Fortnite x Lego partnership pays off big for Lego, How to get an ultimate recruiting list of the best people, and AI is being over marketed: GoDaddy helps entrepreneurs thrive with new AI-powered digital marketing tools

0:00So Fortnite, I don't know if you know this, but LEGO partnered up with Fortnite and it shows that LEGO is finding new success by going digital. Lego saw its first half operating profit source 26%, hitting a new record of more than$1.2 billion, thanks in large part to a popular partnership with Fortnite Maker Epic Games. Since its release in December, Lego Fortnite has reached 83 million people, according to CEO Niels Christensen. Despite a downturn in the wider toy market, Lego is seeing strong demand in North America. The company added, Toymaker is set to replace the oil and all of its bricks with recycled plastic by 2032, shift that may cost 70 % more.

0:34So it just goes to show you again, um, relevant collaborations go a long way. And, um, as long as it's tasteful and it's done in a good way, it, it might work out. And I think 26 % is insane. So 26 % is really insane. So what did they do? Fortnite has a Lego version on their game or they created a whole new game that is a Fortnite Lego game. Yeah. So I'm, I'm staring at this right now. Um, so I think usually what happens is when they do these collaborations, they make, um, they make these skins, right. And you know, in Fortnite, you can have different characters, like different skins. Um, I haven't looked into it exactly, but that has to be the reason, right.

1:15Um, because they do a lot of collaborations with like, uh, movies and things like that. So, um, I think that's what it is. And then that probably got more people to buy Legos. Yep. Yeah, no, I, I, it's a great idea. You know, why not partner and marketing? Like, I'm just like thinking about skins back when I I used to play first person shooter. So if you're using a certain character all the time and you see it at the toy store, yeah, you're going to want it. You're going to want it as like an action figure that you can place in front of your computer. It makes a lot of sense, but go ahead. In marketing, a lot of people think like, Oh, SEO is the best channel or paid advertising is the best channel.

1:52There's no one best channel. And there's a lot of boring, ugly channels that no one talks about that produce a lot of revenue like partnerships. If you produce web design and I produce your, Or if you sell web design and I sell SEO, we can make a great pair in which I can sell everyone design services and you can sell them SEO services. Or if you do SEO and I do paid advertising, I can sell all my customers your services and you can sell them my services and we can cross sell. Partnerships can work extremely well. You just have to find someone who is a similar size, has similar types of clients and figure out how to partner together to cross sell.

2:31because it's unlikely that you're going to have the Lego Fortnite luck. The reason it works so well for Legos is they're a really massive brand. And most people don't know this, but Lego toys is one of the best investments. If you look over time, the return has been quite amazing. I read an article on that somewhere around the web, but I never knew that there was a ROI investing in Lego toy sets and just holding them for a while. I mean, the other angle with partnerships is you can look at it as a precursor to M &A. So let's say you're starting out. Maybe you're not that big right now, but you start partnering up with other agencies.

3:02You guys grow. They grow as well. You learn how they work. You learn how their founders are, how their team is. And eventually it might make sense for you guys to partner up. Maybe there's an equity swap component or you might potentially just buy them out, right? Or you can buy like a minority stake in the company. But it gives you a chance to do due diligence a little bit versus like doing it fresh. So you get to build up this network of agencies versus having to... And I'm not saying you should not have a process where you just source a bunch of deals. But this is one way of you kind of getting ahead of it.

3:34I think that's a way to look at it as well. And I think, you know, Neil, you do partnerships with other companies. You know, we do partnerships with like, you know, different SaaS tools or marketing tools. I'm probably sure we've done it with both companies. And then other collaborations would be like, you know, you and I speaking at the HubSpot conference, right? Or like, you know, working with Microsoft sponsoring one of my events or whatever. Like there's so many collaboration is such a partnership, such a broad word. Ultimately what it comes down to is, can you help each other out? Yep. It's that simple.

4:04And yeah, you're right. A lot of the M &A deals I know of companies who sold, sold because they were partnering with someone first and then both parties were like, oh, this is working out really well. Let's just buy you. eBay, PayPal, great example of this. eBay is worth less than PayPal now. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Good for PayPal or I mean, good for eBay. Smart for the founders. 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.

4:40So 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 marketing school dot IELTS slash agency.

5:09This 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, marketing school dot IELTS slash agency and we'll see you inside. So Neil, you want to see something? I'm going to show you a way because you, you're always looking for great people. I'm always looking for great people. And I asked a friend to help me out. And this post, I'm going to share it on my screen over here. This post over here. Can you see this? okay so this is from gaitano gaitano gynardi right good friend and he's like look he leads off with this linkedin post there aren't many people in sear respect anymore too many fakers want to be gurus and linkedin charlatans but here are 30 people i respect you should follow them so it's like michael king and let's all these people right you know blah blah bernard hoeing kevin and dick about tim solo all these people right um and what happens is this post gets 476 likes 188 comments and 10 reposts and what happens is you look at this list over here people start tagging other people.

6:08Right. And so what most people don't know about this post is I messaged Gaetano on the side. I was like, Hey, like we're looking for great SEOs. Um, he's like, I was like, do you know anyone? He's like, Hey, I got you. So he throws this post up and this is now a post where I'm like, Oh, okay. Well, if we need good SEOs, we're just going to look at this post, but you can do the same for paid. You can do the same for analytics. You can do this for any role. In fact, you and I can do this. Get what I mean? Yeah. It becomes like a big thing where people, and people get mad too. Someone got mad because they didn't, uh, someone didn't tag, uh, or Gaetano didn't tag Neil Patel.

6:41Um, he's like, you should tag Neil Patel, blah, blah, blah. But, um, anyway, it causes people to fight each other a little bit in the comments too. But that's true. Smart one. I never saw that post, but two, I look at content like that. If you can use that for recruiting, that's an amazing way to generate more and more, um, you know, like quality people. And that's the key way to grow a company. Everyone's like, oh, you got to be really good at marketing. Well, to be really good at marketing is you just have to hire people who are good at marketing, good at building amazing products and services, great at sales, great at customer service.

7:18You need a whole organization with amazing leaders. Not necessarily every employee needs to be amazing, but at least amazing people at the top. And it'll trickle down and then the leaders can bring up the B players and the C players. 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.

7:48So 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. 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 wanna learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside.

8:17Let's end with this one over here. So you have one over here on how AI is being over-marketed. So it says GoDaddy helps entrepreneurs thrive with new AI-powered digital marketing tools. Yeah, let's just be honest. these tools aren't making someone rank higher due to their paid ads that much better, the tools like GoDaddy's releasing. And I'm not trying to pick on GoDaddy, but a lot of people are guilty of this. They're trying to ride the stock market high or the valuation high, and everything they do now has AI in it. It's just like Facebook. Look at our new AI. Well, try performing a search on Facebook using their AI.

8:54It's not that great. I don't care if they have it or not. And most people don't use Facebook for anything AI related. We go to check out people's pictures and videos, like or comment and share and scroll on to the next thing. And the stuff that does it best is just pure entertainment and again, has nothing to do with AI. I'm not saying corporations can't use AI to make their product or offering better. But too many people are just hyping up AI like, oh, look at this new AI feature. We're amazing. Everyone should use it now. It does wonders for you. No, it doesn't. It's not going to really move the needle.

9:29Most people sign up for GoDaddy. If they use the AI tools, the marketing is still going to be crap and they're not going to generate that much revenue. And I'm not trying to pick on GoDaddy. This has nothing to do with GoDaddy. Most people who own a domain name aren't going to do well. Most businesses fail. There's only so many spots on page one of Google. There's only so little money that most new entrepreneurs have to spend on paid ads. It's just hard to succeed. And everyone's talking about how, oh, we're releasing this. It's going to change the world. No, it's not going to change the world.

9:58They're just putting a beautiful wrapper on something that's ugly and it's still ugly. You know, it's like saying there's poop and saying it's gold poop. So now that people should wear it as a earring. No, it still smells and it's poop. They call that a polishing a turd, Neil. But I think we talked about this a while back to it. It's like if you, you know, in the very beginning, everyone's using the keyword AI. Everyone's looking into it. But now it's been like it's 2022 is when ChatGPT came out, right? It's been two years now, right? So it's time to come off the trend. Like, you know, for my event, you know, one of the people in the group was like, we should just make all this topics about AI.

10:36I was like, no, it's becoming more played out now. Just talk about regular things that people care about because, you know, AI will be AI just like the Internet. Nobody says, oh, I'm going to go log on to the Internet today, right? Just like nobody in the future is going to say, I'm going to go use AI today, right? It's not how it works. you know even at like this investor talk i'm at there's not many people talking about ai in fact my talk has some ai in it but um i try to emphasize what we're doing from a business standpoint instead of talking about oh look at all these features because that's not what it's about it's like what kind of outcomes are you delivering people are more interested in that at the end of the day the black friday cyber monday weekend is where systems get stress tested traffic surges inventory moves fast and every second counts you need a platform built for the moment that's shopify the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all U.S.

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11:53Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. And people are also getting carried away on the other end too, in which they're saying, man this ai is really off it's so terrible like people are complaining that chat gpt doesn't know how many r's are in strawberry and there's so many articles around that on the web who cares that it doesn't know that there's three r's in strawberry instead of two or who cares that chat gpt can't spell honda and ascii that well like it can still do so many amazing things for you it's better to have it in your life than not have it most things aren't perfect just deal with what they are and use them for what they are and don't try to overhype them.

12:41And if you do, it may work in the short run, but in the long run, it can bite you in the butt. Have you heard of a cursor AI? No. Okay. So I have my developers using it, right? And they're like, dude, we just doubled our speed. So what cursor does is it basically auto-completes the code that you're writing. And he's like, yeah. So one of the developers was like, what used to take me five hours is now taking me 2.5 hours or so. And this is just the very beginning. So everyone on Twitter is talking about how cursor plus uh um clots on it um or you can use chat gpt for it but it's it's helping increase the the coding um efficiency by quite a bit so um but like you know we're not just saying oh we're looking less we're using ai it's like no we're just using cursor over here it's just like any sas product oh yeah we're just using this product over here for that so we're optimistic about this stuff for the long term but i think in the short term it's been overhyped and this was probably this will probably be the last time we'll talk about this um unless it gets more overhyped So that is it for today.

13:36Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe and visit marketing school.io slash agency to apply for the agency owners association. So we're changing it to application only now. And if you're qualified, we'll give you a call and yeah, we will go from there. We will see you guys tomorrow.