Gamestop's Roaring Kitty play backfires, Marketing leaders in dialogue at AI summit in New York: ‘This is 2001 all over again’, Eight Sleep's amazing SEO & brand strategy (22M monthly searches)

0:00The topic that you and I both talked about last week on our episode of Marketing School that we should probably talk about this week is all the GameStop action. yeah i mean we can follow up on that it's uh i mean it's gone up and down up and down and um you want to go first you want to set the tone on this real quick yeah so what's his uh handle roaring kitty or something like that roaring kitty i think it's like kirk collins or something so roaring kitty ended up posting how he's going to go live and do a webinar on friday it's past that day keith gill keith gill so he posted how he's going to do a live webinar and after hours i think the stock spiked to like 60 bucks all right and then gamestop announced this is the curveball they announced they're gonna release more shares and uh get some cash because why wouldn't they um and they also put a disclaimer out there talking about the value of the shares and not necessarily being uh you know valued correctly based on the company financials And, you know, I think they were just protecting themselves from any legal issues.

1:12But, yeah, all of a sudden it caused GameStop to erase the$60 and go back to what it was pre-open. And then I think it went down all the way, what, 20%, 30 %? Or was it 40 %? Let's look at it. Here. Oh, you're not as fast because you're on your iPad, huh? So five days. So it shot up to$61. And just for context, on June 5th, it was at$26. so then it shot up to$61 and then now Friday it's down to$27 so the same thing so it's gone up a little bit from$20 to$27 that's not bad but it's no$60 and this Roaring Kitty guy is still going to make a killing he's just not going to make as much compared to if it was$60 he didn't do it I think the lesson with this one is he built an audience off the Reddit mania and then everyone started to follow him and he kind of held on to it.

2:07And then the moment he just posted a meme of him like, hey, that meme actually means we're about to fight the final boss. When the gamer locks in like that, the gamer becomes really focused, right? And you see when little kids focus more, that's what was happening, right? It's like, this is the final boss. And so I think we're going to see more of this in the next couple of years because I don't know that the SEC knows what to do with this yet. Yeah, I don't know if it's illegal or not. I'm not a lawyer. I saw Morgan Stanley, which owns E-Trade, was debating whether or not to stop Roaring Kitty from trading on their platform anymore.

2:47And it was just legal and ethical reasons and they haven't figured out what they wanted to end up doing. but yeah it's a big gray area because what's the difference from roaring kitty talking about a stock and saying by the way i own it and i'm not giving investment advice and jim kramer on cnbc saying like oh check out the stock it's amazing bye bye bye bye bye right well he so the difference is the difference is it was so subtle because he built the audience and like you remember your friend tim sykes right like he built his portfolio and then everyone started following and he's like, oh my God, this guy's going to help us make money, right?

3:21And then he's just like, hey, I'm going to go all in on GameStop. It worked and he disappeared and then he came back, but he had built up so much of trust with his audience already. The moment he posted a meme, it's just like, oh crap, here we go again, right? So I think that's a really unique thing that he could do where he didn't say necessarily buy more GameStop. Yeah, he didn't explicitly say you should buy GameStop. What's funny is Tim Sykes says, hey, buy this stock, sell this stock, or this is what I'm doing. And he hasn't gotten any trouble. And I know they have amazing lawyers because we share one of the law firms that we both work with.

3:58And I know that legally, during certain times, he can't just go in and out. He has to give like a specific time window before he can do a transaction. So that way he's in the clear. I don't know exactly what the rules were but there's a way to do it where you don't get in trouble and i know you know tim hasn't had any issues from my understanding and he is really careful because we were both in newport beach years and years ago i think like 12 13 years ago years no we were uh he rented like a a house and we were just chilling there for the weekend and he was just like he's like oh check out this stock and he was telling me and you know he was like oh i can't actually do anything i need to give it time because of some alert that I just pushed out for legal reasons.

4:44And then he showed me he didn't make as much as he could because he was following whatever time rules that he needed to, but he still made money from it. All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing six figures, seven figures, eight figures, even nine figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads. We share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions. their most burning questions personally, professionally.

5:13We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment. So you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. So there was quite a few marketing leaders that met in New York, and they had a whole conversation around whether or not AI should be used as a primary creative tool in the ad industry. You know, of course, they're not going to be able to decide for people whether AI should be used or not.

5:48But nonetheless, what we were seeing is people are already worried about it. And they have a lot of different points from whether, you know, hey, are you plagiarizing someone else's work? Is it truly creative? Is the quality going to be high? I think some of it is fear from the ad industry. And I also think that companies should do whatever they want. And if it produces a better ROI, use more of it. If it doesn't, then don't. You know, it's like the marketing leaders met in New York. It's like, who gives a crap? It's like, are they the world's richest people? Do they have a lot of influence where they can, they could, they could just actually make decisions top down that affect everyone?

6:29Not really, right? And so I think more than anything, what you're saying, Neil, is there is fear because most people, I'd say the majority of people, are generally resistant to change. You look at how long the internet took to take effect. The internet's been around for 35-ish years or so, like the commercial internet. And when you look at new technologies, it's like, oh, it's going to be a fad. It's going to be a fad. Granted, a lot of things do tend to be fads. But even crypto, that's going to take another probably 10, 20, 30 years to really play out. And so the stuff with AI, I don't think that try to fight against it, which is what we've been saying on this podcast is going to be helpful.

7:10You're better off just embracing it. Dude, so I totally agree. I don't think there's a point in fighting it. I think you should embrace it, and you should use it to become more efficient. Dude, you and I have been using it for I don't know how long, but year plus. and we found instances where it helps us and instances where it hurts us. Like I haven't figured out how to produce AI fully written content and it'd just be amazing 100 % of the time or even 80 % or 90 % of the time. I'm assuming you're in a similar boat. Yeah, you know, I watched a clip with MrBeast and then someone asked him how he uses AI with his stuff right now.

7:47So he plugged his own software, which is not really AI. But he says that the way he uses it right now uses the AI to find certain moments to clip, right? So if I, for example, in this podcast, we're recording for 90 minutes or so, or 75, whatever it is, but I might say Neil a couple of times. He'll find all the instances where I said Neil, and then you can easily clip those moments. And then it seems like he does use chat GPT quite a bit to come up with different ideas. I think you and I could probably use it better for packaging, because I think both you and I are not the greatest when it comes to packaging our YouTube thumbnails and our headlines, right?

8:17Because you should have a bunch of different ones. But in general, too, because Neil and I both have an SEO background, we tend to i think we go to what we understand which is blogging quite a bit um it hasn't quite beaten the human when it comes to blogging but even with social we both post a lot on social i haven't seen ai create amazing social content yet that just gets i look at it as the same i look at blogging and social as the same it's like writing good shit you know yeah writing or creating visuals it's just not there the visuals may be appealing they're just not getting engagement and at the end of the day if you create content for social and you can't get engagement then And it kind of doesn't matter.

8:53All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about leveling up founders. This is an event slash mastermind for people doing seven, eight, nine figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple of years now. We've had amazing speakers. But more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people. And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are, even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that.

9:25We're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com slash founders. Again, it's levelingup.com slash founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balki, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. Levelingup.com slash founders to learn more. and we'll see you inside. Speaking of engagement, you know what's interesting to me? So the, remember I talked about Eight Sleep a couple of weeks ago.

9:56Guess how many brand searches they get in the United States per month? Eight Sleep? Let me guess, 100 ,000? 22 million. Per month? Per month, per month. Here, so check this out. So I did a little, the cool thing is we're recording remotely. So Neil and I can both do screen shares here. So I did a little post here and here's the right way to measure SEO, right? and Ahrefs have some really cool competitor graphs. I don't know if you know this, Neil, but you can look, Eight Sleep I'm doing in the blue over here and then Amerisleep is in orange and then Sleep Foundation and then Casper and Sleep Doctor.

10:28So these are all sleep websites that get a lot of traffic. You can see, and those of you that are trying to prove out the value of SEO, by the way, when you're looking at your clients, you can just look at Eight Sleep's traffic value. It's$5.5 million per month. The traffic value means that they would be paying Google for that organic traffic, $5.5 million a month. So that's the value of the organic traffic, right? Now, in second place, you see Casper at 870K per month. And Casper was public. I don't know if they took it private again. Sleep Foundation is$687 ,000 per month, right? And you can see over time, the blue line just keeps shooting up.

11:02And then one other thing I want to show you over here is, look, just in the United States, Eight Sleep is driving 15 million visitors per month. And Sleep Foundation is 2 million. And I was like, what is driving all their traffic? Because they're not, I don't think they're the strongest at SEO. Look at this, their share of voice when it comes to their share of traffic value, right? 75 % versus everybody else. And so my point of showing you this is that the way, one, the way to prove SEO is to show, okay, can you tie to dollar values, right? But going back to Eight Sleep, the reason that they're doing so well is because they're going hardcore with branding.

11:37You look at all the sponsorships that they do. The Formula One, they do all the big podcasts out there. Huberman, you hear them on Tim Ferriss Podcast. You hear every single podcast out there, and that's why their brand is just everywhere. It's ubiquitous. Everywhere I say it, it's like you hear it. It's like, oh, do you have an eight sleep? Do you have an eight sleep? Do you have an eight sleep? It's just their brand has gotten so strong. Yeah, and by the way, are your investors in eight sleep, no? Yeah. Good for you. The big thing that I've seen years and years ago, and they're pretty much leveraging this trend, call it like eight or nine years ago, maybe a little bit longer than that.

12:10I noticed a trend where if you get a ton of brand queries, your rankings for everything shoot up. And it still is true today. Google loves brands. They know brands are less likely to put in fake news, bad information, whatever you want to end up calling it, right? And what we ended up seeing is if you can end up building a brand, and the brand doesn't have to be your exact domain name. It can be like neilpatel.com slash ubersuggest. everyone typing in Ubersuggest, and then mainly clicking through on the Neil Patel result. That also helps with brand queries, even if it's not the exact name of your domain name.

12:46They're able to just look at how many people are typing in a keyword and what's a click-through rate on it. And if it's extremely high, it helps a lot of your other terms just rank higher from everything we've tested. You know, I've always had a sneaking suspicion because the name of the company, my ad agency is Single Grain. And a lot of people search for Single Grain Malt Whiskey. and so I don't know if there's a correlation there but it always is there's always a good amount of brand searches for the keyword single grain um the other thing that's worth calling out which we've said a couple times already is the when you think about Mr.

13:18Beast when he tells you to go watch a video he never links to it directly on Twitter he never links to it directly on YouTube because he wants you to search for it in YouTube and he wants to I don't know if he intended to do this but it helps with his brand at the end of the day and you and I both know people that have tested this, they've run different types of campaigns where it's like, oh, you know, like Radfish Kid, SparkToro case study or whatever, right? When he did the reveal on the Google leaks, and that really helped SparkToro. And they got, they got, it seems like they got a bump in traffic at least for that week.

13:46Yeah. And it helps with the rankings for all the other terms that SparkToro is ranking for, right? So you'll find the same thing. And Rand did a study a long, long time ago when he was at Moz where he had everyone type in like best stakes or a keyword like that and uh he told everyone click on like the second result or the third result and it ended up spiking up really quickly he also did an experiment where they would click on like the first result quickly click the back button and then click a few down but uh by the way he also did it with like fake keywords too like gibberish i didn't know that he did with fake keywords but yeah it just shows that google has been using these signals from click-through rates to brand queries and things like that for a very long time they have a huge impact on seo all right everyone So that's it for today.

14:31Speaking of which, the Agency Accelerator, or sorry, Agency Owners Association, I should say, Neil and I will both be doing a session this week. And so we do these group coaching calls every now and then. So that's happening. You can learn more about this group, marketingschool.io slash agency. Please don't forget to rate, rate, rate, and subscribe. It helps this podcast grow. And we will catch you later.

14:59Thank you.