Dubai Conference Q&A - Using Influencers To Grow Your Business & Scaling Your Digital Agency

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. My name is Jared. I'm from US. And first off, thanks for sharing, Neil and Eric. My question is, you spoke on paying influencers on a monthly retainer for more exposure. Could you maybe speak a little more into that process, how you're finding those influencers and what that outreach messaging looks like? So you figure out whatever products or services you want to promote.

0:39So go on Instagram, look for influencers, whether it's tags or searching or just browsing. You find influencers who have big followings that talk about that kind of stuff. You pay them a monthly retainer and say, hey, I want to offer you a job. Don't ask them to be a contractor. Don't try to pay them for posts, but offer them a job. And say, we'd love to test it out for a month. And if it goes well, we can hire you. And what you do is you just pay them a flat fee. and part of their job is they have to go on social media and all their channels every day and promote the products and services that you want to push.

1:13And then the key is they don't just push your products, but the products they push, you ideally want to strike deals with that company where that influencer is also on the landing page that they're pushing people to. The conversion rates go up and the ROI is much better. Awesome. Thank you. And on finding them, by the way, you can use SparkToro. So that's Rand Fishkin's tool. So have you heard of it? SparkToro? No? So S-P-A-R-K-T-O-R-O. So it's good for finding influencers. They'll show you influencers on Instagram, on YouTube, whatever. You can also use a tool called MightyScout. It has a dog on it.

1:46Those are two things that you can use, but everything he said plus the tools. Yeah. Hi, my name is Divya and we have a content writing agency from Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. So I just wanted to ask one question. So we started five years ago and we have onboarded a lot of clients from the Indian market. But the challenge that we are facing is scaling the digital agency. So what do you think is the best method that can be used to scale and onboard clients from the Western countries? I wouldn't focus on the Western countries. India is a big market and it's booming. You guys are investing a lot in infrastructure.

2:26There's a lot of money there. I would just focus on building a big company within India. There's so many unicorns now in India. and why focus on the Western world where it's very competitive, where India needs more people or more companies like yours. And if you want to scale it up, go to events, meet people through networking. But the big thing is go hire people from the other agencies, like the Web Chutneys and places like that. They've already scaled it up in India. So if you hire their managers, they already understand the systems and processes and they can help you scale it out much faster.

3:01Sadly, because it's services based, It's always going to be very manual. And even though you want to scale it, it requires a lot of people. And it won't ever be as efficient as you want. Neil, how big is your India division growing? I don't know. You don't know? Do you have an inkling for, is it like second fastest, third? Our India agency is our fastest growing international division. We are one of the outsourcing partners of your organization. Oh, that's good. I didn't know that. Thank you so much. But India is a booming market. Focus on India. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's here. Hey, Neil and Eric.

3:35So we are a business coaching company based out of India. We have more than 2 ,000 clients. We have more than 1 ,000 testimonials and 500 case studies. We're looking to go to other countries and get clients from their small and medium entrepreneurs. While we are heavy on performance marketing and organic in India, what is the best approach to take to go get clients from other countries like US and other places? Because we have very less exposure there. That was the same question as a previous one? So you're saying how to take, how to get clients overseas? Clients overseas because here we are scaling.

4:09We are pretty much sorted but what we want to do is even work with other countries as well. How big are you guys in revenue? Revenue close to 85 to 90 crores in Indian revenue. I have no idea what that is. What does that convert to millions? I would say somewhere around 12 to 15, 12 to 13 million dollars. That's great. I wouldn't focus on the Western countries yet. You're still small for how big the India market is. Okay. Go be, go get to a hundred million dollars a year in just India. Even for coaching businesses. Is that okay? Got it. It's a big market in India. Yeah. They love coaching there.

4:45Yep. Okay. Got it. And then what you should do is once you do well in coaching, figure out what other products and services you can introduce and upsell it to your existing audience to get more revenue. Got it. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Hey, hello. First, thank you for the fruitful information you are sharing. I'm Huyem. I'm working in a performance agency in Tunisia. So my question is about TikTok. So do you find crucial for every brand to be present in TikTok nowadays? I'm talking about the organic part of TikTok, not the paid. Yes. TikTok is a massive channel. If you're not on there, you're missing out on a big audience.

5:23All brands should be on there. I understand in certain countries, TikTok is banned. But for the countries that allow it, you should be on TikTok. Okay, so there is a special strategy for every brand. The strategy for every brand is the same on Instagram or Meta or Book or Snap. Take the content that you're posting on the other social platforms and add it to TikTok. You don't have to do anything unique for them. Yeah, I look at TikTok as you're actually doing three. You're doing Reels, Shorts, and TikToks. And they're all fighting and trying to kill each other right now. So you might as well take advantage of all.

5:53Yeah. That's true. Okay, thank you. Hi, my name is Dave. I'm from India as well. We also have a business coaching and mentoring business in India. And we're looking, we are running the ads only on YouTube. Most of the traffic comes from YouTube. We're looking to see which are the best options. Influencer marketing is the best, podcast. I'm not so sure which one is the channel where you can have exponential growth. Just like how we can run the ads, pay somebody and get it. So that's one question. And second is, if you guys have agency, how can we hire and work with you as a, you know? So your first question, your business is a coaching business.

6:31So you guys sell courses, memberships, is that what it is? Yeah, the mentorship program. How big is the coaching company? Yeah, 8 to 10 million a year. Okay, so the guy in the back has the same thing. There's probably a lot of other coaching businesses that make 8, 10, 15, 20 million. It's a big market. Okay, so it's not about what channel, whether it's YouTube or podcasting. To really scale from, to get a business to a million, two million, even five million dollars, you can do it with one channel. What is the main channel you focus on right now? YouTube ads. Okay, YouTube. Do you do much on Facebook?

7:04We were, but because we got shut down. Okay, do you do much on Google or paid at Google search ads? A little bit, not much. Yeah. So what you'll find is a lot of businesses grow to being decent size with just one channel. Yours is YouTube ads. To build a big company, you need to take an omni-channel approach. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Google search, Bing, podcast ads, affiliate marketing. You have to leverage all the channels. Some will drive a lot, some will drive a little, but it's a numbers game. You got to even try conferences. You got to try TV ads, radio ads. You got to try it all. It's not what you probably want to hear, but that's a reality.

7:42Here's the flip side to that too. So we have a mutual friend, Sam Evans. So he scaled his business obviously to the 36, right? But he sent 30 million mainly on YouTube and Facebook ads, right? He actually, so his program, I don't know if it's still there, but school.com, if you check it out, he has a guy. This guy's name is Brian. He runs a company called AdSpend. You should work with him because he focuses on working with people that have coaching businesses. And these are all people with big names. and I think they're all doing like 10, 20 million or so. So I think you should work with him because he's good with YouTube ads and he's good with Facebook ads too.

8:13Yeah, so Brian from adspend.com. Wonderful. Tell him we sent you. Thank you, I'll do that. Thank you. Hello. Hi, Mr. Patil and Mr. Eric Su. My question is that Mr. Patil said to many of the people that the market of India and Pakistan is very big and there are lots of people. You are right. If you just calculate the population of India, Pakistan, and China and Bangladesh, so it's like half of the world. But Mr. Patel, my question is to you, people are not in a mood to spend money as the people in California or Hong Kong or any other part of the world. How would you address this pain point? I would really appreciate your detailed answer.

8:56Thank you so much. So we have an ad agency in India that deals with the India market. We have an ad agency in Singapore and Germany and UK and Australia. So we see the different markets. People believe Indians are cheap. They're not going to spend money or people from Pakistan are not in bad economies. We see them spending money with our clients. We see them spending money the same way that someone in California does. We're not seeing much of a difference. The point is, sorry to interrupt. My point is people are trying to spend on Neil Patel or Mr. Eric, but not on a small business in... No, they are because we work with small businesses and we see them spending on the small businesses.

9:33Small businesses are spending on Mr. Patel, but not on some small entrepreneur or a small... Let me rephrase. In India, we have clients who are small. We see them getting customers from other small businesses. Customers from random people in India, the population, are spending a lot of money on small businesses. Small businesses are the backbone of Pakistan and India and places like this. There is money. It's a wrong perception. The data and when you look at the stats and the data that a lot of agencies and governments put out, people are spending money on these small businesses in India and Pakistan.

10:09So your point is that we should also invest in India and Pakistan, it's big market, or we should try to get to the Western markets? No. Stick with India, Pakistan, and the countries you're in. It's a huge opportunity. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. By the way, we're getting a lot of the kind of same questions about the India market, right? If you guys look at your country, I think it has the most potential in the next decade. People might say, oh, China was the one, but now India is the next one. We talked about it yesterday. We see a lot of potential. The logos he's working with, small or big, I'm like, I wish I was in the Indian market.

10:42So yeah. Hi. Good afternoon. Hi, Eric. Hi, Neil. So my question is, is doing local services ads in Google is going to be a smart move to do in 2023? Yes. Go for it. So our niche, we do have a niche, which is a dental marketing. We are a dental marketing agency in the U.S. Now, with the booming different kind of marketing strategies around the U.S. and we are also looking forward to expanding in Europe, local services ads with Google approval and verification are getting hard as well. Is there any other way that we can do aside from doing LSAs for our clients or for our own brand as well? I have a friend that he sold his company called Pro Sites and they focus on dental companies, right?

11:29I think what they did was they would make a lot of landing pages, like local landing pages that they would just rank really well because they're not that competitive. So the ads will work for sure because you're capturing demand in that specific area. So that's guaranteed. But also when you make these local landing pages from an SEO standpoint, you shouldn't have a crazy problem, at least doing relatively well. Yeah, no, local works really well. Keep doing it. I understand doing Google My Business is a pain for all the businesses out there, and it's not easy. There's no easy way around it. The long-term approach is you guys need to build a big site that has city pages for each major city within the United States that you're targeting.

12:07I would go buy a website if you could. I'm sure there's a lot of websites out there in Nden Onish. Okay, thank you so much. I'm from Pakistan. And my answer to the brother who just raised a question from there that Pakistani and Indians are not spending that much money on the advertisement. The reality is totally different. There are multiple companies who are just spending thousands of dollars on the marketing as well. But that was just the answer, just a misconception, which I just wanted to... Hold the microphone closer. And sorry. And my question to you is the AI is evolving and the people are saying the SEO is dead by now, or maybe dead after a year.

12:47How do you see the AI and SEO after five years side by side? Or as an SEO person, as an SEO guy, what should I do in order to optimize the content for the next two years or three years for the long-term strategy, not just a short-term strategy? Let's say something before Mr. Patel answers here. As human beings, as long as we're alive, we're not going to stop searching for things. So SEO cannot die. It might change in its current form, but you're just going to have to adapt as an SEO. That's my only answer. Go ahead. You see it working together. SEO is not going to be replaced by AI anytime soon in the next three to five years.

13:26AI can help you do your SEO job faster and more efficient. So then you can spend more time on things like content or building links versus having to optimize your on-page elements, which a lot of AI can do in the long run, but it's not gonna die. People are gonna keep searching. SEO exists on Airbnb, on TikTok. It exists everywhere, more than just Google, and it'll continually exist. What is your one big strategy or the prime strategy for the next two years? Giveaway free tools. Free tools is the easiest way to build links and get more SEO juice. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real.

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16:14I'm from the Netherlands. I'm the founder of The Nomad Escape, and I host business and mastermind retreat for digital nomads. I have an offline product, so not a digital product, so like events between 2 ,500 and 5 ,000 euros people pay for the week. and I have affiliate marketing strategy. So I have affiliate links to Thrivecart, for example. Quite a lot of big bloggers writing about us, but the bottleneck is now that when people see the event, they want to click on it, people need to apply. So they need to fill in a form, they need to have a call and then they get accepted yes or no. So I would love to develop like a good affiliate marketing strategy for a non-digital product.

16:51What would you do for something like that? Is that possible? Yeah, I'll go because I have a mastermind and then maybe Neil can speak to it too. So what kind of people are in your mastermind? Small business owners, six, seven figure business owners. I don't think I'd start with affiliate because the reason I don't is because, and Neil can attest to this, but I keep the group small and I keep it very intimate. And the group is, we're talking seven, eight, nine figure founders, mostly eight, nine figures. And so if I have an affiliate that's promoting it, like if I'm an affiliate, I'm just going to try to collect cash no matter what.

17:22They're not incentivized to bring the highest quality people for you. You might have some good bloggers write about it or whatever, but we do the podcast. I might send some links and then people apply to it, but that's the main thing that we do. We don't do any paid ads for it. I might hit my email list up for it. So any owned audiences I have, so podcast, email, but it's not going to work when it comes to affiliates or paid, in my opinion. I think you're going to end up growing the most from referrals. Having a good mastermind creates more members. But the other strategy, and this is the easiest one, if you want way more people to join your mastermind, go join yourself, other masterminds and give talks at their events.

17:58And when you do that and people start talking to you, people who are in one mastermind tend to be open to being in multiple masterminds. That's the easiest way to scale out. Literally just go and talk at one mastermind event per month. If you do that, you'll fill up your mastermind really quickly. One thing I'll add too is there, we've been in other masterminds before. They all kind of cross-promote each other. So there's an angle there, but the speaking angle, I really like. Yes, I'm doing that at the moment. Thank you. Of course. I got the mic taken away from me earlier, but I'm Anushka. Hard to answer where I'm from.

18:31Raised here, Indian, live in the States. I own multiple DCC e-commerce brands, all doing seven, one of them eight figures in revenue. And I wanted to ask, what would you say are necessary digital assets to have a brand before you exit? Because obviously you can exit at any point, whenever you want. You can be married to it forever. But what would you say, apart from like omnichannel presence and et cetera, what would you say is your key things? Before you sell? Yes. No revenue concentration. So no one channel making up the majority of your revenue. I always hate that. You need to have a repeat purchases, people purchasing on average from you two, three times, the more, the better.

19:11You got to continually upsell your products and downsells to increase your average order value. I would say those are actually, oh, and then you got to build out an executive team that can continue to run it without you or else it's going to be really hard to sell the company for the next couple of years. Sorry, I didn't hear you. Or else you're going to have a job for the next couple of years. I was only going to say the executive team piece because we met someone that just exited for a couple hundred million and she's got a strong executive team, but she's on her now for the next three years or so.

19:35Gotcha. Because you don't want to make the rookie mistake of exiting too early or getting misvalued because you don't have the right assets if it was a fairly small thing. But thank you guys. You guys are welcome. All right. Thank you, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show. And visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. That's marketingschool.io. Until next time, class dismissed.

20:14We'll see you next time.