In this conversational podcast, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how they are reclaiming control of their marketing by shifting focus from volume to quality. Neil outlines a systematic content repurposing workflow: weekly short-form videos (YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, Snap, Facebook), selecting the top performers to expand into blog posts, and then into webinars, while using Twitter/X as the initial text base. They examine data versus audience feedback, noting that reading tweet stats in videos boosts retention, but qualitative comments sometimes clash with quantitative metrics. The duo introduces "eavesdrop marketing," a storytelling technique that leverages overheard conversations to spark curiosity and drive engagement, illustrated with a case study of Logan Forsythe’s high‑volume content. They critique trend‑hopping and emphasize authentic, persona‑focused storytelling. The conversation then shifts to AI adoption, highlighting Zapier’s internal push for employees to use AI‑powered Zaps, and how such internal dog‑fooding accelerates learning and efficiency. Finally, Neil shares a tweet listing 25 characteristics of great content—ranging from a strong hook and conversational tone to scannability, data‑driven insights, and a clear CTA—providing concrete guidelines for marketers. Throughout, they blend anecdotal stories, data points (e.g., 40‑45% YouTube retention, 21k views on the tweet), and actionable recommendations.
Chapters
Neil, you know, you mentioned how you took your— we're both taking back our marketing. So how's that been going for you right now?
It's going really well, but I'm running out of as many good content ideas than when I first started, but it's still going really well.
Okay, go on.
When we first had it, we're an agency similar to Eric. So we have people who do work on client accounts. They're great, amazing talent. We also hire people internally to do our own marketing. And what's funny is the best people tend to get put on client accounts and not our own stuff. I don't know why. Actually, I do know why, because one's paying us money and I respect that.
Yeah.
But I was just getting frustrated over time in which I'm like, guys, you're sending out too many emails, you're cranking out too many blog posts. I was doing at one point a webinar a week and I'm like, this is just overload to our list and our audience. And I was like, We need to slow things down. And it's not about systems and procedures because that's what our team was creating. They're systemizing everything. And I'm like, we need to focus on improving the quality.
Yeah. And you know, I'll say this, your marketing for a period of time, I just knew, I felt the energy. I felt, I was like, this is not Neil. And therefore I'm not interested.
Yes. But now if you look at the marketing, I create the content on Twitter. If it does well, our team comes in here once a week, same place we're recording this podcast. I'll record once a week. We'll shoot out like 7 or 10. Shorts and crank that out. Then from there, we take the winner of the week and I create a blog post from it. And then we take the ones that perform the best, 1 or 2 a month, and we create a webinar. And when I do the Shorts, I take— or the short-form videos, if it's more than 60 seconds, because some of them are more like a minute 30, we'll cut them down because some platforms like YouTube, you still have to be under a minute for their Reels. But we'll take that content, we'll put it on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. I think I'm missing one. Snap. YouTube.
YouTube Shorts. Yeah, YouTube.
Did I say YouTube before?
No, you didn't.
Those are the 5. Yeah. Twitter would be my 6th, or X would be my 6th.
Yeah.
X is where we start with the text base. We even tested taking— after I create the text base, putting a video like a month later.
Yeah.
Doesn't do as well.
Yeah.
We find it doing well, just better actually, with just the text base.
You know what's interesting? So I told you that even though we got comments that, you know, people are like, okay, Neil's just reading off his tweets, blah blah blah, and then, you know, I got other comments. But here's the thing, I looked at the the data, you reading the tweets is actually pretty good. Because what ends up happening, those of you that watch the YouTube channel, what happens is Neil will read a lot of stats because his tweets have a lot of stats, right? When we add in, like we'll add in like the edits and put in like the actual stats so people can read it, people actually stay longer.
Ah.
So, like to your point, you actually— so, we were texting each other. I was like, Neil, I'm getting comments that like people are getting a little bored when it comes to like you're reading the tweets. And Neil's like, I don't really care if it's boring. Like let's look at the data. So, then I looked at the data.
And by the way, I appreciate Eric giving me the feedback. And I even told him, I want to see the data.
Yeah.
But like, and after that, I stopped reading the tweets because, look, if people are saying things, because there's data 2 ways, there's quantitative and qualitative. I know Eric knows this. But one is what people are saying. The other is when you just look at the raw numbers, and they don't always line up. But you got to take both into account. And, you know, example of this is instead of me reading the tweets, I can look at the tweets before we start recording the podcast and I can talk about them without reading them line for line. Right.
And like, I would just say the— our retention graph when it comes to YouTube is— it's pretty decent. It's like 40 to 45% or so. So it doesn't just— it just, it just goes like this, right? And the average view duration when you do read the tweets, when there's a lot of stats, it's actually pretty good. So there's that. The other thing I want to say is this, when it comes to our— when I'm doing my marketing, like we're recording this in person right now, live. The more I tell stories, the better. So for example, this is a takeaway I got from the Founders Retreat. So this guy, good friend Walter, Walter Birch is his name. He came up with a new concept called eavesdrop marketing. You want to know what eavesdrop marketing is?
I've never heard of eavesdrop marketing, but please explain.
Okay. So eavesdrop marketing is, let's say you and I are sitting at, let's say you're the bartender and I'm sitting at the bar. I'm like, hey Neil, like there's this one thing, man. I could have made like an extra $10 million or whatever if I just did this one thing. And, you know, I know next time if I tweak it, you know, I'll get that extra $10 million like guaranteed, right? And let's say like someone else is listening on the side, they're eavesdropping, right? And then, you know, these are the people that might turn over and say, hey, hey, like I couldn't help it over here, but, um, you mentioned $10 million extra and you said guaranteed. Like, what do you mean by that? Right? And so what's fascinating is when we recorded once, remember I told you about this person, uh, Logan Forsythe, he produces a lot of content for people and 5,000 pieces a month, right? Instagram Reel did decent. It got like 80,000 views or so. But more than anything, I got like 9 DMs from people asking me about, hey, who's the agency?
Who's the agency?
Who's the agency? And in the comments, who's the agency? Who's the agency? Who's the agency? And then they actually, they found it and then they started responding. Good for them. And they're like, it's us, it's us, it's us.
Right?
And then other people started chiming in. It's like, no, we do it for cheaper. We do it for cheaper. And so the comments start going crazier and crazier. So the point is that is a perfect example of eavesdrop marketing.
Yeah.
And that comes from good storytelling.
By the way, you know, Cox does eavesdrop marketing and they do it with phone calls and they're boasting on how they listen to your phone calls and they can end up helping you.
Serving you?
Yes. And they weren't boasting it to you, they were boasting it to potential advertisers and that created a big backlash.
But this eavesdrop marketing is like you— it's like you're saying something and then it's like you're not directly pitching. And so, it makes people desire it. It makes them salivate over whatever it is that you're talking about.
Yes.
You know what I mean? So—
I think it's cool, but it's the same thing, like almost as like riding trends in marketing. You see something that's hot and you're riding it. So then that way you can get more leverage from it. But some people just go really too far with the trends in which, dude, I've seen, you know, really well-known people pass away and then everyone comes out being like, my 10 favorite Steve Jobs quotes.
Charlie Munger.
Yeah. Charlie Munger was recent, like 10 things I learned from Charlie Munger. It's just like, I get it. He's great. This is not the time to create clickbait. Yeah, like that kind of stuff. You shouldn't be riding a trend. Like, pay respects.
Yeah. Yeah. 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. All right. Well, here's, here's another one. 30% of Zapier employees now have AI zaps doing stuff automatically for them. What do you think about that?
30% of Zapier employees have AI Zaps.
So here, let me explain a little more.
Why would Zapier employees need to use Zaps?
So Zapier is a tool. It's a note— it's a tool that basically allows you to allow apps to talk to each other, right? So you can automate things without having to learn to code.
Yeah, but let's, let's give people idea. A great example of this is I create a blog post, publish it on WordPress. The moment I publish it on WordPress, it automatically Zaps to my email list provider like Mailchimp and sends out a Email block.
I can send out a tweet as well. Yes. Yeah. So you basically the old Zapier is like you have to set up these apps individually and yeah, now you can set it up with AI and you could tie it in with OpenAI as well. So you can actually type into like a little prompt saying, hey, I want to connect my for all my leads that come through my WordPress block, I wanted to push to Google Sheets and just type it all out. And I also wanted to push to HubSpot and I also want to get a text message. They'll just create it for you.
But I'm confused. Why are employees doing it? What do employees have to zap themselves?
Because you're saying they so this guy Mike Noop is I believe his name. He's the co-founder of Zapier. He's the head of Zapier AI. So they were trying to, as an organization, get more of their employees to become indoctrinated with AI. And then a lot of people are now, whatever, whatever task they're doing, they've automated it using Zapier AI. So they want— they're trying to dogfeed them the, the, their own product while get them to— getting them to learn more about AI.
I think that's a really smart approach to getting your team learning AI, in which if you don't have people internally testing it out, And you don't even have to go as far as Zapier did, in which you're telling them, hey, use our product. You could just go as far as saying, hey, go use ChatGPT, Bard, and Grok, and whatever else is out there. And once a week, we're all going to meet and talk about cool stuff that we ended up doing through AI and try to make it somewhat related to how you can use this for your job or your industry, like marketing or sales or whatever it may be. If you do that, and we've implemented that, Team members learn so much and become so much more efficient. Not the first month, not the second month. It takes around 3 to 4 months. And the reason I say 3 to 4 months, what you have is you have the early adopters who are doing really cool stuff. And then after a few months, other people are like, all right, I'll give it a go. And then after like 4-ish months, most people are starting to do it. And the ones who aren't, they're like, oh, I'm really missing out. I'm getting left behind. And everyone starts jumping in.
Yeah. It's hard to push every— like we often think that Because we're the founders, everyone has the same energy that we have, but it takes time to adopt. People have jobs.
Usually they don't have the same energy and they have less, but you do meet some amazing people that work for you in some cases that have more energy than the founder. There's a lot of people who still evangelize, love the company, etc. But it's pretty cool from that aspect.
Yep.
All right.
Do you have any other tweets in your mind?
Yes, I do. So, you know, we talked— I did a tweet the other day, the 25 amazing pieces of or characteristics of content. Great content. All right, so I want to go over some of them and you can add to it. I won't read the list verbatim, but one really good— actually, I'll just read the list and it makes it easier. I can go over them. But, and the reason I think this is important—
Should we save this for the next one? You got 2 minutes?
I got 2 minutes. I'll read some of the best ones. So talk about something new, get to the point, incorporate storytelling, write in a conversational tone, use the words you and I, Use media, data-driven, actionable, easy to understand. You need to flow well. You also have to have good organization. It should be scannable so people don't have to read it. Highlights the benefit of a product or service because if you're not thinking about conversion, then what's the point of all that traffic? Encourages a desired action, so maybe you have a CTA or something, tries to convince them to buy your product or service. Write around a specific persona. Your content shouldn't appeal to everyone. It should appeal to your ideal buyer. Continually is refreshing, updated. No one wants to read a 3-year-old piece of content when they can read a 3-week-old piece of content. Optimized for social sharing, especially like make it easy to share with the media and stuff. Needs to be original. Written for a 5th grader to understand. Don't use vocabulary for a Harvard grad. Contains a conclusion because a lot of people scroll down from what we've seen and tested through Crazy Egg. They read the conclusion and they scroll back up and read the rest. Has to be accurate. Exceeds the reader's expectations so they're willing to share it. Lifts people up, don't be too negative. Short and concise paragraphs, it's just easier to read and digest and we found that when you do that, people consume more. Great hook because if you don't have a great hook, right, as Ogilvy said, 80 cents on the dollar is already spent on the headline or hook or whatever you want to end up calling it. And you got to cite your sources.
Those are the things. What was the hook for this tweet again?
The hook was 25 qualities of a great piece of content.
Did pretty well?
Eh, 21,000 views. When I first started taking over my marketing, that would have been something that does well. Now something that does well is like 50,000 to 100,000.
Nice. And you do— sometimes you have ones that did like 750,000 or so. Does that—
Yeah, those are anomalies. I don't count those, but yes.
Cool. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
