Undisclosed marketing tactics from Neil Patel & Eric Siu, and Companies' stance on meritocracy

So undisclosed marketing tactics from Neil Patel and Eric Siu. I don't know if your team wrote the original title, but I changed it to this one.

I wrote the original title, but I liked the one you changed it to. One of the tactics that we do that drives us a lot of revenue is, I don't know if you've seen any of our recorded webinars or live webinars, we actually have QR codes on there where people can, no joke, scan with their phone and it takes them to LeadPage where they can opt in and get a call with one of our sales reps. Dude, it doesn't drive the most amount of leads, but it drives some of the highest quality leads that we get and they convert amazingly well. And I don't know what software we use, but when we go live and someone scans a QR code, it actually says someone scanned the QR code or like 5 people, 10 people, et cetera, which then causes more people to.

Oh.

And it was funny because people were like, oh, is this full of crap? Is this fake? And then Salo hopped on because he's the one who You know, added it in. He's like, no, no, no, now try it. So someone tried it and then it was one, and then boom, it just started shooting up because everyone— I'm like, look, it's real. Um, but that's been a tactic that we've been using for very, like, not that long, right? No, we don't do Zoom webinars. We do the Restream. Is it called Restream?

Oh, you use Restream to push it to multiple platforms, but you're still probably using a webinar platform because we use Lightstorm and Restream.

No, we just use Restream.

Huh, okay.

I log into Restream. I'm a presenter. There's a few other presenters. We have a moderator in there. I just share my screen and it goes live on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok. We go live on 6 channels all at once. I'm pretty sure all 6.

Dude, okay, it's not a tool. It's actually— I just Googled it. So add QR codes to your stream. So, um, yeah, it looks like you're just using Restream and the QR code scanner thing comes up— comes with Restream. So I'm going to tell my team to just use Restream. That's great.

That's what we do to host our webinars. We generate a lot of high-quality leads from that when we do webinars. That's one of the better tactics that we've done, especially amazing for B2B. Another marketing tactic that we've been doing is we do booths at conferences, but we don't just do booths at conferences. We do ANAs at the booths. ANA stands for Ask Neil Anything.

A&A. Wow, that's funny.

And we have the conference promote it and it brings us a lot of people. And then our team members are closing deals right then and there. Not everyone can do it, but if you have, you don't have to be a personal brand. We've also found that if you're not a personal brand, it doesn't work if you just say, hey, Joe here is going to do it. A&A with Joe. No one ends up showing up. But then the flip side, what we do is when we don't have me at an event, because I'm not at all the events, we'll discuss a hot topic that we know hit because we just look at our, my social posts to see what hits. Or you can look at someone else's social posts and have a discussion around that topic and then have people come to a booth. That works really well. If you don't have a booth, you can hit up the conference and you can do an AMA or an ANA or a roundtable discussion. They typically will provide the roundtables. That works really well. The other thing we do at conferences too, and sometimes we'll pay for this, during lunch, we'll have them set up an area for us where someone on our team or me will give a presentation while they're eating. And then we're getting to know all of them and then we're picking up business from there. So those are some of the things that we do from conferences that have been pretty effective. Another strategy that we've been leveraging for a good amount of time now that has been effective too is, We run paid ads to webinars. And most people are like, why would you run paid ads to webinars? That's old school. It doesn't work well. We found it to work really well. The paid ads to a landing page for opt-in doesn't work too well for a lead. From an ROI standpoint, it just costs us too much. But to webinar, it's much cheaper. They're not ready to buy anything, but then we warm them up by getting to know them on some of our webinars. And eventually a good chunk of them purchase and it tends to be very profitable for us.

How much are you spending per webinar again?

Right now I think we spend around like $20,000 to $20-something thousand to promote each webinar.

That's actually, so it's worth it because Neil, I think you've disclosed this on Twitter, but basically each webinar seems to come out to $411K.

So— Somewhere around there.

Yeah.

It's a good expense. And if I stop spending on ads, a lot of the people are still coming to the webinars and it's still driving the revenue.

And you're running LinkedIn and Meta ads or just LinkedIn ads for the webinar?

I don't know. I know it's on Instagram because I've seen them on Instagram. I don't really log into my LinkedIn often. I don't really log into my Instagram often too, but Kyle, who is sitting next to me, was showing me one of our ads on Instagram. So I know it's running there. I don't know what other platforms we're running it, but it must be the social platforms. I know we're not running Google Ads to the webinar. I know it is all social, but that's worked out quite well. And the other marketing strategy that has worked out really well for me is just go and join a lot of groups. You know, it could be EO, it could be YPO, and you're not supposed to market in these groups or try to generate business. But if you join enough of these groups, what I found is there's a lot of people who you just get to know and they'll do business and it's just another marketing expense. Like I found a group here in India, everyone in the group is a billionaire. And I'm like, oh, this is a great group. And they tend to do business with each other within the group. And it's a marketing expense. I was like, all right, cool.

Are you going to join that group?

I'm trying to join it. I'm not in it yet.

Nice.

I think I'll have a hard time joining it. I don't make the qualifications of being a billionaire.

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 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 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. By the way, talking about the YPO thing. So yesterday, as an example, basically what Neil said, I actually, and the EO thing. So I had an EOer that I've known for a couple years. He reached out yesterday. He wanted help with something. And then there's a YPOer that reached out yesterday. He wanted help with something. And then this week we just signed with a YPOer that watched like one of our webinars, right? And so this stuff goes a long way. And then when people feel like you're in the same— when they see that you're in the same group as them, there's instantly a bond. There's a connection there. And even Neil has come around to it over the last couple of years. That's something he's changed his mind on a little bit. A little bit. There's still more changing to be done. But I would say on my end, so what we do is, so programmatic SEO has worked really well for us and we are continuing to refine pages so that we rank for a lot of different agency pages, services pages as an example. And then when you create these programmatic SEO pages, so for example, like you would have Reddit marketing agency as an example, right? Now these pages are created programmatically. So then we add in programmatic CRO. And so programmatic CRO means that we're programmatically optimizing the call to actions, the logos on the pages, and also sharing relevant content. And also we're optimizing the links as well. We're also building— we've already built this. So we use this internally right now. We have a quality score tool that automatically deletes unimportant pages that have zero links and zero traffic after 45 days. Especially with the recent Google leaks, they've really emphasized updating, deleting, consolidating content, which we've known for many years. But to have something like, you got to think about what are a lot of these things that we can automate a lot of these tasks? Because a lot of these sites have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages. And then also what we're doing right now, and we have this, this is actually, it's in alpha right now, Neil, but we have a product that will look at all of your ad creative and then make landing pages that align with that creative. So we're able to do that at scale. And then the other thing I would say is we're trying to continue to update, consolidate, delete, at scale. So we're building a lot of products tied to that, but that's been working well for us. And I would just say the traditional stuff I mentioned a little earlier, Neil mentioned webinars. So webinars work really well. Partner webinars work really well. And then I would say, I think Neil, we're both speaking at HubSpot. We're both looking to speak in Germany. So Neil's actually, he turned me around to this. It's like, yeah, focusing on events where you can actually drive revenue and not just going for fun. Is probably a better use of your time.

So yeah. Yeah, and like the Germany one, great fit. I have an agency in Germany, right? Or division in Germany. So it's like, I was like, all right.

Initially you were like, no. And then you came back like, oh, okay, maybe.

Yeah, because I hit up my team. I was like, would it be good for our German business? And they're like, yes. And then I was like, all right, sounds good. But no, going back to the content deleting and updating, we've been doing that for a long time. We've seen great results from that. What's funny though is most people don't take the time to internal link some of their pages. I don't know why. And speaking of SEO, there's roughly 8.5 billion searches a day. 1.27 billion of them are brand new searches that have never been searched before on Google. 680 million of them, of the searches of the 8.5, are typically question-based searches. So it's like thinking Quora, writing content around questions. It's also helping with AI overviews from what we're seeing. And also creating content around new searches, Google suggests, AnswerThePublic provides a lot of those keywords. So does Semrush, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs. Just going after those keywords. They're really untapped and they're not that competitive. And they drive a ton of revenue. Another marketing strategy we've just been doing for so many years is partnerships. So we look for people who have popular audiences and we'll just promote them and they promote us and we'll do a swap. And we found that to be very effective because if they have a list of buyers and we have a list of buyers, you know, you're just promoting each other and assuming you're following privacy laws, it's a great way to drive extra revenue. We do more of that on business development than marketing, but I really do consider that marketing as well.

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. This person, Lulu, over here says, okay, so she's Asian, okay, she's an Asian female. She says, the implication that women or minorities need anything other than an even playing field to compete and win on merit has always been insulting. And I'm glad everyone can now say it out loud, right? So this website, so when you said meritocracy, this website is owned by Balaji Srinivasan and the website's called meritocracy.com. And you have all these tweets here from these companies and it's like, hey, if you're a company based on merit, you can do this. So I think there's a movement that's starting and this is like a marketing, it's becoming a marketing thing, right? And the final thing I'll say is this to kind of reinforce the fact. So both, I want to reinforce that Neil Knight, We would like diversity, but the first thing that matters is can you do your job, right?

Yes.

I remember I had a female executive assistant. She was African American. And then she told me, she's like, if I ever got hired based on my skin color, I would feel insulted, right? And I think the pendulum is swinging back more towards this. And I think this is— we're going to continue to observe this for the next couple years or so, but we're seeing companies take a stance. And, you know, when a movement starts and we're at the beginning of it, I think it's good for us to, you know, be at the front lines and be able to kind of call it out so you guys can see it as it's happening. So yeah.

And Eric's spot on. If you look at how he and I both hire, we really do look for people who are best for that job, right? And that's the first thing we look for. And that matters the most as well as cultural fit. And we also don't discriminate on age. We'll hire people who are really young, who don't have degrees from Harvard, and we don't care where they're from or what city they live in. If they're amazing and creative, great, we'll hire them. And we will also hire older people and don't discriminate based on the age. Like, my CFO is amazing, one of the hardest workers, and I don't know what his age is, but he's probably one of the elder, more elder people within our organization.

Elder statesman.

Yeah, and I don't care if he's 10 or 70, the guy's just amazing at what he does. I'm like, cool, I hope you'll work for us for a very long time, right? And that's what Eric and I are getting at is if you want to run an amazing marketing department or a business, you can't hire average people. You need to hire amazing people. And I think with scale, it's probably a little bit tougher for them because hiring in these AI roles is much newer. Versus yeah, and you and I are in marketing, and we have a lot of options of amazing talent in marketing compared to some of the other sectors.

Yeah, I mean, some of these AI engineers are getting paid like a couple million bucks a month in salary, right?

In salary?

Yeah, salary. And then then you add stock on top too.

Million a month or millions a year?

Millions a year. Yeah.

Oh, okay. You said millions a month. I was like, did I say that?

I'm sorry. Millions a year. Millions a year. We can end on this final note over here. We give you guys a little tool. I found this. You know, Neil, how You used to be able to, you still can, you can still set Google Alerts to whenever your brand name is mentioned. And you can do this in podcasts. So I see this little app over here called podscan.fm and you can monitor all mentions of you. And it's a good way to reach out to these people. For example, if you weren't on their podcast, maybe you can try to get on their podcast or you can work on a collaboration. But I've always found it helpful to monitor my brand mentions, my company brand mentions. my name mentions. And because podcasts are such a thing now, you can use podscan.fm. They didn't pay me to say this. I just thought this was interesting. So, all right everyone. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate. Go ahead. Yes.

Make sure they go to marketingschool.io/agency.

I was going to do that. So please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe first. And then if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, go to marketingschool.io/agency. That's where we help agency owners grow faster. A lot of people have been saying the community has been great. They've actually got a lot of resources, templates, and a lot of coaching that's helped them sidestep mistakes. So that's the group Neil and I have. Please join it if it seems like it's fit, and there's no long-term commitment. That's the cool thing about it. So that being said, we will see you tomorrow.