My favorite marketing hack to get big customers, Social media is becoming a democracy, How Sam Sulek gets millions of views & more

0:00Today, we're going to be talking about my favorite marketing hack to get big customers. so you and i have you've actually done this more than me um one of my friends did this to actually sell a company and i think it's a great way to generate big customers or go whale hunting so if you don't have a podcast you're gonna have to start one if you already have a podcast great what you should end up doing and it's a really simple strategy is you hit up all the well-known executives that you want to do business with and you hit them up through linkedin because we see a higher success rate. And the majority of the people you message are going to ignore you.

0:37Some are going to say yes, but the people who say yes, they don't care about views. No one's like, how many listeners do you have? What's your rating? You just hit them up and don't mention those kinds of things. And some people will start saying yes. And then you interview them. You can do a 30 minute, one hour session. You interview them, do your research, talk to them about different things that they do, how they see their customers or products or service, whatever it may be. also bring in your company, your viewpoints on certain things. So that way they get to know you. And at the end of the recording, you should ask them all like, Oh, by the way, you know, would love to see if we could help you out with X, Y, and Z, who's the right person on your team to talk to.

1:13And a lot of times they're like, yeah, this would be great. And they'll do an introduction to help you close customers. But we see this as one of the best ways to go whale hunting. You know, my team's been trying to push me to do a podcast with just CMOs and interview CMOs of like Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, et cetera, to just get more RFPs, which isn't a bad idea. I just got to go through the ringer of setting it all up. And my buddy, Jason Nazar, sold his last company to ZoomInfo. Yeah, comparably. He sold it to ZoomInfo. And I was like, how'd you meet the ZoomInfo founder? And I believe he had a podcast with entrepreneur or one of those platforms.

1:54So he set up a podcast. He just hit him up until someone gave him a podcast. Remind me of something. And then he hit up all the people that he thought were either a potential investors or good buyers of his company or partners. And he started doing interviews with them. And over time, one of the people that he interviewed was the zoom info guy. And that eventually ended up leading to an acquisition. So good for him. that's interesting you know what jason is i used to go like when i was like maybe 24 years old or so he used to do these events and these fireside chats in santa monica at a library i used to go to him as well it was at the milking institute i thought it was some library or something it could be like different different venues but i went there and then he had a bunch of people and he would just gather a community around you and so you can do the podcast but if you can gather community around you too that that's that's even more of a bonus but this is exactly what i did with growth everywhere now called leveling up right um but in the very beginning that's what I did.

2:47Cause I, in the beginning, I was like, I'm just going to talk to marketing leaders. And cause there was no Tim Ferriss show at the time. It was actually Andrew Warner. He's the true OG of podcasting. Andrew Warner. Huh? Andrew Warner. Andrew Warner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he would do these long form interviews with entrepreneurs. I'm like, I'm going to do it, but I'm going to focus on marketers. And I didn't know this, right. But it actually ended up getting clients for us. So for example, when I went to a SAS conference in San Francisco on three occasions, people were like, oh, podcast guy, right?

3:15Podcast, right? This is before marketing school. And I think we closed three deals from that super short sales cycles that led to, I think that was a little over seven figures in revenue, maybe 1.2, 1.3 million in revenue. They stayed with us for a very long time. And that's just an example of it working, right? And here's the interesting thing. We now, like last year in 2023, you and I, we did marketing school three times, I believe, at events so that was right hubspot was one affiliate world dubai yeah and then uh something else there's another one your event leveling up yeah i don't really count that one but like yeah but that counts that counts that counts for me oh you know what i counted the nathan latke sass open where we went we didn't do it together but we were like back to back with each other yeah so yeah but yeah no it i think it's one of the best ways to get customers because you're dealing with your ideal buyer.

4:09And what's funny is people love being interviewed. You know, when most people hit me up saying, Hey Neil, do you want to be on a podcast? I never asked, you always say what's your ratings or yeah, I just say yes. Yeah. And what the trick is, is once you get a few good guests on, you then hit up other people and you're like, Oh, I had Eric, I had Neil on, uh, and it lists out the people. I'm like, do you also want to be on? And most people then say, yes, your success rate goes higher and higher. But what we found is hitting them up through LinkedIn is way more effective than hitting them up through email, hitting them up through LinkedIn, I mean, LinkedIn, Instagram.

4:42You could try TikTok, although I've never tried TikTok. But the social networks, we found a higher success rate than if you hit them up from email. And even if your social profiles don't have a lot of followers, it's okay. We still see it working really well. You know, it's interesting. And we'll talk about this maybe this episode or next episode but for the leveling up podcasts that i do now they're longer form interviews like one to two hours and they're all in person so i'm was talking with the team yesterday and i was like you know in some cases like i had one yesterday that or i won't share all the numbers right now but we have we have a video that's doing really well right now we have one guest that's doing really well and the idea total address which guest just vivian two vivian two yeah you're rich bff yeah you're right i thought bff was a cuss word yeah i was anyway so she's great personal finance and like everyone that total addressable market hits everyone right but the thing is that doesn't necessarily help single grain right so it's like if you're going to create content sometimes it's worth thinking about how does this help your main business and so to neil's point it's like i would actually oscillate between having high-powered ceos or entrepreneurs or marketing leaders and then and i'll switch to the people that have like a large audience as well i'll just keep switching like that right because then that'll give a nice balance between me like growing the account more and then also getting people that I want to talk to on the business side.

6:02So that's like a nice in-between for me, right? So you can do it how you want to do it. I'm just sharing. That's how I do it right now. Dude, you know, it's funny. I was listening to your, uh, Chris still podcast episode on leveling up and he talks about Gary Vanderchuck isn't doing as well anymore, but more importantly in there, he talks about the democratization of social media, which is so true. Cause if you look at YouTube, I have over a million subscribers. Subscriber count doesn't matter anymore. What a lot of these platforms did was they said, you have a hundred thousand subscribers or followers or a million.

6:36We don't give a crap. What we're going to do now is we're going to judge you based on your content quality. If people subscribe, sure, percentage of your followers are going to see your stuff. But what really determines how good you do is the quality of your content. And if it's amazing, you'll do well. And if it's not, screw you. We don't care how many followers you have. So Chris then ends up making an example on your podcast. I actually baited him into it. Okay. So then he was talking about Gary Vaynerchuk. And do you want to end up giving the example on Gary? So I basically said, look, and we love Gary, right?

7:10But I just said, you know, Gary's really not doing that well on YouTube anymore. He's doing well on other channels, but he used YouTube was like his jam before. Right. And then he's like, oh yeah, well, that's, that's, you did good with that, Eric. And he's like, I'm going to take that bait. Right. And he's like, yeah, Gary V sucks now. He said something like that. Right. He's not getting that many more views anymore. And so, and then he went into why. And do you remember what he said? Well, he was talking about the democratization of content. And then he was like, look, whether you're a person making recipes or cooking, I'm paraphrasing here.

7:41I don't know the exact example, or you're Susie at home. He's like, is your content really that much better than Susie who's at home and is really putting in all her effort to making amazing content? it could have been years ago but now all the software and everything has made it easy for people to create amazing videos so how much better is it in quality or is it even better in quality it's merit based at the end of the day and like there's a whole thing i have to say about merit in a second but it's like when you think about the tiktokification of social it's like like for example the vivian video on tiktok 4.7 million views right and then she's just like crushing it on my youtube channel right now she's crushing everybody else right yeah also she's like she She has an inflection point right now.

8:23So the point is, if it's good, YouTube will give you credit for it. YouTube's algorithm is always going to work for it. And just understand that the meta, like we talked about Sam Zulik before, the really jacked guy, for sure he takes steroids, right? But he's got like three, four million views, and he's just like a really relatable guy. He's driving like a Toyota Camry or something. Even if he takes steroids, he's still got some views. Yeah. Good for him. And he's just talking about working out every day, right? It's like himself, the content is interesting. Like, do you and I look that jacked?

8:48No. That's why we look that jacked. Dude, what are you talking about? I'm more jacked than he is. But we're not as jacked as Sam Sulek. No, I bet you if you combine both my arms and my legs, his arms are still bigger. And if you combine me too, it still wouldn't work. He is jacked. But his content is interesting. And I was looking at it, I was like, what the heck is he doing to get all the views? But yeah, it's like if you can make really interesting content that intrigues people, I think you are going to do really, really well. And the problem right now is... not too many people are spending time creating amazing content.

9:24You know, Kevin Esprit, too, Epic Gardening. Do you know who that is? No. So he has like a gardening website. So he started gardening during the pandemic, and like he has this whole gardening blog, right? He has three YouTube channels. Two have over 100K subs. One has over a million or so. And he just started a new YouTube channel, only like 12 ,000 subscribers, right? His first two videos, like 500 views, 500 views or whatever. And then he released ones like why YouTubers are quitting, 150 ,000 views, right? And he released another one on the YouTube metagame. And here's what he said about the metagame.

9:54I need a picture of Sam Sulik. It's like YouTube is craving authenticity now. And that's why Sam Sulik does so well. And the thing is, what's interesting is the podcast that I do, they're stories. They're being authentic. We're kind of sharing our stories too. Dude, and funny enough, speaking about creating content that's authentic and amazing, I put out a tweet the other day on the rude awakening for content markers in 2024. And I break down how one number tells it all, 94.29%. So if you're wondering what that number is, we track over 7 billion keywords on Ubersuggest and answer the public. We also track the rankings for these keywords.

10:31So who's ranking in the top 10, top 20, top 100. We don't go beyond top 100. And over the last 30 days, 94.29 % of the web pages that we track got no organic traffic from Google. Like just imagine that, 94.29%. There's billions of webpages. I don't have the exact number of webpages offhand, but I can get it. Billions of webpages are not getting any traffic. And we're seeing that percentage get worse and worse over time. And when we surveyed 1 ,051 marketers, only 922 were creating content with either just AI or AI slash human content, which means it's not 100 % manually written. and we see the number of pieces of content that people are creating increase because of AI, it's easier, but there's still only 10 spots on page one of Google.

11:23And if your content isn't authentic, doesn't have double E-A-T, which is experience, expertise, authority, trust, if it's not something that's unique and stands out, no one's gonna care. You're not gonna get the social views. You're not gonna get the likes. You're not gonna get the comments. You're not gonna get the search traffic. You're not gonna get the backlinks. The big issue in content marketing, whether you want to create text-based content or even videos. If it's not new and fresh or amazing, no one cares to consume it. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale.

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13:39Animations, responsive layout, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Dude, you know what would make your reports 10 times more amazing here is if you show over time the graph to 94 if it goes like 95 96 i bet you elon would retweet that as well maybe not i don't know but like that that would be really interesting 94 94.29 is a lot that's a lot of pages on the web that get no search that makes me not want to post anything yeah but that's not visitors it's seo traffics particularly right yeah because some of these sites could get direct traffic or whatnot these are web pages that's another good example like it's the same thing you know you know how i talked about how like instagram reels tiktok and youtube shorts is like a slot machine yes like you just keep publishing you don't know what's gonna hit and something just hits right so you have to be consistent but you have to keep leveling up your quality yeah but the second thing is the most important part because if you just keep pushing and you're saying it's going to be a slot machine when you have that winning coupon or coin it won't come up if you only post crap because the way the algorithms work is they're like, Oh wow, your last 20 videos or posts, no one cared about.

15:00So when you post the 21st one, even if it's really amazing, it doesn't hit. So what you have to do is post a lot of amazing stuff. And a lot of that still stuff won't hit, but it'll do better than your non-performing stuff. And over time, when you then have that winning coin or coupon or whatever, you'll go viral. And if you look at what Eric's been doing on his YouTube podcast for leveling up, And I told him this this morning, and I'm not trying to talk trash. I meant it in a kind, productive, good feedback or comment. I told Eric his podcast is getting way better, right? Yeah, that didn't feel like talking crap to me.

15:36That what? That didn't feel like talking crap to me. No, no, I know, but I don't want people to say that I'm saying like your podcast used to be crap, right? I'm saying like the quality has changed. And do you remember what you told me on when I said the quality is way better? Oh, yeah. The effort is way better. Exactly. And Eric himself is taking over a lot on the content direction versus having other people help them out or outsource. I'm not saying your team's not helping you, but you're taking the lead on it. And it's made a big difference. If you look at my social posts, I've taken the lead on it.

16:07And my social profiles have drastically changed. Even TikTok, I figured out how to get more traffic. YouTube, same. Facebook, still getting crushed there. But the rest of the social networks are doing decent, way better than before. and we'll end on this point i mean we've been saying this for the last couple months like if you want your business to grow if you want your marketing to grow you have to be involved i think both of us like even with this podcast right now we're we're sitting in front of each other we're recording um we have brad from record edit podcast.com he's not paying us to say that by the way um but we actually pay him yeah we pay him and he's sitting here but like at the end of the day we're putting a lot more effort into this you can see we changed the format and there's someone on twitter i forgot what his name was but he's like man the format's way better i used to listened to episodes sporadically, but now I listen to every single episode.

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