WooCommerce SEO woes, Creator-led demand gen, Top 100 B2B brands up by 10% vs. last year

Did you see the WooCommerce SEO migration disaster?

No.

So, okay. WooCommerce, they are— would you call them a plugin for WordPress where it helps enable WordPress sites to do e-commerce? That's basically what it is at the end of the day. Yeah?

Yeah, it's a plugin that just makes your WordPress more like Shopify, but it's not as good.

Yeah. So, um, Cyrus Shepard on Twitter said this: Crazy, 5 months after completing a major domain migration, WooCommerce will revert the entire thing after traffic goes south. This after assembling a group of SEO experts and consultants, quote unquote. Gotta be honest, the chance of things going worse after a second migration is easily greater than zero. So basically in this graph over here, they basically migrated from WooCommerce to woo.com. And traffic just tanked, like completely fell off a cliff, like basically to zero. And now they seem to have switched back. It seems like they're, they're They just reversed back in like November of 2023. The traffic is coming back slowly, but it's still like maybe 40% of what it was before.

That sucks. But from the grand scheme of things, WordPress can drive most of the signups from WordPress.com.

Yeah.

It's such a big business. You get what I mean? Like, I totally agree, right? Like, yeah, you shouldn't botch these migrations and it's important to do 'em right because you're just losing extra revenue. But with the WordPress migration, with the site migrations, yeah, ideally you want your traffic to go up or at least stay the same. For a business of that size, I don't think it matters too much. But again, I would've been pissed and I would've had someone fix it right away.

Yeah, you would've gone apeshit. I would've gone apeshit.

Yeah. They just bought a business for $125 million, was it?

I don't remember.

Yeah, no, the article ended up coming out. I think it was—

Google.com, yeah, they'll be fine. I mean, but this is stuff that, this is just what happens when companies don't take SEO seriously. Like a migration's really hard. Translations, translation can get complicated too. Like all these things that you want to do at scale, you want to make sure that you're talking to the right people at the end of the day.

WordPress owner acquires Beeper, the app that briefly brought iMessage to Android, $125 million.

Huh.

And then they bought, was it text.com? Text.com? They bought that last October. Huh.

Yeah, so they're going on a little spree.

Yeah, now they want to do content not just on a blog, they also want to do it through, uh, messaging. But I don't think that's that much of a big pain.

Like, sometimes people just start buying stupid stuff. So, dude, you have an iPhone.

I have an iPhone. Do you really care if you text Android people and it's on iMessage?

Nope.

Me neither. I text them, it goes through. Why do I need to Buy an app that has multi-service messaging app. Like, who cares?

No, so like reaching— reading that Amazon book Working Backwards, you know why the Fire Phone failed?

Why?

Because so they were all gung-ho on this one feature.

Wait, sorry, cut you off.

What is the Fire Phone? So that— okay, this is— this is when Amazon launched a phone. They were trying to compete with like the iPhone and everything, right? And Jeff Bezos was really sold on it. In fact, he was the one that help push the narrative through to get this product out there. What they were selling was like this like 4-dimensional camera or whatever that can do all these things like you can scan your sunglasses and you'll see it in like all these different views, right? But nobody gives a crap about that, right? All you care about is with your iPhone, you care about the ecosystem, the apps, the usability of it, all these things, right?

Yeah.

So, that's where they missed the mark because they didn't do customer development. They thought that the feature that they had was so game-changing that, well, at the end of the day, even when they sold it at a really high price, but eventually they got to a point where they're just like, we should just give this away and try to get people to sign up to Prime. Even then when they started to give it away, nobody wanted it.

Dude, it reminds me of like the Snap goggles. Everyone's like, oh, these are really cool.

You can take pictures. I had a pair.

You had a pair. I'm like, who's going to— okay, Eric bought it. He's testing for probably marketing purposes. Who really wants to buy goggles just to take pictures? It's just like, no, I could just bust out my phone and click a picture. Because the goggles also didn't look that good.

You know, it's kind of like the Meta ones. So the Meta ones, they look cool. They look— I mean, I think they kind of look like this, right? So you wear these sunglasses.

Are those Ray-Bans?

No, but, um, the Ray-Bans, it's the same thing as the snap thing where you could hit it and it'll take like a 60-second story.

Wait, are they Tom Ford?

No, but, uh, they're not Tom Ford. But anyway, if you can do that, it's kind of cool. Like we can, like on command, I can hit it. It just, I think it was too early for its time. And plus not many people use Snap. So.

What I'm looking for is imagine wearing a pair of glasses like Ray-Bans or anything like that and getting what you get in Apple's Vision Pro right in front of your face.

Yes.

That'll sell like crazy.

Yes.

If that was sold today for 20 grand, I would pay the money for it. Yep.

Yeah, so it's the convenience of it, it's the usability of it, and it helps you create content a lot more naturally. That's why we would pay for it too. That's a big reason.

I think it would also make life better.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know about you, but like when I walk around—

You can't wear a big—

Yeah, not just wear that, but like I'm always curious about things. And sometimes my wife always tells me, like she'll like elbow me like we're in like a store. And I'm like, so how many sales do you guys do per day? What's your monthly revenue?

What portion is cash?

Which portion? He's like, Neil, they think you're gonna rob them. You can't talk like this. You know, I was like, I'm just curious to learn about their business.

Yeah, it's like, it'll be an assistant that follows you around. So I think we'll eventually get there. All right, real quick, I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io/agency and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back To the video. You want to know? So Chamath said this recently. He said that content creators are the new form of demand gen. Did you see that? Did you listen to a recent All-In?

I did not.

So which is interesting because when you think about, you think about Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Andreessen, you think about Brad Gerstner, right? Bill Gurley, for example. These are all well-known VCs. They all, they've all done very well for themselves. Do they need more money? Not necessarily. Do they want more deals? Yeah, they do. Um, so they're creating podcasts, they're writing newsletters, they're doing all— they're making little communities. And I think it's interesting because it's— marketing is getting harder. And when you look at the creator payouts, 70% growing year on year, it's going to continue to compound even more. The question is, are creators the next form of demand gen? And we see from our side, we're seeing a continued rise in, in interest in influencer marketing.

It's funny, I do think creators are amazing demand gen, a way to attract more demand. We've shifted how we look at marketing. A lot of times we used to look at platforms like Instagram, especially when it comes to social, Instagram or TikTok. We no longer look at platforms like Instagram or TikTok unless it's for paid ads. But for organic, we mainly focus on the people. Who are the people that are gaining the attention? And are they relevant enough for the product or service that we have? And can we work with them? Because they can generate demand. Look at MrBeast and how much demand he generates for chocolate or burgers or whatever it is that he wants to sell that day. Yeah.

And I'm assuming when you work with these influencers, you're just taking a cut. Like let's say I charge $100,000, you probably just take 10% or something like that, right?

No, typically it's a fee to do all the work and the outreach and stuff like that.

Oh, you're doing cost plus? Yeah, yeah. Got it. So you're not taking a cut on whatever the influencer charges?

It depends. A lot of times it's cost plus, sometimes it is a cut. It depends on the corporation and how they're structured and they want it to be done internally.

Got it. Yeah, so it's a collaboration.

Yeah, because for some companies, they're just like, here's our budget. This is the ROI we're expecting. We want you to go spend it. We don't want to pay you any fees. Take it from The budget. And then some are like, no, we want you to tell us what your fees are. And either way, we're transparent in both ways. But just certain organizations are like, I need it done this way for accounting or internal purposes to get approval. And we're like, all right, that's fine.

Everyone has their own incentives. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We did this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders if you want to hang out with amazing people. Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more and we'll see you inside.

Did you see the value of the top 100 B2B brands are up 10% versus last year? This is from Marketing Week.

No, I haven't seen it.

Yeah, so B2B companies have been doubling down on branding. Everyone's like, oh, the economy's struggling, it's a bad time, people are pulling back. Yes, they may be pulling back on certain sales or marketing spend, but a lot of them have been doubling down on marketing efforts that help with brand growth. And it shows that the value of their brands are up 10%. They're When people are running scared, they're hitting the market harder because they see potential growth opportunities.

Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

Yeah, the Warren Buffett quote. And it makes sense too, because what's happened over the last year and a half, 2 years, actually, it's been roughly 2 years since the market started getting bad. At first, everyone was afraid and they're cutting back and people are like, we're kind of getting used to this environment. Business still isn't that bad. Yeah, let's keep spending and doubling down and gobble up more market share when things are cheaper.

That's what happens. So typically what happens when people become— this is why Warren Buffett has such a big cash pile, right? He's waiting for things to get really bad. Who knows when that day comes, right? Knock on wood. But that's when he's going to deploy a huge chunk of his capital. And so he's going to become greedy when others are fearful. I'm kind of seeing this more in business right now where entrepreneurs have been sitting on the side for a while. And we've all been like a little fearful for a while. And now it's kind of like, okay, we kind of, now it seems like a good time to maybe start going for it a little bit. And that's what's happening.

Dude, I think this is the best time in the economy. And again, this is not financial advice, but I think this is one of the best times in the economy to double down and just go hard on marketing, buying up other competitors. Buying in.

Yeah.

Dude, that's where the opportunities are, right? It's just like, A lot of people are shy or they're struggling and they're shy because they've been, you know, down for quite a bit and they just are depressed and they're just like, look, I don't want to get up. I don't want to keep going. I don't want to push too much harder. And we're buying companies right now from founders who are burnt out. No joke. Like we're going to close a deal next month. Great founders, great company. They work with amazing brands.

Are they staying?

Founders are staying. They work with amazing brands. Like, Levi's and Domino's and Grand Hyatt and Grab and Renault and Canon, like real enterprise brands. And a lot of the founders are just burnt out and they just want to be part of a larger organization that can help them.

2 lessons there. One, yes, go buy them when they're burnt out and probably when things are a little tougher so you can get a better multiple or better valuation, I should say. The other thing is if you can keep the founders, amazing, because the founders usually— a lot of— there's a lot of brand— not brand equity, but a lot of goodwill is built up with the founders at the end of the day. Um, and the other thing is, by the way, don't think that you can't afford these things. You can— there's a lot of different ways to do these deals, right? You can, you can take money from your balance sheet, you can seller finance, you can trade equity, roll them into your company, right? There's a lot of ways to do these deals.

It's— SBA financing.

SBA financing, that's up to $5 million, right? You have to buy the whole thing though. Um, I think with the SBA, the founder can't stay from my understanding. I could be wrong though.

I don't know. Um, but Eric, who's done a few deals in the past, creative, you got outside debt partners, you got SBA loans, and you've done seller-based financing.

All the things, all the creative things.

But with specific deals, you've done a combination of all of them just for even one deal, right?

Yep.

And you can get really creative. Like you don't have to just take one route if Something gives you part of the money, but not everything, you can, you know, add a few more things in there to make a deal work.

Yeah. And then you can have— there's private equity does— I mean, you just study private equity. They have oftentimes with agencies, if you keep the founders, usually there's like a 3 to 4 year— what is it? It's not a— it's not an add-back. What do you call it when you earn out? Earn out? Earn out? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And they usually, uh, they usually still have equity in it. They don't want to just walk away.

Because they want the founders to have some skin in the game. They don't want to just like walk off into the sunset.

Yeah.

Because they need that founder because there's a lot of information they know. Because when you're buying a company, by the way, you're getting their best face. You really don't know all the skeletons in the closet. So ideally, you can keep the founder on. So we're going to end it. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's the community that Neil and I have. We're like, community is everything. We think it's the next funnel, the next way of growing your audience through a community. Check it out. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Let us know what you continue to think about these long-form episodes, and we'll see you in the next episode. Thank you.