Our 2025 Marketing, Wrapped

0:28Everyone's doing a wrapped right now, right? because you can just say your top channels of the year or your top tactics for the year or whatever, right? So maybe we can start with our favorite tactics for the year, right? So go ahead, you wanna say something? Drink your water, drink your water. Okay, I'll go first because he's drinking his water right now. So we're gonna do our 2025 marketing wrap. We're gonna start with tactics first, okay? So what are my favorite tactics for the year? We've talked about this on the pod before, but if you go out there and you create a product that people like, it will pull you.

1:00And if it pulls you, like, for example, it's pulling me into working harder than I've ever worked in the last few Decembers. I'll just put it that way. Um, but that's always a good way, right? Because you got to think about if you have a good product, it's a good offer and a good offer. If, for example, if you can do something that other people can't do, then that's going to bring people with you and they're going to tell other people as well. Right? So when you have that, you got to double, you got to triple down on that. Um, Neil's done a good job with, uh, Uber suggests he doesn't great. He's done a great job with answer to public and he's also got other stuff too that isn't so public but um neil's done a good job with products i mean neil was actually a pioneer i'm tooting your horn a little bit right here back in the day crazy egg that was the first heat mapping tool out there he had kiss insights as well which was a nice um like a little survey at the bottom right that thing that that thing did well right initially um that okay i think kiss insights never did more than like a few million bucks a year in revenue.

1:53It was decent. It was decent. And then you had other products too. But point is, these things time and time again, because the bar to create them is so much higher, they do well because they're rare. And I believe that the cost of software is coming down because if you're using anything like Replit, Bolt, or V0 out there or Cursor, people like, normal people like Neil and I, when it comes to, when I say normal, I mean we can't code. You're going to be able to do this stuff more. So that's the first one. Go ahead, you pick your favorite. My favorite is a webinar funnel. And you can end up seeing the stats here.

2:29A nice little graphic over there. That's cool. Yeah, so that's our stats on average for a webinar. That's one of them, but they roughly all follow that same pattern. And this one was B2B webinar funnel breakdown just in the United States. We collect leads and revenue globally. But if you look at just the United States, somewhere around 6 ,000 registrations and 1.1 % of our MQLs of the registrations, because we've got all the fields we consider MQL, become SQL, all right? And 56 % of the SQLs, which is sales qualified leads for anyone listening, become opportunities. And 71 % of the opportunities turn into pitches.

3:05And we roughly close 21 % of the pitches into a one deal within four weeks. And it goes up to around 32 % if we send the data out all the way to 12 weeks. It's been one of our best strategies to generate revenue. We do two of these a month. It's not a numbers game. You know, we even tried one a week, but we've actually found it's better to do two a month and pick the topics better. We've even done things like run surveys, or you can even do polls on X to see what topics people like, although they don't let you type in long enough titles, which suck. And it'll give you ideas on what to do for the next webinar.

3:43Um, but webinars have been a big, you know, part of our marketing efforts in 2024. And one thing I would have to say on the webinars is this is not include cause we can't track from it going live on all the social channels at the same time. And what revenue that's also causing from running a webinar too. All right. So that's a good one. That's our first one for wrapped. And now we're going to give you our 2025 marketing wrapped for our favorite tool. My favorite tool that we use more than anything else, it's an AI tool is actually HeyGen. We use it more than any other tool because we're translating and transcribing our content into all the other languages.

4:27And it's gotten good enough where I'm in countries like Italy and we're showing the audience the videos and they're finding it fine with very little to no errors and they love it. and the engagement is starting to do quite well in all the regions that we're targeting. Mine by far has to be OpenAI. And when I say that, it's like, oh, what a cop-out, right? But we leverage OpenAI's API heavily. You guys do too, I believe. But also the fact that ChatGPT Pro just recently came out, I use it so much. I use it for everything. I use it when I argue with people. It's great, right? I put up a LinkedIn post, and then my friend got really upset.

5:02And it did nothing to identify him, right? This LinkedIn post basically got 1.2 million impressions on it. And then he called me and he was really upset. And then I was like, wait, I didn't do anything wrong here. He's like, no, but you shouldn't have said that. I was like, but I didn't identify you or anything. He's like, no, you shouldn't have said that. I was like, I talked to some friends about it. I was like, yeah, it doesn't seem like I'm wrong. And then I talked to the AI about it. It's like, yeah, it doesn't seem like you're wrong. So I use it to settle debates and it really pisses people off.

5:29It's like, well, that's a robot. I'm like, that's a robot based on like, you know, uh, trillions of, of human like data sets. Right. It's so that's one thing, but I've talked about earlier. I use it for, I use it for to become like my personal CFO. I use it for marketing strategy. I use it for coming up with, um, different hooks. Uh, I use it for social, for content creation as well. And so I, and I use it when it comes to how many calories do I, am I having in my food right now? Right. So it's not even just for marketing, it's for everything. and I think it's made me, like we talk about, oh, there's going to be the singularity where we merge with machines.

6:03I feel like it's kind of already happening. Yeah, and Eric is not trying to say the machines are going to replace the humans, but we're going to work in tandem together and we're going to become much more efficient with the machines. Yeah, and try it guys. When you strategize what is content, SEO or whatever it is exactly, when you work with this, you can pay the 20 bucks a month or 200 a month or use Claude or something else. I've just found that the 200 bucks, we're like a step up now. Yeah. All right. You pick the next one. Let's keep going on this wrap. Isn't there so much more to wrap? You pick one.

6:40Favorite growth strategy. Okay. This is our 2025 wrapped favorite growth strategy. What is it, Neil? I don't know. What is yours? I can tell you what mine is. Yeah, you go first. Mine is probably M &A if I had to pick. it's boring it works it's expensive but it's not as risky and it's actually cheap for the results but it's expensive from a cash standpoint you can get loans though there's sba there's government loans bank loans the reason i like mna is a basic example of this is let's say i'm an agency that offers seo services technically we offer more than seo services but actually i'll give you a real example.

7:19At NP Digital, we offer SEO, paid advertising, email, the list goes on and on. We even offer creative services, but we didn't have a big portfolio. We weren't known for it. And our creative capabilities weren't that great compared to a lot of the competitors. So we bought someone and what ended up happening is, is because we bought that company that had these creative capabilities, it got us included into larger RFPs. Even if we didn't win the creative side of the RFP, we still won our portion and we made more money just because of acquiring the other business. And guys, RFP is a request for proposal.

7:54Typically larger companies will put you through this process. It's a bit of a slog, but it's worth it because deals can be big. Yes. So what's your favorite growth strategy that you're going to leverage for growth next year? I mean, I kind of gave it already. I mean, the fact that, so the product that we have is called Carrot ABM. It's K-A-R-R-O-T. And right now everyone we're talking to, so we threw up a post and I kind of just did this for fun, right? I threw up a post and it got a thousand comments on it and maybe six or 700 likes and it got maybe a million impressions or so, right? And that generated a bunch of leads for Carrot.

8:29And the thing is, what does it do? It's a personalized LinkedIn ABM ad solution, right? It allows you to scale LinkedIn ads. And the thing is, nobody else can do this right now. We've confirmed this with LinkedIn. And my thing is, sure, M &A, we have an LOI out right now and it looks like, well, we'll get this deal done. Totally agree that M &A is great. It's tried and true, right? But I think if you can find something and double down on it, like what's cool right now, and Neil's done this before, but when you get on these calls, you can almost double and triple dip, right? Because it's like, oh, they actually need ads, but do you actually need someone to manage this for you?

9:02Oh, it becomes a managed service. Oh, by the way, do you actually need SEO help, right? So you're quickly cross-selling and upselling into these things. And not only that, a lot of these people that are working with, it's people that our agencies too, right? And so they're like, oh, well, I want to refer you to this person. It's like, it kind of just builds on itself. And so my biggest learning here is if you get lucky and you have something that pulls you, then go with it. You know, knock on wood. It's like, there's still like a lot of work to be done, but it's fun, right? So I would just say, if you can combine those two into your portfolio, it doesn't just have to be one thing.

9:35Keep in mind, let's use Neil as an example. Okay. Yes, he's doing M &A. Yes, he's hiring amazing people, right? Yes, he's looking for global expansion, which is kind of M &A as well. But also, yes, he has products, right? Also, he has services that he's expanding into. So you can do all these things. It might look like it's unfocused, but I'd argue that as long as you're within your company, as long as you're focused on that, that's true focus. All right. So here, let me tell you why ChatGPT is worth$200 a month. Did you see the new version? Yeah. The new version of ChatGPT, there's a chat gpt pro which is two hundred dollars a month okay and so basically what it allows you to do is it allows you to use their finest model it's um o1 pro and o1 pro it thinks it thinks really long instead of you know when you use regular chat gpt gives you an answer pretty quickly yeah what i found is when you're trying to do like a let's say you're trying to do like a financial model or like a discounted cash flow forecast or you're trying to i even used it um because we're adjusting our core values right now, right?

10:33To make them punchier. We actually got stuck with my leadership team, right? But working on it with ChatGPD 01 Pro, we workshopped it pretty quickly, right? We got to the new core values, right? And so I've been using it in the last couple of days or so and using it for different, like could be for finance reasons, could be for values reasons, could be if I get stuck on something from a marketing standpoint, right? We're coming up with hooks for this podcast, for example. It does a more complete job. I even use it in a meeting today. Someone on my team used Claude and then I used O1 Pro and we got a more concise, like a much better answer from O1 Pro, right?

11:09So the question is, is it worth$200? Well, here's the thing. If I'm a child and let's say I'm five years old, it probably isn't worth$200, right? But if I'm using it for business purposes and I'm using it for like a discounted cash flow forecast or I'm doing it to come up with something that's going to make a big impact on my business, for$2 ,400 a year, I'm going to ROI on it pretty quickly. and that's why to me it's worth the$200 a month. So I look at it as if you're a startup, let's say a business, but you have barely any people, you can now get a six-figure employee to help you out for$2 ,400 a year.

11:44And I look at it as if you're a really big organization, the$200 a month will save you quite a bit of man hours, make your people more efficient and even save you on some headcount. So it pays for itself really fast. So it doesn't matter what size of a business you are, either way, it pays for itself probably in the first 30 days with no problem. Yeah, I think it's a tremendous deal. And the thing about O1 is when you're using the ChatGPT Plus, which is$20 a month, it caps you on the O1 usage, right? Now when you're using, I think O1 Pro, it allows you to put images in there as well. So it's multimodal.

12:14So you can ask questions and it'll give you detailed responses. Sometimes it'll think for like 42 seconds, right? Which is a long time. Sometimes it'll think for like one minute and 30 seconds or so. And, um, by the way, if you pay for that, you also get unlimited use for Sora, which is a topic that you have. Yes. Um, and if you haven't seen it, Sora is pretty much out. Um, chat GPT or open AI ended up announcing it. They are limiting its functionality, like creating human faces and stuff like that, which I think is smart. Uh, cause I think that can cause a lot of Deep fakes. Yeah. And I'm happy that they ended up releasing this after the election versus prior to the election.

12:55Because I think we would have seen a whole mess if that was released early. But this is really cool technology. And I think it's really in its infancy. When you look at the first version of it, it's ridiculous. But here's the crazy part. It's ridiculous. And again, this is just the first version. What's going to happen? Ridiculous in a good way or bad way? Good way. Okay. So what's going to happen in three years, four years, five years, right? And this really leads into a topic that both you and I have, right? Speaking of OpenAI and ChatGPT, there was a memo that Google CEO ended up releasing.

13:30And he ended up saying out there, search will profoundly change in 2025. Maybe not a memo, but he was cited as saying that. And I know you've mentioned that as well on your list here. he didn't go into too much detail on how search is going to change, but he says in 2025, it is going to change. And I think we're in the first one, not first ending of search, but I think we're in the, if we're looking at search as a whole history, you know, it's been out there for a long time, but when it comes to AI integrated into search, I still think it's like the first ending, you know, if we're using a baseball analogy and we're going to drastically see it shift in the next five years.

14:14So here's what Sundar said. He said, search itself will continue to change profoundly in 2025. I think we're going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. I think you'll be surprised even in early 2025, the kind of newer things that search can do compared to where it's at today. Yeah, but he's not giving specifics on what's going to really change. He's not. But I think we're going to see more AI overviews, results. There's a lot of like, we can make predictions if we want, but stuff like that. Dude, and when you think about what Google's doing and all the data they have on you as an individual from Gmail, your search patterns, et cetera, it's just like there's no way that this is all going to end up being where it's just going to be you search anymore and you get an answer.

15:04I think it's going to be really personalized to you and what they know about you in the long run. I don't see that in 2025, but I do see that within five years, your search history will be truly personal based on all the information they have on you. Did you see that Google launched a new chip, a quantum computing chip called Willow? Yeah. Did you see how he promoted it too? Yeah. I mean, well, I saw how he, I just saw him really promoted on X. I was, I was slammed yesterday. So how did he promote it? Yeah. So he ended up going, I have it somewhere here. There you go. Let me pull up the X. The X post has like seven plus million views on it.

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17:16No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, 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. So he ends up announcing on X, and he talked about it in many different areas, but he's like introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up more qubits.

17:59I don't know how to even say that. Cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in under five minutes that would take a leading supercomputer over 10 to the 25. Septillion. Yeah, 25 years. Yeah. Far beyond age of the universe. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of crazy to think about. So then Elon Musk responds with, wow. And then he responded back with, which I thought was really slick. We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day. Wink. And it's like he's basically sourcing collaborations too. Because I think Sam Altman also commented too.

18:37Everyone's like, wow. And it is a very wow moment. I think it's underappreciated. Like he basically attacked X for his marketing. And it's also getting him collaborations. Because here's the thing. When you have a really good product and it interests people, then it's going to do well, right? It's good. Like a really good product will pull people. Yes. And I bet you they're going to sell, if it's ready, I don't know when it's going to be ready for primetime, but if they're ready to release it, they'll probably generate a ton of sales and it'll cause a stock to, forget the stock price. It'll cause a company to generate a ton of revenue.

19:08Did NVIDIA dip yesterday because of this announcement? No, NVIDIA dipped because of China news. So it's all convoluted. You know the China news, right? On Monopoly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, okay. You, so that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, go to marketing school.io slash agency. If you want to learn more about our little agency community to help you grow faster. I think Neil, we're actually speaking in 10 days to the community. So that's that. And yeah, we'll see you tomorrow.