The Ultimate Strategy Showdown for Traffic, Retargeting, and Referrals

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy. I hope you enjoy the episode. Who's got a question, a problem, or a takeaway that they'd like to throw in? I think Rebecca, if you wanted to start, it sounded like you had something that was on the tip of your tongue.

I'm curious, and you guys have probably talked about this. And so if you have, just point me back to like maybe a session if you happen to remember it, and I'll, I'll just listen to it. We're in lead generation, all that stuff. And the thing that constantly comes up, and so it comes up in all of your email too, is cold outbound prospecting and all the magical tools that everybody sells Selling with the, uh, they're developed, you know, they're creating the AI emails and they'll practically send them and get you your own, uh, leads. We haven't seen this being successful yet. It's constantly touted as successful. And so I'm just not comfortable recommending it in the smaller B2B space. And I'm curious if somebody's actually like making money off this besides just charging people to do it.

So Rebecca, is it more around like Kind of who's crushing with cold outbound right now?

I guess so. Yeah, I guess so. And I, I don't— crushing to me means somebody's helping a client make a lot of money versus they're just selling it like crazy. And they're going to make money for about a year and then they're not.

Anybody smashing with cold outbound right now? I can say I'm not. So yeah, but—

I tried it once. I am not.

Rebecca, I did share a link in chat. That's a really good template. It's really like straight into the point. But Anybody feel free to jump in here.

Okay. Thank you.

So we just started with that, with the whole like our B2B Clay, uh, Warmly, like automated outbound stuff with a consultant he set up. I don't understand everything that's been set up, but he walked us through the whole thing and we're actually getting meetings booked. Like we just started 2 months ago, so we're, we're still getting signals of traction. But so far, some of these logos that are responding and booking meetings are actually Real, like legit companies we'd want to work with. So I think in like 2 to 3 months, we'll, I'll be able to tell you whether or not we actually closed revenue.

David, that is really good to hear and encouraging. I did a test for our company and it was a smashing failure. So, but all those tools, all those tools that he just said.

I'll show you a little workflow, David. David, finish your thought. Go ahead.

I was going to say, I'm happy to intro you to the consultant, but I don't know if it's, it might be a little too early to like Be confident making that intro. But if you want to, like, you're cool, learn about what— That's okay. I'll make my own mistakes.

I'll make my mistakes.

Okay.

So I have a quick question for Rebecca. When you say it was not successful, like, how long did you give it? Not long, because the person wanted too much money. We were paid— we paid $4,000 over about maybe a month or two, and I just wasn't even seeing replies or anything. And this is someone who's very experienced in the space and is very into the whole HubSpot world. And came recommended by somebody I trust, and who knows what was going on, honestly. So I just shelved it, and then my clients asked me about it, and I'm like, I just don't know how I feel. So I need to get more comfortable. So that was one of my first questions I wrote down. Cool.

I'm going to share my screen real quick.

Thank you.

David, to your point, this isn't going to necessarily work for everyone, but I was thinking about this. Here's my screen. So this is our Slack over here. We have a visitor intel outreach channel. So this is retention.com and we're just pushing it to Slack. And then what we're doing, we used to have an automation set up for this. So for example, this visited our site. She's senior manager SEM. We've actually paused all these automated outreach messages. And I actually think, you know, what we came up with is kind of tacky, this AI SEO thing. And I feel like AI is kind of played out now when people try to lead with it. But all that to say is like, we, we do lead score them and then we're like, okay, the rationale for 8 out of 10 is they're a senior manager in SEM.

Okay.

They visit this page on newsletter advertising. Now what we do instead, and even I do this sometimes, is I'll just add 'em on LinkedIn. Um, and I'll also, I'll send 'em an InMail, not just a, just not just like a connect note, but I'll send them InMail, um, tied to whatever, like, oh, they're interested in newsletter advertising. Oh, by the way, we talked about this over here. Or like, here's this webinar over here. That way we can build a deeper rela—

relationship.

I think the hand-to-hand combat is where we generally find much higher response rates, maybe like 30, 40% or so. Just know that you're probably going to have to spend some InMails on it.

I think so. And the tool you're using, which one are you using to sniff your visitors?

retention.com.

retention.com. Okay. You said that at the top of it. That validates a lot for me, to tell you the honest truth. So thank you.

Of course. All right, that's a nice loaded one. Who else has got something?

Wait, why do you use retention.com instead of RB2B, or is it the same thing?

Oh, it's— I use RB2B.

Sorry.

It's the same. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I use RB2B. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you, David.

Yeah.

Peck, you want to go?

Sure.

Yeah, this question for Eric. I know you invest a lot in marketing, YouTube, podcasts, everything. For Single Grain, Where are your best customers? You know, if you had to stack rank your channels, where are your best customers coming from? Yeah, number one would be referral and it's not even close. It's interesting because I met with another founder of a creative shop in our— my hometown, Arcadia, last week. And I was like, where is all your business coming from? I asked the same question. He's like, all of it comes from referral, right? But it's hard to scale that way. So referral would be the best, obviously. But then second and third, I would say the most predictable channels for us would probably be SEO and webinars. And webinars to me is just a form of partnerships. I don't think enough of us here are doing it. So what we do on our side with partnerships is like, hey, like we have a couple leads on our side, we're going to send them to you. And we don't, we've talked about this on Marketing School, we don't necessarily try to track them too much. Neil does the same thing. But you just generally get a feeling like if I'm sending, like if I send 4 leads to David and he doesn't send me anything, like over time I'm going to be like, okay, like, but we'll probably just start sending him less leads and then we'll send it to people that do kind of reciprocate. And that works well. And then that leads to webinar partnerships and other types of like email, you can do like an email deal or something like that. And then SEO's kind of been the gift that keeps on giving. And I don't know about you guys, but like our traffic after the last update keeps moving up. So, you know, knock on wood, we can hold onto that. And then Peck, I'll add a bonus for you here. We're totally revamping our YouTube right now. And maybe my lesson of the week here before someone else has questions, and feel free to raise your hand. We have a YouTube guy that works with like a couple of like billionaires who have YouTube channels like Robert Kiyosaki, Ken McElroy, and And he's helping us right now. His name's Josh. But what he's doing, he's like, one, he's like, Eric, you know, I saw him at an event I spoke at a couple weeks ago. He's like, your YouTube channel is shit. I was like, tell me more. And he's like, yeah, you talk about all these different things, but like it doesn't help your business and like your, this sucks, that sucks, you know? And then I had him sit on a call with my team. Basically he's agreed now to help me repackage videos and I'm going to show you what I mean by that. So what I mean by that is if I can share my screen, Over here. Give me one second. I need to share the right thing. Okay, here we go.

Okay.

Can you guys see this? Yes. Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So all he does now is he'll write the idea for me. He'll come up with the ideas and he'll just send me like a Word document like this. And then he'll come, he'll have like a couple thumbnail concepts and then here's a hook over here. And then I can basically go into, um, the video itself. I might need to do a little preparation, He had one earlier today on me, me just kind of telling a story. And I, I basically like, I popped this up, I might've prepared for 5 minutes or so, and then I recorded like a 34-minute video straight. And the thing with my channel is, is that I was interviewing people around like dating and finance and things like that. It started to kind of pollute my channel. Now I'm, I'm honing in a lot more. That being said, I had a dating one that came out yesterday. You guys all should watch it. It's, it's fantastic. But, but like, he's the last one right now. I'm just like, I'm talking to Seth Godin later this month. I'm talking to Anthony Pompliano. But 80% of my content's just going to be me. 20% will be interviews and it's just going to be business and marketing. So my mistake last year was, sure, I enjoyed these conversations with other people, but now I'm honing everything back into like what's actually going to drive leads. Um, and I will say that some of these interviews actually do drive leads, but it's not the dating ones at the end of the day. So yeah. That's funny you mentioned that because I noticed you did that dating one and I was like, what's the strategy here? Is this helping? Like, are you trying to go broader? So thanks for sharing that.

It's because I was confused and Yeah, you answered my question.

Yep. Yeah. And by the way, like, I'll— that video from yesterday will probably get like 100,000 views, if not more. Like his last one I did with him, 300,000. It's because these guys all have good soundbites. Um, and like we do have ads in there, like mid-roll ads like that, that helps as well. But what I found for like, uh, Instagram Reels, for example, what actually got us leads, there's one video where I was telling Neil a story about this Loro Piana store where you can get 70% off in Italy. And then that one got like, I don't know, 3 or 4 million views or so. And I had a couple people text me about it. And then, you know, these are like CMOs or C-level people at, you know, multi-billion dollar companies. And so that's a scenario where I think if you tell a good story and it's helpful, people will remember you. But if you're, if you're like interviewing someone else, you're propping them up. And that generally isn't that helpful for your business. And it's also more work on you too as the interviewer. So just keep that in mind if you guys want to do that stuff.

So, Eric, wouldn't it make sense for you just to have a separate channel for the dating stuff that you're doing? Because I mean, if you like that and it's fun, you know what I mean?

I don't, I don't really, I don't know. Like, the conversation's intriguing to me, but I don't know if I really like it a lot. Like, I like conversations like this where we're talking about business and marketing.

Fair enough. I catch up a lot with your conversations with Neil.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's those. I enjoy those a lot. So 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 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. All right. Um, let's see. Can you go ahead, Noman? Hey, how's it going? Um, hey, so a, uh, client asked me this week if AI-generated content is getting hammered by Google or will be getting hammered by Google. So just kind of curious what everyone's thoughts are in that area.

They can Hammer that. Wow.

This is AI. This is all AI generated, this section. And so what we've done just to make it actionable for you, Noman, is you can see over here, it dropped quite a bit. This is like, there's an update and then another update happened. But we've been very focused on the quality of these pages. And these are taken from transcripts of Marketing School. And then we have a human in a loop that will write it out and just to, to, to really handle the last like mile or two. Um, and you can see now we're getting rewarded for the quality. And so I think a lot of people are thinking more so about quantity still right now, quantity versus quality. I think people should think more about quality than quantity and not necessarily think about pumping out thousands of pages, but maybe it's like hundreds or so. Um, and so yeah, hopefully that helps. No, that, that's great.

Thank you.

I, uh, we discussed this a couple weeks ago. I think Alex was on the call and a few others.

We talked about this actually, and I'm curious, like, How much of that last mile is human?

Like, is it 10%, 20%? I mean, like 30, 40%.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know, David, you have a content marketing agency, so I don't know if you want to speak to it.

We use some AI for like the beginning of like drafting and all of that, but it's like maybe 80% human. But for our own website, there definitely is AI content and it's a similar chart to what you just shared. Eric, we're doing a lot of AI for our own marketing.

Yep.

Well, Ginger, your question was, can Josh help with super small businesses or does he work with A-listers? Right now he does have like an A-lister vibe around him. He hasn't answered me directly, but I don't think I'm an A-lister. I think he just likes me. So you're an A-lister, Eric.

Come on.

In the space of entrepreneurship and marketing, you are definitely an A-lister. I appreciate that. Uh, but yeah, I think, I think eventually he'll open it up more, but he's not cheap. I think he, he's only like 21 years old and he's charged like $25 grand a client, so he's got demand.

So yeah.

That's awesome.

I love it.

Yep.

Cool.

Um, who else we got?

Can I ask a question actually on that recommendation that he made?

Yep.

So the, uh, the script was about, um, you fired employees, how do we prevent you being next? Oh, how's that? How does that translate into business?

Yeah. So now his, his idea, and that's a good question, Scott. So the, the, the idea itself will bring in a larger audience, but it is centered around AI. Um, I just, I was just like, dude, don't gimme an AI title. Like, I'm, I'm so sick and tired of them. Um, so he's like, okay, well you replaced, cuz I, I explained him. He, so he called me yesterday. He was like, he's like, okay, tell me like some of the math behind it. And I'm like, okay, well, Um, one of our developers started using Cursor and then he increased his speed by 2x. And then he said in the last year or 2, he's increased his efficiency by 3x. Okay. Then you have a multiplier there. And then, then there's like some other things we added this week. It's like, it's made him like even faster. Right. So it's like, um, we're kind of doing the math behind it. We're like, okay, maybe like we've gotten, you know, 7 or 8x faster overall. And so we just kind of backed into, backed into that, that like random number.

Yeah.

So, okay, so the title is clickbaity, but the, but the text, the meat and potato of the video is actually you talking about your business, the agency, how you've seen. Okay. Okay.

Correct. And you know who's a good example, Scott? I think, let me pull him up real quick. So this is my friend Ken McElroy. And so Josh works with this guy. Let me pull this up real quick. All right, pulling it up. And then we'll go to you next, Kevin. So this is Ken over here. All right. So Ken, you can see he's got 425K subs. And then let's just click on his channel and channel stats. You know, I think they're doing better like last month, the month before, I think they had 2 or 3 million views or so. But before that, he was only getting like 100,000 views a month or so. And then we had, you know, Mr. Hero Josh step in. So like some of his videos here will get like 100K views, right? What my 10,000 tenants reveal about the economy. I'm buying $90 million in property. Here's how, right? So decent amount of views for these, but his whole thing, Scott, is he's trying to get more qualified applicants to join his fund, right? Because he's a real estate investor. So it actually has increased. I would say it increased his output by like 21x in terms of qualified applications. So there is business value from what he's getting.