Marketing hack to get big customers, Social media democracy, Sam Sulek's million views & more

Today we're going to be talking about my favorite marketing hack to get big customers.

Hmm.

So you and I have, you've actually done this more than me. One of my friends did this to actually sell a company and I think it's a great way to generate big customers or go whale hunting. So if you don't have a podcast, you're going to have to start one. If you already have a podcast, great. What you should end up doing, and it's a really simple strategy, is You hit up all the well-known executives that you want to do business with and you hit them up through LinkedIn because we see a higher success rate. And the majority of the people you message are going to ignore you. Some are going to say yes, but the people who say yes, they don't care about views. No one's like, how many listeners do you have? What's your rating? You just hit them up and don't mention those kinds of things. And some people will start saying yes. And then you interview them. You can do a 30-minute, 1-hour session. You interview them, do your research, Talk to them about different things that they do, how they see their customers or products or service, whatever it may be. Also bring in your company, your viewpoints on certain things so that way they get to know you. And at the end of the recording, you should ask them, oh, like, oh, by the way, you know, would love to see if we could help you out with X, Y, and Z. Who's the right person on your team to talk to? And a lot of times they're like, yeah, this would be great. And they'll do an introduction to help you close customers. But we see this as one of the best ways to go whale hunting. You know, my team's been trying to push me to do a podcast with just CMOs and interview CMOs of like Procter Gamble, Coca-Cola, et cetera, to just get more RFPs, which isn't a bad idea. I just got to go through the wringer of setting it all up. And my buddy Jason Nazar sold his last company to ZoomInfo.

Comparably? Yeah, Comparably.

He sold it to ZoomInfo. And I was like, how'd you meet the ZoomInfo founder? And he's, I believe he had a podcast with Entrepreneur or one of those platforms. So he set up a podcast, he just hit them up until someone gave him a podcast.

This reminded me of something.

And then he hit up all the people that he thought were either A, potential investors or good buyers of his company or partners, and he started doing interviews with them. And over time, one of the people that he interviewed was the ZoomInfo guy, and that eventually ended up leading to an acquisition. So, good for him.

That's interesting. You know what, Jason Nazar, I used to go, like when I was like maybe 24 years old or so, he used to do these events and these fireside chats in Santa Monica.

At a library. I used to go to them as well.

It was at the Milken Institute.

I thought it was some library or something.

It could be like different venues, but I went there and then like he had a bunch of people and he would just gather a community around you. And so, you can do the podcast, but if you can gather community around you too, that's even more of a bonus. But this is exactly what I did with Growth Everywhere, now called Leveling Up, right? But in the very beginning, that's what I did. Because I, in the beginning, I was like, I'm just going to talk to marketing leaders. And because there was no Tim Ferriss Show at the time, it was actually Andrew Warner. He's the true OG of podcasting.

Andrew Warner?

Huh?

Andrew Warner?

Andrew Warner. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MixerG.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he would do these long-form interviews with entrepreneurs. I'm like, I'm going to do it, but I'm going to focus on marketers. And I didn't know this, right? But it actually ended up getting clients for us. So for example, when I went to a SaaS conference in San Francisco, On three occasions, people were like, "Oh, podcast guy, right? Podcast, right?" This is before marketing school, and I think we closed three deals from that super short sales cycles. That led to I think that was a little over seven figures in revenue, maybe 1.2, 1.3 million in revenue. They stayed with us for a very long time, and that's just an example of it working, right? And here's the interesting thing: We we now like last year in 2023, you and I we did marketing school three times, I believe. at events. So that was right.

HubSpot was one.

Affiliate World Dubai.

Yeah.

And then, uh, something else. There's another one.

Your event, Leveling Up.

Yeah, I don't really count that one. But like, yeah, but that counts. That counts.

That counts for me.

Oh, you know what? I counted the Nathan Latka SaaS Open where we went. We didn't do it together, but we were like back to back with each other. Yeah. So yeah.

But yeah, no, I think it's one of the best ways to get customers because you're dealing with your ideal buyer. And what's funny is people love being interviewed. You know, when most people hit me up saying, hey Neil, do you want to be on a podcast? I never ask—

You always say yes.

What's your ratings or reviews?

Yeah, I just say yes. You always say yes, yeah.

And what the trick is, is once you get a few good guests on, you then hit up other people and you're like, oh, I had Eric, I had Neil on, and list out the people and be like, do you also want to be on? And most people then say yes. Your success rate goes higher and higher. But what we found is hitting them up through LinkedIn is way more effective than hitting them up through email. Hitting them up through LinkedIn, I mean LinkedIn, Instagram, you could try TikTok, although I've never tried TikTok. But the social networks, we found a higher success rate than if you hit them up from an email. And even if your social profiles don't have a lot of followers, it's okay. We still see it working really well.

You know what's interesting? And we'll talk about this maybe this episode or next episode, but for the Leveling Up podcast that I do now, they're longer form interviews, like 1 to 2 hours, and they're all in person. So, I was talking with the team yesterday and I was like, you know, in some cases, like I had one yesterday that— or I won't share all the numbers right now, but we have a video that's doing really well right now. We have one guest that's doing really well and the idea, total addressable market—

Which guest?

Vivian Tu. Vivian Tu.

Yeah, your rich BFF.

Yeah, your rich BFF.

Remember I thought BFF was a cuss word?

Yeah, I was like, BFF? They'll buy stuff? Anyway, so she's great personal finance and like everyone, that total addressable market hits everyone, right? But the thing is, that doesn't necessarily help Single Grain, right? So it's like, if you're going to create content, sometimes it's worth thinking about how does this help your main business? And so to Neil's point, it's like I would actually oscillate between having high-powered CEOs or entrepreneurs or marketing leaders, and then I'll switch to the people that have like a large audience as well. I'll just keep switching like that, right? Because then that'll give a nice balance between me like growing the account more and then also getting people that I want to talk to on the business side. So that's like a nice in-between for me, right? So you can do it how you want to do it. I'm just sharing that's how I do it right now.

Dude, you know what's funny? I was listening to your Chris Do podcast episode on leveling up. And he talks about Gary Vaynerchuk isn't doing as well anymore. But more importantly, in there he talks about the democratization of social media, which is so true. Because if you look at YouTube, I have over a million subscribers. Subscriber count doesn't matter anymore. What a lot of these platforms did was they said, you have 100,000 subscribers or followers or a million, well, we don't give a crap.

Yep.

What we're going to do now is we're going to judge you based on your content quality. If people subscribe, sure, a percentage of your followers are going to see your stuff, but what really determines how good you do is the quality of your content. And if it's amazing, you'll do well. And if it's not, screw you, we don't care how many followers you have. So Chris then ends up making an example on your podcast I actually baited him into it.

Okay.

So then he was talking about Gary Vaynerchuk. And do you want to give me the example on Gary?

So I basically said, look, and we love Gary, right? But I just said, you know, Gary's really not doing that well on YouTube anymore. He's doing well on other channels, but he used to— YouTube was like his jam before, right? And then he's like, oh yeah, well, that's— you did good with that, Eric. And he's like, I'm going to take that bait, right? And he's like, yeah, Gary Vee sucks now. He said something like that, right? He's not getting that many more views anymore. And so, um, and then he went into why. And do you remember what he said?

Well, he was talking about the democratization of content, and then he was like, look, whether you're a person making recipes or cooking— I'm paraphrasing here, I don't know the exact example— or you're Susie at home, he's like, is your content really that much better than Susie who's at home and is really putting in all her effort to making amazing content? It could have been years ago, but now All this software and everything has made it easy for people to create amazing videos. So how much better is it in quality, or is it even better in quality?

It's merit-based at the end of the day. And like, there's a whole thing I have to say about merit in a second, but it's like, when you think about the TikTokification of social, it's like, like, for example, the Vivian video on TikTok, 4.7 million views, right? And then she's just like crushing it on my YouTube channel right now. She's crushing everybody else, right? Um, also she's like, she has an inflection point right now. So the point is like, if it's good, YouTube will give you credit for it. YouTube's algorithm's always gonna work for it. And just understand that the meta, like we talked about Sam Zulek before, the really jacked guy, for sure he takes steroids, right? But he's got like 3, 4 million views and he's just like a really relatable guy. He's driving like a Toyota Camry or something.

Even if he takes steroids, he still got the views. Yeah, good for him.

And like, he's just talking about working out every day, right? It's like himself, the content is interesting. Like, do you and I look that jacked? No, that's why we've been doing this.

Dude, what are you talking about? I'm more jacked than he is.

But we're not as jacked as Sam Sulek. That's what it is.

No, I bet you if you combine both my arms and my legs, his arms are still bigger.

And if you combine me too, it still wouldn't work.

Yeah, he is jacked. But his content is interesting. And I was looking at it, I was like, what the heck is he doing to get all the views? But yeah, it's like if you can make really interesting content that intrigues people, I think you are going to do really, really well. And, you know, it's the problem right now is Not too many people are spending time creating amazing content.

You know, Kevin Espiritu, Epic Gardening, do you know who that is?

No.

So, he has like a gardening website. So, he started gardening during the pandemic and like he has this whole gardening blog, right? He has 3 YouTube channels. 2 have over 100K subs, one has over a million or so. And he just started a new YouTube channel, only like 12,000 subscribers, right? His first 2 videos, like 500 views, 500 views or whatever. And then he released ones like, Why YouTubers Are Quitting, 150,000 views, right? And he released another one on like the YouTube metagame, right? And here's what he said about the metagame. And he had a picture of Sam Sulek. It's like, YouTube is craving authenticity now, right? And that's why Sam Sulek does so well, right? And then the thing is, what's interesting is the podcasts that I do, they're stories.

Yep.

They're being authentic. Like This Is Us, we're kind of sharing our stories too.

Dude, and funny enough, speaking about creating content that's authentic and amazing, I put out a tweet the other day on the rude awakening for content marketers in 2024, and I break down how one number tells it all, 94.29%. So if you're wondering what that number is, we track over 7 billion keywords on Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. We also track the rankings for these keywords. So who's ranking in the top 10, top 20, top 100? We don't go beyond top 100. And over the last 30 days, 94.29% of the webpages that we tracked got no organic traffic from Google. Like, just imagine that, 94.29%. There's billions of webpages. I don't have the exact number of webpages offhand, but I can get it. Billions of webpages are not getting any traffic, and we're seeing that percentage get worse and worse over time. And when we surveyed 1,051 marketers, only 900 or 922 were creating content with either just AI Or AI/human content, which means it's not 100% manually written. And we see the number of pieces of content that people are creating increase because of AI. It's easier, but there's still only 10 spots on page 1 of Google. And if your content isn't authentic, doesn't have EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authority, trust, if it's not something that's unique and stands out, no one's going to care. You're not going to get the social views, you're not going to get the likes, you're not going to get the comments, you're not going to get the search traffic, you're not going to get the backlinks. The big issue in content marketing, whether you want to create text-based content or even videos, if it's not new and fresh or amazing, no one cares to consume it.

Dude, you know what would make your reports 10 times more amazing here is if you show over time the graph, the 94%, if it goes like 95%, 96%, I bet you Elon would retweet that as well. Maybe not, I don't know, but like that would be really interesting. 94%, 94.29% is a lot.

That's a lot of pages on the web that get no search traffic.

That makes me not want to post anything.

Yeah, but that's not visitors. It's SEO traffic particularly, right?

Yeah.

Because some of these sites could get direct traffic or whatnot. But these are web pages.

Dude, that's another good example. Like, it's the same thing. You know how I talked about how like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts is like a slot machine?

Yes.

It's like you just keep publishing. You don't know what's going to hit and then something just hits, right? So you have to be consistent, but you have to keep leveling up your quality.

Yeah, but the second thing is the most important part because if you just keep pushing and you're saying it's going to be a slot machine, when you have that winning coupon or coin, it won't come up if you only post crap because the way the algorithms work is they're like, oh wow, your last 20 videos or posts no one cared about. So when you post the 21st one, even if it's really amazing, it doesn't hit. So what you have to do is post a lot of amazing stuff and a lot of that still stuff won't hit, but it'll do better than your non-performing stuff.

Yeah.

And over time, when you then have that winning coin or coupon or whatever, you'll go viral. And if you look at what Eric's been doing on his YouTube podcast for Leveling Up, and I told him this this morning, and I'm not trying to talk trash, I meant it in a kind, productive, good feedback or comment. I told Eric his podcast is getting way better, right? And—

Yeah, that didn't feel like talking crap to me.

That what?

That didn't feel like talking crap to me.

No, no, I know, but I don't want people to say that I'm saying like your podcast used to be crap, right? The quality has changed. And do you remember what you told me on when I said the quality is way better?

Oh yeah, the effort is way better. Exactly.

And Eric himself is taking over a lot on the content direction versus having other people help him out or outsource. I'm not saying your team's not helping you, but you're taking the lead on it and it's made a big difference. If you look at my social posts, I've taken the lead on it and my social profiles have drastically changed. Even TikTok, I figured out how to get more traffic. YouTube, same. Facebook's still getting crushed there, but the rest of the social networks are doing decent, way better than before.

And we'll end on this point. I mean, we've been saying this for the last couple months, like, if you want your business to grow, if you want your marketing to grow, you have to be involved. I think both of us, like, even with this podcast right now, we're sitting in front of each other, we're recording. We have Brad from recordeditpodcast.com. He's not paying us to say that, by the way.

But we actually— We actually pay him.

Yeah, we pay him and he's sitting here, but like, At the end of the day, we're putting a lot more effort into this. You can see we changed the format. And there's someone on Twitter, I forgot what his name was, but he's like, man, the format's way better. I used to listen to episodes sporadically, but now I listen to every single episode. So thank you for that.

Yeah.

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