Pod Insights Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips Don't Ignore These Top Marketing Channels About this episode In episode #2885, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the most effective marketing channels. They highlight the significance of referrals and client retention in driving revenue, and share insights on the necessity of building strong relationships in agency growth. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Top Marketing Channels Explored (04:53) The Importance of Referrals and Retention (07:41) Building Relationships in Agency Growth (09:37) Technical Expertise Over Sales Tactics (10:14) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com.
0:34 Speaker 01 Let's talk about the top marketing channels. I know you have a tweet on this one. I believe it's from Alex from Ozy, right?
0:41 Speaker 00 Okay, Alex from Ozy said, "Organic ROI measured for us through book sales." And I want us to give our numbers, because I wanted to contrast, right? So number one's email, 800K subs there. Number two, YouTube, he has 2.8 million subs there. Number three is Instagram, 3.1 million subs. Four is LinkedIn, 450K. Five is Facebook, 200K. Six is Podcast, 41K average download per episode. Seven is TikTok, he has 1 million followers there.
1:04 Speaker 01 But okay, so he's not ranking them based on emails or subscribers. He's ranking them in order based on what's driving the most revenue? Is that correct?
1:12 Speaker 00 He's ranking them in revenue, but he's also giving his sub count.
1:14 Speaker 01 And does he give the revenue for each channel or not?
1:16 Speaker 00 No, so here's what he says. He says, "These are rough. My books are also free on my podcast. I don't sell courses. I don't teach M&A. Use if useful."
1:23 Speaker 01 We're just speaking marketing channels, not like employee referrals or anything like that. I would say number one channel by far is Google, SEO. Number two is email. If I had to pick a channel, number one is SEO, number two is email. And a lot of email is driven from SEO traffic or social traffic, eventually subscribing, but it's actually mainly SEO traffic, because we track where we're getting a lot of our emails from. And a lot of it just comes from organic search traffic. Number three would be social. If I had to pick, I would say LinkedIn, we're doing better these days than YouTube, because we're going more upstream.
1:53 Speaker 00 How many impressions are you getting per week on LinkedIn, do you know?
1:55 Speaker 01 Uh, it's right here. 3.0 million post impressions.
1:59 Speaker 00 Three, yeah, three million in the last seven days.
2:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, so three million post impressions on LinkedIn.
2:04 Speaker 00 You have, you have what, like a couple hundred thousand followers?
2:06 Speaker 01 Let's see, six hundred and eighty-four thousand followers.
2:09 Speaker 00 Dude, so we, we can put a pin in this one, but I only have like forty-six thousand followers. And last week I got one point one million impressions. So we can talk about that in a second.
2:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I would say LinkedIn is really effective, but the key that we found with LinkedIn is it has to be very specific content for your target audience. Like, um, I got a lot of impressions for talking about Hailey Bieber and how many.
2:31 Speaker 00 I saw that.
2:32 Speaker 01 Her smoothies.
2:33 Speaker 00 Eight hundred grand in one.
2:34 Speaker 01 Doesn't drive any revenue.
2:35 Speaker 00 Of course not.
2:35 Speaker 01 But on the flip side, when I do charts on like, you know, uh, I just put out one today on form field conversion rates, you know, how many, what's your conversion rate? What's a conversion rate on average, depending on how many form fields that you're collecting?
2:48 Speaker 00 Your charts have gotten better. They're, they're actually useful now.
2:50 Speaker 01 They're, that kind of stuff doesn't generate the impressions, but it generates leads. So we focus on that because we look at at the end of each week, what is actually driving leads for us? Um, and I, I recommend to anyone, don't optimize for impressions. Optimize purely for revenue because you're just wasting your time if you optimize for impressions. Unless your goal is branding or to be famous. And after I would say LinkedIn, if I had to pick another channel, I would say it's webinars. But webinars, a lot of that comes from email and social. It's actually roughly half.
3:21 Speaker 00 Did you try to Hala strategy, the DMs with LinkedIn for webinar signups?
3:26 Speaker 01 It's too much work.
3:27 Speaker 00 You hire people.
3:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know, but we already get so many webinars.
3:32 Speaker 01 I go, how many webinar signs we get this week? And so we got twelve thousand for this webinar. I'm like, all right, what are we going to do? Message a lot of people, get extra three hundred signups?
3:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're good.
3:40 Speaker 01 And we already get enough big corporations on them. But when we do our webinars, no joke, roughly half the viewership comes from streaming live on all the social platforms.
3:49 Speaker 00 Yep.
3:50 Speaker 01 So the webinars are not all.
3:52 Speaker 00 And you're just using Restream for that.
3:53 Speaker 01 Yes. And when I say, let's say if we get twelve thousand signups on a webinar, that's twelve thousand signups pre-streaming.
4:02 Speaker 01 And then when you're streaming live.
4:03 Speaker 00 24,000?
4:04 Speaker 01 No, because even on the 12,000, they don't all show up.
4:07 Speaker 00 Oh, you get like 2,400 that show up, maybe 3,000 that show up, right?
4:10 Speaker 01 On a good webinar, we get like 5,000.
4:13 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a lot. That's including the people that are just watching.
4:17 Speaker 01 On both ends.
4:18 Speaker 00 That's a lot. So anyway, your mileage may vary. I just called this one out. High level, same, same for us. SEO would be one. Email would be close second. Those are probably the main ones for us.
4:31 Speaker 01 My top marketing channel, Pat, you had to look at it. It's none of those. It's.
4:34 Speaker 00 It's your referrals.
4:35 Speaker 01 And it's, it's how you want to categorize them, but they're in these three buckets and I don't, I forgot what order they're in. RFPs, employee referrals and client referrals. Those are our top three channels. And I don't know how you want to combine them. We just lump them to one, but that makes up the majority. And when I say majority, over 50%.
4:52 Speaker 00 Yep. And that's, that's, it just comes down to your product at the end of the day, right?
4:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
4:56 Speaker 00 And so a couple of years ago, you know what our churn was? Oh my God, the, the, the, the retention for one of our service lines was 17% annual logo retention, right? This year it's 91%. So I'm like, if you improve the product, you're going to get referrals. And then a lot of those people leave and they don't want to look like dummies when they go somewhere else. They want to hire someone that they can rely on and they're going to go somewhere else and they're going to hire you.
5:17 Speaker 01 But what was the churn numbers again?
5:19 Speaker 00 It was 7, 17% retention, annual logo retention. This is a couple of years ago. Now it's 91%.
5:24 Speaker 01 So 17%.
5:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, 17% retention.
5:27 Speaker 01 So that means 83% churn.
5:29 Speaker 00 Yes.
5:30 Speaker 01 Okay, and now?
5:31 Speaker 00 Now it's 9% churn.
5:33 Speaker 01 9% churn a year.
5:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, annual. This is for a service, one service line. So it just, it comes down, a lot of it comes down to hiring at the end of the day, right?
5:40 Speaker 01 Totally agree. Dude, I did an interview today and the guy was asking me, you know, SEO questions, agency questions.
5:48 Speaker 00 A podcast interview?
5:49 Speaker 01 Questions. Uh huh.
5:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:50 Speaker 01 I forgot the podcast name. Apologize, but I do so many of them on a weekly basis. So he was just like, what's the biggest thing you've learned like from running an agency? When it comes to just like growing an agency and how do you grow fast? Cause he asked me, did you ever expect your agency to have a thousand plus people? I was like, no. And I'm like, a lot of it's luck and timing. Sure, I worked hard, I executed, I've been doing this long enough, I'm persistent. But I do believe me getting into the industry early really helps solidify, right? And I think like Gary Vaynerchuk, jumping on social media early helped him out. A lot of that's luck and timing. He was smart to spot the trend though, right? So it's not all luck and timing and I'm not trying to take anything away from Gary.
6:32 Speaker 01 He's amazing at spotting trends and one of the best I've seen on the web. And so he was asking me, what's the key to like really growing an agency? And he's just like, you know, most people would assume results. And I gave him an example of what we did for CNN. We won awards for it. Did you know in a year period of time, we drove an extra billion page views to CNN through organic traffic SEO? A billion just from our efforts, trackable. That's a lot of freaking pages. You agree with this, right? That's a crap load. And do you think we retained that account after we did amazing results? Nope. You want to know why?
7:13 Speaker 01 Account manager didn't build strong enough relationships with the key decision makers. And I was explaining to him like, you can have the best results in the world, but if your account managers aren't great at building relationships, and I'm not trying to badmouth our account managers or anything like we learned, and some of the executives as well, including me, that need to do a better job. If we built better relationships with the key decision makers, they would stick around instead of giving it to someone else.
7:38 Speaker 00 Cause you're not just a number anymore. You're someone that they care a little bit about.
7:40 Speaker 01 Yes, and this is why you gotta do more face to face and get to know people personally and business wise.
7:47 Speaker 00 But yeah, you know, when we look at all of this, we're just like, man, we wish that, you know, the big thing, the lesson for me, and it took me many years to learn this is, you can have the best people to do the work, but if you don't have great communicators and account managers, at least in a service-based business, you will lose a ton of revenue over time. All right, quick note, this is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies, and if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto optimizing, auto updating from an SEO standpoint.
8:30 Speaker 00 And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. It's interesting because I put up a post last week on LinkedIn just saying, agents, there's a lot of agency people out there that are such great talkers, and they don't know how to drive any results at all, right? But you kind of need some of these relationships, you know, I was gonna say schmoozers, but it is schmoozing at the end of the day, right? You just, that's a skill in itself. So everyone has their uses.
9:12 Speaker 01 Totally. And the other thing I learned too is, we, throughout our years of running an agency, I used to believe the person who's the best at selling is gonna win the contracts. Forget relationships and who you know and all that kind of stuff. But like, oh, the person who's the smoothest at talking and a really good salesman and know these special skills, you know, like on how to close and put pressure. When you go up to enterprise, none of that matters. They look at de-risking, and they look at, how much is this gonna cost? What is the ROI gonna be? And can you prove to me you can actually generate the ROI before I sign the contract? And if you can get, if you can do a better job than everyone else, because it's hard to do that 100%, right? No one really does that 100% in a service-based business. There's no guarantee.
9:56 Speaker 01 But if you can really prove, not just with case studies showing that your people's experience who are gonna work on their account, showing them things like what you've done for other competitors or other similar logos over time with case studies that are public. Of course, you don't want to share private data. That's the kind of stuff that wins a pitch and just getting super technical instead of being like, "Hey, you know, use this sales tactic to close people and you'll see your sales double or triple or 20%." And I used to get these pictures so much, "Hey, if you let us take over your sales, you'll generate 20, 30% more of..." I was like...
10:30 Speaker 00 A lot of it's from the internet marketing world, right?
10:32 Speaker 01 And I was like, "I doubt that you can take over my sales." And I'm not saying we're the best, but I'm like, "It's not about being the smoothest talker. It's about knowing your client and being super technical and explaining to them how you're actually going to produce the results for all that money that they're spending."
10:46 Speaker 00 Yep. Yep. That is it for today. Go to marketing school.io/agency. By the way, that price keeps going up. It just doubled last... yesterday, actually. So yeah, go check it out and we'll see you tomorrow.
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