Our 2025 Marketing, Wrapped

I think we should talk about our 2025 marketing wrap. All right, so we're going to do our 2025 marketing wrap. We're going to start with tactics first, okay? So one of my favorite tactics for the year, we've talked about this on the pod before, but if you go out there and you create a product that people like, it will pull you. And if it pulls you, like for example, it's pulling me into working harder than I've ever worked in the last few Decembers. I'll just put it that way. But that's always a good way, right? Because you got to think about, If you have a good product, it's a good offer. And a good offer, for example, if you can do something that other people can't do, then that's going to bring people with you and they're going to tell other people as well, right? So when you have that, you got to double, you got to triple down on that. Neil's done a good job with Ubersuggest. He's done a great job with Answer the Public. And he's also got other stuff too that isn't so public. But Neil's done a good job with products. I mean, Neil was actually a pioneer. I'm tooting your horn a little bit right here. Back in the day, Crazy Egg. That was the first heat mapping tool out there. He had Kiss Insights as well, which was a nice, like a little survey at the bottom right. That thing, that thing did well, right? Initially.

Did okay. I think Kiss Insights never did more than like a few million bucks a year in revenue.

Okay, it was decent.

It was decent.

And then, and then you had other products too. But point is, these things time and time again, because the bar to create them is so much higher, They do well because they're rare. And I believe that the cost of software is coming down because if you're using anything like Replit, Bolt, or v0 out there, or Cursor, um, people like normal people like Neil and I, when it comes to— when I say normal, I mean we can't code, code, um, you're gonna be able to do this stuff more. So that's, that's the first one. Go ahead, you pick your favorite.

My favorite is a webinar funnel. And you can end up seeing this.

You're showing me a nice little graphic over there. That's cool.

Yeah, so that's our stats on average for a webinar. That's one of them, but they roughly all follow that same pattern. And this one was B2B webinar funnel breakdown just in the United States. We collect leads and revenue globally, but if you look at just the United States, somewhere around 6,000 registrations and 1.1% of our MQLs of the registrations, because we collect all the fields we consider an MQL, become SQL, all right? And 56% of the SQLs, which is sales qualified leads for anyone listening, become opportunities. And 71% of the opportunities turn into pitches. And we roughly close 21% of the pitches into a won deal within 4 weeks. And it goes up to around 32% if we extend the data out all the way to 12 weeks. It's been one of our best strategies to generate revenue. We do 2 of these a month. It's not a numbers game. We even tried one a week, but we've actually found it's better to do 2 a month and pick the topics better. We've even done things like run surveys, or you can even do polls on X to see what topics people like, although they don't let you type in long enough titles, which suck. And it'll give you ideas on what to do for the next webinar. But webinars have been a big part of our marketing efforts in 2023. And one thing I would have to say on the webinars is this does not include, because we can't track from it, going live on all the social channels at the same time and what revenue that's also causing from running a webinar too.

All right, so that's a good one. That's our first one for Wrapped. And now we're going to give you our 2025 Marketing Wrapped for our favorite tool.

My favorite tool that we use more than anything else, it's an AI tool, is actually HeyGen. We use it more than any other tool because we're translating and transcribing our content into all the other languages. And it's gotten good enough where I'm in countries like Italy and we're showing the audience the videos and they're finding it fine with very little to no errors and they love it. And the engagement is starting to do quite well in all the regions that we're targeting. Yeah.

Mine by far has to be OpenAI. And when I say that, it's like, oh, what a cop-out, right? But we leverage OpenAI's API heavily. You guys do too, I believe. But also the fact that ChatGPT Pro just recently came out out. I use it so much. I use it for everything. I use it when I argue with people. I use it like, it's great, right? I put up a LinkedIn post and then my friend got really upset and it did nothing to identify him, right? So, this LinkedIn post basically got like 1.2 million impressions on it, right? And then he called me and he's really upset. And then I was like, wait, I didn't do anything wrong here. He's like, no, but you shouldn't have said that. I was like, but I didn't identify you or anything. He's like, no, you shouldn't have said that, right? I was like, so I talked to some friends about it. I was like, yeah, it doesn't seem like I'm wrong. And then I talked to the AI about it. It's like, yeah, it doesn't seem like you're wrong, right? So, I use it to settle debates. Um, and it really pisses people off, right? It's like, well, that's a robot. I'm like, that's a robot based on like, you know, uh, trillions of human like datasets, right? So that's one thing. But I've talked about earlier, I use it for— I use it for to become like my personal CFO. I use it for marketing strategy. I use it for coming up with, um, different hooks. Uh, I use it for— so for content creation as well. And so I— and I use it when it comes to How many calories do I— am I having in my food right now? Right. So it's not even just for marketing, it's for everything. And I think it's made me like, we talk about, oh, there's going to be the singularity where we merge with machines. I feel like it's kind of already happening.

Yeah. You know, and Eric is not trying to say the machines are going to replace the humans, but we're going to work in tandem together and we're going to become much more efficient with the machines.

Yeah. And Try it, guys. Like when you strategize, whether it's content, SEO, or whatever it is exactly, when you work with this, like you can pay the $20 a month or $200 a month or use Claude or something else. I've just found that the $200, like we're like a step up now.

So yeah.

All right. You pick the next one.

Let's keep going on this wrap. There's so much more to wrap.

You pick one.

Favorite growth strategy. Okay.

This is our 2025 Wrapped favorite growth strategy. What is it, Neil?

I don't know. What is yours? I can tell you what mine is.

Yeah, you go first.

Mine is probably M&A if I had to pick. It's boring, it works, it's expensive, but it's not as risky and it's actually cheap for the results, but it's expensive from a cash standpoint. You can get loans though. There's SBA, there's government loans, bank loans. The reason I like M&A is a basic example of this is let's say I'm an agency that offers SEO services. Technically we offer more than SEO services, but actually I'll give you a real example. At NP Digital, we offer SEO, paid advertising, email, the list goes on and on. We even offer creative services, but we didn't have a big portfolio, we weren't known for it, and our creative capabilities weren't that great compared to a lot of the competitors. So we bought someone and what ended up happening is, is because we bought that company that had these creative capabilities, it got us included into larger RFPs. Even if we didn't win the creative side of the RFP, we still won our portion and we made more money Just because of acquiring the other business.

And guys, an RFP is a request for proposal. Typically larger companies will put you through this process. It's a bit of a slog, but it's worth it because deals can be big.

Yes.

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.

So what's your favorite growth strategy that you're going to leverage for growth next year?

I mean, I kind of gave it already. I mean, the fact that— so the product that we have is called Karrot ABM. It's K-A-R-R-O-T. And right now everyone we're talking to— so we threw up a post and I kind of just did this for fun, right? I threw up a post and it got 1,000 comments on it and maybe 600 or 700 likes and it got Maybe a million impressions or so, right? And that generated a bunch of leads for Carrot. And the thing is, what does it do? It's a personalized LinkedIn ABM ad solution, right? It allows you to scale LinkedIn ads. And the thing is, nobody else can do this right now. We've confirmed this with LinkedIn. And my thing is, sure, M&A, we have an LOI out right now. And it looks like we'll get this deal done. Totally agree that M&A is great. It's tried and true, right? But I think if you can find something and double down on it, like the cut, the what's cool right now, and Neil's done this before, but when you get on these calls, you can almost double and triple dip, right?

Yeah.

Because it's like, oh, they actually need ads. But do you, do you actually need someone to manage this, this for you? Oh, it becomes a managed service. Oh, by the way, do you actually need SEO help? Right? So you're quickly cross-selling and upselling into these things. Um, and not only that, a lot of these people that are working with us, it's people that are agencies too. Right. And so they're like, oh, well, I want to refer you to this person. It's like, it kind of just builds on itself. And so, My biggest learning here is if you get lucky and you have something that pulls you, then go with it. You know, knock on wood, it's like there's still like a lot of work to be done. But it's fun, right? So I would just say, if you can combine those 2 into your portfolio, it doesn't just have to be one thing. Keep in mind, let's use Neil as an example. Okay, yes, he's doing M&A. Yes, he's hiring amazing people, right? Yes, he's looking for global expansion, which is kind of M&A as well. But also, yes, he has products, right? Also, he has services that he's expanding into.

Yeah.

So you can do all these things. You can— it might look like it's unfocused, but I'd argue that as long as you're within your company, as long as you're focused on that, that's true focus. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to learn more about our little agency community to help you grow faster. I think Neil, we're actually speaking in 10 days to the community. So that's that. And yeah, we'll see you tomorrow.