaries and you get a bunch of traffic for it, but it's all irrelevant traffic anyway.

And it's basic, right? And I've talked about this in the past. When we generate leads for our agency, a lot of it's coming from, and revenue, it's not the majority of our traffic. It's probably the least amount of traffic. It's someone typing in random stuff and I'm making up a term. But it's stuff like, we have a blog in 20-something languages and we have 6 different products. What's the best way to structure our website? Like it's people getting very specific and enterprisey. And that wasn't the exact search term, but we got a multimillion-dollar account. I believe it started at around $600,000 from that search term, but it wasn't exactly that search term, but it was something around there. It was a $600,000 project that eventually ended up turning into a multimillion-dollar-a-year project. And we've had that customer Probably 3, 4 years now.

By the way, by the way, so Meta has this thing over here. I was looking at the Washington Post. So Meta's oversight body prepares to lay off VPs. So they're cutting a lot of VPs because they're trying to also save on costs too. So you're seeing a lot of people cut middle management because VP is very much— VPs are very much middle layer management.

But the way they're trying to cut, and we talked about this like 6 months ago, I was just in London and someone worked at Google. And he's like, you know, a lot of us did an analysis because Google has tons of engineers. And they're like, we noticed every year they're giving a little bit less and less for severance, you know, like a month less than they were the previous year.

Yeah.

And he's like, the other thing they're trying to do is they're not trying to fire. They're just trying to force you to really come into the office as many days as they can because then it just causes people to quit. And then You don't have to pay any severance.

So what is your take on this?

I think more people are going to bust an X or Twitter, whatever you want to end up calling it.

Just fire a bunch at once?

There's a lot of laws that cause these companies to be able to not just fire a ton at once. But dude, do these companies need like 100—

He did it in California.

He did it in California. But they also had financial struggles, right? Or according to him, they had financial struggles. When a company is struggling financially, it's easier to get away. But when you have $80 billion in profit and you just fire a whole slew of people, it looks bad. It's also perception-wise. But dude, these executives know like, oh, we have 170,000 people. How many people do we need on our search engine team? How many people do we really need running Android? Like, you really don't need all those people. With X in and of itself, I see more stuff being shipped on X than I did when it was Twitter. Ever.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then on the flip side, remember when Mark Zuckerberg was talking about Threads and they released Threads? It was a small team that created Threads. Also, wait, why do you need all these employees doing all this stuff? Like, you don't. A lot of these companies, forget AI, there's just so much bloat in corporations and these companies just hire and hire and hire. Even Apple has a lot of people. But what I think Apple was really smart with during COVID they just didn't stack on tons of people like all these other corporations.

This is also show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. This is what happens when you have a zero interest environment. And then now people are hesitant to hire, right? And I think we talked about yesterday when we did the Agency Owners Association call, 685,000 jobs were lost in May.

Yeah.

And then the jobs that were gained, I think a lot of them were like part-time or public jobs. And then you have a— it's a record high right now with the number of people that are actually working multiple jobs, right? So people struggling to make ends meet. On all sides, right? For people and then also for companies.

Isn't it funny when they talk about like the, some of the jobs reports depending on the websites you read, most of them try to talk about jobs added versus the jobs that were also lost during the month.

Yeah. You know what? So basically people know how to manipulate data to tell different stories because marketing at the end of the day is just telling stories. So data can be sliced up any way, shape, or form. I actually had an argument with some of my ex-EO Forum members. We had a dinner on Tuesday. And they all thought the economy was great. And then I started citing all these things and they're like, where do you get your information from? I'm like, who cares? Like, what matters is that I'm thinking for myself and then you all should think for yourself, right? But, you know, it is what it is.

The funny part is I remember after the 2008 recession in the United States, they adjusted what they considered unemployed. So if you were unemployed for, I forgot how many months, there was a threshold and it was 4 or 6. They'd just be like, oh, you stopped looking for a job. Well, no, there's a lot of people that were unemployed for more than 6 months, whatever that threshold was, that were still looking for a job and they just couldn't find one.

Yeah.

But yes, what Eric and I are getting at is people manipulate data in many different ways, not always intentionally, but people do manipulate to try to paint a story their way. And people do that in marketing all the time. You see it on people's homepage, right? Like X amount of people trust this or use this. How many people did you survey? They'll be like, 70%. Oh, we surveyed 10 people. So 7 out of 10. I'm like, all right, that's not really a big sample size. It doesn't do much.

I got to 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 that discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, 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 again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. Well, you have a topic here on the marketing strategy we use to get enterprise accounts.

Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people talk about top of funnel, bottom of funnel, middle of funnel, generating customers. But I thought it would be fun for you and I to just discuss what we're doing with our marketing to generate customers? Because we're in B2B, not, I know not everyone is, but if you want to get bigger customers, you know, I'll let you start off first. What are you guys doing these days to generate more enterprise? I'll let you go first. You want me to go first? All right. So some of the things we're doing is we're getting much more specific with our content. We're creating content. And what I mean specific is talking about problems people are facing, going after ultra long-tail keywords. So not like, 4, 5, 6-word phrases, but like 8, 9, 10-word phrases. We're targeting terms that would be more specific to companies that would be global versus just in one region. Another thing that we're doing is we're doing more webinars and we're getting more specific with our topics versus generic. So like, you know, instead of talking about digital marketing trends, we'll get very specific on something related to SEO or social media or, How to track ROI in a cookieless world, getting really specific and more granular with problems that people are facing because we're finding that those webinars generate us much more revenue. The other thing that we're doing is we're funny enough focusing less on digital marketing from the purpose of content creation, whether it's blogging, social media, But we're actually spending more time on content creation for offline and specifically doing our own conferences. So I just got back from Netherlands, Spain. Where was it? Yeah, I was in Turkey or I was in Amsterdam, Istanbul, then I was in Madrid, then Malaga, and then London. All those regions other than Istanbul, we did our own personal events. Not only was I speaking at other people's conferences, because some of them I was doing both, but we were also doing our own events. That's been very effective. And we're also doing more corporate events. Like when we'll reach out to companies on LinkedIn, different marketing people, talk about their problems, get to know them and be like, hey, you know, we're actually in your area. Would you like us to come and give a presentation to everyone in your marketing department about X, Y, and Z topic? And a lot of times they'll be like, oh, we're virtual or whatnot, or there's only so many people come to office. No problem. We can do a Teams or a Zoom call, even for the people that are in different countries or states or cities. And we can not only talk about, you know, certain marketing topics, but we can also answer any of your team's questions. And people love it. And what we do ahead of time is we actually ask them to poll their audience with their most pressing questions. Pressing issues that they're facing in marketing. And we adjust our presentation to talk about an overarching theme that is really important to the company. But we'll have our back half of the section of the presentation, we'll be like, all right, now let's talk about the most pressing issues that your organization has. And then we'll go over the main issues people have question by question and give the answers and solutions. And we found that to be really effective as well. But those are some of the strategies that we've been doing. And we've also been investing in more PR. To get press and some of the bigger publications. That hasn't been working too well for us in the United States. It's been working well for us in other regions, but we've been struggling to get a lot of press from like the bigger publications in the United States. Yep.

So a couple things we do to get enterprise accounts. So one thing is Neil and I were both looking at potentially speaking at the same event in Europe. And so they reached out and said, so we're negotiating a deal right now where We can set up our own event, our own dinner, set up some introductions, right? There is actually an overarching theme here. So we're pressing hard on webinars. We're doing a lot of partner webinars too. I'm hosting the YPO Global Marketing Summit next year in Miami. And so that's a whole ordeal too, right? But I'm very selective about the things that I might speak at and the way it's set up. And I actually got this idea from Neil is to actually, I do dinners and things like that, but I think setting up mini conferences and setting up introductions is really smart. What this all comes down to at the end of the day, what happens in a webinar? What happens in an event? What happens in a dinner? It's actually a longer interaction and you're actually building relationships with other people. So you're actually getting to go deeper versus these, versus like a Short, for example, or a TikTok. And I'm not saying we get enterprise clients from TikTok or Shorts, but main thing here is if people feel like they can trust you, the more they feel like they can trust you, you actually become an entity that you're de-risking, right? Their career. Because when people want to work with you, they want to make sure that they're not going to lose their job, right? They want to make sure that you're going to make them look good at the same time. And same thing if you run a business too, you want to make sure the company's going to grow. And so the more they listen to you, the more they know, like, and trust you. And then that's how you're able to build, right? So partner webinars, events, dinners, which is like one of my personal favorites. The other thing that I don't think we really touched upon obviously is you have to have a good product and service because that's how you get referrals. And what happens is these enterprise accounts, I remember when we had one gal that worked at a publicly traded health company and then she went over to direct marketing at Lyft and then she went over to direct marketing at like another startup that raised like a couple hundred million dollars or so. But she followed us I think 3 or 4 times and think about the lifetime value that you're generating from just doing good work. And so, well, how do you do good work? With a service business, you have to make sure that you're really on top of your recruiting, right? So everything comes down to relationships at the end of the day. I want to take a second to tell you about my 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 as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode.

The other thing that we're doing is we're doing quite a bit of M&A. We acquired a company called SearchGuru in Southeast Asia. They have offices in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. We're also in those regions, but they've been around longer. They're more established, so they had more enterprise customers within those regions. But most people don't know this, a lot of RFPs for APAC are run out of Singapore, and they're not in the highest GDP countries in the APAC region, right? Like China has great GDP, India has great GDP. Australia's pretty good as well. And Japan is great as well. So is Korea, et cetera. What we started doing is we knew when we bought that business, we're like, huh, you already have a lot of the accounts. Your decision maker who gave you the account is also the decision maker for some of these other regions for a good chunk of their clients. We're in these regions, you're not. So we're just like, all right, we're just going to take your customers and sell them on all the other regions that we're in that you're not. And we're going to sell them on all the other services that we offer that you don't.

Yeah. So Neil actually has a checklist for this. So one, here's one thing you got to think about if you're going to go buy agencies. We're talking about services specifically, right? So one, you want to aim for a company where ideally they have services that you don't offer.

Okay?

So it's complementary. 2, global accounts. So you can take your accounts and pitch on the region, right? And then also regions that they're not in, right? Where regions maybe you're in. And so then you have this thing where it's a 1 1 3 situation. Yeah.

Yeah. You got that from the thing yesterday, huh?

No, no, no. I remembered it was those 3 things and I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss it. So yeah.

No, no, you got it right. But yeah, we found that to be super helpful over the years. And the other cool thing is when someone offers services that you don't offer or vice versa, when you cross-sell services, not only are you getting more revenue per month per customer, but you'll find that if a customer pays you for more services, The churn goes down. So instead of them paying you for 1 or 2 years, maybe you can get it up to 3 or 4 or 5 years. So not only are you making more money per month, but you're getting them to pay for many more months or many more years. So you're making quite a bit more cash on that end as well.

Yeah. And I highly recommend everyone read the book, 7 Powers. It talks about the 7 kind of major factors of strategy. And one is switching costs. And agencies don't have many of the 7 powers, but the one thing that you can enable is switching costs. And when we did, The Agency Owners Association call yesterday. One of the main things was us talking about, hey, you should have multiple services if you want to continue to expand, because a lot of people, they get stuck at maybe the six-figure or their seven-figure mark because they're not thinking about expanding into other areas, or they might be too scared to do so. Right? But you know, at the end of the day, if you want to layer people on, you want them to de-risk. No like and they know like and trust you, but you got to continue to de-risk your company. I remember a couple. This is I don't know. 5, 6 years ago when we had Lyft, they put us into the RFP. We worked with them for maybe 2 years or so. And the reason we lost the deal was because, oh, we didn't realize, one, we didn't realize you guys had all these other services. So we did a bad job of even telling them, but they wanted to go with someone that was perceived to be bigger as well. And they had a bunch of other services. So it's all about de-risking, especially when you get bigger and bigger.

And it's funny too, because a lot of agency owners, have this belief that you need to focus. So you shouldn't offer tons of services. Well, there's many ways to focus. You could focus just on one vertical like B2B SaaS and offer B2B SaaS players SEO first. And then once you get that down, then offer them pay-per-click and then email marketing and conversion rate optimization, but you're still sticking with B2B SaaS. And then you can stick with B2C SaaS, or you, right, you can expand into more verticals as well. So there's many ways to focus. Not just saying, hey, we're only going to do SEO, but for all verticals. You can do multiple service lines just for one vertical. And there was an agency that ended up selling a long time ago called Mute6 that was founded by one of our mutual friends. And he sold the company to Dentsu for a good amount of money. He did really well. And they did marketing, whether it's Amazon or social media or paid ads, but they did marketing specifically for D2C e-com brands, right? Right? And it was a really effective strategy. Had a big exit, fast growth, did so well with the verticalization and offering more services. But it was focused just on that market that they were getting tons and tons of referrals from Facebook because people were like, oh yeah, this company is really good at X. Now the company has changed because he left and a lot of the good people left after. So, you know, it's not the same that it was, but when he was there, The company was doing extremely well.

Make sure you go to marketingschool.io/agency.

That's right.

That's right. See, even with Neil's jet lag, he remembers it.

All right.

That's it for everyone. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe as well. And we'll catch you later.