Is There Really A Summer Slump In B2B Marketing?, How We Are Managing Multiple Offers Right Now, What Are We Doing To Build A Brand

In this episode #2987, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss navigating B2B summer slumps, managing multiple offers, and building authentic brands. They also explore the emotional side of AI-generated content and the importance of valuing relationships over wealth. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) Navigating Summer Slumps in B2B Marketing (04:21) Managing Multiple Offers Effectively (06:17) Building Brand Through Authenticity (11:34) The Emotional Impact of AI and Content Creation (15:12) Valuing Relationships Over Wealth To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 00

  I think, look, I can just say on, on sales numbers for us, lead count has picked up again, and we're closing a lot more predictably. And so that, that, that's been good for us. So.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we see a slump during the next few months. Summer is typically slow for us in marketing.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Which is good to talk about, because you said, is there really a summer slump in B2B marketing? Because I actually talked to my, my team about this too. So what's your take on it? And then I'll give you my thoughts.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  We usually don't see a slowdown too much in traffic, or leads, or self-service revenue. We do usually see a slowdown in enterprise contracts during the summer, consistently, every year.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  How about when you go back to your software days with, let's say, was Kiss metrics mature enough for you to have good data there on, was it a summer, summer slowdown or not?

• 1:18Speaker 01

  There was not a summer slowdown, but the price points were much lower. And we usually, non-enterprise. So self-service, non-enterprise, we typically saw, or yeah, self-service, non-enterprise, we typically didn't see much of an impact during the summer months. But for enterprise, we typically do see more of a slowdown, because a lot of people are taking vacations with kids.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. My guess, so I, I think we can both agree that agency side, there's almost always a slowdown when it comes to summertime. I think software side, we're actually seeing a pickup. Right now, we're, we're just going into summer. But I think software side, we'll, we'll, we'll see it be more consistent, which is good. That allows us to maybe focus more on building out the software side during this summer slowdown with agencies.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I also think you see the software picking up for a different reason. It's new, you're not at scale yet, you're growing. It's a solution that people need. There's not a ton of good alternatives. And. When you look at your base, you've grown really well, but you're still starting from a smaller base. So you shouldn't see any slump or slowdown for a while.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Well, when I say that, the reason is in the last week for Carrot, which is our LinkedIn account-based marketing product, I think we closed three or four in the last week, right? Which wasn't like that before. Like, all these people are coming out of nowhere. It's like, hey, we're ready, we're ready, right? And they're just like paying the thing, right? We're just, we're ready to go. On the Clickflow side, which is our SEO software, there's a lot of good mid-market enterprises in there. So, and I want to say that's a novel solution. I would say there's some more mature solutions out there. But I would say it's consistent. The lead flow is consistent on those sides. And it doesn't feel like, if anything, it feels like it's picking up there. Whereas on the agency side, you see the summer slump coming.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  What's the price points?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  So on the Carrot side of things, if for a pilot, it's three grand, four grand for 45 days, okay? And then it's basically two or three grand a month, and then, or 5% of ad spend, whichever is higher. That's the first one. Okay? And then, on the Clickflow side, we're just rolling that into services. So it's like, we'll give you 25,000 words for free, and then we just try to roll them into services, which is agency services.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, which is a good idea. During the Kissmetrics days, we usually didn't see a slowdown for things like sub 10 grand, 20 grand. We typically saw a slowdown in buying cycles when it was things like 100 grand, 200 grand. No, annual, annual.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. This is like, we're talking...

• 3:41Speaker 01

  When they needed more of a sign-off.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, 30, 40, 50 grand. So you don't, you still need a little something sometimes, depending on the company size, but not always.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  I don't, yeah, I don't have too much data on the, for software, 30, 40, 50, because at Kiss, we were, we had contracts that were even six figures, but majority of them were sub 20.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And I would say majority were actually sub 10. So I just didn't have good data points on price points like 50, 60. But I do know from 100 plus, because with Kiss, we had a lot of lower, and then some crazy high, like 100 plus.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Who sold those?

• 4:17Speaker 01

  We had a sales team. There was a guy named Ben Sardella who ran all the sales for us.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And what we always found was summer slowdown with the higher price points, not because we weren't getting leads or traffic. It was it just required more of a sign off. And a lot of those people that we're trying to get sign offs for were taking summer vacations.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Yep, yep. By the way, I mean, because we're kind of talking about this, let's talk about how we're managing multiple offers right now. Because I mentioned earlier, the click flood of offers will give you 25,000 words for free, production grade content. Carrot is basically, okay, we'll help you create personalized LinkedIn ABM ads. And you have different offers too. And so how are we managing different offers right now? That is the the prompt.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So the way we manage different offers is we have different teams for different offers. And then we have people placed within each of those teams that work cross organizationally. I'm probably using the wrong term, but where they work in all divisions. And their goal is to integrate and make sure people are cross selling and doing what's best for the company and not just doing what's best for a division. We also have incentives aligned for the different divisions to focus on what's best for the organization, not what's best for their own individual unit. I'll give you a great example of this. We have Answer the Public. We collect leads from Answer the Public, right? We have it in there where if Answer the Public helps collect more leads, but it hurts their revenue,

• 5:41Speaker 01

  you can do cross company charges and give them some of the marketing budget or budgets from some of the other organizations where it helps them to offset some of the hurt that Answer the Public is taking by helping some of the other organizations. And then on our end, we just look at the math formula and what is best for the overall organization. And then we do that.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  Yep, I have nothing to add there. That's basically you guys do that at a higher level than we do. So we do, we do a couple of things there. But the main thing is just make, I think the main thing I want to cover from that one is just we have alignment. We don't want silos where it's like, oh, I'm just on this one. I'm just on this.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Doesn't work out.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  No, we need you guys to understand everything across the board because that's how we're all going to do better. Because you build in more lock in, you build in more retention.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  And we've had people who are supposed to operate on, I think, company wide, even when the incentives are aligned that way, but they only care about their department.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  And when we had that, those people don't last long.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Yep, yeah, it's about how do we help the team, not how do I make more money individually?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Or for my department.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Because if the person does really well for the organization, the organization will figure out a way to compensate them.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yep. So you have one here on what are we doing to build brand? Or how valuable are in person events for enterprise marketing?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's talk about what are we doing to build brand? I just went to an in-person event and there was a lot of publicly traded organizations and they're all talking about if we don't get the clicks to our website as much, because things are changing. If you're doing shopping, a lot of it's coming to social commerce and in-app purchasing TikTok shops, Shopify. You can buy an app now. I mean, not Shopify, Instagram, right? I don't know about Shopify. I don't know if they even have an app. But Instagram, TikTok, you know, you can just buy natively within their own applications. You have AI overviews, Google AI mode, ChatGPT. Yes, you can get clicks, but you're not getting as many clicks. And there was an interesting thing that we saw in the room.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  So most of the organizations that were there, almost actually all of them, I'm pretty sure all of them. They're publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded organization. And we're partly owned by a publicly traded organization. And almost all of them had data and analytics divisions. And most people saw interesting consensus. Conversion rates from what? And you're talking about maybe 20, 30 companies in the room, multiple people from each company. Most organizations saw actually a higher conversion rate from ChatGPT than most sources. They're like, we don't get that much traffic, but we're getting really high conversions from the traffic we can track.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  And what was interesting here is, is you're probably not getting as high conversion as you think from ChatGPT. You're only able to assign the conversion to the clicks that you're getting. But how many other people are seeing the brand and learning about it and not clicking over versus Google or some of the other platforms that are clicking over to learn? So I believe the conversion rate is actually really lower, but the total number of people that learn about the brand is much higher than they're able to track. And if you look at what you and I are doing. We are still focusing on building content heavily and unique content that is on new topics

• 8:57Speaker 01

  that most people aren't talking about because it increases our chances that the AI platforms are going to continually mention us. And as they mention us, we look at that as a huge way to build a brand and a way to stay relevant and drive revenue.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. And as you're saying that, by the way, so us doing this podcast, we do try to stay, we do talk a lot about marketing news, but I think about my YouTube channel, the videos I've been making recently are a lot tied to latest trends around business, marketing, or AI. And guess who's who's going to pick that up in AI mode? Well, Google owns YouTube. So like, we're going to show up, right? And so it's, we're playing the law. I think if I had to answer this question directly, what are we doing to build brand? There's a lot of video that comes into play and we're really building for the long term and we're trying to compound for the long term with the understanding that the game is much different than it was 15 years ago, where we could just crank out blog posts. You actually have to spend time, Noah setting this up, you coming downstairs, me driving here, right? Five minutes away to

• 9:54Speaker 00

  do this, but sit in person and actually have to bring our A game and actually have to experiment because that's authentic.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  And so it's, it's, it's easier to build a brand if you're being authentic.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think if, and what really opened the eyes for me is when we were at the YPO Marketing Summit that you threw in Miami, we gave a talk. Noah was there. Noah tends to record all our podcasts, but at that time, he couldn't record our podcasts because he was recording the talks at the YPO Marketing Summit.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  So we were in our room or your room and you pulled up some sort of camera on a stick. I don't know what it was called.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  So what? It's a DJI Osmo. And so Noah gave me his, his extra one and I had what?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I thought we only had one running.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  No, we had two running.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Oh, we had two running.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had two. Yeah.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  And then I think we just had DJI mics or something like that. Right?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And it was, it wasn't as good quality as this because we didn't have Noah doing the lighting and all that kind of stuff. We know you couldn't be at two places at once. So we, we understand. And that episode or that string of episodes, because we recorded straight for like an hour and 20 or 30 minutes.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  We had no scripts. You and I just free flowed for literally almost an hour and a half. And we had some of our best feedback and view counts on those episodes.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And it was purely because we were just being authentic and transparent.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And I think after that, you and I started being like, oh, let's just be more open and transparent. It's not like we were trying to hide anything. It was just more so, let's just be off the cuff and real.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz the reality is, by the way, if you're doing interesting things, you should just talk about those things. It's easier to just talk about stories about things that you're doing already.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  Versus trying to react in a news cycle. Yes, we talked about Elon today, but that's a bigger topic. But it's, and that's what makes you authentic too, cuz you're out there, you're trying things. And so that's what, and that podcast, by the way, the comments we got were, it feels like two friends having a conversation. And then another comment was, this is the type of content we follow you guys for. And we're like, oh, okay, fine. We should do more of that. And by the, sometimes it's not like we need a lot of views or whatever. You just read like one or two comments and it's like, the qualitative feedback sometimes matters more than the quantitative feedback.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. So, but there's one thing I sent you, and I ran a test here. This is kind of,

• 12:36Speaker 00

  maybe you call me crude for running this test after my mom passing, but I basically shared this poem with a lot of people. Okay, I shared it with you.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was not crude. It was, it was sweet. I thought it was a beautiful poem.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  So I shared this poem with a lot of people. I shared it with like my mom's best friend the other day when I saw her and she, she started crying, right? And a lot of people were crying. I mean, I cried a lot when I read this poem, right? Now, the crazy thing about this poem is that it's a note that my mom, my mom wrote to me, right? Now, here's the crazy thing. I had my mom, she wrote me this note in Chinese. It was a three-page note. I can't read that stuff. So I went to ChatGPT, I translated. It did a good translation in English. It was pretty good. And then it asked me a question at the end. It was like, do you wanna make this poetic? And I was like, sure. So I made it poetic and it was levels above the original. The English translation, it was not even close because then I had my, my mom's best friend the other day, she was reading it. I was like, I need you to read the original. So I started the original, right?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  She's like, yeah, the, the poem crushes the original. Not to say my mom wrote anything bad.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  No, it, it, it just took the emotional aspects and emphasized them. It was taking the true meaning from your, what your mom was trying to write and write it in a way of someone who's a talented writer.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  It, yeah, it made it a really talented writer. Now, my mom, what she wrote, like the essence is still there, I think, to your point, right? But I'm just like, wow, this, this is the first time where I've seen something AI generated make multiple humans, like a lot of humans cry. Obviously I'm going to cry from it, but I'm just like, yeah, you know? And this is the worst it'll ever be. It's just going to get better over time. So it, the poem was so good that I have, I'm having a version framed for in front of my, and I having a version framed for my bedroom, but it's like, uh, I, I think if there's one, one thing I'll, that, that I want to pass to everyone here is the one thing I have no regret on here. And this is not necessarily an Eric Sob story, um, podcast, but I read on Reddit a long time ago. It's like, what's the biggest regret you have before your parents going?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Everyone was like, not recording more content. So that DJI Osmo that we recorded in Miami, I made so much vlog content with her before she, she passed and we, I basically interviewed her like a podcast, right? Got her stories and then had her write this, this, in the stories book you can buy from Amazon called Tell Me Your Story Mom or Tell Me Your Story Dad. And then that, that's where I got all those things, right? And so all that to say is like, a lot of people hit me up afterwards. They're like, we're going to do that. Um, and if your parents are still around, do that too. And maybe you too can have an AI generated poem that makes humans cry.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And before we go, the one thing that I learned from your experience that really changed my life and was touching is when you're going through this, you started doing things with your parents that you normally wouldn't because I've known you for a long time. You were single track minded and work was your priority and work came first for everything. I saw you do things like take your mom to some place in Pacific Pal, uh, Palos Verdes or something like that, right?

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Uh, Rancho's Palos Verdes. Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And spend time. I saw you do the books. I saw you go over to where they live and spend way more time and not put business first. And, you know, when you told me about the book and you can't get back time and filming. It made me realize because if I look at my life, yes, I travel more and I don't have a choice because the economy is bad, but I would make decisions like if you look at me in a home, I've switched homes roughly once every year and a half and I optimized for what makes me the most money and what's best for my business versus what's best for my family. And when you pointed some of those things out, like going through your experience, you're like, is it worth making a little bit extra more money and like for me, not having a yard for my kids to go and run in

• 16:14Speaker 01

  or something like that. It starts making you think, what is the extra money really worth? Because when you pass away or you're about to pass away, are you going to remember the money you made or are you going to remember the moments? Yeah, you're not going to take any of it. So it's like, all right, you know, there's a point where it's like, it's just not worth it.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let me, I think there's one thing that sticks out to me here. So it's a, the line that comes to mind is there's no greater poverty than being rich in things and poor in relationships. And so one of the things, my mom wrote that book, the question was, what is the accomplishment that you're most proud of? And it says, my friends and my family. And I'm like, yeah, that's all that matters. And so I think that's, that is one thing that she helped reinforce there. Like what else are we working so hard for at the end of the day? Right? And then the final point here is like, you know, the time that we get to spend with them, it's like that, that is worth way more than it's worth, it's weight in gold. Like, what do you get more of working for another hour or two? And I would say that if you watch this or you listen to this podcast,

• 17:13Speaker 00

  we talk about creating content, we talk about software, we talk about creating business or hiring amazing people. You're looking to build all this leverage, but then like, do you really need to crank that hard as hard as we, like, we used to crank pretty hard, right?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  As we get a little older, maybe not as much anymore. So.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  That's right. Like I was on a plane, I watched a movie. I'm like, you don't.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  You usually watch movies.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I usually work while I watch movies, but I actually watched the movie without working.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  That's rare.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  That's rare.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. A full movie.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  A full movie.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Wow. I haven't done that for a while.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Maybe I'll do that next time.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  It was like an hour or 40 minutes or something like that. I was like, oh, I watched the movie without working. It was like something called like Novocain or something like that. I don't know.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  He's nodding. I don't know what it is.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  You know, Novocain.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Is it actually a person who doesn't feel pain and tries to

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, Rescue Girl. I think it's called Novocain.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Uh, it was a bank teller or bank manager or whatever, but like,

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  I just relaxed for a minute. It was kinda nice.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So enjoy your lives, guys. Um, that's what it is. And take it, take it one day at a time and, uh, you know, it's all about friends and family. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.