Our favorite marketing tools for 2024's Q3 and Old marketing that still drives major ROI

Guys, we are going to start with some classics here. We're going to start with our favorite marketing tool for Q3 of 2024, and I'm going to go first. So what we're doing with this episode— actually, I'll come back to this because we don't want to lose your retention if you're on YouTube. So the— I found this tool over the weekend. It's called Overlap. Do you know what Overlap is? Of course you don't. So Overlap is— it's backed by Y Combinator. So they funded Dropbox, they funded Airbnb. I saw Gary Tan post this, right? He reposted it. And you remember we talked about Opus, the thing that finds the clips, right? So I took some of our YouTube videos. You basically take links of your YouTube videos and you put it in there, it does a really amazing job of finding the right moments and clips them. And the title is great too. And so what I've been doing today, I ran a test. For the next 5 days, I'm going to be running a test. I've been just taking these like 2 to 5 minute videos. Like let's say we're talking right now. And today I posted one with Jason Cohen where he grew WP Engine to $400 million, right? He had some good— he had a good snippet on like, hey, when should you raise money? When should you not? It's not like a bad thing or a good thing. He just gave his feedback.

Yeah.

And that actually got some pretty good reach on Twitter and LinkedIn. And so, it's free to use right now. Just type in tryoverlap.com and you can sign up for it. And I think this is going to be very helpful for us in terms of scaling out our content and repurposing a lot more. Because if you figure, you post to Twitter, okay, and then you do Threads, right? They took a Joe Rogan episode with Peter Thiel. Did you see that one?

Yeah.

I didn't watch the whole thing yet.

You saw the meme though that's going around?

No, I didn't. But let's come back to that. But what Overlap did was they took that whole episode and then they basically chopped it all up. That tweet alone got 300K views. And I think that's going to be their growth strategy. Just take from the top podcasts and just keep doing that. And I'm like, wow, okay, I'm going to do that for Twitter and I'm going to repost it to Threads. Okay. I'm going to do like a smaller version on LinkedIn and then I'm going to find other places to repost to. But that's why I think this is amazing and it's free right now.

And it's working. I saw your LinkedIn post. It showed up on my feed with Jason Cohen, right?

Jason Cohen. Yeah. My LinkedIn posts usually didn't get much reach right now.

Right. It was a good one. And what's funny about him is most people don't know this. WP Engine, he's raised quite a bit of money, but it does $400-something million in annual recurring revenue. His previous business was sold for, I think, $400-something million as well.

Then it resold for $2 billion. You saw that, right?

I didn't know that it resold.

I put that— you didn't read the whole post.

I didn't read it at all. I was on my phone. But, um, but I knew it sold for $400-something. And then I'm assuming someone did bolt-ons, they grew it, and then they resold it.

Yeah, but he bootstrapped that one.

He bootstrapped it. And I would say if he, his background isn't marketing, but he's an underrated entrepreneur. He's really brilliant. And I really do say he's underrated because not too many people follow him, but he has great advice and he knows quite a bit about marketing. Now for my favorite tool of Q3 2024 is Waymo. Is it Waymo?

Oh, Waymo. Yeah, the Uber, the robotic—

No, no, no, Zaymo? Waymo had— Zaymo. Waymo's the self-driving car.

Oh, you know you don't use Waymo? It's around our area.

The self-driving? No. Yeah, I'll give you a code: zaymo.com. Check it out. So again, Z-A-Y-M-O. And the reason I mess up on the name, and I think they did a terrible job with branding, every time I hear this name or see it, I always think of Waymo, the Google self-driving car, and it's just been around forever. But Zaymo is a new type of email marketing tool. So imagine you're selling a product and you're selling a product for a t-shirt, right? You're a fashion company. You sell a t-shirt. You have 10 different colors and you have 4 different sizes, right? Extra small, small, medium, and large. I'm making them up. You can end up sending an email promotion for the product you're selling, that t-shirt, in the email, They can select the size and color and click a button and buy still in the email. They don't actually go to your website. They just click in your email and it purchases it and it sends it to you. They're using AMP technology, you know, like the old AMP URLs, right? For mobile.

Yeah. Wow.

They're using the AMP technology to allow you to be able to, as a marketer, send emails that create the experience where someone can just purchase within the email without even leaving That not just the email application, but without even leaving that single email that you sent them.

The conversion rates are so high on this.

I'm seeing deliverability a little bit lower. Conversions are higher, right? But deliverability, because it's not pure—

How much lower?

It's case by case, but we're usually seeing like 5, 6, up to 10% lower.

Wow. Look, I'm just looking at the site right now. You can get reviews, you can send surveys, you can do quizzes. You can also upsell, cross-sell. I think this is phenomenal. So this is a good find. And is it expensive? Look at this, $99 monthly for 50,000 active profiles, $299 a month for 150,000 active profiles.

Someone's gonna end up crushing them by just releasing a free version.

Yeah, and the thing with, with AI in the next couple years, someone's just gonna duplicate a version of this in like a day.

Yeah.

And give it away for free. So, but it's cool. Hey, I hope they do well. Um, this is great.

They— I think they raised some money. What's funny is when I first met them and then I tried out the software and stuff, Uh-huh. I just tried buying them.

Like, just sell the company to me. And how'd that work out?

And they're like, no. And then like, okay, just sell the software to me, a copy of the software. I don't need the brand. Yeah.

Because I don't want the brand. Why would they do that? There's no upside to doing that for them. Zamo, Crunchbase.

I'm like, just sell me the software. It'll be your funding round, and then I'll just go and do whatever I want.

So they raised $500 grand, and they raised that pretty recently in April.

I think they raised some money before that.

Yeah, well, that's all I see. Pre-seed from Y Combinator.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay. Where'd you meet him?

Utah, some event. And then I eventually got around to playing with it. You know, I'm a slow adapter when people tell me stuff to actually use it. I then ended up using it. I had some other people in e-commerce use it so I can get data. And then I saw decreases in deliverability, not right away, but slowly over time. But conversions, you definitely saw increase.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Like 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 to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and 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. Dude, we should also talk about old marketing that still drives major ROI. So this year, I mean, um, you know, For context, Neil and I were both speaking at two events together, I think. HubSpot and HubSpot, and then This Is Marketing in Germany. We're gonna be in Frankfurt. I've never been to Frankfurt. Have you been to Frankfurt?

I've been all over Germany.

Frankfurt as well.

I used to go to Germany every month, but not Frankfurt. I've been to Berlin and Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf. Yeah, Munich. I've been everywhere.

Okay, so I've been to Munich too. So so we we um I think it's. Sometimes people are always like talking about the new things and new things, but I think it's also helpful to talk about what's the old stuff that still works. And so, maybe we'll spend some time talking about that. And like for starters, live events work really well. That's why I'm talking about live events. Events in general work really well. You do webinars, I do webinars. Dude, I did a webinar last week and it wasn't like I got a— we restreamed it for the first time. And Neil was the one that brought me over to this because he streams it to multiple channels. Because sometimes I'll see you push it to Instagram Live. Nobody's watching on your Instagram Live, but there's still like 200 people watching it, right? Which is like, if there's just one person But for the person that buys from that, it's totally worth it. And so last week we saw it, there's like 500 viewers on the link. I was like, that's not going to get anything. Dude, we got 2 major leads from that.

Wow. Yeah.

Just from 500 views, right? So it just doesn't matter at the end of the day. So events go a long way.

Do you do the QR code?

We haven't done it yet. We're going to add that for next time.

Oh, it makes such a big difference.

Yeah. And so it's like our, our like, you know, weenie, like, you know, a weak version of it did pretty well for us. So yeah.

Yeah. Some of the old stuff that we still do that just does really well is partnerships with other companies. Like if Eric owned an agency that did web design and I owned an agency that did marketing, this is a hypothetical because we both do marketing, I could send him web design clients and he can send me marketing clients. It just does extremely well. Another strategy that we've both been doing in marketing for ages and it's old is updating old content. Like if you had old content that was ranking but it's slowly diminishing and, you know, dropping in rankings and, and the returns from that page are diminishing, update it. But where people get it wrong is they think, oh, I should just update my page every month. If you update it too much, it actually doesn't help you. We found that if you update it a few times a year and you're keeping it relevant, like if it's a page that needs to be updated daily or weekly, like a deal site or something, that's different. But if it's an article, updating once or twice a year is usually good enough. You just got to look to see what others are doing that you're not doing to just make it better and make it super thorough. And we're finding that really helps drive more traffic the moment you do that.

We should go back to the partnerships for a moment because oftentimes people ask us about how do you structure the partnerships. So the way I think about the partnerships, let's say you're the web design agency and I'm the performance agency. I'll say, okay, we're going to send you a couple of leads, right? You know, our expectation, our hope is that you would send us leads back. And usually if we send you like 3 or 4 and we get nothing back, maybe we'll even send you like 6 of them, get nothing back. We're probably going to move to somebody else. Yep. And that's the same thing for you guys, right?

Yeah. We try not to do partnerships where it's commission-based. We try to just do partnerships where it's just like, I help you, you help me. Yeah, we don't really keep a tally, but we do keep a tally in a sense that if someone's driving us zero and we keep driving them business, then we look for a different partner. But we won't look at it as I drove you 2 customers, you owe me 2.

You're not going to go tit for tat.

Exactly. There's a general feeling like, yes, you know, like, like, hey, I drove you 10 customers. You didn't even try to drive us one. You haven't given us one lead. This is not working out. You're just using us and we're getting nothing in return.

Exactly. Email marketing obviously still works really well, right? And we use our email marketing, our email list to drive a lot to webinars. I saw you send something this morning where I think you sent like a Seinfeld email just so everyone knows. A Seinfeld email is where you just share a story about a random thing that happened. At the very end, you just have a call to action. You're like, you just told a story and at the very end, here's 3 booking times for strategy calls with my team. And I'm like, that probably, that looks like it works decently.

It works decently. Another thing that we've been doing, and this is a little funny, we're showing it to a percentage of our visitors. We just, you know, our color scheme for our website is orange. So we just have a random squiggly orange that just pops up in different places as you scroll, like just randomly and it disappears. People click on it and they fill in their opt-in info. Not a full lead, but like you get an ebook, name, email. It's working extremely well.

Wait, I don't get it. Okay, explain how that looks.

Okay, so imagine a teardrop. Okay, so a little circle and then, but at the top, like it's a little squiggly and imagine it just changing shapes to like being thin and squiggly and moving just random shapes. Okay. But really tiny. It's like a blimp on the radar, right? But you're seeing it in random places of the page as you're scrolling. So people start clicking on it and they're putting in their name.

So it'll randomly show up on like one of the download buttons or whatever and they click on it?

No, no, no. You're browsing, it can show up anywhere, anywhere in the white space. Not over text. We put it in the random white space. It's not placed specifically. And as you scroll, it'll disappear and it changes location and people just click on it.

Oh, so if you click on it, that's when the thing—

Pop-up appears and they give you information.

Oh, got it, got it, got it. Because they become curious on what that thing is.

Yes, it was converting really well.

Oh, that's funny. That's so random. But that's not an old marketing thing though.

But it's going back to like the popups. But what we did is instead of having a static call to action, we ended up making it where we're just shifting it into random places and changing up the design. The key though that we found is if your opt-in is really, really good and you're giving them something like crazy value, people love it. If it's not, they hate it. Like, stop showing me this stupid thing.

The number one challenge for businesses is Hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us. And I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. You know, speaking of offers, I think we should give Alex Hormozi some credit. It turns out that he actually has a— he has an offers book called $100 Million Offers, but he actually has a workbook that basically just summarizes what a good offer is. And there's an entire workbook. I still do think like talking about old marketing that the offer is the highest leverage thing or one of the highest leverage things you can do in addition to maybe pricing, for example. And so if you have a really good offer, it's a no-brainer, then people are going to take it, right? And so I think it's worth it for your team, your marketing teams to study this book because it's like, it's basically like a quick summary again on what a good offer is and it's an entire workbook. And so you put them through it, they should understand what a good offer looks like afterwards.

And another great example of old marketing that still works is authenticity. People love authentic brands. And here's an example that everyone can relate to. How many people really liked the old Mark Zuckerberg? Too robotic, didn't seem human.

I like the new one.

You like the new one, right? The new one has personality. You, Eric, don't wear gold chains. I don't wear gold chains. I don't have curly hair. I think he has a 6-pack, at least one of his days when him and Elon were—

He's a jiu-jitsu fighter now.

Yeah. You and I aren't as in good shape as he is, right? But yeah, we— there's something about the new Mark Zuckerberg that we like. And what it comes down to is when you look at him, yeah, he's still a little bit socially awkward here and there, but his brand is just like he's being him and it just feels authentic. The old guy, it just was too robotic and micromanaged and, you know, PR training type of character. It's like haircut was just really funky.

Yeah.

It's just like, hey dude, you came out of a lab experiment. I don't mean this in a cruel way. I'm not saying he's ugly or anything, but very monotone. You could tell based on the new Mark Zuckerberg, his personality is shining. I like it. It doesn't matter if you like his look or not. He's just more human.

I would say once we change the format of this one, because we've been getting comments from people, it is actually more authentic for us because we're just having conversations now and we're reacting Sometimes people will be like, oh, you guys did not prepare for any of this. It's like, no, we're just, we're literally just talking.

Yeah.

Right.

Um, and wait, but to go on that topic, we do prepare a list of topics before each podcast episode. And there's usually 20+ topic ideas within.

I don't know about you. I've actually read through all my stuff. Like, so, and it seems like you do too. Um, the final thing I'll say around just to end it on the old marketing that drives ROI is the whole idea of the attention. We've talked about this. New SEO isn't just SEO.

It's—

we're talking Amazon, TikTok, we're talking YouTube. It's attention is spread. It's so fragmented now that you have to repurpose. You have to go omnichannel. And most importantly, if you're going to do that, you have to post natively to each channel because each channel is a different game you have to play. So Twitter or Threads, you might actually be writing threads on LinkedIn. You can't do the same thing. It's— you have to play a different game on each one. And so these are all great things that I would just recommend rewinding and listening to these things because even just doing one of them will go a long way for you.

Dude, I totally agree with that. And when you think about some of these marketing tactics that Eric and I are giving, whether they're old or new, don't try to do them all. Just pick one or two because if you try to do all of them, you're going to get overwhelmed. And what you'll find is a month later, none of them will be implemented. So just pick one, get it done, and then come back to this episode and pick another one and then get it done. and then continually stack them.

All right guys, that is it for today. Please go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow. Please help us balance out the, the people that don't like the new format. Tell us you like the new format. All right, we'll see you guys later.