The future of SEO, Influencer marketing's evolution, & Why 100% of sales execs' LinkedIn posts fail

I guess we can predict the future of SEO here. Do you want to add anything to this?

No, but I think when it comes to the future of SEO, if you think about it right now, most people just optimize for Google. They think SEO equals Google rankings. I think the future of SEO is going to be Google rankings, TikTok rankings, Instagram rankings, YouTube rankings, SearchGPT, and the list continues on and on. And a great example of this is we talk to so many corporations that create social content for Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, but yet they don't really optimize for their rankings on these platforms. So it was like, oh yeah, we got a lot of comments and views, but you could continue, you can actually rank on these platforms. When you type, people type something in, they can recommend your videos or your content and you can keep getting more views. And a lot of just businesses forget that aspect. They're like, oh, SEO is just for Google. Well, no, if you're creating content on other platforms, you should optimize for them to continually get engagement and views versus just one-off.

Yep. So here's what I think the future of SEO is going to look like. First and foremost, it's not just Google anymore. I actually, I was traveling. When I was traveling, my travel buddy, we'll just call it the travel buddy, the way she behaved was she searched for things on TikTok, right? So TikTok search, that's one. Amazon search for shopping. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Yeah.

Let's also not forget that these LLMs, like an OpenAI, They use, they use RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, right? And they, that, they pull from search engines for that, for that data. So basically, these LLMs are basically, they're building on top of search engines like a Google, for example, and they're working in tandem. So I don't think these LLMs are going to replace Google necessarily, but that's what the future of SEO is going to look like. And by the way, it's getting harder. You get these AI overview results, you get these local packs, you get these other, everything's being pushed down by the ads as well. So SEO is just getting tougher overall. And also, when we think about attention, attention is kind of fading away from like, Google's still getting a lot of search, but the attention is so spread out now amongst all these different social platforms. So I think, Neil, we've talked about this, that the future of SEO is you have to— we've talked about going omnichannel, we talked about having to diversify. Because, you know, we used to be one-trick ponies, we used to be all in on SEO.

Yeah.

But over the years, we're just like the attention, Marketing is— marketing 101 is you're bringing people to the point of sale. Well, if you're trying to find those people to bring them to the point of sale, you have to understand where they're hanging out. They're not just hanging out on Google anymore.

No, dude, even podcasting. We've been doing this podcast for what, 7+ years now?

I think 8.

8 years? Oh my God. It's been a long time. I used to live in the Mandarin when we did this.

You did?

It's Waldorf now.

Yeah.

Dude, that's a long— And the heat. We used to turn off the AC.

Yeah.

Speaking of AC, my AC doesn't work here.

Oh, I stayed at your place for like a week. Yeah. Wait, your AC doesn't work here?

Dude, they've been having issues at this Mandarin for like a week. I always have bad luck at Mandarins with AC.

Wow. But I mean, look, by the way, we've been doing this consistently for 8 years. I mean, we're in our early 30s when we first started doing this. And you just have to stay consistent. By the way, if the attention is there, you stay consistent with it no matter what. That's the reason we're still here.

Yes. And if you look at what Eric and I are doing, we adapt to the channels that we see people are on and we optimize for them because that's where we know the attention is. But there's one caveat that most people get wrong. What Eric and I do is we optimize for the channels once they start becoming popular. We don't go after the new and up and coming and be like, oh my God, like I think one was called BeReal or something like that.

Yeah, I made that mistake with Clubhouse, remember? I tried to drag you onto Clubhouse.

Clubhouse, yeah. Yeah, and same with, what was the other one? You didn't get into that one, but Norgaard did it with, AirChat.

AirChat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Neither of us really used it. And what you want to do is you want to focus on the ones that you know are popular enough and they're getting enough traction where you know they're not going to die. A great example of this is Threads. Threads crossed, I think, 200 million monthly active users, right? Meta made an announcement on that. It's big enough where it's not going to die. If you're already creating content, it doesn't take much more to post it on Threads and you should.

Yeah, just port it over.

Yeah, just port it over, copy and paste. You don't have to do much more than that.

Yeah. And by the way, you do that for LinkedIn as well. It's not like you're natively posting to LinkedIn. Yeah. And it works well.

It works well. Do you do the same thing?

You're just copying and pasting? Totally. Yeah. It's just, I just found it like, I used to dedicate like an hour to writing, taking our Shorts and writing like a caption for them. 'Cause I found that the copy that my team was writing wasn't, it didn't feel like it was in my voice, but now I'm just like, whatever. So.

Dude, sometimes same thing with me. Some of my team write emails and I'm like, man, this email isn't as good enough. I can make it better. And then when you look at the ROI of, massaging the email just a little bit.

ROI is not there.

It's not really there.

It's like, okay, you're better off buying more companies.

Yes.

Yeah. 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 wanna 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. Can we just talk about how SEO as we know it is dead and here's what the future looks like?

Yes.

Okay, so, and then we'll move over to yours. So this tweet from Charles SEO says, if you're an SEO consultant, agency, freelancer, then it's time to admit that our entire industry doesn't revolve around Google anymore. Which is, I wanted to triple down on what we're talking about. So, you know, he's basically saying the future of SEO is becoming a jack of all trades, quickly adapting to where the audience is, and then quickly gaining marketing share. Most of these platforms take considerably less time to see success than Google too. The SEO industry is only dead if your audience isn't using the only search engine you can optimize for. So again, we both started with Google, okay? Or we were mainly focused on Google, but now we've learned these other channels like YouTube. Oh, on YouTube, you got to learn good headlines. You got to learn good packaging. You got to learn how to retain them within the first 30 seconds. So that's a game in itself. Okay, well, what do you have to do with TikTok, with Reels? Oh, you got to have a really good hook and you got to hold— you got to make sure they don't swipe away, right? You got to make sure you have a good, you know, little title thumbnail there. There's just all these games you have to understand how to play and you can't keep playing the same game over and over, especially when that game is dying. We're not saying don't do Google SEO, but SEO is much more than that now. And I just wanted to reinforce that piece because SEO as we know it is dead. Like the old SEO.

Yes.

You got to evolve.

You got to evolve. And we're seeing companies slowly start evolving. At our agency, NP Digital, we're getting more and more people each and every single week saying, hey, can you help us optimize our content for TikTok, Instagram, And a year to 2 years ago, that would rarely ever come up in a conversation. Mm-hmm.

But by the way, they ask you for like, when they reach out to us, it's like, oh, we need help with Reddit marketing. We need help with WhatsApp marketing. It's like, it's going further and further out. Go ahead.

And there was an article on Adweek, you know, Kate Spade and a few others were talking about it in which there are more and more companies are aligning branding and performance. I had a similar conversation about this earlier today and we were talking about Nike and you and I discussed Nike on our last podcast episode. in which Nike is bringing back the old CMO. Phil Knight is the CEO now of Nike, and they're going back to the roots of branding. If you look at a lot of companies, what they're really doing, whether they want to admit it or not, and where the future of marketing is going, branding and performance are becoming more and more closely aligned. You can do branding campaigns on television and use apps like, or use services like Tatari to figure out if those campaigns actually drive revenue. Because it can tell you if someone watched that commercial and then they went to your website and purchase because TV now is usually connected by internet, right? So they're using IP addresses. Similarly, if you do tons of Google Ads and people are like, oh, that's performance. Well, if you spend $5 million a month on Google Ads and all these people are clicking on your website, you're getting a lot of branding from it. It's not just performance. It is actually growing your brand at the same time.

Yeah.

And you're seeing a closer and closer alignment with it, especially with, a lot of traditional channels that were typically used just for pure branding being able to be purchased through digital channels and they're becoming more and more trackable as well.

Yeah, I think before, maybe 10, 15 years ago, we might have said, oh, it's all about performance. But no, the reality is it's or— sorry, it's and.

Yes.

And so you want to have both. And by the way, like, you know, I think Adidas talked about how performance marketing didn't work. We had that discussion where this Nike executive that was a brand executive was like, performance didn't work, right? It's not that it doesn't work. It's you got to, you got to do both at the same time. Otherwise, if you don't, it's like cutting one of your legs out from under you.

Well, if performance didn't work, Google wouldn't be a trillion or $2 trillion company and Facebook wouldn't be a trillion-plus dollar company either.

Yep. So I think that's what we got to say about that. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. You have this one over here about how influencer marketing is moving because we're talking about performance, how influencer marketing is moving into a more rigorous metrics-driven era.

So there's this article on Ad Age and what you were seeing before with influencer marketing where people would be like, I need Kim Kardashian or Gisele or Tom Brady or LeBron James or Steph Curry to promote one of my products. Oh, look at this. Cristiano Ronaldo promoted, most popular Instagram user. We paid him $20 million for this campaign. I'm making up a number. And they're like, yeah, it got our brand really out there. Look at all these likes and engagements. And what companies are realizing is it's a big expensive black hole, especially if you just do it with the big influencers. And they're like, wait, we just spent $50, $100 million on these influencers. What was the ROI? Well, I can tell you the engagement. Well, engagement doesn't mean ROI. You're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. A lot of big corporations don't care as much, but you want to start ramping up to $10, $20, $30, $50 million, they actually care about ROI. And what they found over time, which you and I have talked about this time and time again, is with influencers, you can actually track the ROI. There's many ways to do it. You can create them unique landing pages. You can have promos with them. You can have them tell their users to swipe up, let's say if it's a story, and go to your site so you can get direct conversions. Yes, some of the conversions aren't trackable, but with micro-influencers, you can get a much better ROI. It's way more work because you have to recruit so many more people, but the ROI is much more positive. And they're like, wait, with smaller influencers, or especially with ones where we can hold them to these numbers and KPIs, not only are we getting the branding exposure, We're actually driving direct sales and it's trackable. And it's easier to not necessarily scale up, but continually do it quarter after quarter, year after year and get the budget because we can prove that it's driving ROI.

That's interesting. Is there any tech that they're using for this?

Usually most people just use their own analytics and they're using a lot of campaign variables when they're asking people to promote.

Ah, okay.

That makes sense.

That's simple. So standard. Okay. Well, speaking of, because we're influencer, you know, a lot of it's talking about socials. Did you see this tweet, not a tweet, this post, this LinkedIn post post from Jason Lemkin basically saying that 100% of marketing and sales executives who post on LinkedIn are failures?

No. Okay. 100%?

100%. So this is, this is interesting. So Jason Lemkin, he founded EchoSign.

Can't be 100%. That's too high. I think he's just exaggerating.

He's exaggerating a little bit. But this over here, I'm trying to pull it up. Okay. So I found an almost 100% correlation between sales execs constantly promoting content on LinkedIn and failing at their role in sales or marketing, at least across all my top investments and companies I work closely with. I know this may be triggering to some, and that many folks who produce prolific amounts of content will disagree. I also know we produce a lot of content at SaaStr too, so that's the largest SaaS conference in the world. I'm not a sales exec per se, but it's also a fair critique of even me. But here's the thing. It took me a while to figure it out. Why? Why do folks posting multiple times a day on sales advice on LinkedIn flame out every single time I've seen them join a portfolio company? The reason is it just becomes your core focus past a certain point. Can you be good at sales if it's not your number one focus? Maybe. Can you be great at it? Hmm. And perhaps more importantly, can you be a truly great VP of sales if something else is your top focus during daytime hours? Maybe, but not in my experience. LinkedIn has turned us into B2B doom scrollers just on LinkedIn, not TikTok or Insta. It is what it is, and it can feel great to build a big audience, but it also is a big investment to scale that. It can often become, quote, Dot, dot, dot, your core focus, at least of your passions, of your creativity, of your quiet moments, instead of closing that deal, running that campaign or building that pipeline.

So he's actually specifically talking about sales executives who are—

He put marketing in here too.

No, but he said sales executives.

He did.

He's talking about sales or marketing.

Failing at their role in sales or marketing.

Yeah, because some sales actually—

Yeah, yeah.

CROs, marketing reports into them.

Yep.

I don't know if there's a direct correlation. I know quite a few people who post content on LinkedIn, but they're not posting endlessly each and every single day. They may just post one thing a day and they're posting it on all the social networks.

Yeah, that part's fine. I think the ones that are, you know, you know who does this, who's pretty prolific and it's actually worked out well for him is Adam Robinson from Retention. So they've grown their business. I think they're probably, you know, Mid-$20 million ARR or so. But he's built everything in public. And he's done well with that. And then there's this other guy, Chris Walker, Refined Labs. He did pretty well with LinkedIn. But you actually, I think about it now, it's like there aren't many LinkedIn influencers that I know of that have big businesses.

No. And I don't log into LinkedIn often. So I don't see any of these people. I literally log in once a week just to see if there's any messages that I need to respond to. And that's really it. Yeah.

So I think, look, Jason Lemkin's point here is well taken. It's Keep the main thing the main thing. It's going to be hard to crush at your role if your main thing is you're trying to focus on building audience. Like, more power to you for doing that. Actually, I know someone that does this. They were VP of marketing at a couple of companies and they were posting a lot on LinkedIn. And I'm just like, man, if all the time you're spending on doing that, engaging with other people, like, if I'm paying you at— if you're VP of marketing at my company, I'm scrutinizing you.

Uh-huh.

You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of shit to do at my company with marketing. And you're spending time marketing yourself, like, don't do it on my dime.

I think people got it wrong. A lot of people are posting on social because they believe it's going to help them build a bigger brand, which it does. And they believe in turn that's going to help them make more money. The real way to make a lot of money in the corporate world is you do an amazing job and you continually get promoted and you keep working for bigger and bigger companies.

That's how you do well.

And people are riding this personal brand hype Too far, in my opinion.

Even though we we do a lot, and not not not anymore. We we used to do. I would say we used to do a lot more than now. We're just focused on the business. So we're I think we're different than like ten years ago.

Yeah, I haven't done much in the last like four years. I really cut back. But ten years ago, ten years I did a lot.

Yeah.

And I had this notion that personal brands would be the new big corporations, and that hasn't come around really. If you look at Kylie Cosmetics, did she do amazing job? Yeah, she's done a better job with me than personal brand. But Kylie Cosmetics. is still not Estée Lauder or L'Oréal. And I'm not trying to knock her, she's done an amazing job. And again, I, Neil Patel, am no WPP or Publicis or Omnicom. You look at the big corporations out there, it has nothing to do with personal brands. Is branding important? Yes. Is a personal brand better to have than not have? Sure. But I think what's more important is building a really amazing corporate brand.

Yeah, and then compounding it for decades.

Yes.

Because WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, they've been around for a while.

Dude, the Fortune 25 in the United States, guess how old they are on average?

Uh, 106 years old?

Yeah, you read my tweet? I was looking that up. I literally put it in an Excel spreadsheet and I was averaging out.

I was like, how many years old are they? 106.7, that's what you put, I think, right?

Or it was 107.6 or 106.7, it was one or the other.

Yeah. All right guys, so that's it for today's episode. marketingschool.io/agency if you want to go grow your agency faster. That's our little community. In fact, Neil, do you want to come to the next session next week? Are you in town next week?

Depending what time, I'm driving home, but yeah.

All right, we'll figure it out. So this is when Neil and I will jump in every now and then, every month or so, and we'll have guest speakers and all that. And you have an entire community of people all trying to grow. We're talking, we're talking 7, 8-figure agency owners, 6 figures as well. And, uh, yeah, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow. Bye.