Should Marketing Teams Spend Time Getting Awards, and How Many Pieces of Content Should You Post Daily on Instagram?

0:28You have one over here that's interesting to me. helps you generate more revenue. Arguably, talent is the most important thing. I've always been a big fan of these in the past. I was stressing it to the team. I was like, guys, we need all these best places to awards. You know who's done a good job with it? Acceleration Partners, Bob Glazer. You'd always have the Glassdoor one or this one, that one. It's not that hard. When I say it's not that hard, you just have to push your team and you send them a survey and just remind them over and over. Eventually, you get a good amount doing it. As long as you treat your people well, then most people are going to fill it out.

1:02So I found it to be helpful because it's something you can call out during the recruiting process too. It's like, oh yeah, we looked at your glass door, you know, what else, blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh yeah, we always have these best places to work awards and this is how we treat our people. And you're interviewing right now three candidates to be a CEO? Or four. For a CEO or CEO? COO. And then the CEO search is starting. So you're going to do a CEO search and a COO search? Which ones are you interviewing for first? It's the COOs ones that are just the ones that have come through first, right?

1:33But the CEO ones, we're actually going to an executive recruiting firm for that one. CEO for the same company or a different one? CEO for the agency. And the CEO for? The agency. Oh, you may run into issues. We'll see. Because if you're hiring both of them, you should hire the CEO first before the CEO. Well, I'm going CEO right now because I don't know how long they're going to take, right? with the CEO one. And I'm going to have to be hands-on for a while anyway. So that's why I'm looking at it right now. So I'm not completely sold that we're going to find that CEO this year because as you know, it takes time to find a really good one.

2:11And so that's why I do think one takeaway we can give everyone is sometimes this stuff takes time and you have to be a little flexible. Sometimes you might just find the most amazing person immediately. Sometimes it might take you a couple months, even a couple years. Yeah, it took us, I think, a year and a half to recruit our CEO. You had to court him. Yeah, it took forever. Yeah. But going back to the awards, it helps with closing some of these candidates. The four that you're interviewing, I'm assuming all of them have jobs and none of them are looking for jobs. Most of them have jobs. Yeah.

2:44Usually good people have jobs and you got to convince them to come work for you. Hence, things like these awards or anything else that you can show as proof elements that your company is amazing to work for culturally helps. I would say if you're a founder, for example, if you're you and then I'm me, I think the founder does have an advantage that if you can paint a really good vision, you can actually convince people to jump over. Because they're like, dude, I have a really good situation. But if you paint a vision and then you understand what it is that they want and what they want to be doing in the next five years, and if you can paint that for them and they believe in you and they see what you've done and they look up to you, you can bring them over.

3:20I was talking to my European head, the guy who heads up EMEA for us. and when I was talking to him, he's like, because we want to expand into some new regions, and he's like, oh, I know the perfect person. Let me see if I can convince him to join, and we haven't opened in that region yet, but we're looking to, and it just takes time because you have to find the right people, and he's just like, yeah, he needs a week or two, and then he'll get back to me, and I told him, I'm like, okay, before he tells you a no, if he tells you yes, great. But if you think there could be any chance of a no, tell him I want to talk to him or my other co-founder wants to talk to him, get him on the phone with one of us and we'll help sell him before he has a chance to say no.

4:04It goes a long way, dude. I've had people and I'm sure you have too, that where they would, they would kind of get a little shy and say like, oh, they're going to pursue something else. But then once you get on a call with them, it like completely sells them. And then they've like flipped around. So one little call, sometimes it's even two minutes, three minutes, it can flip the entire script. Yeah. And then I started giving them talking plans. I was talking to my head of EMEA. I'm like, look, this other person works for a big holding company, right? He's like, yeah. They have tons of bureaucracy, right?

4:30He's like, yeah. I'm like, we let you do your own thing. Do I bug you that much? He's like, no, you mainly call about sales numbers and overall targets and if we're on track. I'm like, yeah, okay. I'm like, you wanted to buy a company in, I won't name the country, but there's a specific country that we're buying, or I should say, we're in an LOI to buy a company in France. So I was like, you want to buy a company in France, right? And he's like, yeah. And I was like, you push for it. I didn't look much into the company. I haven't even talked to the founder. And I just let you do it, right? And I was like, he's like, yeah.

5:03I was like, where else is this other person going to get that? I'm like, you need to let him know the type of culture and the trust we have with our leaders who are proven and who are good. Yeah. As long as you do a good job, you're fine. Yes. Yeah. We're very flexible with people who do really good work and you are too. and then the ones who aren't, you got to keep track of it. You're quick at letting, now I'm a lot quicker, but you've always been quick at moving on. Okay, you've got some good ones today. Let's do this other one over here. What you learned from publishing three pieces of content a day on Instagram versus two.

5:34It doesn't work as well, both your pieces of content. When you start publishing them too close and I was experimenting with high quality content, so good hooks that are proven and all this kind of stuff, not just randomly publishing content. If you post two videos too close to each other, we're seeing consistently the reaches going down on both videos. But with Instagram that most people don't do, we started testing out trial reels and posting the normal piece of content the first time. And then later on the day, we post our charts. We were posting the third piece in between. What we did with the third piece was start doing a trial reels.

6:12And the moment we started doing that, we started seeing an uptick in views for the original or the first post of the day. Interesting. Yeah. Neil and I were both running a lot of experiments this year with social. I'm still the most excited about YouTube. And then Neil's actually got this one over here about should you keep your long form videos only on YouTube? Dude, you know, I got pitched from my team that we should only put the long form content on YouTube. Like, look, Mr. Beast is the gold standard. He puts it on YouTube. So I'm like, just because Mr. Beast is performing the best doesn't mean everything he's doing is right.

6:47I would say I'm great at SEO and business, but it doesn't mean I'm the best or everything is right. There's always someone that you can learn from or something that you can learn from and you can always experiment because just because it works for one person doesn't mean it'll work the same way for you, even if both of you are in the same industry. And I was just like, why not just post that video on Instagram, LinkedIn, and everywhere that's saying, well, no, you want YouTube to be the place and drive everyone to, and I'm like, I disagree with this. If the content's good, I think you should just push it out everywhere.

7:19I think it just depends. Okay, so it sounds like they're obviously big Mr. Beast fans. I think if you're Mr. Beast, you want to optimize for YouTube as the main thing because you're just trying to get more and more views and be the number one YouTuber in the world. That is your goal. That is all you're focused on. Your goal is to get as many views as possible, not for views sake, but to drive more business for your company, right? And so you're right, people are hanging out on LinkedIn. You're right, people are hanging out on X. I don't care, even if you get a thousand views or so, it's still amazing.

7:47Because one person in that might be a big company decision maker. And a lot of people on YouTube, even though we get good leads from YouTube, a lot of people are tire kickers. Yeah, and what I decided was, all right, you guys want it on YouTube first? No problem, leave it on YouTube. Within a week, I'll just publish it on LinkedIn, X, and there could be a delay of a week. It doesn't make a difference. Or two weeks, who cares? and they're like, no, you want everyone to know if you have content to go to YouTube to watch it and push them off from your other social media. You should have just asked the question, what's the goal?

8:16What's the goal of Mr. Beast and what's the goal of NP Digital? Yeah, and I told them, we want leads and we're going to go wherever the audience is. And we'll even run ads towards these videos if they're high performers because we want to keep rotating in our general awareness campaign where we have 14 different, we'll have shorts, we'll have long forms, things like that. We just want to keep rotating content so we're constantly top of mind. and if you're going to spend all that time recording on a weekend and it's going to be highly produced and highly edited I want more people to see it yes yeah so that's what we think about that but I will say we are putting more effort into YouTube long form ourselves and we're publishing two long forms per week and it's interesting finally in my last 10 videos four of them are like they're either really high performers or high performers and I haven't seen that in years I'm like oh YouTube is finally giving me credit again because when you look at a channel sometimes Sometimes, you know, sure, even though my channel has 170 ,000 subs, it's not a lot.

9:09It's decent. It's not a lot. That's a lot. But Neil has one point. I even call it your channel too. Neil has 1.3 million. Before, a couple months ago, Neil might publish something. If he's lucky, maybe it's like 3 ,000 views, 5 ,000 views, something like that, right? Yeah, for sure. I don't really publish long form on YouTube. Yeah. And so you got dinged for that too, because a lot of your past long forms in the last 12 months or so weren't getting a lot of views, right? It's like, we were getting pretty pathetic views for the sizes of our channels. and when I publish, I maybe will average 1 ,000, 2 ,000 views per video.

9:37You would average 5 ,000, 10 ,000 or so. It's really nothing. Now, for example, the talk you and I did in Germany, that one has 72 ,000 views. Great for an SEO video. There's another one. We did a podcast. That one's 6 ,000. I'll take the 6 ,000 views. That's great. I think it's more so when you keep putting more effort into long form, you will reap the benefits long term. I do believe the work that Neil's doing, check out his channel. I think that AI one will probably get a couple hundred thousand views. That's my guess. Yeah. And speaking of YouTube, you have in here how to win at YouTube in 2025.

10:10What do you think is the number one strategy? So I don't know if there's a number one strategy. I think we should just talk about what we're doing, which we kind of have been. My take on it is one, if you want to get a lot of views, we're going for larger time ideas, which is funny because you and I, I've created a ton of AI content in the last couple of weeks. So that's all coming, And whatever I tied in with AI and marketing, which is my specialty or business, it just works well. So I'm doing that. And also the vlog, I enjoy doing the vlog because people leave comments. And I think it's building affinity from a community standpoint.

10:46And that's not hard for me to do. So I'm spending a lot more time on the ideas. You are as well. And our team is spending a lot more time on the editing. And the packaging piece, I kind of just used to defer it out to my team. now I'm like I spend a lot more time on the packaging for the thumbnail and the headline and I come up with three different concepts and they might come up with different ones but we're a lot more on top of it and we're taking a lot more seriously so I even though we do shorts and things like that even though we do this podcast I'm more excited about the long-form stuff so yeah what I found with YouTube is it's all about retention which is obvious but what people focus on is the hook for the video.

11:24What they don't focus on is continually creating hooks throughout the content. So if you have a 10 minute video, open loops. Yeah. How can you end up creating a hook four or five times or have four or five different hooks more so? So then every few minutes you're keeping them engaged because they know that there's more and more coming. The second thing that I've really seen work really well. Let's give him an example. I'll give him an example of your video real quick. So Neil had this video on AI agents. And so So let's say on the first part, he's talking about, oh, you really need to use ChatGPD for this.

11:56But wait till the next one. The next one's just going to blow your mind, right? And so that's an open loop where you just keep inserting open loops. And so when you create a script now, if you're using ChatGPD to help you with scripts, ask it to put in open loops for each section. But continue. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours.

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14:05Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. The next thing that you really need to think about when you're creating this content is how can you actually keep people engaged through the visuals? So one thing that we've been testing to see if it helps with retention is when we're editing and in a lot of our videos, like Eric and I produce, we're naturally educating. So there's multiple tips, like tip one, two, three. But at the beginning of the video, we may not label it 10 ways to do X, Y, and Z or three ways to do X, Y, and Z.

14:48But on the screen, when you're giving tips, even if it's just for a specific section, like you're talking about SEO and you can be like, A, you need to do this. And there's a B and a C on the screen show A, B, and C and D and whatever it may be, but blur out B, C, and D. What is it? Until you get to it. And what we've seen, you know, we're still testing it, but we're seeing slight improvement rates on video retention. So we're trying to do a lot of things with just editing to just keep people around longer. So then that way it increases our overall views. Yeah. So I think if we were to simplify it at a high level, one, we're more focused on it.

15:23And two, because we're more focused on it, we're spending more time optimizing it. And so really it just comes down to focus at the end of the day, because if you look at both of our YouTube channels back in the day, a couple of years ago, whatever you can like fart and a video gets 500 ,000 views, right? Same thing with me too. Like I'm like, man, so my career, my marketing career visit 400 ,000 views. This one over here, 200 ,000 views or so. Yeah. It was, it was also easier back then. Very much easier. Yeah. Also with YouTube, you need focus. If you're like, we're in marketing, we tend to try to create content around what we're known for.

15:53We, you won't see me go create content around, I don't know, Girl Scout cookies. Yeah. It comes to top of mind because you hooked me up with some. I was going to bring some. I appreciate it. Yeah. did you see the latest report? I think it was like on Fox or something like that. Someone sent it to me. What? On all the cancerous ingredients in Girl Scout cookies. Oh, no, I didn't. I guess I won't be giving them to you. No, but Eric, when he gave them to me, it was very thoughtful and kind for my kids. He didn't give them to me with bad intention. He actually bought some Girl Scout cookies for my kids because he knew it would make them happy.

16:24And I ate some of them as well, not many, but I tried like two of the Thin Mints. Dude, they're legit. Dude, I buy a lot of Seize candies from the mall because we're right across from the mall. so I keep reloading this white truffle apple pie. It's so good. Do you eat it? Yeah, I eat one every day. What is it? It's white truffle apple pie. It tastes like white truffle apple pie. Okay, what's for white truffle? It's like the little chocolate. It's just white chocolate? Yeah, it's white chocolate and then there's like apple pie in the center and that's what, it tastes amazing. Is it big or tiny?

16:50It's tiny. It's like a little piece like this. Each one's like 70 calories. So you only buy one a day? Well, no, I have a box. I buy half a pound of that and half a pound of dark chocolate molasses chips. What the heck is a molasses chip? It's like these little rectangles and they're thin. And so I'll eat one at a time because each one's only like 20 calories or so. But sometimes I might eat like two or three. But that way I don't do as much damage to my body. So you eat that every day along with the apple? No. White truffle? It's one or the other. That's my treat. It's one or the other. In the afternoon after lunch, we only eat sweet green or we eat salads from this other place.

17:24And we just eat cheese candy. That's it. Dude, cheese candy is legit. Yeah. I prefer the almond clusters or like the nut clusters. So the chocolate around with nuts. I don't like it getting stuck in my teeth. Yeah. Macadamia nuts. You know, that's always good. I don't know if C's has that. I'll bring the white trouble next time for your kid. No, no, no, no, no. They have too much candy. They need to focus. Dude, they're kids. Go tell your kid to focus. All right. Hey, did you see the XAI launch? How it's kind of crazy? It's version three, right? Grok three. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Elon built this 200 ,000 mega cluster of these GPUs, which is insane.

18:03It's never been done before. I think it was 100 ,000 versus then he doubled it, right? What's the biggest? What does OpenAI have? I don't think they have anything close to that. I don't know. You can Google it. Yeah, you're definitely going to Google it. How big is Open...

18:20Let's see what it comes up with. Did you ask in chat? I just Googled. OpenAI clusters are quite large. potentially causing thousands of nodes with some reports suggesting a scale of 7 ,500 nodes. Nothing. Yeah. So Elon says, hey, I have a lot of money. Okay. So I'm going to buy this. He went to NVIDIA. He built a 100 ,000 megacluster and I think he upped it to 200 ,000. And they didn't think he would do it. He did in record time, right? And this is him working in these five-minute increments. So Austin Allred tweeted this. He said, it's not about the model comparisons because Grok 3 is still kind of behind OpenAI's like a one model, for example, which is why they don't show it in the scores.

18:58Right. But it's not even about that. It's how quickly they've caught up because a year ago, nobody talked about Grok. Right. And so it just shows that a team. So this is what Austin said. A team of cracked people can forego everything else. Focus, right? Pay NVIDIA huge amounts of cash and be on par with you in 18 months. It just shows what happens with these frontier models. We're back up. So I just Google, how many GPUs does OpenAI have? OpenAI uses around 720 ,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Okay, but it's probably spread out. It's not in like one mega cluster, I don't think. I have no idea, but it says...

19:33But I believe that. Grok's consists of 200 ,000 GPUs. You should ask what's the difference between the 200 ,000 mega cluster versus OpenAI's. See, guys, we're not technical here, but I really want to know because I don't think that's... There's nothing that's been close to that done before. now as Neil searches for it just if you look at again love him or hate him right we're not saying we go worship Elon we're just saying like you look at he sourced top talent he used his pile of money as fuel built a data center ran it on natural gas and got the model out right in time just and he also added deep research to it as well and so these things are just going to get more impressive you're smiling what's happening I can't come up with the answer I'm trying to research it, but nothing's giving me the exact answer on the spot.

20:22Yeah. Anyway, I think it just goes to show again. I think what we're trying to reinforce here is focus and speed, and you will get there. Let's actually ask ChatGPT. ChatGPT is not going to know. He's going to be biased. Okay, I'm going to ask Grok. Well, actually, someone needs to keep the podcast running. So I'll keep the podcast running. And let's talk about the next one while you look it up. Look it up on... Yeah, ChadGPG does not tell me, but Grok may end up telling me. That's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow and check out marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster and goodbye.