Don’t Create a Personal Brand If You Want to Do This as an Agency Owner

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. you got three thumbs up on it so how do you think about like personal branding um as related like leeching for your business and what what platforms and content formats are you focused on right now and what kind of budget also the team and tools that you use

0:52so does your agency only offer personal branding services or you're just more so wondering should you brand yourself personally for your agency? Yeah, I'm so concerned, like, because I'm not posting, actually posting on LinkedIn and just thinking, should I do some personal branding? If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't build a personal brand. If you look at the biggest agencies, none of them really have a personal brand. If you look at most of the largest corporations, most of them have a corporate brand. And I have a personal brand. I'm in London right now. I just gave a speech at Unilever's office to people on their marketing team globally.

1:29I think they said there's roughly 200 people who signed up for it. All right. We don't have Unilever as a client, just as an FYI. So I'm going in there and I'm talking. My competition has Unilever as an account. You know what Unilever cares for when they hire agency? They don't care about Neil Patel. They don't care about your brand. They care about who's on my account. What have they done in the space and what are the results that they performed with other clients that were in the space. That's it. If you want to scale up, SMBs, sometimes they care about the people, but what they really care for is who's on my account and what's the results.

2:08And if you can showcase that, you should be able to beat someone who has a personal brand. Now, posting on LinkedIn and doing those things, I think is great because it can build up your corporate brand. And at the same time, you may build a personal brand at the same time. But when I try posting on social media, I try to mention my agency every once in a while, I try to use graphs, and I have my agency's loco in there. My goal is not to build up my personal brand, my goal is to build up my agency's brand. So that way more companies hit us up and be like, cool, we want to work with you, who's going to be on my account.

2:40And if they're qualified, and we like what they do, and we like what the agency's done in results for others, we'll hire. But I'm telling you, you know, a lot of the companies out there know about me, but they won't hire me because we don't have enough experience in their sector, right? Or their industry or in the region that they're going after. They don't give a crap who Neil Patel is and they shouldn't. And it's about the corporate brand. You know, what's interesting? I was at a, so I was at a dinner with my ex EO forum mates, maybe two nights ago or so. and three of them are agency people.

3:14And one guy, he does commercials for, next week they're shooting with LeBron James. They're doing with all these movie stars all the time. And I'm like, how long have you been in business? 20 years. And he's like, I'm going to go, he's like, I'm going to go for another 10 years. He doesn't do any marketing, but he's out. It's the three of us, the four of us actually all agreed that it's all down to relationships at the end of the day. So Amber, I wouldn't, I say for you, because Neil and I, we both started with SEO. I would say if I were starting today, I definitely wouldn't start with SEO, but you know, I would understand if you wanted to try to build a brand on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever your audience is hanging out.

3:46But to Neil's point, you know, the other day, what I was super proud of was when I was doing kind of a check with some of our top clients and like a quick check-in. Right. And I was like, so, you know, how's the experience overall right now? One through 10, 10 being best. And then someone said 10 out of 10. And I'm like, I was so happy. I was like a proud parent. Right. Because, you know, if you asked me that one to two years ago, I would have said it probably would have been like a two or three, right. Because our services were not where they needed to be. But like, that's how you grow because a lot, some of our clients are coming through, not a lot, I should say, are coming through referral.

4:16And then some are coming through SEO, maybe some other channels, but it's really the referral stuff that compounds because once you do good work, someone's going to move over to another company. They don't want to look bad. They want to de-risk themselves. And the least risky thing is to go with someone that they know, like, and trust. So the work is ultimately the most important thing. But I don't think it's useless to do the personal branding stuff. So let me give you some direct answers and then we'll move on to the next question because I know you asked about platforms and content formats.

4:44So Neil and I, I'm speaking for you right now, Neil, you can jump in at any time, but we're both hitting YouTube right now. We're both still doing the podcast. We like doing the podcast partly because it's a reason for us to hang out as well. So we see each other at least once a week, if not online, if not in person, sorry. And then what else do we do? Neil's really happy with Twitter right now. I'm hitting Twitter every now and then. His team even posts to Twitter and then his team repurposes to LinkedIn and these other channels. But we do try to be omnipresent, but I would say it's not the primary focus anymore.

5:15Whereas before I would have said I would have focused a lot more. So Neil, feel free to add anything. Yeah, I think you pretty much nailed it. And with content formats, text works, but video really relates with people. And you can do any of that kind of stuff. But remember, there's a lot of agencies built without a personal brand. Majority of them have been built without a personal brand. And it's a working formula. You know, like, I love Gary Vaynerchuk. He has a bigger personal brand than me, right? And I'm not trying to talk crap on him. And his agency is bigger than mine, by the way. But neither him or I run a big agency compared to WPP, Ogilvy, etc.

5:54I'm not Ogilvy, WPP, Omnicom, Bensu, you name it, right? Those guys make us all look really tiny. None of them built a personal brand. Is Gary Vaynerchuk's approach wrong? No, he's been doing it longer than me and he's grown. Is my approach wrong? No, but if you're trying to create something big, there's many ways to slice it. You can do it my way, Eric's way, Gary's way, Densu's way. You got to also pick what's right for you and your personality. You know, and if it's not right for your personality, then pick a different approach. Just like Eric does different things in his business than I would do.

6:31Doesn't mean his way is right. Doesn't mean my way is right. There's multiple ways to skin a cat. By the way, it took us to our 30s to realize that. One day, Neil and I were just on the phone, and he's like, you know, everyone just has their own ways. And it's like, it's true. It's also change. It's hard for us to change our ways too. So yeah. John, you want to ask your question? You got two thumbs up on them. I got to take a minute to tell you about the agency owners association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials.

7:02So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes. We share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency.

7:31This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, at marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. You're talking my question. Yes. Somebody here already actually asked the question a couple of questions back, so it's actually been answered. But my question was the same. I mean, what are the key factors that you can take going from a six to a seven-figure agency? It does seem to be somewhat of a glass ceiling, but y 'all have been answering that question all along here.

8:02Okay, cool. So you're good on that one then. And it's not a glass ceiling. It is actually really easy to go to six to seven. Again, multiple services reduces churn. It keeps your clients paying longer because what you find in these six-figure agencies, you're like, we're getting clients, but we keep losing them. And you don't need to get as many clients. You just need to keep them longer because that six-month point, one-year point to keep a client is not long at all. Most people who buy agencies are looking for people who are keeping clients for four plus years, even in the S &B category. It's possible.

8:33I know quite a few S &B agencies that are keeping clients for three, four, five years on average. cool uh mario made a good point here wp i didn't know wpp was started by billionaires you know that neil i didn't but not all the agencies were started by billionaires um but that is a good point some of them did had a leg up and i think you said it was mario right and another point to uh or another thing for mario's point is densu owns a bank they can pretty much borrow money for pennies on the dollar right japan has negative interest rates for a long time so it's like it's not that expensive to borrow money when you're a Japanese-based company.

9:13And the only reason I bring that point up is, you know, he's right. If some people are starting with other things that we may not have, like a personal brand or millions of dollars or billions of dollars, use whatever you can to your advantage. But if you don't have those things to your advantage, that's okay. There's still a way to grow. For example, if one of you guys on here has a podcasting agency and another one has a social media agency and another one has a personal branding agency and you all focus on individuals but not corporate brands in theory you guys can all partner up cross sell make it seem like one cohesive business and you would retain your customers much longer but you would keep your own revenue because you can say okay i get the i get to keep the podcasting revenue you get to keep the social media you get to keep the personal branding and you know you can either combine forces or you can operate them separately but you can work together because there's agency networks out there that help cross sell.

10:07And what you're doing is you're providing the client with everything that they need and you're working together, which keeps the client much longer and you end up making more money. Cool. I want to move to Brian's question here. So Brian, you want to ask your question? Yeah. Sorry. See what exactly I wrote here. the recommendation around seo right so i'm an seo guy that's my bread and butter so i'm just curious like what's the number one recommendation you have like kind of supercharge seo um to really like that maybe i haven't thought of or that maybe isn't so obvious to everybody what was the question did i miss it i kind of broke up i what's your number one recommendation to supercharge seo my number one recommendation to supercharge seo is build a brand so use a rule of seven do anything that you can do virally give away free tools because if you get more people typing in the brand name um then what you'll find is your rankings for all keywords just go up really fast yeah it's there's been i think we've cited this on a couple of recent episodes of about how the brands, the brands continue to get a lot of links.

11:26And because they're so well known, they just eat up the search traffic for everything. Eight Sleep is a good example. So we cited this one. I don't think the podcast came out yet. But Eight Sleep gets 22 billion Brad searches per bot in the United States, probably a lot more overall. And they don't have a lot of pages, but their domain rating is extremely strong. and their traffic value is like 5.5 million per month. And all they do is they sell these products. That's kind of the main thing. And that's a really good example of brands just crushing it. The other thing I told Neil my theory on this, because a lot of people search for single grade, but they're searching for malt whiskey, but they still search for single grade quite a bit.

12:06I'm like, okay, if you could take a word that search quite a bit and that's your brand, I wonder if there's a leg up there. But that's just a random thought I wanted to add in. Thank you. 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.

12:37We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. 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. Koush, you want to go on this one? You want to ask your question? Yep, thank you. So I'll go for my question.

13:07It is, so what kind of services should a digital agency based out of India focus on while trying to enter the Western market, especially the US and the Canadian market? and to follow up, are brands actually interested in offshore service providers for our industry? Is it actively searched for by not the smaller brands, but we're looking at slightly bigger ones with bigger budgets and all of that? So one thing for an agency to offer in India, that's a loaded question. And the reason I say that is you can be an outsource agency, but if I was an agency in India, I would only focus on the India market.

13:44It's one of the fastest growing markets. it's massive for us our number one market is the united states our number two market is india by far wow there's just so many big corporations in india a lot of them are asian corporations like chinese or u.s companies or european companies that entered into the india market there's just so much money there and people look at it as a third world country um but But what they don't realize is their GDP is massive and it's growing at a rapid rate. It's one of the fastest growing countries. Fair enough. Fair enough. Any particular industries that are doing really well in India right now?

14:26We're seeing all industries do well in India. But what I would do if I were you is pick one industry that you like the most or specialize in or have the most connections. Start with that, help them with all their services, and then expand to other industries. Perfect. Sounds good. Cool. All right, Nathan, you're up next. Hey, yes, this is like a follow up question, I think on James' question about the whole land and expand thing. And this is more niche specific. So, you know, my niche is media companies to think about folks who are monetizing via info products or, you know, AdSense because they do SEO or affiliate deals.

15:01How would you think about like land and expand in that context? Yeah, sure. So what do you offer them? If they're a media company, right? And they want to get into info, what do you offer them specifically? Yeah. So right now we work primarily with newsletters and like personal brands to drive email list growth, low CPLs, high open rate, high click through rate. I want us to find ways to get closer to revenue. It's just what are the ways, right? It's because everybody monetizes a bit differently. So what are the services you offer? Are you actually creating their funnel? Are you doing the paper paid ads?

15:37Is it just Facebook or is it Google or is it a combo of both and TikTok and Instagram? Like what are the services that you're providing? Yeah, exactly. So we run paid ads. So the funnel stops, lead comes in and then we don't touch the funnel after that. For now, we're experimenting when going deeper. Okay. So you help create the funnel or no? We are now helping to create the funnel for three clients. Perfect. So you can start by creating more funnels for people. the second thing you can end up doing is creating multiple types of funnels webinar funnel ebook funnel you know you name it i don't know what funnels people are creating these days for media companies but you get the point the second thing you can do is when you're running paid ads what platforms are using other than is it mainly just meta yeah okay so also start adding on google as a service also start adding on tiktok and all the other platforms even if they don't drive the volume but if you can get the cpls roughly at the same, like YouTube and stuff like that, which works well for info, you're good to go.

16:37Right. And then the next thing you can do is you can start also helping them with other services, such as like conversion rate optimization. Right. And what I mean, conversion rate optimization. Okay. You sold a product. Great. Let us create a new funnel for you to upsell more products to your existing audience. Oh, cool. How many more upsells and downsells can we offer? So you can just start tacking on a little things like that. Or it could just be like, Hey, you're doing organic social. Let us help you. You keep promoting and creating your own content because you're already a media company or influencer or whatever, but we'll help you create content that's organic.

17:14That helps you correct more emails, right? Or we're going to help you outline some things that you guys can be talking about when you go live. So you can encourage people to go to specific landing page to collect more opt-ins. And yes, this isn't going to be the sexiest topic, but it's really related to what you promote. So you should get more conversions from it. The point I'm getting across is you're still in the same vertical, but you're offering more services that they need to generate revenue or more revenue from their existing customer base. Whether it's creating better funnels or running paid ads on more channels or helping them rank organically for their content so that way they can collect more email lists.

17:49to doing conversion rate optimization on their site so you get more people in the funnel, such as just exit intent, collecting more email addresses, to helping them monetize an upsell. Because if they're getting$1 ,000 per customer, maybe you can get it to$1 ,200 by offering more upsells and downsells. All these little things help and they'll become more reliant on you. So then they're much more likely to keep paying you. Great example of this is when someone's signing up for a webinar, you can also collect phone numbers and you can help them run their text messaging list and manage that for them, which then makes you more valuable as well.