How We Adapted Our Marketing Strategies in 2025

0:00Do you want to discuss what we're doing in 2025 and how we're adapting our own marketing strategies? Yeah, sure. So go first. Okay, I'll go first. So for our marketing in 2025, actually, this is very recent. I started testing this yesterday. So I'm going to make separate Instagram YouTube channels. separate Instagram YouTube channels. And I'm using my HeyGen avatar with my 11 Labs voice. And then I'm combining it with Opus to make the B-roll. And I'm stretching out the B-roll really long, right? And I threw up a video on my Instagram yesterday. I think you might've seen it. And that video actually performed better than a lot of my other recent reels.

0:41And it actually got shares too. I'm like, oh my God, it's getting shares. And so I'm like, I'm just gonna go to town on this thing and just make it, because it's not hard for me to make it into a process. And making the script's not hard either. because I can use Gemini and I can just go to Neil's channel, for example, and pull all his videos or I can pull any marketing channels videos or any news channel. Make a script for 60 seconds and then make very specific to, I'll tell Gemini, hey, this is an AI avatar of Eric Su talking and I want you to make a script for 60 seconds and leave with a punchy hook and then it'll give me the script and then I'm going to make a bunch of these videos.

1:15So that's a starting point and we already decided Rowan Chung that got 92 ,000 Instagram followers and 8 million views in a week. And so that is one angle that we're testing. But what else are you doing that are adapting in 2025 that you are doing differently than 2024 specifically? So that's one. You must be doing quite a few more things that are different. Yeah, so a big one that I have a lot of my focus on right now is Carrot ABM, which is my SaaS. So it's scalable, personalized LinkedIn ads. and we are shipping a lot of different things in there right now. The way we're doing that, so when I talk to my team, I'm like, guys, a lot of the features we have, we're going to splinter a lot of them off and just give them away for free and they'll collect leads.

2:01And a lot of these things can stand on their own and that's going to be the primary biggest thing I think for this year. Cool. Any other strategies that you're adapting or changing? Well, you go and then I'll go with more. All right. So in 2024, we started the year posting a piece of content on our social profiles each and every single day. We ended up ramping it up to roughly two towards the end of 2024. So two pieces a day. We started getting really specific with our target demographic. And 2025, the way we're adapting our social media organically is we're going to still posted two pieces a day, one short form video, one graph or chart that's data rich, but we're going to add a third piece in another short.

2:48And we're going to also add in a long form video. And I would say the biggest difference that we're testing in our 2025 strategy is we're trying to go more top of funnel. I don't think it's going to actually drive revenue. He's going to take off his clothes guys. Yeah. I don't think I'm going to go that far, But in 2025, the way we see it is we're spending more money on advertising than we did in 2024. If I had to say roughly in 2024, from an ad perspective, like just let's say advertising on search and social, call it maybe$400 ,000 in the year. So not much at all. We're trying to spend, call it$3,$4 million at least at minimum this year.

3:31And our belief is if we create more organic social content that is top of funnel, when I say top of funnel, it's not going to be targeted towards a CMO, but it's going to be targeted towards marketers, entrepreneurs, people working in marketing departments. We believe that'll help increase our ad click-through rate and make our ad costs cheaper. So that's the arbitrage there on producing more social content. another thing that I mentioned is is we're running ads we're gonna we're running ads for our agency right now we're doing that last year but we're ramping up the spend so just straight ads straight ads like with a bald head team or like what is it we're doing that one for remarketing we're running just simple 30 second clips for you know youtube facebook or meta we're also going to start running ads for our software as well like people using the software and talk about how it's helping them and then run ads to people signing up.

4:29Because when we're looking at our ecosystem, a percentage of the people that use the software become discovery calls. And we have the number each month from each software. And our goal is to increase those numbers because that's additional revenue that we're not really baking into the software side. But that allows it to pay for more of the cost and makes advertising for us cheaper because there's more revenue that we can add on to a potential customer. The other big thing that we're doing too is I started a podcast just interviewing CMOs of large corporations. One, it allows us to learn more.

5:00Two, it gets our brand out there with our ideal customer. And these are ideally CMOs of global companies. So that way, hopefully in the future, we get included in more RFPs. We think that'll have a big impact three, four years from now, but not really in the next 12 months. What else are we doing? I took over the blog. I'm creating more short form content than longer form articles. I'm deleting a lot of the content. I'm going to, you know, put things in a more organized fashion so people can more easily find the content, but more so get people answers to their questions when they're researching our content quicker.

5:37I'm trying to run tests to see if I can remove the exit pop-up because it drives a good amount of revenue. I just hate having an exit pop-up, even though it's upon exit. You? Hey, you've had an exit pop-up? for decades. Yeah, but our team's made it aggressive. You've been X at Pop for weeks since you were born. I know. But my team's made it aggressive where it doesn't just cookie you and only show it to you once. They're showing it to me like three, four times. Exactly. And they're like, look at the revenue difference. And they are showing positive numbers that are great from it. But there's a certain point where it's just ruining my experience and I don't want to go to my own website.

6:08I'm like, this is just bad. I'm like, we've got to remove this. What else would I say that we're actually doing? We're using HeyGenMore to translate and transcribe all of our videos into other languages and post them on the social web. And then we're going to build up social channels and all the other major languages like LinkedIn and channels like that. We haven't done a ton of that yet, but we are in the process of working on that. And I think some of that stuff will roll out over the next two, three months. And yeah, I also don't think we need as big of a marketing team. We can be efficient with the people we have without having to hire tons more and still be able to spend more and get more done.

6:50Cool. And so to finish off on my end, what's interesting is with the calls we do for Carrot, which are SaaS discovery calls, separately, my single grain sales team reaches out to all the leads and say, hey, thanks for your interest in Carrot. By the way, this is the parent company, single grain. And, um, you know, here's what we do. Right. And then here's like some three bullet points that actually has booked. It's booked. It's booked a couple of meetings and these are all, let's just call them SQLs. Um, and so that's been, that's been interesting. And, um, similar to you, I'm cracking down on the marketing team and my internal brand team as well.

7:29I'm just way more involved. It sounds like you are too. Um, so the little thing, like to me, I don't know about you, but I just been sitting on the sidelines and expecting people to kind of figure it out. Now I'm just like, no, no, no, just this, this, and this. By the way, oh, guys, you know you can just go to take your export from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and also your Ahrefs, and then just combine them all. And then you have a nice big spreadsheet, and you know what to optimize, right? So I'm just pointing in the right direction now and nudging them a little more. I actually made, because Neil's so good at checking.

8:00Neil's memory is pretty good. He was just checking and start calling people, right? I have bad memory. So I made a sauna board called Delegated by Eric. and it has so much stuff now and I just keep sending, and sometimes when I'm no due dates, I'm just throwing random due dates on there and I'm constantly checking in and I have recurring tasks too. So even if I complete it this week, it pops up again next week, right? But on the LinkedIn side, we're going to move forward with a guide that works with some of the biggest LinkedIn creators. So I'll let you know how that test goes because you're doing a test right now as well.

8:29That one's exciting to me. And then similar to you, the way we're doing ads is you and I both create a lot of content. You and I have different offers as well. So it makes sense to have 14 or even 20 different touch points where we're just retargeting people with all these things, right? If they see one thing, we retarget them with a bunch of other things. One could be a software offer. The other one could be one of the other features. The other thing could be, oh, here's a podcast episode over here. So it sounds like you're doing something similar. We're trying to be more omnipresent. And this, to me, it's not exactly search, but it is everywhere optimization.

9:02Yeah. And I would say the last thing that I'm doing, you're doing something similar on the conference and we're both cutting back on in-person events. I don't know if you're doing this one, but we've been pitching conference organizers who hit me up to speak to have me dial in virtually through Zoom or whatever it's called. And then I speak. We've been booking probably one paid virtual engagement a week. it's not as high of a success ratio as in person and the money's not as good but we look at it as you're getting paid to promote your brand and your business so why not I'll say sponsorship dollars are back we talked about the Super Bowl deal it's interesting because in D2C when I talk to my team D2C influencers are going a little downwards and I've listened to a couple podcasts where a lot of these guys are D2C marketers but the interesting thing is because B2B marketing lags behind D2C marketing, well, B2B influencer stuff is kind of on the upward trend now because it lags behind.

10:06That was good. See, we should do more of those. I'm sure people like that one. Here, I got one for you. So last weekend, I was bored. It was Saturday. I started using these more AI code editors. So I've talked about V0, Replit, Cursor. These are all great. You can build a prototype pretty quickly. So I would build the prototype but I wanted to deploy it. But deploying it is actually really hard. And I was like, but I'm like 80 % there. I should learn the rest. And so then I started workshopping this sort of perplexity. I was like, I have all this other stuff I'm doing and then I'm like, also here's who I am because I can Google who I am.

10:42I'm like, here's who I am. And then it's like, yeah. Basically it's like, stop being stupid. It's like, just focus on the strategic vision and focus on creating content. That's where your leverage points are. And if you could prototype the thing, great. That's all you need to do. but marketers, look, if you don't have resources right now, sure, you should learn how to deploy it but if you're a little further along like Neil and I are a little older, you probably shouldn't learn how to deploy it. You should just learn how to prototype it really quickly and then move on. Dude, a lot of these tools work so well when it comes to just building products or even making engineers more efficient.

11:15We found with AI, our engineers are moving faster than ever but we actually have a snag on the product end. because product people are planning it out the visuals, the flows and all that the engineers are actually fast in their product people at this point so we're revamping our product team and fixing a lot of things there to get them to be able to keep up with the engineers who are just so much more productive I saw a really good post today it was exactly relevant to this I'll send it to you afterwards it's not just product managers, it's AI product managers because now it's basically the argument with the post is you only need AI product managers that are really good and really fast, right?

11:55Because they're basically saying you're not going to need that many product managers in the future. You just need some super powered ones. And this is another example of AI efficiencies. I'll give you one. Have you heard of this one site, Mobbin? No. So Mobbin is the best website for you to get unlimited UI UX designs from any site. So you can go to like, okay, click on Basecamp or whatever, or click on like Asana. It will show you all the screens, mobile and desktop too, for everything. And so you could take the screenshots, dump it into like a V0 or whatever and have it finish it off. So there, value.

12:29Now I'm going to check it out. Yeah. M-O-B-B-I-N, guys. M-O-B-B-I-N dot com? Com, dot com. Yeah. But literally, I don't know how they do this, but it's full screens, the entire flow of every app. Wow. Yeah. I don't know how they do it either. Yeah. But I'm going to check it out. Why not? Can you pay for it? And then I'll use your account. Eric and I are good friends. So yeah. All right. You pick one. Let's talk about how to grow a podcast in 2025. Cause we all both know podcasting is booming. And not enough people are starting a podcast, but I think the elections change our perspective on podcasts, especially from a marketing aspect.

13:12And if you start a podcast, but you don't grow it or promote it, you're kind of screwed. Yeah. So if I were starting, let's, let's approach it from maybe one angle is we're starting from scratch. The other angle is maybe a little further along. Okay. So if I were starting a podcast from scratch today, I would make sure. And when I first started leveling up podcasts, 12, 13 years ago, I made sure that I recorded the first five or six episodes. And because I was more focused on marketing, I got people that had audiences at the time. So my very first guest was Pat Flynn. the second one was Ran Fishkin and these guys were all bloggers right and then I had Noah Kagan was my third one so I had some good marketing speakers so if you're nobody in the beginning if you can somehow convince these people to do a podcast I was lucky enough to do so and then leverage their audiences and if you can't do that what I would do as well is I would try to reach out to a couple of let me think about this how did I promote it in the beginning You would ask them to share it on their social web?

14:19No, I cheated in the beginning. I used Product Hunt. So you just put it on in Product Hunt? Because I think they have a podcast section, right? They used to. So you know what happened? Back then when it was called Growth Everywhere and Marketing School, we shared every single episode to Product Hunt and every day we were number one and number two because we gamed it, right? And then they actually did a podcast, Product Hunt did a podcast where they were talking about the top podcasts. Every day was Growth Everywhere and Marketing School, every day. And so we actually got a lot of downloads that way.

14:44But my point is, if you can leverage other people's audiences and hopefully get them to promote it as well, that was my strategy in the beginning. And I wouldn't say it worked like gangbusters. It took still three years to get any type of traction. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind-the-scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally, from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need.

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16:59That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. You can also, whether you're starting off or you're established, you can run ads to your podcast and ask people to save or subscribe to your podcast. When you look at Apple specifically, they're looking at those numbers to determine the rank and they're looking at the growth rate of those numbers. So it's a great way to pop up really high in the chart. And what you'll find is that'll start causing you to get way more organic downloads and listens. It's a great hack. Eric and I have tried this. Many other people have done it.

17:30It works well. You know what else works? if you buy ads on other popular podcasts, it works really well. And we've done partnerships with like My First Million, for example. And you used to be able to measure this using, I forgot what was, Chartable, but they shut Chartable down. Unfortunately, Spotify bought it and shut it down. You can do those types of podcasts ad trades. So you can do that for free. Or you can do what Jordan Harbinger used. I think he still does this, but he would allocate about a million dollars a year just to sponsor other podcasts to help grow his podcast. And so it makes a lot of sense because people are already natively listening to something.

18:07And I think podcasts are a great way of transferring trust, right? Because those of you that have been longtime listeners and some of you say you listen to every episode, thank you for doing that. If we tend to recommend something, it's usually gonna have more weight than like some random ad, so. Or you can do a collab. So what Eric and I have done is we'll do a podcast with Eric and I and HubSpot. And HubSpot will push it out. We'll push it out the same exact episodes. So you're just recording one, but it's going on multiple channels. Within that episode, you're mentioning your podcast brand and theirs.

18:38You both will start getting more downloads and listens and followers from that. Honestly, we should do more of that. We should do more of that. It works really well. We do that quite a few times in 2024, maybe like four or five times. Yep. But I think we should do them like once a week. All of them are good. And it's also cheating too, because yeah, and maybe that's a good idea. It's cheating because it also gives you another piece of long form content that you can use. Yeah. Yeah. So you know what you should do? You should actually, you know, it's funny guys because Neil had this home that he just finished building and he had this nice home setup and it looked, everything looked good for the very first time, right?

19:08And then Neil moves away like very quickly and then his podcast setup is like trash again. So he's just like sitting on random couches but it was perfect. There's like all this stuff. He had all this memorabilia and everything. Dude, you even want to know how expensive that room was. How expensive? I don't know. My guess is I probably spent 100 to 200 grand on it. Wow. And then, yeah, just like that. With the soundproofing and everything. Yeah. It was a perfect thing. The designers and construction people. Yep. It was a big waste of money. But you're going to build a new one. So it's okay. The new one should be way nicer.

19:37Yeah. Yeah. Sadly. Okay. So let's talk about what, I mean, why should people start a podcast in 2025? So I think the first thing is because of the elections, podcasts have gotten even more popular and I think they're a lot more acceptable. And so in my opinion, I'll start it off first. When you start a podcast, you build a lot of trust with people. I listen to a lot of the same things and I feel like, I forgot what it is when you have a one-way relationship, but I feel like I know a lot of these people now. And when people walk up to you at conferences or if they walk up to me, they talk to me as if they know me and I'm sure they do the same thing to you.

20:12Yeah, another reason you should start a podcast is people are moving away from mainstream media. It's not just about the factor of some people trust the press, some people don't. I'm not really talking about that issue. If you look at Netflix, Hulu, Disney +, Amazon Prime, they've taken viewership away from people who are cord cutters and who don't want to watch traditional channels. So a lot of attention has shifted away. And if you can create a podcast, what's beautiful about it is, and this is why a lot of people like them, you can go in depth in a podcast where you can't on a mainstream television channel.

20:49Like Mark Zuckerberg going on the Joe Rogan podcast, he can talk for more than an hour specifically about Apple or Facebook or whatever he wants and go super in depth. For him to say, hey, CNBC, I want an hour of your time and we're going to just do an episode just on us. That's really tough. It's much easier to do it on something like the Joe Rogan podcast. By the way, If you do a five-minute segment or even a 20-minute segment or even an hour, you can't really go in-depth with somebody. But if you go two, three hours, you actually really get to know someone and you get to know if you like them or if you don't.

21:24And that's why it actually worked out well during these elections. It is, but it's hard to go two, three hours in-depth on a podcast episode. I mean, at a certain point, I think, so this is interesting because when I did the podcast with Seth Godin, I'm like, so how long do you usually go? He's like, you know, one hour is good. He's like, 55 minutes to be exact. I was like, okay, why 55 minutes? He's like, because after that, it just starts to become like a bunch of fluff, right? And so, but here's what I'll argue. I'll argue against that and say, in that 55 minutes, you're used to getting all your main talking points out.

21:54I do find a sweet spot is probably around two hours. I think you start to go beyond two hours, it starts to get like a little, a little fluffy. Did you do a two hour podcast with Ahrefs? Yes. How'd that go? It went well, but the difference between Ahrefs or someone else asking me two hours is because I've done a lot of podcast interviews. He did a lot of research to talk about subjects that most people have never asked me about. So it was fun for me. That was a good episode. The second thing that he did was he knew how to keep, Tim did a really good job as a host. you know i recently did a podcast episode doing my own podcast just interviewing cmos i don't have a ton of experience interviewing others it is a skill to learn and i'm not great at it well on the flip side i'm used to being interviewed all the time and it's easy for me right but being the one that asks questions i'm just not actually harder you realize that right yes i'm just not used to it and it feels awkward i'm like i gotta ask people questions yeah and And then I'm trying to chime in and create a conversation.

23:00I'm just not used to asking a question and stop talking and then going a little bit back and forth and trying to pry. I'm used to participating in the conversation, being the one who interviews. Why don't you just do that? I feel like it's fine. Like, okay, when you call, when you like you call and then we talk on the phone, sometimes it'll go for an hour. Sometimes it'll go 45 minutes or whatever, but it's a back and forth conversation. I think you just be you and ask the typical questions you would ask in a business, in a business conversation. it's a little bit different don't get me wrong i do that but when i'm talking to you we know each other or when i'm talking to someone else and it's random and i'm asking some questions yeah i can get a lot of that out in 5 10 15 minutes but when you're trying to stretch it to 40 minutes an hour two hours it's tough to have those general business conversations because cmos of big corporations that are publicly traded do not want to talk about a lot of the things uh that i would be asking.

23:52You know what I do, right? So I do a ton of research and I'll have like a bunch of questions, but they're all backups. So the way I start it, like hopefully it flows. If it doesn't flow, I start falling back to my backups. And then usually I don't like, I usually don't even get to like 20 % of my questions. I have that as well. My team helps me with the backup questions, but when you're interviewing a CMO of a publicly traded corporation, they usually want the questions ahead of time and they start crossing off all the stuff they cannot talk about or refuse to talk about. That's the tough part.

24:21And I'm only trying to interview CMOs. That's hard. Trade-offs. Like if I'm interviewing you, or someone who's interviewing me, or Alex Ramosi, or Noah Kane, yeah, that's whatever. Yeah, that's tough. Also, if you're a CMO, CMOs are usually not that prepped to do interviews either, so they also don't want to screw over the company. Second thing, they don't want to look bad. So you actually have to dance around it. That's a good point. Especially when it's a publicly traded company, and no joke, every time I've done one of these, I'm required to send all the questions in advance. We don't volunteer it.

24:51They all ask for it. They want to vet the questions beforehand. And it's usually their assistant that requests it and we have to send it. That's, hey, wait, are you recording online? Live? Yeah. Okay. Okay. We're not streaming it though. We're just recording it and then we push it out at a later date. So anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe and go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to join 50 plus other agency owners to grow your agency faster.