Should you be spending big money to attend marquee events?

All right, Neil. So right now a bunch of people are at the All In Summit, which is about 10 minutes away from here. So you and I listen to the All In podcast, and I went for the first 2 years. It's really expensive. It's $7,500 per ticket. They had Sergey Brin, founder of Google, speaking. They have Elon speaking. They have all these people speaking. Last year was like MrBeast, and they had like all these different people, right? Venture capitalists. Yeah. Twitch streamers.

Politicians, maybe?

Politicians too. Yeah, they had a Larry Summers, who is Secretary of Treasury, right? And I think they had like they had a they had a congressman speaking as well. So it was like a two day, two and a half day event last year. There was like you know you dress up. There's like a James Bond event. It's like a casino night and all that. And the next night it's like there's another party in a Santa Monica pier. It's a lot of and then the third night it's like an all out party. It was like Grimes who was who's who's married maybe not married to Elon and she was like DJ, right? And so. It's a lot of time and effort spent. And I was just telling Neil that the first year I went, our mutual friend Syed, he left in like 3 hours.

Wait, why did he leave within 3 hours?

He's like, the value's not there, I'm going home, right? And then the first year, by the way—

Wait, he went home? 'Cause he must have flown to come here.

No, no, no, 'cause we were in Miami the first year. The first year I was living in Miami, it was in Miami. So it worked out perfectly for me. And next year I had moved back to LA already. It was like 10 minutes away from me, right? So I was like, I'll go. So, you know, Syed's thing is like, hey, I don't care what I pay for the conference, my time's valuable. If it's not good, I'm going to leave. And here's the thing, there was— we were just walking and then the CEO of— or the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, was just walking around. So it was like a very high-caliber group. But, you know, after going last year, you know, a lot of people asked if I was going this year. I'm like, you know what, I think I'd rather just focus on my business this year. What's your take on it? Because you don't go to a lot of marquee events.

I probably spend more money on events I don't think I really go to any events unless I'm speaking.

But when you speak, some are marquee events.

Sure.

Yeah.

The main reason being is these events provide value. The networking is amazing to meet some of these people. What I've learned in my business is it doesn't matter if I meet the CEO of McDonald's or Coca-Cola or some multi-billion dollar company. The person who gives me my contract isn't the CEO. I have to go through procurement. I have to go through CMOs, marketing managers, VPs of marketing, right? And eventually convince the department that's in charge of the budget to work with me. Just because a CEO is interested in us doesn't mean I'm going to get that contract. So unless it's an event with my ideal customer, and when I say ideal customer, I'm not talking about the corporation. It has to be the corporation The person in charge of the budget and the person has to have budget. What I mean by has to have budget, if you're McDonald's or Coca-Cola or Google or Adobe, pick any of these big brands, they have marketing budgets, but a lot of that budget is already pre-allocated to existing vendors. So you have to hit them at the right time to get that budget and you have to convince them that you're the right fit. And usually these big corporations have rules for these big contracts where it has to go through procurement and you're competing against 7 or 8 other businesses. So it's not as simple as just be like, yeah, man, I met the CEO of McDonald's at the All In Summit. I'm creating a hypothetical here.

Yep.

And we hit it off. We're now going to do all the marketing for McDonald's. It just does not work that way. It doesn't matter who you know or which investor. They could do intros. It just doesn't work that way for me to get large enterprise contracts, so I tend not to go.

I stress the enterprise piece. So Neil's talking about enterprise in this context and it does take forever. But here's the other thing, even with mid-market plus, right? You might have the CEO, you might have the founder saying, I really want to work with these guys, but in this case you're still going to compete. And I found that these marquee events like an All-In, those aren't necessarily where I get the customers from. Where do we get our customers from? We've talked about this. Webinars work really well.

Yes.

Webinars work better than like us speaking at conferences, at least for me, right? Speaking, sometimes you get some leads here and there, but webinars just crush it. You know, SEO crushes for us. And, you know, having really good offers and running paid towards them crushes as well, right? I found that speaking at events is fun. But like, for example, when Neil and I, we flew all the way to Dubai to speak at Affiliate World. I don't know about you, we might have gotten like a couple leads here and there, but nothing really substantial formed from that. And I'm not saying Affiliate World is a bad conference. It was an amazing conference. There's thousands of people there. But did you get anything from that?

Not one lead. Not— and I've spoken at a few affiliate summits, never really picked up any revenue from it.

Yep. And then next week we're speaking— is it next week? Holy crap. Next week you and I will be in Boston speaking at HubSpot, right? We're doing a marketing school session. Last year, a couple of good leads, but I don't think anything really panned out. And so how about you?

Nothing panned out for us at Boston, but we meet up with existing clients there and we have a good amount of our team members in Boston, so that helps us. The way we look at HubSpot is a little bit different than most events. Affiliate World, it's a great conference. It's on affiliate marketing and they have a lot of people. HubSpot is a $20+ billion company. I'm rounding. I haven't looked up their stock price in a while, but the last I checked, HubSpot—

Neil always has to check stock. What's he say, stock? He's like, he has to check the stock.

Yeah, so $25.39 billion company. That's a good-sized business. And when you're looking at something like HubSpot, they have a lot of the who's who in marketing there. I think it's one of the best stages to speak on for branding.

Interesting. You know, that's why I set up a dinner that I don't think you can make because we're arriving on different days. I always try to set up dinners at these things, right? And last year we had a small one, but I think it's good for, from a, you just nailed it. It's like if you have team members there, you can build a deeper bond with them. And also you can build a deeper relationship with your clients too, because you're talking about client expansion at the end of the day. Because how are you ultimately going to grow your business? You can reduce your churn, you can expand your clients, or you can close new clients. It's those 3 things.

Yep.

Yeah. So anyway, should you be spending money, big money to attend these marquee events? We don't want to beat a dead horse there, but I think it just depends on what you're looking for. But if it's primarily—

No.

If it's just primarily for lead generation, probably not.

If you're going to learn, these places are a great place to learn and they're great places to network. Not necessarily a great place to generate direct revenue or indirect revenue in the next 12 months.

Yep. 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 to 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. Speaking of which, because we're talking about networking, should we— so I'm going to give you 2 paths to choose, right? One topic is, is LinkedIn or X more powerful? Or the second one is how we speak on multiple topics per year at live events.

Let's see. Let's go with, is LinkedIn or X more powerful?

Okay. So I'm going to pull up this screenshot over here. You can pull it up on your screen too. So Lenny Sun, who has Lenny's Newsletter, that's a great tech newsletter. He says, people are sleeping on LinkedIn. Here are my newsletter podcast referral stats for the last 3 months. Not only is LinkedIn driving 5.5x the traffic of Twitter or X, 77,000 versus 14,000 visits, but it's also driving a higher percentage of paid subscribers not being shown. That being said, this all pales in comparison to the power of email marketing. So I'm just showing you what it says over here. So for email, last 3 months or so, last 90 days, he got about 12 million, 12.5 million views and then 7.8 million users. So 7.8 million, that's people overall, I think. And then 198 free subscriptions from that, right? Now, from LinkedIn, he got 66,000 views, and then he got 2,000 free subscriptions. And so from Twitter, 335 free subscriptions, 14,000 views, right? And so I think that's interesting because oftentimes, like, I think I learned a lot. I learned the most, I think, from X. But Still, LinkedIn's organic reach, pretty good.

You know why? You want to know why LinkedIn's organic reach is so good?

Go ahead.

They have an issue of convincing people to post content. If you look at per user, they—

It's less than 1%, I think.

Yes. They lack users posting content.

So you have a better shot.

I posted an infographic late last night. I was up at 2:00 AM.

I don't know why. What were you doing at 2:00 AM?

I had calls internationally. That's the problem with having offices in Overseas countries. And it was on which social network generates customers with the highest lifetime value and talking about LinkedIn versus X. What do you think has a higher lifetime value for both B2B and B2C?

LinkedIn.

It does. So one would be the highest because we surveyed 219 corporations that know their lifetime value and they run ads on these social networks and everyone has a different, number for their LTV. So we just use 1 as the highest. LinkedIn was the highest for B2B and B2C was 0.91. X for B2B was 0.95. So 5% less than LinkedIn.

What was the second one again?

Second one was 0.91 and that was B2C.

Okay, got it.

And that was for LinkedIn. For X, it was 0.95 for B2B, 0.87 for B2C.

Got it. Yeah. I mean, you know, marketing is where your people are spending, where your audience is spending time. That's marketing 101. So if you're B2B, LinkedIn all the way. 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. I think we might as well, because we're talking about live events, we might as well talk about how— because I don't think a lot of people talk about how we can speak on multiple topics a year. And so I remember when Neil and I were flying to Dubai and Neil's like, you want to see how I prepare for my talks? And then Neil opened up a Word document and he put out a couple bullets. He's like, that's how I prepare for my talks, right? And then, you know, Neil's got a team now that helps him put together the slides and everything. But before you had all these resources, You know, how did you go about preparing for both? Because you can't just say the same thing all year. You got to change it up. You know what I mean?

Yes. So what Eric is talking about, when I prepare for a presentation, what I first do is figure out what I want to talk about, brainstorm ideas with the team or with the conference organizer, or just come up with the topic on my own. Then I bullet out the message in a Word document. Like slide 1, I want to cover this topic, slide 2, this topic, slide 3, and I do it till the end of the presentation. And then I would go and create the presentation. These days I don't create the presentation. These days I kind of don't even bullet out anymore, but I'll just send it to my team when I do bullet it out and they'll just go create the presentation. So for example, we're both talking at HubSpot next week. My presentation for HubSpot is how content is not king. I've done similar presentations in the past, so my team created some slide decks. We have a lot of new data, so when they showed me the slide deck, I think it was 29 slides or 25 slides for a 25-minute talk. I removed some of the slides and I added 13 or 14 more, and I was like, I want this chart at this slide, this chart at this slide, reorder this, and I'll just adjust it so that way it flows and it's hard-hitting with some new data.

Yeah. I mean, you're basically tinkering with it.

Yes.

And so like, someone from your team, Marita, she helped us with our Marketing School slides. So Neil has a talk, a solo talk. I have a solo talk. And then we're doing a together talk for Marketing School. And then we also have a Marketing School meetup. You probably don't even know what's going on with that one. We're facilitating like roundtable discussions for that one. We're just moving around the tables. That's how it's going to look. That's a little preview for you. But how I do it is I typically will just have blank slides and I'll just write out one main idea per slide. And to Neil's point, when he talks about just one message, one key message, that's what you're looking for at the end of the day. You don't want to have too many ideas in your talk because your talk's only 20 to 45 minutes or so. You can't try to jam too many things into it. So if you have one cohesive thing that people can understand and just back it up, that's something that people are going to remember. And so for us, I mean, to Neil's point too, For example, funny enough, Neil's speaking at my event, which is a YPO event, and I told his team, I was like, you know, your team gave me all the ideas that you typically speak on. I was like, I don't want him to speak about any of that. I was like, have him speak about acquiring other agencies, right? Because there's going to be 30% agencies in the audience, right? And that was my angle for you to set you up to talk about cool things that you're doing there. And maybe, maybe some deal flow will come your way. But you see, that's you collaborating, but you're not even into the collaboration.

No.

Yeah, yeah. But that's how we do it, guys.

Yeah, and it's the only way to just make things scale. It's too hard. Dude, even as we're recording this podcast, I get an email right now on an M&A deal.

Why are you checking your emails while we're doing a podcast?

It's too hard.

Dude, you have your notifications. Guys, don't turn your notifications on. Then you get ADD like Neil. And now his mind's halfway in the M&A deal 'cause it excites him.

Yeah, I know. And I'm like, oh, I can't read it 'cause it'll show my screen and all the things. financials, so I was like, oh, let me just ignore that.

Yep. But anyway, I mean, that's how it works. I mean, and final thing I'll leave on this one is that you should always ask the event organizer what a home run looks like to the audience. Who's in the audience and what does a home run look like? And then you can tailor around that. A lot of people don't even ask what a win looks like, and that's setting yourself up to fail, so.

But you need to ask who's in the audience and who's the ideal customer before you even make your presentation. You want to make sure you adapt to them.

For sure. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency. You can no longer just sign up For it, it's application only now. And if it does look like it's a good fit, we'll have someone from our team reach out and see if it's a good fit for the group. So that is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.

Thank you.