How to Up Your Social Media Management Game with GoHighlevel

And without further ado though, let's jump into social media posting. I'm gonna go through like a little presentation my marketing team did an amazing job putting together. So as Josh mentioned— Look at that, James, these slides. This is a commercial show. I know, I know. Look at that. I had nothing to do with this. I'm a terrible speaker. I'm a software engineer, so you'll just have to excuse me. But I think that's why they put these slides together to keep me on subject, but it only works a little bit. So anyhow, social media is important. We all know that, blah, blah, blah, right? Stats, stats, stats. No one's surprised by that. Um, but the most important thing to think about from an agency perspective is how the world sits today, right? So today there's a lot of really big companies out there, um, who have existing platforms. And by the way, um, so Sprout Social, it's publicly traded. You can go look it up yourself. $187 million in revenue. Um, I also like to point out, uh, if you search Sprout Social CEO, um, real estate, you can see this guy is running around buying $80 million, $30 million Calabasas house, $20 million Malibu house. So there's some money in social media apparently. But all of that to say, all of that money, I believe, comes off the backs of marketing agencies almost exclusively, because I think agencies today are in the business of getting these people customers and getting nothing in return for it. And fundamentally, that's what HighLevel is trying to change more than almost anything else. Now, obviously, there's some really good common technical problems with social media management if you use some of these other platforms, multiple logins, dealing with different team members. Collaborating, measuring ROI, all that stuff. And you know what? We try to help solve for that with HighLevel. You can log into one spot, multiple clients moving in and out of different client accounts seamlessly, provide a login for all of your clients so they can see it. Approval flows. You can convert people from posts into actual leads, which is what they really wanted at the end of the day anyways. So you could absolutely create some really tangible value here that you couldn't otherwise do in other platforms. And at the same time simplify your life. Also pricing. We just crush it at the end of the day with HighLevel. Something that's really important to us is how do we create a platform where it's one price for us and unlimited for our users and our customers as agencies? And so you're not paying per location, you're not paying per post or per number of social media accounts connected, blah, blah, blah, some fantasy metric that doesn't matter. For us, it's just included in all the plans and it has unlimited users, unlimited posts, all that stuff. And that's just the period on the sentence. And so with that, I'll jump into the exciting actual demo of the software. And the most exciting thing to realize is it's not exciting. It's nothing you haven't seen before. And that's the point. So it's baked in a high level here in the marketing section. It actually just went live in the SaaS mode today. So you can automatically include it and charge for it as part of SaaS mode. Um, and for those of you who don't know what that is, um, I bet you Josh has a video on it. If I had to guess, um, the goal here is simple. We want to replicate all of the tools that you've seen before. So we've got the calendar view, um, you can drag posts around automatically if you want to reschedule them. You can obviously, uh, like this one right here is actually scheduled for, um, in the future. It's pending. Um, you can come in here and actually edit, delete, so your clients can actually see the post before they go live. They They can approve them, edit them, all that wonderful stuff. You can see all of the existing posts. I'm a terrible social media poster, so this is always a joke when I do this. But you can come in here and you can— there's Chase Buckner. He's a nice looking guy there. Hey there. And so we have integrations with Facebook business pages, Facebook groups, Instagram, Google My Business. We have LinkedIn and Twitter coming out next month. Obviously you can post this. Right away. You can schedule this post in Google My Business. You can come in and you can do things like call to actions, or if it's an event, you can actually put the dates and times and select all of the info here on how all of that works. Again, I'm a terrible social media poster, so I apologize ahead of time. But all of these things are things that I think all of you have seen before. And again, that is absolutely the point. Um, the biggest thing that we are working towards, and this will go live, uh, this quarter, is also how do you take this concept and scale it? And the way I think about this is in two ways. So one, back to that root idea that, listen, there's, there are people literally doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in just selling the software. That's a very important thing to note, and that's something you can do right now today. And for me, that's, that's huge, and that's really the future of agency revenue. but also how do you then post at scale for clients? Because if you're doing social media posting today, you know, going in and doing custom bespoke posts and really charging what it takes to do that, I think is really difficult for most small business owners to stomach. And it's been my experience that it's not a success or failure kind of thing. So, you know, when we got into this, we assumed it was all about results. You know, we started with Facebook marketers, who are running leads and converting those into customers. And it's been my experience that many of those people did a phenomenal job for their clients. I mean, phenomenal job, and actually would just consistently get fired despite doing a phenomenal job. And I can even actually understand this concept. So, you know, my previous SaaS company was in the accounts receivable space, and it's really exciting way for saying I would send people reminders to pay invoices, but I would do some miraculous things for my customers. I would have, I would have people walk in with $1 million past due over 90 days on invoices, and I would deliver $200,000 of that money to them in the first month that they worked with me, and I'd still have them cancel my $19 a month software product. And I was blown away by this. And fundamentally for me, it turned out that they just didn't realize I had collected $200 grand for their $19. So when I finally got a report that showed them that, that it turned them around. But I think what happens— in my case, I was lucky, I was charging $19, so that math was easy. But in an agency's case, I see agencies kill themselves day in and day out, and ultimately they don't get the respect they deserve because small businesses just can't figure out how to spend thousands of dollars a month no matter what. I always joke, I think as an agency you could say to a small business owner, look, you hand me $3,000, I'll hand you back $5,000, and I still think you'd get fired, um, because they just can't figure out how that's ever even possible. So what do we want to do? We want to create services that scale. And in this case, what I like about social media posting as an idea is you take the software, you create the revenue stream around that, and if you're gonna go for the posting, the way I envision this is you wanna post at scale. And the way to do that is, let's see, is this. So imagine that you have, this is an HVAC company, and although this one is fake, imagine you have all of these pre-done posts ready to go and you can push them out at scale using custom values to, to make the post unique for each customer. And you can do that for everyone in your vertical and you can pre-schedule these out a year or 6 months or whatever it is. This is really what I'm pushing on for this quarter and what we'll have live. As much as the channels are cool, um, I think being able to provide a service at scale is even cooler. And so for us, this is where what we'll have is the ability for you to create these posts. We're also working on a built-in library of free posts that we'll give away to everybody. In, uh, we're targeting, I think it's 50 verticals, 150 posts each. It'll take us a while to get there, but we're committed to doing it. But regardless, you can take all these posts and push them out at scale to all your clients, and then all of a sudden you can create a very sustainable recurring social media posting, uh, service at a much more economical rate for you and also a much more economical rate for your client. But more importantly, or most importantly, I think you can still create tremendous value for them, the exact value they would have gotten had you actually created every single post from scratch. And now you can do that at scale. And so for us, that's really the focus of this tool. How do I give you more revenue around the software side and give you an easier way to get additional revenue on the services side in a way that's super scalable?

Yeah, I think for me, Sean, the questions are integration, right? Being able to use one platform as opposed to hopping between others. And, and cost reduction. Like, so there's two sides of the equation, right? SaaS, right? We're gonna like offer this as a service that replaces these tools for clients. But on the service side of our business, if we're building our funnel in HighLevel, we're doing our marketing and our automation for our clients in HighLevel, we're doing it for ourselves in HighLevel. We've got our funnel, we've got our thank you page, we've got our follow-up sequence, we've got our calendar. Now we can eliminate another tool, which is Hootsuite or SocialPilot or one of these other social platforms We've reduced our costs, we can profit more profitability as an agency. We've also streamlined our operations, which I think both of those are important, but it's probably more the streamlining than anything else. You've already got all the client details, you get all the access, now you can do it all in one place. I'm really excited. The question is, can this really replace the functionality of a Hootsuite or SocialPilot?

Sure, yeah. So the, the answer is always the same. You know, for some people today, the answer will be absolutely. In fact, we already use it now internally to do all of our social posting. And for some people, there'll be some feature that we've yet to roll out that we will roll out that will eventually make it a yes. So, you know, in the future, we, like I said, we are adding this quarter both LinkedIn and Twitter, which come out next month. We'll add the social posting at scale. And then the other thing we're going to move into is the ability to pull in all of the comments. On any of the posts into conversations, just like you would a text message reply or anything else. Because again, you know, we will be the one-stop shop for, you know, every small business, every medium business to do these things. And ultimately, what I would, what I would sort of say is it all depends on who you are, right? So, you know, if you, if you, if you know Josh as well as I do, I mean, he works with some heavy hitters. So he's the last guy on the list to ever be able to replace some of these big technologies because his customers tend to be on, on the, on the mass massive side, but you're talking top 5% of an industry. For the vast majority of people, even in his industry as an example, this tool would just crush it. And in fact, it's funny, I was just looking at this. Oh, that's our new— we'll get to that in a second. So this is Alpine HVAC Heating and Air here in Eugene, Oregon. This is my only single location business customer that I retain only because he's a nice guy and I want to help him out. But you can see right here, I told him, look, you need to start using this tool. You need to start pushing on Google My Business. I mean, 115 photos, 10,552 views in the last month. I mean, this is leading to real business for this person. I mean, when I met this guy, he was one man in a van, and now he's 13 trucks and growing, and he's never in a van on any given day. He no longer installs anything. I mean, unfortunately, he was awesome. But I'm telling you today, if something breaks in my HVAC system, he's not coming out to fix it. But I'm proud of that because he's grown himself through utilizing HighLevel as a platform and done an amazing job. And I think Google My Business, if any of you are in the local business space, you know the power of Google. 99% or very close to that of all searches intended for local go through Google, period. And Google My Business is their platform that they're pushing to get people out there. And so having something that can post to that is huge. And in this case, this is a a single business utilizing a tool to do the posting themselves. They're not even any good at it. I told them to take less ugly pictures, but as you can see, it doesn't matter. They're still killing it and it's leading to real business for them. And if— and the other part is, if you— if I look them up correctly, um, what you'll also see is it's leading to amazing reviews. So when I met them, they had 12 reviews. They now have 436 reviews, and you can see These are open reviews. There's no gating going on. It's just, hey, thanks for letting us serve you. Would you leave a review? And they're crushing it. They're one of the biggest companies here in my town of 200,000 or 300,000 people, and they're only going to get bigger. And it's amazing what they've been able to accomplish. And lucky for them, they did eventually hire an agency partner to help them. So they're doing better than ever. But you can just see what's possible with the platform.

Sean, what social profiles does it integrate with now?

Yeah, so today we have— so there's Google My Business. Now this is a two-for-one special. So you've got Facebook business pages, but you also have Facebook groups and then also on Instagram as well. And then like I said, Twitter and LinkedIn will be next month. And I don't know what— I think that's all of the major ones, but I'm sure there's—

Jennifer Brown was asking if Pinterest was anywhere on the radar.

Pinterest is on the radar. Absolutely. For me, normally I think most people would approach this as— whoops, wrong thing— is how do we drive at more channels? And I'm definitely interested in that, but it's the business model that matters for me. It's how do I help the agency make more money? And I know that when I talk to agencies that do social media posting today, it's a very monotonous manual process. And I know that if you can make it scale, you can make a lot more money. And so first we'll hit the posting at scale and then we'll move on to the additional channels like Pinterest. That's a great question.

Yeah, I think a couple of questions on the different places like Facebook, Instagram Stories, TikTok. But I think your answer was Right on point. And it's like, what's the 80/20 principle here is we're going to focus on the, the, the platforms that matter most.

Absolutely. And, and the methods that matter most. I mean, again, you know, I, I cannot tell you how many great examples, um, you know, I was— this is where I like to go off script, but you know, if you go look at PatientPop, PatientPop recently was acquired by Correo. And but prior to being, uh, but prior to being, uh, acquired by Correo, which is massive EHR company by the way, They had gone out on their own and raised $125 million. What does PatientPop do that's so special? Well, I can tell you what they do. Their biggest thing that they do is websites. They're a marketing agency. How in the world does a marketing agency go out and raise $125 million? I'll tell you how they do it. They do it by creating a price point that is amazingly scalable and makes them look insanely cheap in the face of their competition. Here's their initial pricing, $600 a month. They're able to take you from $600 to $1,000 off the back of this walk-up. But if you look at what they're doing, their websites are actually just 3 WordPress templates that they slightly tweak for every customer. And I think the average digital agency would scoff at that and say, man, those things are terrible, or they don't— I can't believe they're so patterned and everything else. But here's the thing. The average doctor that they serve could care less. They just looked at their website, said, wow, that looks good, paid, and said, wow, $600 a month, that's it, sold. And that's exactly how they got to where they are. And so these scalable models, um, are, are key. It's really the model that you have as much as it is, uh, the, the services that you, that you charge. Outbound Engine, a very similar concept. What these folks do, uh, primarily the real estate market, um, but I think it could work in almost any market is they do social media posting, they do email marketing at scale to your list. But what they're doing is all of the articles that are in the emails are articles they find on the internet that are already posted by somebody else, and all the social media posts are the same thing. It's the same social media post for 10,000 real estate agents. But they, they literally also raised, I think, $70 million and were just recently acquired. So these models are super scalable because they deliver a lot of value at a price point As you can see here, $199 at a price point that really makes sense for the average small business owner to pay. So I always come on and I talk about ideas that tend to be a little bit of the antithesis of standard agency practice, but I think I've got good numbers to back it up. And if you're trying to scale your agency, again, the thing I find that unless you deal with incredibly large customers who don't— who have the, the bankroll to pay $3,000 or $4,000 a month, and almost as importantly, an individual in the business who can sit down and actually look at your— what your results are. It's just super hard for the average dentist to sit down and really analyze the results, because if you think about it, if their hands aren't in the mouth of the patient, they're not making any money. So really what they're doing is they're sitting down with a bookkeeper once a month and just saying, listen, show me everything we spend on, from the most expensive to the least expensive. And I always I always say, forget labor versus not labor. Let's say you're charging $3,000 a month. What does a dentist pay for that's anywhere close to that? Maybe rent, maybe dental supplies, but you've got to be in the top 10. And as they're going through it, they're just saying, "Can I get rid of this? Can I get rid of this? Can I get rid of this?" And if it comes to you and it's at all, "I'm not sure what we're getting out of the deal," that's where you get the whole, "Oh, let's just pause that." thing, right? And that's no good for anybody. So we need to find a price point that's very durable. And, you know, the $500, $600, $700 a month price point is like a utility bill, way less than it is, you know, I can't pay for that.

Yeah, good stuff. A couple questions here, Sean. Can we interject some questions?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Otherwise I'm gonna keep talking forever. Nobody wants—

Tanya is asking what type of reporting is there, um, on social media specifically?

I think all that we have right now is what you see. But this quarter, this is the fun part. Now we now have a public roadmap. So if you go to ideas.gohighlevel.com, if you go to the roadmap, you can pick by category. And this is actually the roadmap that we have set out. So you can see right here, enhanced stats. There'll be a big stats rollout here this quarter. And the nice thing here is we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, right? So what we're trying to do is look at exactly what is already in the market and, and work through those. So stats I think will be things like, you know, engagement, clicks, and like whatever the standard stats are that you would expect and want in a, like a Hootsuite or a Sprout Social or something like that. To a great extent, that's exactly what you'll get, and you'll get it this quarter.

Awesome.

Good question.

She's asking, is social media posting available with the highest tier plan, or is it available with the starter and freelance?

All plans. All plans, because, you know, my, my, I sometimes I get a little bit of guff for this, but, you know, I always say, what business should be posting on social media? And I, I always ask it that way because I know the answer. All of them should be, duh. And so we want to make sure that as an agency, this, this is one of those walk-on hooks that I think for, for the right agency may be their walk-on, right? Or if it's not their walk-on first, first item, it can very quickly be something that they add in. And again, You know, my sort of the way I would stand on this is I would say, you know, how many of your customers are going to buy social media posting software from someone, right? And I, again, I think the answer is all of them. And ultimately, if you can be the product that they choose, I think that's what's key. And as we move forward here, if we just zoom back and say, well, what is an agency supposed to do? It's supposed to solve the problem of helping its clients grow and expand their business. And today that is way more about just service, it's also about technology. And so agencies have to start becoming the power players when it comes to recommending technology to their clients. And this isn't— this is a weird thing in the agency world, but it is certainly not a weird thing in many other industries. You know, the, the MSP market, the IT market took this transition years ago where when, you know, when you call up an MSP and say, you know, I, I need to get my office outfitted with IT stuff. They walk in the door with both technology vendors and the services, and they combine them together because what they've learned is that, that dentist or that plumber or that lawyer, they need the internet to work and their email to work, but they don't really care how it all works. In fact, they would rather rely on you. And I think this is where marketing agencies are moving as we go down the road.

Good stuff. Herman was asking the name of the second agency. Outbound Engine was the second agency you just talked about.

Yeah, so not an agent. So, well, these people wouldn't call themselves an agency, but yes, yes, yeah, Outbound Engine is exactly, uh, yeah. So in fact, it's ironic, we got on the phone with these folks and then, um, a couple years ago, and then this pricing table appeared. It's almost like they've seen it someplace else. But yeah, um, but precisely. And then there's another, there's another example. People are asking for examples that I love to death. The other example I love is Thrive. And if you haven't heard of Thrive before, or if you have heard my spiel on Thrive, I apologize, but I think it's worth repeating. So Thrive looks like this. They're a publicly traded company. They do over $1 billion in revenue, but who are they really? They're really the Yellow Pages all stuck together in one big— It was a SPAC, which is basically a fancy thing where they basically took all the Yellow Page companies, glued them together and then took them public. And, but the— why am I bothering you with that craziness? Who uses Yellow Pages anymore? Nobody. But that's the great thing. They're not selling Yellow Pages anymore. They're selling SaaS. See right here? SaaS. And then this $127 million in revenue, so not too shabby, 44,000 small business clients. And how are they selling it exactly? They're selling it with 1,047 local salespeople. If you Google Thrive LinkedIn space, your town, so long as it's not Dallas, Texas, where they're based, you will get the name of your local Thrive salesperson. And what they're doing is phenomenal. They're walking into small businesses in every town and city. They're selling Thrive and they're getting $300 a month. They're getting low churn rates. But here's the great thing. What is Thrive exactly? It's less than what HighLevel has from a feature set perspective, but more importantly, it's not their software. It's actually a white-labeled version of Visita, um, right here. And they're— but they're being utterly successful with it. And so what this proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt is that marketers and agencies such as you folks who have way more skill than the Yellow Page salesperson— if the Yellow Page salesperson can make this sale and do so successfully, I think all of you folks are in line to crush it.

Yes, there's really two plays, right? There's the play of sell this as part of your service offering as an agency, or there's the play of, hey, look, I'm going to give you a suite of tools, and now my suite includes you being able to post your own social updates and have it integrate to the three most important platforms.

Yeah, and I'm always— I'm very opinionated on these things, so— and I'm always okay if Josh totally disagrees and probably listen to him since he knows more about it than I do. But I always think about it as always bifurcating. So selling both the tool and the service, because if any of you have ever had the experience of being fired for your services or ever had a client quit, if you have the software broken out as an individual cost, even by the way, if you line item it out and charge zero while they're on services, you create an off-ramp. Because I'm telling you, if you've done this for, for any length of time using the old methodologies, here's how it works. Your client walks in the door, they say, "Hey, I want social media posting." You say, "Great. I need you to go buy XYZ social media product." 3 months goes by, 6 months goes by, they fire you. They keep the social media posting platform you recommended. So how much revenue you get? Zero. How much revenue does the social media product get? Whatever they charge. How long do they keep them? For years to come. Why is that fair? Why should that not be you? Why should agencies not create a durable recurring revenue stream around software? It's ridiculous. And that's exactly how the world should be. And in fact, it's my crazy idea and suspicion that many, many, many software platforms get a truckload of customers from all of you folks. And honestly, without you, they would be in a world of hurt. But I think that what they give you today is nothing, and what you give them is a lot. And I think it's honestly time to change that. Love it.

Armando says, that's right, down with demand.

Well, and you know, most of these companies— I mean, I heard Hootsuite recently tripled their prices. Um, you're very much, you're very much stuck with these companies. You're stuck at the, at the, at their will. And ultimately, there's not much you can do. Um, even if you do use them and your clients never leave, I mean, fundamentally, even if you get an affiliate check from them, you know, all of them are owned by big shareholders. They're publicly traded. Their goal is to get more money at the end of the day. Um, you know, and none of them care about agencies the way we do. It's just a different way of looking at the world.

That's awesome. Anything else we should know as we think about the social media and upping our social media management game?

Yeah, I mean, I think the— I mean, we'll continue to make this thing as just as amazing as any other platform. Um, our other big add for this quarter that's going to be on this side of the house is we'll be putting in native blogging as well. So if you're doing blogging for any of your clients now, they'll have the ability to come and do that. It'll work both on any HighLevel funnel, HighLevel website, but also you can take it off of HighLevel as well and put it on any WordPress website or any website at all for that matter. It'll all be SEO'd and all those wonderful things. Because again, if we can give— the way I always think about it is if we can give a client something that they'll log in and use every day for one thing, they're stuck for life. And fundamentally, I think, yes, they will absolutely continue to use agency services forever, but they'll also use the tools forever, and they really ought to get them from the same folks.

Armanisys, to be clear, this is GHL product.

Heck yeah. Everything you see is ours. So, I mean, we're a bunch of nutty engineers. Okay, so here's the fun thing, right? So I've been in this game long enough and I know how it works. So Everybody out there in the world who's a software company, their goal is at some level, at best, to use you to get your customers, and at worst, to displace you. Fundamentally, they see the world as a one-sided game. They think that their mission is take the whole market, and they raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. We got here completely differently. We did it by partnering with agencies and by understanding a fundamental truth that they either refuse to recognize or just don't want to talk about, which is every small business that's successful out there fundamentally has an agency at their side. They may not admit it, they don't talk about it, they might not tell their friends, it could be their dirty little secret, but at the end of the day, without agencies, businesses won't thrive because agencies are skilled people. You, all of you, know things, practice things, learn things, and implement things every day that your customers will never know. And the smartest people, it's so obvious, I mean I always think of like the dentist, right? You sit down in the dentist chair and the dentist says, you know what, I've been learning a lot about funnels and websites and lead conversion. And okay, let's drill your teeth now. You're like, oh my God, what are you talking about? Like, that's the last thing you want to hear from your dentist, right? And so the point is, if you want to be the best dentist in town, of course you're going to have an agency. So we know this. This is why we white labeled from the beginning. It's why we only sell the agencies. And it's why all these other people do not. They don't care about you. They're not interested in you. At best, you're a sales channel. For us, we believe that if we really want to help the dentist, which is really what we want to do, we have to empower you folks with technology because you have the skills necessary to actually take the tech and do with it what is possible. Whereas the, the best dentist in the world is going to see out of the gate that that's a stupid endeavor for them to attempt, and the, and the, and the dumbest dentist in the world actually try it and simply fail. We're not interested in either of those pathways, and we never will be. So that's, that's why we're different. And that's what we're trying to achieve.

That's awesome. Brady Quick just wrote, Josh and GHL has 100% changed the direction of our agency, and we love it. Thanks, Brady. That's, that's awesome. Chris, this is super helpful and informative. So much value here. Excellent.

Yeah, I mean, we, we will have— I mean, I may update these numbers later this year. But as of right now, our largest SaaS agency will do $10 million in revenue this year just off software alone. The next one that'll do $6 million. And those are really exciting numbers, but I know a lot of people who are doing well less than that. But when you're talking about a 98% profit margin product, you don't have to do those numbers to be incredibly happy with your outcomes. And I know people that are one-person bands in their bedroom doing amazing numbers, and I know people who have massive teams doing big numbers. It's the type of model that can be rolled out regardless of agency size.

Hey, Sean, I think this is a great question. Uh, Herman's asking, Is there a great offer example that you can show to model to offer social media management?

Well, okay, so keep in mind I'm not a coach, and every idea I have I've stolen from someone smarter than me. So from my perspective, that's the kind of person I am. I'm not creative, I'm an engineer. So I just look at models out in the world and I try to emulate them. So like on the social media management side, I really like— like, I just pulled up Social Rotation. I don't even know these folks, but I keep using their website because I love their concept of all of these pre-done posts. But I like the outbound engines of the world. I think they have the right attitude there. It's— I mean, I just so see it as a price point game. I mean, it's— it's— and here's the reason why. It's, it's human psychology at its best. You know, people, people have a very hard time doing the math. I always, I always joke, you know, if you went into a car dealership and there was a state law passed that said, you cannot do anything other than show the full price of the vehicle, car sales would be sliced in half in a microsecond. It's like every car says, drive this car off the lot for the low, low price of $300 a month. Forget the fact that at the end of the day, the car's $60 grand, and actually when you finance it, you're going to end up paying $75 grand. No one wants to hear any of that. They just want to hear the $300 number because it's lower. It's psychology. So for me, social media management, would be it's a price point game. Find a, find a number that, that people will pay that scales for you where you can create a really good recurring model around it. At $200, $300, figure out what flies. But that's how I'd start it. And if you look at PatientPop, that's how they scoop their market. And by the way, um, as far as lead acquisition goes, PatientPop, um, Podium, um, really fun stories. PatientPop walked around their local town to the tune of $1 million in recurring revenue. That's how they got started. No Facebook ads, no funding, no fanciness, walking around, a million bucks selling to every doctor in their town, a website package. But why they won was the price point. The average doctor was getting quotes for $10,000 for a new website, and they were pitching $600 a month. It just spoke to their customer. And did they tack on top of that? Absolutely. Did they raise their average revenue per customer? Absolutely. But it starts with that low entry price point that's hard to say no to. And I also like reactivation campaigns. I think you've covered those, huh, Josh?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Dave Edwards is asking, is it a myth that social platforms penalize the posts in their algorithm that use third-party platforms like HighLevel or Hootsuite or SocialPilot?

I don't think so. I mean, what I know on the Google side is we have really good connections at Google. We spend a lot of money on their hosting, and so that gives us access to pretty much every team in Google. And so we specifically started— went out to them because there was a social posting platform recently that got smacked down for posting in Google. And I really didn't want to have that happen to our crowd. I think at the end of the day, the problem there was they allowed you to sort of— I think it's called spinning or something, basically like rapid regurgitate the same post with like different spun phrases or something which we didn't build in. But they told us, A, that this type of posting platform is totally legit. And then two, they also said there was no penalty whatsoever. So I know from the Google side, it's absolutely confirmed. And I have never, not once seen evidence that a posting platform has any negative effect on your rankings. Also, the follow-on of that is if you start to think about the value of social media posting, to what extent is it rankings related and to what extent is it like a double check that people are going to do on business? And I think oftentimes it's one of those scenarios where I've seen your ad, right? And actually, we have this happen at HighLevel. I've seen your ad, and now I'm going to come to your social media and I'm going to look at your posts and I'm going to see how you look, right? It's like when the doctor walks into the office, like, they have the white coat on, do they have the stethoscope? Okay, cool, they're probably a doctor, right? But if they walk in, you know, with a, you know, cutoff t-shirt and some ripped blue jeans, you're like, whoa, wait a second, who are you, right? Um, so I think it's oftentimes also about, um, really about making that business look their best. But no, I don't believe there's any evidence to support that you get downranked.

Yeah, I've heard, I've heard, you know, both sides, right? I, you know, it could, you know, the benefits of the automation far outweigh the potential, you know, penalization that may exist. Uh, Paul Money is asking, in your opinion, Sean, how many different social posts should we be making per a client per week?

Oh, this is where I am happy to bow out and say I have no idea. You know, Josh here is absolutely the expert when it comes to this type of stuff. He knows way more than I'll ever know about how to do a great job for a client this way.

Yeah, I would say, I mean, it really depends. It depends upon the niche. It depends upon what, like, what are you focused just on social activity? Or are you just like Sean said, posting for the sake of the client to see there was a post that happened every week? I think if you're really aggressive in a market like restaurants or med spas where there's actually a social element to it, you're going to want to do, you know, maybe a couple times a day. If it's more just for the sake of showing activity on their social profile, probably once or twice a week is sufficient. So really, really depends upon the niche, depends upon your service offering, depends upon, you know, what you're, what you're looking to accomplish.

Well, that's a good question. Post— what about posting to really move the needle? I guess that's the same thing, right? It just depends on your niche. And also, I would also argue— I mean, I don't know, Josh, I love your niche more than any because it's one of those durable niches that— but there's no love for it. I mean, generally speaking, no one loves their HVAC person. So my question on that is, let's say I am an HVAC business. You know, let's just say you have the most amazing social media posts of all time. Does anyone care?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know that they do. Um, and that's kind of been our philosophy. We work with plumbing HVAC contractors, for those of you that don't know. Um, and we've looked at it left, right, and sideways. Like, could we be more aggressive with social posts and building their following? And, you know, there's very creative ideas, but in our world, like It's very directional. When your HVAC or your plumbing's not working, you go to Google, you run a search, you look at the companies that show up top, the ones that have the most reviews, the one that maybe you saw on ads or billboards or heard on the radio. Um, and to me, that's much more important than posting every single day on Facebook or Twitter.

And I think this crystallizes the point for me. So not only do you work in that industry, but you work with the absolute biggest, baddest people in that industry. These are the top most successful HVAC companies. And yet even with those people where you would think it would matter the most, having super unique social media content actually doesn't move the needle much. It's important. It's a checkmark on the thing. You can't not do it, but you can absolutely overdo it and get very little for your effort. And so if that's the case for the top 5% of that industry, just imagine for most of us who don't have the opportunity to work with the top 5% in our industry, at least not yet, Imagine what that means for us, right? It means that that same post, if we use it across 10 clients or 100 clients, it's not going to move the needle and it's certainly not going to lower the needle either. It's going to check the box. And that's the way to think about social media posting in my mind.

Right. I think in a lot of scenarios, that's exactly what you're after.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

What else is new and exciting at HighLevel that you guys have coming out or that you are excited about?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, so obviously we have the blogging and that's super cool, but Our goal here is we have a ton of it. So we have a ton of enhancements. So we have a big massive speed increase on the funnels coming up that we've been— and websites. Not only do we have a brand new CDN, which you've actually already rolled out, but we have a whole nother layer coming in on top of it. And early tests are pretty cool. And this actually matters really in a huge way. So at HighLevel, we use our own stuff. Our website is built on our funnel builder. And we recently moved from the old CDN to the new CDN, and not only did we drop 3 seconds or something, um, on average for the page load, from like, I don't know, like 11 to 9 or something, but our sales went up. So the number of conversions we got every day went up dramatically, actually. And so, um, it's— we're very much in line with our customers in this way.

Site speed matters.

Yeah, site speed absolutely matters. Oh, and then the other big thing— I'm sorry, I forgot to— forgot to mention, um, we're also coming out with Google Reserve. So We're in the absolute last throes of Google Reserve. For those of you who don't know what Google Reserve is, you can Google it. Of course, Google Reserve is huge for HVAC, but also huge for other niches as well. So imagine you come to Google, you're able to actually book right off of, right off of the Google listing there. Today, if you look at Google Reserve, there are very few vendors who have been approved for this. I sent Joshua Nelson a screenshot or a link the other day, but I'm, I'm pretty certain that it's, uh, very few. It's like 3 or 4 providers in the plumbing and HVAC and home services overall niche. We'll be in that list, um, here shortly. And then right after that, we'll actually be going into legal as well. And why this is important is if you think about, um, uh, like plumber in Portland, Oregon, Google is very much pushing these local service ads, and as part of the local service ads, they're also very much pushing things like Book or Reserve with Google. Google's future for local business is they're intent on keeping you at Google as much as physically possible. And some of these, some people might like this, hate this, disagree, agree. But I just know in talking to Google, this is absolutely their intent. But here's what I know. It doesn't matter. Like, if you look at these, It doesn't matter if Google— there's no website here, right? If Google captures leads here, which they're starting to do. So notice there's a phone number here, and in some of these you can actually click and submit like an actual whatever, like a form. Google— the big fall down here is Google is not going to be able to close those leads. So on our side, it'll start with Google Reserve, and then for the ones that have the form, We'll actually be able to start pulling those in soon. We're on a beta for the API. It's a closed beta. Very few people have access to it. But essentially, if you click on DNF Plumbing and they have one of those, like, click here to get in touch with us kind of things, we'll actually get those leads. And so you'll actually be able to actually be able to start autoresponding to them, booking them in, all of those things, as well as booking right off the actual Google Reserve listing. I think this is huge for anybody who's in the local business segment. And it took us literally 6 months of paperwork and legal and all kinds of stuff to just get started in this journey before we wrote a single line of code. Because what is really big about this for Google is it's them actually handing consumer data to, to somebody else, which is a huge deal for them. So it took a long time to get approval. So we're pretty excited. This should launch this will launch next month.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's a big deal. I think having the option to get into the reservations, obviously the GMB messaging or Google My Business.

Oh yeah, we already got that. That's huge. Yeah. So for us, we're just going to keep whatever Google feeds us, we're going to run it down and we're going to consume it and make sure that it flows into that one spot. Because again, being that central hub for your client's front door, Super key, right? And the problem with calls like this is, as much as I love to talk about new stuff, it's also always like, how many people on here are using Missed Call Text Back, right, on GMB? My bet is very few of you. I love that it was everybody and people said, be quiet, of course I'm using that. But that one thing right there is massive. Imagine you could say to someone, look, next time someone looks you up on Google, they call and you don't pick up the phone, we'll automatically book the appointment in for you. Like, oh my God, that's amazing. Really? How's that possible? Like, you do that right there, you get one client for the average HVAC person or almost any business, and it easily pays for the $300 or $400 a month you want to charge them for that service. So there's some very easy things that just the basics— it's kind of like, you know, the slam dunks always make the front page, but it's the two-pointers that win the game. Those are the types of two-pointers that I think are here today that everyone should be implementing. Even before they get into this cool new stuff.

Yeah, Sean, I think it would be great if you have the time and the group wants it, if you could— last time we were on, we did the, the simple SaaS play and you just kind of mapped out like the simplest thing that all of us should be selling to our local clients that can have a huge impact and be very sticky. Give me one in the comments if you think that'd be helpful, if we could just kind of unpack that simple SaaS play really quickly here for you guys so you've got like a really clean Yeah, well, I got scared there for a second.

I didn't see any ones.

You're like, no one wants it. Yeah, that's coming in now. They want—

let's do it. Okay, good. So, yeah, so the thing I always talk to people about is the simple SaaS play, because I think the thing with HighLevel is there's so much that it's easy to get overwhelmed. Right. And ultimately for us, we want to pack as much value in as we can. We're also a bunch of nerdy software engineers, so it's sort of the way we roll. But if I'm really thinking about this from an agency perspective, It's like, how could you create instantaneous value for your clients as fast as possible? And so if you go to the SaaS configurator, we sort of kind of try to lock down out of the gate. Here are the basics that we would sort of talk to you about doing. And so here's how I think about this. So going back to my good friends at Alpine HVAC. So if I'm— if I'm— if this person's my best friend and I want to help them out of the goodness of my heart, you know, what's the most important thing to me? So One is, hey, listen, if you call this phone, if someone calls you here, which by the way, the vast majority of people now use Google My Business to actually find even businesses that they already know. I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't store my favorite restaurant in my phone book. I just pop up in Maps and search them again and call right off of that listing, let alone people like an HVAC company, for example, who I've never seen before. I'm trying to research and I'm calling. So right there, let's imagine a couple of things. One, you call this number, they don't pick up, and we automatically text that person back, hey, sorry, missed your call, we're on the other line with the customer. Would you like to book an appointment? And then that person then can write back, oh yeah, actually I would. Um, and then we're like, great, here's a link to our calendar, grab a time that works for you. That's Miss Call Text Back right there.

Okay, found money in almost every vertical you can imagine. Any people that called in but they didn't get an answer They're about to call the next guy, but they get a text message.

Exactly what's going to happen. And in fact, the other piece of this is you also then pick up all of the call tracking. So then immediately within HighLevel, what will happen is all of the calls will flow through and you can actually tell them and show them exactly what they're getting out of all of the calls. So you can go in, show them the call reporting, and you have all of this rich data. And in fact, ask the average small business owner how many calls they missed. And I'll tell you what they're going to tell you. Oh, I never miss a call. And I'll tell you something, they actually believe that. That's the scary thing. So, but they're— but what they don't know is they're lying to themselves while lying to you at the same time. You put this in place and you'll crush it. And here's the cool thing about it. We make it just stupid simple. We go— all you have to do is go in to the settings section and I relaunched a new tab for— so I keep this fancy call report up, but you just go into the settings section and you literally just connect their Google My Business connection under Integrations here, and it will automatically swap the number out for you so you don't have to do it. So it's very simple. So that's just literally one thing, right? Just one silly thing. And then the other thing that I love is Google My Business messaging. Also, by the way, we turn this on automatically. So if you connect their Google My Business in here, what will happen is it'll actually turn this into— and I'll show you actually a good example of this. Is Visionary Law Group. I'm probably not going to spell it right. My bad. There you go. So now on mobile, I can actually chat with that business directly. This is a huge new thing for Google. They're pushing this in a big way. So now what happens? I go to Google, I can see that this person has chat. I don't have to call them if I'm on the go, if I'm in a meeting, but I still need to find a law firm, an HVAC company, whatever. I send them a message. It's asynchronous. So then the business owner can get back to it when they want to. Oh, and by the way, you can also still automate off the back of this. So let's say somebody writes in, you can do the whole, hey, would you like to book an appointment? Great, here's a link to our calendar, grab a time that works for you trick if you want to. Um, but either way, now the business owner comes back to it, um, 6 hours later. If I message you back, it'll actually pop this back up on any phone, um, without— and it doesn't expose the mobile number of the person. It's very simple, it's very easy. It's a great value add. There you go. Simple SaaS play number 2, Google My Business messaging. Then let me jump over to— I want to make sure I don't miss anything off my list here. I probably should keep that up. Web chat, right? So web chat is awesome. Let me see if— let's see. I always like to use customer websites, not my own. See if Visionary Law Group. Still has theirs. Yep, there it is. Hey, look, there's the web chat widget on the website. Now you can chat with the customer. Now we do this differently than everybody else. This is not actually live chat, and there's a very good reason for it. Your customers are never there. And by the way, anybody who again says otherwise is lying to themselves and you. And we all have experienced this a million times over. I'm going to close this website because there's a video. Ultimately, people are going to give you 5 seconds. And if you're not back to them in 5 seconds, they're gone. So we turn that into an SMS conversation. So now when that business owner gets back to their office, looks at their mobile phone, because of course there's a mobile app, um, they can actually get back to the customer, and that customer, they know how to reach them, right? So there you go, web chat. Reputation management, same deal. Alpine HVAC, um, Visionary Law Group. Do you know how hard it is to get positive reviews for a law firm? There, there are lots of situations where people engage lawyers and those lawyers on, on fact do a great job for them, but they don't get what they want and they're still mad about it. So to see a 5-star rating for Visionary Law Group, in my opinion, is phenomenal. They have a better and higher rating than Alpine HVAC. So being able to automate the review collection process is super important. Um, quick side note there, uh, for those of you who have been following along with, um, with this, the FTC is going hard at people for review gating. They just— Fashion Nova is an e-com store. Hiding reviews that are negative and trying to gate can get your customers sued in a very big way and have an FTC action. So just heads up, anybody who's in the reputation management business, this is a big thing to follow. The FTC is trying to start taking— making examples out of people. So just a quick heads up. But it's okay because the way we do reputation management we just send people right to Google, we pop the review link. And by the way, that actually statistically works better than gating anyways. So there you go. Reputation management, a simple SaaS play. See what else I got? Facebook Messenger, GMB call tracking, which I looked at. Oh, text to pay. So the ability to actually text out a link to people. So like within a conversation, you can literally go in and you can say, hey, let's say it's like a dentist's office or somebody, you can literally come into a conversation and text them out a payment link. So you can hit request to pay. You can put like, it's like a little mini invoice. Like let's say I'm going to pay for a couch, it's $100. Then I can select either a date. Do I want the link to expire? That kind of thing. And then when I'm ready— oh, whoops, I have to select that. My bad. Does not expire. Save. What I can do is actually create a link out. To that person. You can put it in a text, you can put it in email, you do whatever you want with it. And now you're sending out an easy, fast way for them to collect money from a customer. Makes things very simple. Again, a good part of the simple SaaS play. So there's probably at least 2 or 3 more things— social media planner, invoicing— but I'll rest there and see where we're at.

That's great. And so, guys, really what you want to have is a Basically, if all you did was the mix— missed call, text back, the call tracking, um, the GMB messaging and reputation management to help them drive more online reviews— like, that's something all of these prospects you're talking with every day need. And it could be something that generates monthly recurring revenue, because once they use it and they get some results with it, it becomes an annuity. Like, they're going to pay that into perpetuity. Um, so, you know, make sure you've got the simple SaaS play, either to lead as a foot in the door which a lot of agencies do with success, or, you know, more like the way we would do it is we want to sell our agency service on the front end, and if they say no to that, then we've got this as a drop sell where the client that's been with us for 9 months and is ready to go a different direction, we've still got the recurring revenue from the software piece. So I really think that like this is something all of you guys as agencies should be integrating into your service offering, either to get your foot in the door or to retain the revenue from the clients that you do work with. Yeah.

And obviously remember, again, there's a lot here, right? And so in this left-hand menu, we've recently simplified it, which I like, but you can still hide and show different things to clients. So for example, as an agency, you know, you may use this full functionality, but they may not, right? So, you know, I love that we have an opportunity tracking board and you can move a sales pipeline and all that, but for some businesses that's way overkill. They don't have to see any of that stuff when they log in. So you as an agency, remember, can control a lot of this because what we're envisioning here, right, is not you selling software, it's selling, it's selling services that scale. And the way I think about that is some of these tools they're going to use, and some of these tools are expert-only, for your eyes only, and you're really cohabitating in this environment with them, which is how you're creating service revenue along with them, along with the software revenue. So don't feel like you've got to give all of this to them on day one. You can literally start with one thing. In fact, Yeah, most, most of our customers will start off here on the conversations page and that's it. They just see the conversations page. So conversations, wherever they come from, maybe they come from Google, maybe they come from Facebook, maybe they come from SMS, but all their job is to do is come in here and actually respond. Super simple way to start, creates a lot of value. Yeah, I love it.

And I love the idea of the SaaS play. I think for a lot of us it might feel like, yeah, I get it, but I run an agency and I charge a monthly retainer fee. The way we use it is really more as a sticky play for our client base. Yeah, so for what we were investing in, Infusionsoft is a one tool that just did email marketing. We're able to have email, calendar, text message automations, chat, one fee, and we can provide it white label to all of our clients. And so now every client we get gets added to HighLevel. We actually call it Conversion AMP in our agency. It is practically no cost if you look at it in the grand scheme of things, and it's a value add for every client we work with. We can put marketing automation and all of this in place, and it's a great drop sell to retain revenue. So lots of, lots of reasons to put this in place. Sorry to like go off track.

For those of you who are doing retainer-based invoicing, we have, uh, full invoicing now, and we'll have recurring invoicing out, uh, this quarter. So If you want to start using us for running your invoices for your clients on your retainers, you can do that soon.

That's awesome. Ben's asking, how do you market this to your client? Do you come up with your own name or do you call it HighLevel?

Yes. Okay. Yeah. So simple. app.golawhustle.com. So Law Hustle is an agency. This is what their clients see. Law Hustle Apple. So when their clients pull out their iPhones or their Android phones, they're not going to see HighLevel, they're going to see LawHustle, right? So again, super key to us— I wasn't joking about the fact that we believe in agencies. Um, we do not want your clients to know that we exist. We're not interested in them knowing our brand. Um, we're not co-marketing with you. You, you are the front, the center, and the end of everything they know when it comes to technology, because we are strident believers in the fact that they have no business whatsoever poking around and doing their own stuff. It doesn't mean there aren't things that you're going to tell them how to do, teach them how to do, give them access to do in the system. But that's up to you and it's on your timeline and not their timeline. And again, we want to make sure that they never come to us. We don't want their money. We want them to pay you. I mean, that's exactly why we have SaaS mode. The whole point of SaaS mode, more than just the feature set, SaaS mode is about collecting money. It's about being able to come in here as an agency, define your plans monthly, yearly, etc., and get your clients paying you directly, automatically. We get none of this revenue. None of this right here comes to us at all. This is all to you. So it's very important that you white label it. It takes about 5 seconds to white label— well, it's not 5 seconds, 5 minutes, sorry— realistically, to white label the front end. And you can do some really tricked-out stuff. You know, my friend Chris Lyle at Visionary Log Group. He has, he's got a really cool skin on his. We allow some really amazing things that other platforms don't. Like, you can come in here and put in custom JavaScript and custom CSS, which will allow you to basically control the entire front end. We have a whole backend that's backend API that's open. We're very developer friendly. Our mission here again is we do not want your customers to know we exist. So hopefully, great, hopefully that answers your question.

Yeah, great question. I'm glad you brought that up, Ben. Has this been helpful, guys? Give me a 1 in the comments if you kind of feel a little clearer on like kind of a simple SaaS play, how you can tap into the social posting as a revenue stream or a cost reduction mechanism. Lots of good feedback here. Chris says this has been amazing. Sean, anything else you want to add? I know your time is at a premium and we're almost at our hour.

Yeah, no worries. I just am always honored to come here and to speak with all of you. And I truly think that we are We're on to something different and we're doing something in a totally radically different way, which is why we're here. Um, we, we've, you know, my mission and vision for the company is simple. I want to do $1 billion in revenue, but I don't want to do $1 billion in revenue. I want to know that we're doing $1 billion in revenue collectively, all of the agencies bringing in, um, all of that money. And you know what, I truly believe, if it's not already true, someone out there will someday do more revenue than we do, and I'm gonna love that day. Um, we very much see ourselves as partners in this. And we really appreciate all of our customers because we really think that at the end of the day, the core mission we started with, which was, hey, we want to help a lot of small businesses. This is the way to do it. This is the way to empower them, and this is the way to make them truly successful. So I'm just super thankful for all of you and what you do every day.

That's awesome, man. Well, our agency runs on HighLevel. It's critical to what we do. It's helped us build our multiple 7-figure agency. Thank you for building it. Thank you for the great feedback that you, you provide, for the, you know, the quick responsiveness and support, um, and for creating this as a mechanism to really add value to our clients, retain our clients. A couple saying they want more training. Specifically, what specifically in this area would you need more training on? Let us know because there's tons of training in the community. I've got lots of training. So if you let us know what we— what you need, we could probably point you in the right direction.

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I think this is what's key about people like Josh, because I get to, I get to play with products all day and features and write code, and I love that. But how it translates out into the real world, this is the other thing. Everything you see in our app, we've basically stolen it from smart people like Josh, and many of our great ideas came from Josh specifically. And this is what we do. We listen to our customers every day. We don't really think about what we want to build because we have no idea what we're doing. We try to listen to what you tell us to build. That's why if you go look at our roadmap, you can see it's also an ideas board. You can vote ideas up, and we literally go to that ideas board and we say, okay, what's next for social media? It's the thing with the most votes at the top. Um, and that's how we decide what we're going to do next. And again, those votes are not being put out there by dentists or lawyers or lawn care people. They're being put out there by agencies only. Um, and so really it's a reflection of you, um, and your vote counts. So please do contribute. Um, even if you're just voting up an idea, that's huge for us.

Hey Sean, Don Franklin is asking if you have any update on WordPress hosting.

It's almost out live for everybody. So this quarter— yeah, sorry, we have a lot of things in the hopper. So WhatsApp, somebody asked about earlier, out this quarter. Hosted Twilio out this quarter, hosted Mailgun out this quarter, hosted WordPress out this quarter. We're in private beta with all of those products. We want to run them through our best and brightest agencies who have been with us for the longest. To make sure that we don't miss anything before we release them. But we've been doing that for about a quarter now. Things are looking awesome. So across the board in all 3 of those products, you should see those go live before the end of this quarter.

Awesome. Good stuff. Great questions, guys.

Um, this quarter, Brian.

Thanks for being here, everybody. Sean, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing. Keep up the amazing work. If you have questions, post them in the, in the Digital Marketing Agency Success group or the HighLevel group. Tag me, tag Sean. We're in both. We'll do what we can to help and want to see you guys continue to succeed.

All right, well, thanks everybody. It was great to be here. Have a great rest of your day. Bye.

See you later, guys.