This Is The Most Important Thing You Can Do For Your Agency
In this 32‑minute lesson Matthew Larsen explains how B2B service agencies can dominate their market by "owning a keyword" in the minds of their ideal client profile (ICP). He argues that the most powerful way to do this is to build a hybrid service‑education business that produces a bingeable library of long‑form content (primarily YouTube videos) that solves every problem an ICP might face. The core of the strategy is the 7‑11‑4 rule – derived from Google’s Zero Moment of Truth research – which states that a high‑ticket buyer needs roughly 7 hours of exposure across 11 touchpoints on 4 platforms before converting. Larsen breaks down how to meet each component with a mix of paid ads, organic outreach, partnerships, newsletters, and community platforms. He stresses the importance of hyper‑focused ICP targeting, acknowledging that high‑value ICPs represent a tiny fraction of the population, so low view counts are expected and not a failure metric. To keep prospects bingeing, content must be high‑quality, actionable, and consistently aligned with a single, opinionated business philosophy. He introduces a Theory‑Example‑Implementation framework for each piece of content and two quality‑assurance tests: the "USEFUL" test (does the content immediately provide value?) and the VAR test (is it Valuable, Actionable, and Readable?). Finally, he argues that a distinctive philosophy not only fuels content creation and fan‑building but also protects the agency from AI‑generated copycats and market saturation. The lesson ends with a call to start building this ecosystem and a promise of future deep‑dive videos on creating a personal philosophy.
Chapters
So today's lesson, we're going to talk about the concept of owning a keyword in the minds of your market, your ICP, your industry, and so on. And this is quite frankly, the best situation that you could probably find yourself in. So you own a keyword primarily through creating content, especially video content. And what you do is, or what you want to do is you want to create a bingeable series of content. That solves every single problem that your ICP could possibly face. So what you want, or like the end result of this, is you want people in your ICP to be going about their day, they run into a specific problem, and you want them to instantly think, well, I better go to your YouTube channel and see if they have, you know, a video on it, or you have a video on it. So to own a keyword, we basically do this with a combination of our own original ideas. And by making sure that every piece of content we produce is an improvement on the last. And eventually when you do this, you are going to own the keyword to such an extent that you become the title, the hook, the thumbnail, and basically they just click on it and they consume it because it's you. And if you can achieve this, like you can make really insane amounts of money in basically any B2B service type business. Very, very quickly. So what we're trying to do, or what we should be trying to do with our business is we want to be creating like a hybrid service/education business with a full marketing and offer ecosystem. And if we're trying to make the maximum possible profit, we want to build our agency or whatever service-based business we're in towards this model. And I think that this is the ideal way to do things. Because we have our main service that we have right now, but we also have basically the education part for all of the people who are just not a good fit for our main service. So like the 3 things that happen when we do this, we're going to have 4 different ways to drive traffic, you know, paid ads, content outreach, and partnerships. So that will be everywhere at once and we'll be able to own that keyword. Then we're going to have more total leads, a higher show rate, and a higher close rate. As we develop this entire marketing ecosystem that basically captures, nurtures, and qualifies leads. And then our business will be much more profitable in comparison to selling service only because alongside whatever service that we are selling right now, we can also sell courses, consulting, get referral fees, affiliate commissions, digital products, and all of that kind of stuff. Because roughly speaking, like 1 to 5% of our total ICP might be a good fit for our service. And we're leaving a huge amount of money on the table by not having a system like this. So that model will allow us to scale bigger, faster, and easier in comparison to just selling our service, especially if we're someone who only relies on referrals, networking, or even like a single marketing channel. So this works for any B2B service business, but owning a keyword is a significant part of this process, it's kind of like pouring fuel on the fire. So to own a keyword, the first kind of piece of theory that I think people should understand is the 7-11-4 rule. So the 7-11-4 rule is based on a Google study called ZMOT or the Zero Moment of Truth. You can look that up if you want to learn more. Someone named Daniel Priestley included this in one of his books. He's kind of like a marketing consultant. So he really popularized this more, but it's based on that Google study. So essentially what the 7-11-4 rule says that on average, and you know, we need to keep in mind on average, if you want someone to buy a high-priced service from you, they need to spend on average 7 hours with you across 11 different touchpoints and 4 different channels. So that is kind of like what we're trying to create when we have this marketing ecosystem. And it's an interesting rule. I think I find it hard to believe that you could just like simplify it down this much or even measure it at all. But if anyone was going to know, it's probably Google, right? They have more pieces of data on human behavior than probably anything or any entity in history. So it reminds me of this kind of like super normie NPC thing that marketing agencies tell boomers like, oh, you know, our work, our ads just are failing because they haven't seen them 7 times yet. Right. It's kind of like that, but I do like this much better. I think it's a lot more sophisticated. And regardless if you can actually measure something like this or not, or simplify it like that or not, I think logically speaking, we could all agree that that is directionally correct. It makes sense. And as such, like we are going to build our whole marketing ecosystem kind of around this rule. So let's break it down if we can a little bit. The 7 hours I think is going to be by far the hardest part for most people. And although it's not in the original study, I think that like, this is my opinion that if you're spending this time with people in person, It's kind of like worth like 2 or 3 times as much as it is digitally. It just kind of feels that way. So like if you spent 1 hour in person, I'm kind of like spending 2 or 3 hours watching your YouTube videos. And that's why events, you know, masterminds, just closing the deal in person seem to work that much better than selling digitally over Zoom or phone or whatever. But Regardless, I think it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to on average systematically get people to spend 7 hours with you without creating a bunch of long-form content, such as YouTube videos, podcasts, just like actual lead magnets that are long in length that they would just go through, or just long blog posts, webinars, just, you know, free communities. Books is an amazing one. Someone read your book for like 4 or 5 hours. That's huge. And then just like time spent on sales calls is a lot of them. If you like kind of, how would you say, if you like find yourself needing 2-call closes, 3-call, 4-call, probably because you haven't spent, or they haven't spent enough time with you, not enough trust has been built and so on. And to see like why I think that it's so important to do this long-form content is let's just look at like kind of the opposite. So if we say that one post, whether that's like a written post or a short-form video, represents kind of 60 seconds of time spent, like that is 1 minute, of course. So the math is simple. So 7 hours is 420 minutes or 420 pieces of content. So in order to get someone to spend the 7 hours with you, They would literally have to consume 420 short-form posts for you. And not only, I would think that most people, like almost no one is going to have 420 posts to begin with. That would also depend on or count on like them actually seeing all of your posts, like in the social media algorithms. And that is very, very unlikely to happen. Right. So. If you compare it to the options we listed, maybe we have a bunch of 1-hour YouTube videos or a bunch of 2 and 3-hour podcasts, or 2 hours to fully consume your lead magnet, 30 minutes to do your blog posts, 90 minutes watching your webinar. Maybe cumulatively spent like 3 hours in your community. And then like all of that kind of stuff, much easier to get to that kind of 7 hours of time. I don't think it's real genius to You know, understand that, right? The short-form posts have their place, of course. I think a good way to think about short-form content, whether it's written or video, is to, you know, promote yourself or get them hooked to where they'll actually willing to view your long-form content. But anyways, the next part is the 11 touchpoints. And to me, that's really should be relatively straightforward, as should the 4 platforms. Like we can get this by just posting 1, 2, 3 times per day across all platforms, pointing all of our content towards, you know, free lead magnet, getting them on our email list. And then, you know, sending a high-frequency newsletter, whether it's 3 times a week, 5 times daily, et cetera. And then just running retargeting ads on every platform. And we should really be all set as far as I'm concerned. The 4 platforms is relatively straightforward too, you know. You should be able to get them on your YouTube. You should be able to get them on your newsletter, run Facebook and Instagram ads, run retargeting ads on every platform, post on every platform, should be kind of good to go in my opinion. But the final one is up to you. A lot of people will try to get them in your community. That is a different platform or on LinkedIn or Twitter, you know, you name it. But what to me is really good at this stage is every time someone like follows you or interacts with your stuff. Have an automation that will like enrich them, uh, on like Clay or something. And then have your setter like follow them on, find and follow them on every platform and DM them so they see you wherever you go. Very good way to top it off, in my opinion. So once we are like, understand that 7-11-4 rule, like sounds great, right? But what do we actually, you know, like what do I actually post about, right? And we want to post about the problems and the circumstances of our ICP. If we want to own this keyword in their minds, the primary factor is how well that we know the different problems, circumstances, and desired outcomes of our ICP. And this is for several reasons, but the first is because either the messaging in the ad or the idea or the topic of the content is primarily what is going to determine the targeting and who the content is delivered to. And then on top of that, who it resonates with, and that data feeds back to the algorithm, either if you're running ads or watching content, and then it just keeps going and going and going. We really need to understand that we are not like some prank YouTube video or like some live streamer or some like influencer or trying to build a media company with our content. Like we are primarily trying to post this content and own the keyword to get the trust of high-ticket B2B clients. So it becomes more important how well the content resonates with our ICP rather than how many raw views and traffic we get, right? But the thing that we really need to understand, and we're going to talk about this more throughout the rest of this video and just a lot on this channel. Is that the higher level our ICP is, like the higher level businesses we go after, the less views that we're going to get, right? Just like mathematically, if all of our content is made for business owners, like doing $1 million per year or more, because that's who can probably afford our services, only 9% of Americans are business owners. And then of total business owners, it's estimated that 4%, so So basically 4% of those 9% of Americans are business owners that do $1 million per year. So like literally the math on that is our content is only for 0.36% of total people, right? So we have to be okay and we have to recognize and expect that we're going to get less views and so on. For example, if someone is making, you know, very broad content, And it's even for like 3% of total people, which is basically like almost 10 times more broad than our content, they're going to get more views, right? So like views to actually getting money and getting sales are not correlated really at all. And oftentimes if you have a high-level ICP, inversely correlated, like if you get too many views, it's not necessarily a good thing. Right. And then for some people who have like even higher level ICPs, like let's just say you have business owners doing $10 million a year and that's who you make your content for. Like you make your list of problems for $10 million per year business owners. You make content around that. The math is even like smaller, basically. So then you have 9% of total business owners times 0.4% of those business owners, which is the estimated number of people who get to $10 million per year. In that situation, your content is only for 0.36% of total people. It's like when we're going to own this keyword, right? Like this math is very important because a lot of the time, like you're going to, if you're uninitiated and you don't understand this, you're going to come up with like the wrong impression. You're going to see your videos, your content getting, you know, very little views, very little likes, and you're going to like completely transition or completely abandon that strategy when you're actually doing it right. You just have a lack of understanding, right? So this is also very important to understand because different levels of people, different levels of ICPs, even within the same industry have different problems, right? And we're not going to be able to own the keyword for our ICP without understanding this. Like an agency owner doing $5 million per year in revenue is going to have much, much different problems than an agency owner who's trying to make their first $10K a month. Right. Even though they're both agency owners, very different. And if we don't understand this, like we are not going to be owning that keyword. Like, let's just say we're trying to own the agency keyword for people doing $5 million per year, but we're, you know, Just doing like basic stuff or just like broad agency content, not going to be able to do that. Right. Very important. So like apply that logic to any industry, any level, et cetera. And we need to do this because the concept of owning a keyword only really exists in the context of the ICP, which is the level of business that we are doing. Right. So. I could own the keyword of agency for agencies doing $5 million per year, or I could own the keyword of agencies doing $10K per month. Basically, whatever I choose, and it's your choice to do, but like you could own, or I could own the key, like keyword, like the agency keyword for agencies doing $5 million per year. And I could also be like pseudo anonymous to agencies doing $10K per month, even though it's the same industry, which is very interesting to kind of think about. Right. So when we're trying to own the keyword in the mind of our ICP, like think ICP, specific avatar that you're going after, not literally owning the entire possible keyword. Because unless you're Alex Hormozi or something like that, who's just insane mass appeal, not really going to be possible for you. And you're going to spend a lot of time, effort, and face a lot of disappointment trying to do that. So when we do this right, like we should become able to come up with a literal list of the different problems that our ICP faces. And then that will become the basis of our content strategy. And that's how we'll eventually come to own that keyword. If we don't have the list and, you know, we don't make content around the right problems that our ICP faces, then we're not really going to own that keyword. Very, you know, I guess it's obvious, but it's not obvious based on people's content strategy that you see all the time. That's kind of haphazard. So like what owning a keyword looks like in practice is basically that you have created a bingeable series of content that offers solutions, advice, tips, and tactics to basically every single problem that your ICP faces. And you do that better than any of your competitors, right? So remember the hardest part of owning this keyword is going to be getting them to consume 7+ hours of content. And especially with YouTube, because that's where we're going to do the bulk of this for most people, we really need to create high quality stuff, right? We need basically them to watch YouTube video number 1. Like, let's just put ourselves in my shoes right now. I need you to watch this video of mine. If it's your first one, then I need you to love it. I need you to subscribe and then think of, okay, this is interesting. And then you have another problem that you're facing. I need you to go to my channel, find that video, click on it, love that one, completely solve that problem. Boom. Then you search for another one and find that and so on and so on. And you're so happy that you tell your friends about it. And then you come back tomorrow, come back next week, watch the 4th video and the 5th video. Then you like look in my basically description, download my lead magnet, you know, come to my webinar and so on. Like that is what I'm trying to create with this video. And that's what you're going to want to create with your stuff. So a few things really need to happen for this to take place, right? Our content needs to be built for a specific ICP and stay on that ICP. You know, we don't want to bounce around from thing to thing to thing to thing. I'm trying to build mine around lead generation, right? High-level lead generation, not for beginners, but for people looking to go from $1 to $3 million per year to $10 million plus, right? We can't have any of our topic or any of our content choices being off topic because what that does is it breaks the chain of binging. If we just bounce around to different topics, I don't bounce around from lead gen to operations, to hiring, to sales, to all that kind of stuff, because that would make my channel not bingeable. All of our content also needs to meet a certain threshold of quality. If you love this video, then you click on my next one and it's terrible, that might break the chain of binging. Our content actually needs to solve their problem or give them actual advice. Actionable advice that they haven't heard a million times before. If that doesn't happen, or if it does happen, it might break the binging. And if the binging is broken, it's going to become exponentially harder for us to systematically get them to spend 7 hours with us. It is annoying because everything has to be on point and we can never take a video off or have a bad day, so to speak. But it is just what it is, right? We need to get this to happen. So how do we make our shit bingeable, right? Very important question. What we really want to do is kind of approach it with the right frame of mind. We want to create fans and not followers. And then we do that by providing value and not chasing views. So once we have that mindset in place, to me, it actually becomes quite clear what we need to do to make our shit as bingeable as possible. And the main difference between fans and followers is a follower clicks the button to see your content or, you know, updates if and when it is convenient for them to do so, if they feel like it, versus fans feel a deep emotional connection and they actually are going to invest their time, money, and loyalty into us. There's a big difference between just a follower or just a subscriber and an actual fan. And I hopefully that sentence really showed the difference. As far as value goes, really such an annoying term these days, like just provide value, bro, and everything will work out. To me, like value is going to be the tangible business impact driven by your video. So basically, particularly how well you perform at solving their specific industry pain points, right? So the way that you basically create fans and provide value and ultimately own the keyword is by making videos that are full of actionable advice, strategy, and tactics to help them solve their specific problems. They're going to watch your video. They're going to try out what you tell them to do basically for free, basically. And then they're going to have success with it. That is kind of the chain that we want to do. And then bringing that back to the bingeable stuff or how that ties into like this video, actionable advice. They try it for free. They're like, oh my God, this is sick. They go to the next video, more advice. They try it for free and you just keep having success, having success, having success. That's what we're trying to do. A great and simple framework to me for this. And this is kind of what I try to base all of my stuff around is Theory, example, implementation. So that's a piece of actionable advice that you can try to do for your own content. So we really are going to need them to truly understand, not just be, you know, a lot of people will say like, if then, then that. It's fine if it's just like low-skilled labor, but if you're trying to really get someone to buy into you and really teach them, they need to understand at a Deep level. And I ignored that for a long time. I kind of let myself get psyoped to just get into it fast as possible, list of action steps, blah, blah, blah. And it's fine. But if they don't really understand, they're not going to buy in and they're not actually going to do what you tell them to do. And then they're not going to get that free success with it. And they're not ultimately going to buy at scale. Right? So the theories first. Then you want to give them some examples because that's usually how people learn the best. And it's going to make it a lot easier to teach. And then you're going to want to just give them a very high-level action plan that they can implement in their business. It's the implementation part. You don't have to go crazy with it, but the action plan should clearly be there. You don't really want them to have to dig through your entire video in order to find out what to do and then Do it, right? We want them to take our advice, make it as low friction to find the advice as possible, have success with it, because that is what makes it easy. So this theory, example, implementation, I think it's pretty good because it's very versatile. If your whole video is built around one thing, then you can just kind of do that at a high level. But if you have like, okay, here's the problem, here's the 5-step solution, you could also do that on a micro level for each part. And it's just very kind of good. So ultimately when we do this right and we basically the ultimate version or the ultimate thing that we know, like, what am I trying to say here? We're going to know that we're owning the keyword when our face becomes the hook, the title, the thumbnail, et cetera. When they just click on our stuff, Just because it's us, that's how we know that we are doing a good job of creating actual fans, not followers. When we're playing the same game as everyone else and just creating followers, we're going to have to spend so much time worrying about and optimizing our title, our hook, our thumbnail, et cetera, because there's just nothing separating us from someone else. But when we focus on value, we have that list of 10, 15, 25, 30, 50, 100 different problems that our ICP faces, and we just do a good job at solving them. We're playing a different game now. We're playing, we're becoming one of one kind of thing. And we don't have to be as sharp and optimized, although we probably can and should be because we are the product, right? They're clicking because it's us. So a good metric to try and gauge when you're like doing this is look at your monthly audience. It's just a metric on YouTube and the equivalent on other platforms. And if your monthly audience goes up slowly and steadily, like not really relying on going viral or anything, then you know that you are doing a good job of this. And on kind of the flip side, when you are creating your own content, it can be sometimes dangerous to a certain degree to simply copy the titles, hooks, and ideas of other people. Because if they're doing this and they're just doing a great job of having a ton of fans, it's not really a great indicator that they're super optimized per se. They're just— fans are just clicking on it because it's them. Their fans will click on anything. It doesn't really matter. So we really need to understand that too. So on a more micro level, there's 2 kinds of quality assurance tests that I kind of like to run for every piece of content. And this is more like actionable stuff as rather than like a full-fledged piece of theory, kind of just going to be quick. So it's the VAR test and the useful test. And let's just do the useful test first, because it's so simple. For every piece of content you want to make, just ask yourself, like, is this useful? It's amazing how much better people's content would do and how well they would own their keyword if they actually just ask themselves, because the answer is often no. Useful, I guess, is kind of subjective, but what you'll see a lot of people doing, and let's call these people idiots for lack of a better word, is they'll just post and they'll be like, Things like saying how much better they are than their competitors, bashing their customers. Like, oh my God, I'm so sick of dealing with these monkeys. Oh my God, people are doing this bad. They're so stupid. Like, not very useful. Another one's talking about their own lifestyle, like doing POVs, day in the life. Unless you're an info product seller, like that's pretty bad. And just general whining, complaining. Posting on off-topic stuff, like if it's not useful, don't post it. Shitposting and posting funny stuff is hit or miss. It can be useful because humor has its use and has its place if you're actually funny, but most people simply aren't. And if you're not funny, it's a real negative kind of thing to see. So realistically, ask yourself, how is this useful? Before you post every piece of content. If you can't immediately answer the question, how is this useful in like 0.1 seconds, it probably shouldn't be posted. You shouldn't have to think about or try to justify why it's useful. It should just be self-evident. And the next test, the VAR, is more of a test to gauge quality and value. So VAR stands for valuable, actionable, and readable. Value, of course, is quite subjective and quite annoying. So in this formula, we basically want to ask ourselves a simple question, and we can do this basically on a sliding scale based on how long the content is. So for example, would you pay $50 to watch this YouTube video? The answer is no, probably not good enough. Essentially, like, even though it's free and posted publicly on YouTube, would you pay $50 to watch it? Or We can basically do this on a sliding scale based on the length of the content, because in a very real way, people are paying, right? You are paying to watch this right now. You're just paying with time instead of money. But for something like an Instagram reel, that's 60 seconds. We can kind of just change it. Would you pay $5 to watch this or something just to reflect a shorter timeframe? The next is actionable. And we've kind of talked about this, but to ultimately own the keyword, we need to give out free advice. Get, or like have them follow that advice, have them get a result with that advice for free. And then they want more and more and more. And then they ultimately pay us for custom tailored advice that is relevant to their business. Right? So the actual test, is there a very clear plan or series of action steps that they can take in the next 24 hours? We want them to get this result for free. We don't want to hide this or make it difficult for them to understand what to do. That is counterproductive. So in each piece of content, especially longer pieces like YouTube, we should seriously lay out what they should do after every step or the video as a whole, make it super obvious, lead magnets, checklists around it, all that kind of stuff. And then the final piece is the content should be very readable or easy to consume if it's a video. So what I like to do, is there one idea or one image per headline? You know, you don't want to mix everything up, mix and match. That applies to written content. But if you're looking at the screen right now, I'm making this video. I'm screen sharing on a document. So same thing here. So that VAR test is a high-level rule that will see if your content is actually going to help you own this keyword or not. The final piece is a very, very important one. I don't know if you're going to be able to own a keyword without it. By far the best way to achieve everything that we talked about so far, as easy as possible as well on top of that, is to simply make your own philosophy about how a business should be run in regards to your ICP. This is basically one of the core pieces of my own business philosophy that I talk about in Lead Generation Academy. And I talk about to my clients and my employees all the time. And I'm going to make an extremely in-depth course on that on its own. But basically, we need to have our own philosophy. We need to have a set of principles or tactics or coherent system on how someone who's reading our content should run their business. If we don't, we basically become a minnow in an ocean. We don't stand out at all. There's nothing cool or interesting or enlightening about us. We just basically become a copy and paste personal brand and no different than everyone else. And that's not really a great place to be. Basically, let's take a look at how making our own philosophy would impact each step. So like for the 7-11-4 rule, it sounds very logical that if you had your own philosophy for how someone should run their business and they kind of want to learn more, they are going to binge your content. They're going to spend as much time learning about this philosophy as possible, fulfilling the 7-hour rule. And then basically you'd have endless things to talk about and post about fulfilling the 11 touchpoints and 4 platforms. For the problems and circumstances of your ICP, it's very logical that your entire system would be specifically designed to solve those problems. So it's going to be pretty efficient to do that. For fans, not followers and value, not views, it's very logical that having a system or philosophy that people buy into is the ultimate form of creating fans and providing value. For that bingeable series of content, same thing. I can think of nothing better, to be honest, to get someone to binge your content than it all being centered around some sort of philosophy. Your face being the thumbnail and hook, same thing. So basically creating your own philosophy maximizes your chances of achieving every single point of this system in this video. And without having a core philosophy, I think it is extremely difficult to achieve any of them. Let alone all of them, because the opposite is also true for every point. Like if you don't have some opinionated way that logically explains why someone should run their business like X, Y, and Z, very difficult to get them to binge or watch a lot or become your fan, right? In addition to that, and the way we'll close this video, having your own philosophy basically protects you, in my opinion, from AI, from competitors, and from copycats. It makes you one of one or one of a kind. And that is a great position to be in, especially in 2026, 2027, and beyond where competition online is more fierce and more saturated than it ever has been. So I'm going to make a whole video about creating your philosophy on its own. But that is basically why we need to own a keyword in a 32-minute explanation. So I hope this video was worth your time and I'll see you in the next one.
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