Our Biggest Marketing Wins in 2024

0:00Let's talk about our biggest marketing wins in 2024. for. So on my end, I think probably the biggest win so far is Carrot ABM, which is our LinkedIn account-based marketing product. And so I believe that the cost of building software is going to continue to decrease and the speed of building software is going to increase a lot. So if we can build products that quickly and drive the demand that we're driving so far, like with the Carrot, for example, like the first post we threw up on LinkedIn, we said, hey, there's this LinkedIn ABM product that we have, 600 likes on it, about a thousand comments or so and a bunch of enterprise companies in there.

0:34We did the same thing again. It just started. I think we got five or six enterprise accounts interested in today. Here's the other thing. I did this by complete accident because I didn't reveal what the product was called. Then someone asked in the comments what's the product called? Then I said, care at ABM. A bunch of people started Googling for it and today we got 60 signups. In the 60 signups, there's five people that are like, we're talking mid-market enterprise level. So my point of saying all this is that, you know, we've talked about this on the podcast before. You can go buy or build products.

1:05I believe you're going to be able to build a lot faster now. This is interesting, too. This is an additional benefit. I saw a short with Ahrefs, right? They built like a couple of tools. Tools get a lot of traffic. I think they got an additional 1 ,000 referring domains, links, and they drove about a million in extra visitors per month, right? And that's not saying it's all qualified visitors. We're probably pretty junky visitors. But to get that many links for building these pretty easy things to do, it comes down to can you ship product quickly and can you ship quality product quickly? The second piece is on partnerships.

1:36Good thing we have some good relationships. And so working with a HubSpot or an Ahrefs, for example, or a SEMrush, if you can teach something to their audience, they're usually down to let you do it. And so partner webinars work well for us. And we also think about other collabs that come from that as well. And I would say more than anything, because we've talked about people so much this year, it's like, whoa, how is recruiting a marketing win? It actually is a marketing win because if you can recruit great marketers, they're going to bring the tactics and strategies that are going to help you grow, right?

2:03So we've gotten pretty lucky, I would say, with recruiting this year, just great people. And same thing with Neil too. They bring on a lot of great people as well. As you get older, you realize it's not even about money at the end of the day. It's just about relationships, whether it's your family or your friends or whoever. My biggest marketing win in 2024 was I slowed down on traveling towards the end of the year and I started creating tons of content myself with the team. And we started noticing our brand get out there way more and people saying that they're seeing our company everywhere. The biggest lesson I learned from this is although people talk about how they want more in-person relationships, just doubling down on what you're great at.

2:43I'm a decent public speaker, but I would say I'm a better marketer and I'm a great individual contributor. So I focused on creating tons and tons of social content, especially towards the back half of 2024. And that's been a huge win for us. Another big marketing win for us is we do two webinars every single month and we live stream them. That's been huge for us. It drives quite a bit of revenue. Third big win that I would say that we really leverage is we started doing much more M &A in late 2023 and 2024. And what I learned is if you can buy companies with a good name, you can cross sell, leverage their assets, and you can do much better.

3:26A great example of this is if someone has, and I kind of already knew this, but didn't think about this when we were doing M &A. If someone has 10 ,000 visitors of enterprise companies reaching out to them, and you have hundred thousand. When you combine them, a lot of times, if you do it right, you don't get 110 ,000 visitors. You can get 115, 120 ,000 visitors. So you're just gobbling up traffic, combining it, and you're seeing exponential growth there. You may be like, well, I can't afford to buy businesses, but there's a lot of businesses that are struggling and you can just take over the website for pennies on the dollar.

3:59And you did that with one company. I did that with one company and it was a huge win for us years ago. Um, and I recommend people consider doing that. Have you ever wanted to target a bunch of accounts on LinkedIn at once and personalize them? Well, previously you couldn't do this. Let's say you wanted to target 500 enterprise companies and you wanted to hyper-personalize those ads. You can do that now. And LinkedIn has confirmed with us that nobody else can do this right now. Only we can do it. The product is called Carrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T. And it's Carrot Account-Based Marketing. So if you go to carrot.ai, you can go learn more about it and we'll see you on the other side.

4:35Those have been some of my huge wins for 2024. And if I had to add one thing on top that I think most people don't do right, when you do your webinars, stream them on all platforms live. Yeah, and Neil uses Restream for that. Uh-huh, and if I had to say another win is, I test my content before I publish it everywhere. I test it on Twitter first, and if it gets traction, then I post it on all the other social networks. It doesn't mean it's going to do well on all the social networks, but if it does well on Twitter, it usually does well on most other social networks. That is it for today. Go to markingschool.io slash agency.

5:06By the way, that price keeps going up. It just doubled. last yesterday, actually. So yeah, go check it out and we'll see you tomorrow.