SEO workflows that 10x your speed and save on headcount, Old marketing that still crushes today, Is it worth submitting to your business to the Inc 500 and for other awards?, and more

0:00Let me tell you about some SEO workflows that TEDx your speed and save on headcount. I don't think we've talked about this before. Have you guys been doing this? We've been building out these agentic workflows, right? And what that means is, let's say an SEO manager. So an SEO manager has a lot of jobs, right? There's keyword research, there's technical work, there's competitor analysis, there's all this stuff you need to do, right? And so first we map out all the jobs to be done from an SEO manager. Okay, don't worry, I won't bore you. And then the next step is, okay, within those jobs, what do we need to do?

0:27So for example, with SEO, you need to update, consolidate, prune your content, right? So we made an agent for consolidating content. So scan your Google search console and then next it'll look at the URLs and look at relevant URLs and they'll figure out what to combine. And then I'll say, okay, push this to a human so a human can quickly review and then I'll push it out. And then I'll just keep moving through other workflows that we have. And then what's happening now is we're 10xing our efficiency and we're getting a save on headcount because all of this is thinkless work, right? Finding the right internal links, all these things.

0:56So a lot of people talk about AI agents. We're making these agentic workflows. And that's how it's been speeding us up and speeding clients up on our side. So yeah. Have you guys been doing it? We have. We've been doing it for a while. We created an internal application called Scout years and years ago. And it's been doing things like crawling Google Search Console or analyzing analytics on a daily basis to find new keyword opportunities, plugging them into keyword tools, coming back with a list, looking at which ones are top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. But yeah, we've been using technology, machine learning, AI, whatever you want to call it for a long time to just produce efficiencies.

1:33Because at scale, the biggest thing you have is it's hard to hire amazing people who can continually produce the same quality of work and output each and every single time. And the way around it is, of course, you interview and you have really strict processes, but you also build technology that creates kind of like a handicap that just levels up the whole team. Yeah. The way ours works is basically on the internal links, it'll basically, once we approve it, it automatically changes them on the site. And the same thing with meta titles, meta descriptions, all those things. So it'll change them at scale.

2:10But I think the right move, and we probably agree on this, is you still need a human in the loop. I think people still think, like, there's two ends to this right now. One, if you put too many guardrails on an AI, it becomes too robotic. If you don't put enough guardrails, it goes off into, like, craziness. So if you have a human in the loop that's kind of in the middle, then you can get the best of both worlds. Yeah, like what we do with Scout is when it comes to title tags or meta descriptions, it constantly looks at which pages are decreasing in click-through rate and which ones are increasing.

2:39and it starts learning from the changes that have caused pages to increase and it makes recommendations for title tag and meta tag changes to all the pages that have gone down. But then a human has to approve it before it rolls out. Got it. So are you guys rolling it out on your end or is Scout rolling it out? Both, combination. It depends on the customer. Got it. Cool. All right. So actually just might dovetail into the next one, which is talking about old marketing that still crushes the data. So this can be a marketing school classic. All right. What's the biggest one that we see crushing? It is still using boring old business partnerships.

3:18Think of like affiliate commissions, but instead of affiliate commissions, I partner with you if you just do SEO and I just do pay-per-click and you cross all your customers to me and I cross all to you. It's like a version of affiliates, but for marketers and you're not paying out commissions, you're just cross selling. That's a pretty easy outreach. You say, hey, I have some leads for you. Do you want to chat about it? And that's basically it. And it's like a 30-minute phone call, maybe less. Yeah, another thing that we've done with the partners is you create pages on their website about your service offerings.

3:49And they create pages on your website with their service offerings. Because both sites get organic traffic. They also collect leads. It then helps both parties generate more leads for those services. Got it. On our end, and we've talked about this, but events do really well, whether you're throwing a lunch or dinner, or you're speaking somewhere and you're having the event people setting you up with people that you want to talk to that fit your ICP. So Neil and I were both speaking at HubSpot Inbound and we're both speaking at a conference in Germany. And the one in Germany, Diss's Marketing, they're setting us up for a dinner in Frankfurt.

4:21So it should be cool. And I think it just always, one, throwing your event goes a long way and you can throw mini events, right? They can be like breakfast or lunch or whatever. And then you can throw a happy hour or you can throw like a larger event, right? It just depends on how much you want to spend on it. And also taking max advantage if you're going to be speaking at an event because there's always a lot of amazing people there. There's always a lot of amazing people. I love events. I still think it's one of the best places to learn marketing. Another strategy that we end up doing is, and this is old, but we crawl the web and we look for people who are running VWOO and optimize these scripts that are in our space.

4:58And we take screenshots of their websites on a daily basis. so then we have a log of all the tests that they're running and then when you have a default that's been there for a week or two or a month and it stays and it's not a test anymore usually you should look at the old variation and the new one and then see, oh, we should consider testing this as well That's interesting, so you have all that data and you can probably ingest that data into something else and basically say, hey, these are the new patterns that are working in the last 90 days or 120 days or so or we just take that data and just implement it for our clients and keep it to ourselves yeah well no i'm saying you can do either way you can do it privately or publicly yeah we have it we just have it privately yeah got it and we're seeing it for different industries we do it for clients in different sectors and things like that dude i mean today i was talking um there's a guy i um actually has to be anonymous so um basically he was telling me that he was getting emails for like$1.50 a pop and email marketing, email marketing still crushes today, right?

6:00Not enough, not enough people think about email marketing. We talked about copywriting a little earlier today. I think it's so the, the, the art of copywriting is, is so magical. And then when you, when you apply to email marketing, it's just, to me, it's just like you get to ring the cash register every now and then with email marketing. And if you can acquire emails for$1.50,$3 a pop, I was talking to a guy today, his agency can get emails for two to$3 a pop. And some people have been working with him already. I'm like, okay, we'll give you a shot. Two to$3 a pop because we have, you have a high LTV service.

6:32I have a high LTV service. Why would I not do that? Um, yeah. So yeah, it's just a question of, are they running the right targeting? Cause if they, if they get you just tons of email addresses, uh, businesses that are just into startups and they're starting their first company, they just launched a website. Yeah. You're going to get them on your list, but it's going to be hard. They're highly qualified. So I talked to a handful of people they worked with and they're all highly qualified. So I'll let you know how it goes. Yes. And Eric did something right there. When you're interviewing an agency, look for who their existing customers are and talk to them.

7:04It'll give you great insights on their service and the quality of their work. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners, think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds.

7:34Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. So we internally analyzed 41 D2C sites, and we looked at what percentage of their customers came from the people visiting their site the previous year a whopping 3.8 percent not a lot but that's crazy to think about 3.8 percent of these d2c e-commerce sites of their current customers on every month in monthly basis new customers visited their site a year prior oh you put where were people so were people who saw the site over a year ago i mean that makes sense to me because like okay for example I have my shower head Jolie.

8:38You know what that is? It's like filters your water and everything. It's like just to make sure you're not spraying your body with like bad water. But I would probably refresh that like once a year, once every six months or so. So I wouldn't think about it until like it's time. Yeah. It kind of makes sense. No, but forget you refreshing it once a year. I'm talking about you visiting a random website like Jolie, never buying their product. A year later, you go to their site and buy their product for the first time. I do that. Yeah. I think a lot of us do. And the important lesson from this is 3.8 % may not seem like a big amount, but it all adds up.

9:14And what marketers need to focus on is not just attract new people, but maintain relationships with your visitors because you don't know when they're going to purchase. Now, if these 41D to C sites did a great job of email sequences, building relationships, helping them out, I bet you that number would be a lot higher. Some of them do. The majority of them don't do a good job of maintaining relationships with their visitors. Almost all the 41 sites that we looked at do a great job of maintaining relationships with their paying customers. But if you built better relationships with your visitors, even if they didn't buy, over time, you'll generate way more than 3.8 % in sales.

9:54You have one over here. Is it worth submitting your business to the Inc. 500 and for other awards? I've been seeing a lot of people releasing news clips like Inc. 500, check out this award or you know best places to work yeah and i haven't really seen it help with any form of marketing like you may get a link here or there but those links aren't really that useful or relevant and you're on a list of links with a ton of other websites so it's diluted because they may link out to another 100 sites or 500 sites we're just not finding getting these quote-unquote awards that look cool where you can put a badge on your site, really helping that much with driving more revenue.

10:36Yeah. I think a lot of those are vanity. The only ones I've ever cared about, and even this is debatable, are the best places to work awards where like, if there's some that really matter, right? You got the glass door ones, you have, um, there's a great place to work company out there. I think it's like, it's, it is a reinforcement that, Hey, maybe this culture is pretty good. Um, and so those are the only ones that I might care about a little bit, but even then it's kind of shaky and the best places to work badges and awards are very important in a good economy when the market is tough and you can't find enough employees because everyone is hiring and a bad economy i don't think they're as important like right now because people will just take jobs by the way it's harder to win those awards too in a bad economy because so many people are getting cut right and so maybe the companies are the best during that time maybe aren't the best because Because that's a company that's super stable.

11:28Because startups, tech, it can be unstable in bad times. Yeah, and I wasn't laughing that people get cut. But I totally agree with you. The moment you start cutting, people are worried. And you're going to have one of the worst ratings ever. But the businesses that don't operate from a financial standpoint and they're not responsible, they can be really terrible companies to work for. And I've seen a lot of startups do this. Because then they're just like, oh, we're almost out of money. Well, would you rather had 100 people working for you, and then six months later, you're out of money, and then everyone's out of a job, or you had 100 people working for you, you cut 30, and you can figure out how to sustain, and now you can go for another five years.

12:12You can live another day. Yes. The extra five years, it still sucks to cut 30, but those other 70 people will have a job for a much longer period of time, and you're taking some pain for some gain, but it's like, which one's the better of the both evils? And in some cases, it's better to keep feeding 70 mouths for five years than it is to only feed 100 for six months. And by the way, like you'll have to take the blame for the 30 people that you had to let go and they'll hate you. Bless you. Thank you. They'll hate you. They'll write negative reviews. And, but that's what you sign up for. And it sucks, right?

12:51You never sign them up to be in this position, but you have to sacrifice for the greater good or else you're going to affect 100 people. Yes. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive.

13:23And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school dot IO slash hire. Again, it's marketing school dot IO slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. And on a final note, Anthropic with their Claude, they're releasing an enterprise plan to compete with OpenAI. I don't know if you saw that. I did see that. Are you paying for it?

13:54No, I was actually hoping you were paying for it to get feedback. I haven't started using it yet, but I will tell you that related to Claude, because a lot of people are using Cursor AI. Did I tell you about that? Did we talk about that already? Yeah. I haven't used Claude Enterprise yet. By the way, we pay for OpenAI teams, but I don't see the benefit of it quite yet. I think the benefit of it would be everyone's sharing their information into one thing, so it's building your own little internal LLM. But I haven't used it, have you? Like with OpenAI's team? I haven't done OpenAI's team, and I haven't used Cloud Enterprise yet.

14:31What I found is when we talk to a lot of organizations, even people with our organization, a lot of people are using OpenAI. They can actually get a lot done with the free version of ChatGPT, and most people don't even need a paid version. Really? I use OpenAI quite a bit on my phone. I just ask it questions. Do you find yourself using it quite a bit? I don't have it on my phone. Some people's kids, they don't even know what Google is anymore. They just like ChatGPT. How are your kids with, like Emma, what does she use? We don't give them devices. Oh, that's very good. Too young. Very good. We have them read a book or play puzzles.

15:04Very good. You don't have to do, ChatGPT on your phone is amazing. I can do like a quick financial, like, oh, here's how I want to structure this deal. over here. Here's the numbers over here. Or like, Hey, how much body fat percentage should I be at? Right. It like does all these things. And then I take a picture of my food. How many calories is it? What is it? What's in it? Right. Because everything pretty good. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce.

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16:08Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this Black Friday one to remember. I think you more optimize your life and I'm more like, I just try to eat somewhat healthy or even like deal structures going back to the business stuff. I get an email and people are like, here's this deal that we're looking at. Here's the overview. here's why we like it here are the pros here's the cons here's a potential deal structure let us know if we can proceed or not yeah and it's just i spend most my time on the phone talking to people and closing deals how many how many hours do you think you spend on a phone per day four and a half five on phone calls yeah yeah at least four and a half maybe five yeah that's not i mean that's a good amount but i don't think that's insane you know what i mean yeah but okay What do you think you spend the rest of your time on?

17:05Getting work done. Emails? There's a lot of routing for you now, right? Emails don't take more than 30 minutes a day for me. Okay. What else? I read a lot. I probably spend three hours a day reading. Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC. I read a lot of space stuff. Space stuff? Yeah. What space stuff? Just about the universe to my children. What? Oh, for your kids. Okay, that makes sense. So that's your story. So you get to learn while you're reading to them. Oh, what a scammer. You're not reading about like knights or like princesses and all that. You're just trying to learn while you're teaching them.

17:43Wow. That's actually pretty smart. When I'm home, I probably read like 45 minutes worth of space stuff to them a day. What the? Okay, that's amazing. So like about black holes and everything. Okay, tell me something about black holes. No, no, no. I am not that smart. Okay. And by the way, most of the articles on black holes or even books on black holes, it's like people talking about alien life. That's how much really we know. Like they don't know much about it. Yeah. But it's just interesting to read. And the goal for me, the reason I read a lot of space stuff is A, I would love it if my kids were into space for their careers.

18:24And B, I would love for them to live on another planet. Wow. That might just happen in their lifetime. All right. That is it for today. please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe go to markingschool.io slash agency it is now application only so you can't even pay to get in if you wanted to get in now you have to apply and so that is it for today but other than that we'll see you tomorrow