The Role of Referrals and Networking in Agencies

0:00All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business. This is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so. And you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency. Hope you enjoy the episode. Peck, welcome. Hi, Austin.

0:30Hey. um did you want to jump in actually uh and maybe just tag team on on david's question here which is um where your most recent clients or leads have come from we're getting ideas about like you know different forms and sources for for leads and clients sure um i seem to can't get away from just referrals. So we, we just try to reconnect with folks. Um, I was recently in, in, in Vegas for a business trip for, for our team offsite. But during that, I, we allocated one day for having a dinner with the, you know, friends of our company. Um, and we came away, you know, invited, I think we've invited like 10 people and we got six people to show up.

1:21um and then out of that we got two follow-up action items so that you know say for the price of a you know four star four dollar sign dinner you know catching up with some folks in so that's our one of our go-to motions now is if i'm traveling for business um we ahead of time build a list of like who do we want to reconnect with in that city or town um so like i'll be in Austin later in a couple months and we're already starting to plan like, okay, who do we want to invite to our dinner? And that's always been fruitful. It's like coming full circle. We went digital and now everybody's back to dinners and old-fashioned networking.

2:10And thanks for scheduling that meeting. So hopefully connect in person there. um the uh the people you're inviting to those meetings are they people you already know or are they cold they're they're people well we we tried actually inviting some cold people in vegas and they didn't rsvp so i think the way it works out in reality is is the people that we already know um the last meeting that i had before this one i had a local bay area one one was a old client one wasn't a client yet and one was thinking of engaging with us it was actually an old client that was had a new potentially new work for us so by by you know having an old unexisting client as well.

3:02So I've seen, I just took this playbook from, from Twilio. We were a Twilio partner and what they would do is arrange, you know, lunches and dinners and they would bring a client. They would bring someone who's kind of Twilio curious and then they would bring partners. Cause if they needed a partner, you know, it's like, Oh, here's a partner. And I would go to these. So, so yeah, it would, I was like, let me borrow, you know, I call it R &D, rip off and duplicate this playbook. Actually, my idea now is it takes a lot of work, event planning. So I'm actually going to outsource this to someone like an event planner.

3:45And I'm writing the requirements right now. But the idea is I just want to show up, have an RSVP list. I'm happy to just whip out the credit card and pay. But, you know, all that stuff leading up to it, like, oh, food preferences, allergies, blah, blah, blah, RSV, what's the best time? Like, all that is so much work. So I'm just going to have an event planner do this monthly, like, clockwork. And the idea is, I just want to just tell me where to show up and just I'll pay for it. Don't worry about it, you know? You know how you can upgrade the dinners? I thought about it just now. if you find an agency that does complementary services to yours both of you invite both of your clients you do together at dinner and now you're overlapping clients that are new to each other look at you i love it just share that away and then and then you split the dinner too and you split the dinner too i should have thought of that earlier but this is that came to mind as peck was talking i was like man that's a good idea actually yeah yeah i love it are you guys on the map do you know there's a map in the community i can i'll show you there but yeah if you haven't um i'll make the post just like put yourself on the map and then that way you can see where everybody's office is you can connect that way too oh cool that'd be pretty sick cool guys um thank you thank you for the input there does anyone else have a challenge or something that's top of mind that they want some input i can ask a question i don't know how relevant it's going to be to half of the group though but i welcome the ideas um i just put a tool in a in the in the chat and it's a hubspot's new tool ai search grader and so if you run your company through that search grader basically you know you give it a net you give your company name you give your industry the size or whatever and then what it comes back to come back with is ai sentiment and then it comes back with ai now uh let me look at the screenshots i was just showing it to the client um anyways it comes back with ai information how ai understands your brand whether it knows about share of voice right so it comes back to share of voice and sentiment and that kind of got me on a path of thinking right so as we let's say most of us kind of start with one service and then we expand into multiple services when you talk when you deal with ai and when your company your clients start to wonder how to be on top of mind with ai models it gets so much more complicated because ai takes information in from various different sources like social media reviews websites right newspapers media publications video audio basically every single source out there and so now when you just focus on one service and the future of digital marketing is essentially AI whether you do it through Google or something somewhere else it doesn't really matter how do you position your services now to encapsulate that overarching presence that someone has to create in order to be on top of mind in AI model that makes sense is that too wrote up a question let me know if that makes sense at all like it's not enough to be a social media agency anymore it's not enough to be just an SEO agency like PR is required video is required and most of the clients are not doing all of that stuff and if they're not how many of them are going to fall behind with AI providing answers if AI doesn't even think about them yeah actually I brought this up with another company it's like seo just on google is is not couldn't be good enough soon and you have to have a search strategy for ai yeah and i don't even think it's i think they labels a tool wrong i don't think it's supposed to be search like ai model grader or something like that um but yeah google is not gonna go away that's for sure but just like Facebook was the king and it got smaller because now TikTok and Instagram and everybody took a share of voice it's gonna same is gonna happen to Google eventually and just other platforms will be equally important and it's like your attention is not distributed and there is no hope in the future to just rely to rely solely on Google it's not gonna be enough and that's like you can you link to the tool in the chat I would love to oh I think yeah I put it there yeah okay um so funny story related to this is one of our prospects leads found us through chat gpt they said that they asked you know they they put in like hey here's who we are here's what we're trying to do it was the best agency and they said our name came up i was like are you sure like yeah yeah you know it's like that's how they found us that was really try to replicate the prompt uh they didn't give us you know we're not that close uh ultimately unfortunately they didn't end up going with us, they found they were interviewing a couple agencies, but they said that we were very close.

8:54We were like the final two. And then ultimately they went with someone who had like direct relevant experience with what they were trying to build. Ours was a little adjacent, but, but it was funny that that was how they search. Like, like to your point, people are not using Google anymore. They're just, you know, Hey, you are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, trying to do this, you know, what software development agency would be best for this. and like now it's not about search anymore it's about asking a a large language model right sorry about the emoji i don't know why i'd show that uh yeah yes yeah and that's a problem it's very personalized and customized you know depending on a prompt in the future not even so much right now some of the articles it scrapes is just the best of something and it just scrapes that information but in the future it's going to get so much more sophisticated and it's like how do you offer a package where you can actually influence the ai sentiment in a way that there's the PRs, there's influencers, there's everything happening that cohesively makes an impact.

9:56Neil Patel is probably positioned the best for that. He's been at it for a long time. Yeah. That's my question. 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.

10:31Great experience 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. As far as like, Scott, let me just make sure. Did you have that question answered?

11:02Or would you like more feedback from the group? No, if anyone has any feedback, more than happy to hear it. If not, then we can move on. And yeah, it's a bit of a loaded question and not necessarily something that's easy to answer, I guess. So if I understand the question, I was just going to say, if the question understood the question, I might not have understood it fully. But it's not enough to just have more niche services within the realm of all the services in digital marketing. And what are people doing to expand that? Can it help me get on track? Well, if AI is the future and AI is going to be part of everything, whether it's search platforms or social media platforms, and AI takes into account such a greater variety of sources in order to have certain sentiment about the brand as well as to understand the share of voice of the market based on the information they consume.

12:04if you do just one small part the impact that you're making is not no longer going to be as large as it was as it is right now because while seo and google is big it's relevant but if ai is now a bigger you know it's everywhere it's not going to just look at search results no longer it's going to look at yeah no i i do have an opinion on that so in a nutshell kevinology so I'm very involved in AI AI adoption AI deployment I follow a lot of the AI thought leaders from Sam Altman all the way down but there's a great just for as a resource for fellow agency there's the AI marketing association if or I think it's association but AI marketing Association, the amazing podcast.

12:50But when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it took almost 30 years for light bulbs to be fully used in society. And so what we're seeing right now with AI is high interest, low adoption. So it's still in the hype mode, in a sense, there's a lot of hype, People are fearful of it. The average, I mean, millions of people went and signed up for OpenAI when it came out. They have less than a 10 % like super user from that initial use base, basically. And so there is definitely early adopters and innovators using this and creating use cases for it and doing this. The average consumer, though, has no knowledge of what AI can do for it still.

13:41It's moving so fast, too fast in a lot of cases that even industry leaders can. So back to, you know, what I've been hearing and then I have my own opinion, what I've been hearing, because this comes up in a lot of these conversations amongst thought leaders, things like that, is will AI replace Google for where people search? And right now, perplexity probably is the best solution that and Google is trying to copy what they're doing. If you're not familiar with perplexity.ai, I would definitely go there. It's free. There's a paid part of it, but it's fabulous for hybrid AI and what we're used to with Google.

14:24You still get all the citations, all the backup, etc. So that being said, if you look at perplexity's model, they're still using all the search engine results for Google to populate the results of the answers they give you when you ask it in an AI format with the citation links back to those websites. And so I think that's the future. I still think that the SEO and if you're not visible on Google, you're not going to be suggested in these tools that are citing best places. Now, you're right. If somebody's saying, what's the best restaurant in Toronto or Mississauga or Markham or wherever, you know, Chachi BT is only as smart as it were collected.

15:09That last time it ran in 2021 or if it's current or whatever, what was popular back then? So people aren't trusting the results of a lot of the current models until they're still trying to figure out if they trust it. Is that the best? Right. And so the practical use cases of search engines and local and all that still rely heavily on what Google has. So I think we're five years out before, unless they just totally replace what's there with something new, and we're forced to swallow the pill or what they're giving us. So that's just Kevinology theory, you know, the way I see the future. Because I'm having this conversation with a lot of my clients that are SEO clients.

15:56They go, should we continue to invest in SEO? And I take them through that story I just told you. And they go, yeah, that makes sense, man. Let's keep on going, you know. Yeah, I don't think the concern is about the present. The present is the way it is. And there's no concern. It's more about how do you innovate your services to fit into the AI futures, essentially. that's what the question is if it's so drastically large to process so much information do you have to offer more services to become more effective as an agency uh that's where our mind is we're worried that perplexity is going to take away the share it's not but like if you guys watched nils and eric's last episode i think they were talking about investment into ai by various different organizations like facebook and google yeah it's 180 billion dollars or something it's like and it's just drastically increased so adoption is one thing but when these companies feel the pressure to innovate they're just going to push it shovel it down your throat to actually what do you call it to oh austin dropped out and i became a host

17:05and then basically and then basically yeah if they if they have to if they feel pressure from the competition adoption might not even be a consideration they might just go and just push it into the market, just like Google did with the hour release and it was full of failures. But yeah, it's just, it's more of a question around services rather than the actual concern around. 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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18:09Sign 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. Yeah, I think you definitely like I'm winning deals. Like I start with the website. We get SEO. They need leads now. So we get paid advertising. They need email marketing to nurture those leads. They need like, so we definitely offer the whole thing. And I didn't always do that. I always had a partner who offered it. I said we offered it. But now we do a lot of this in-house. Once I got enough business, I brought it in-house.

18:47But basically, you want to have those solutions. Otherwise, they're going to look somewhere else for it, you know, kind of thing. And then back to the AI thing, you know, I think, you know, like crypto, like blockchain is something new. There's a company out there called Shipping, I think it's called. and they do reward tokens for engaging with brands. So like if you go and eat at McDonald's a lot, you get tokens on, you know, but they learn about, you know, a lot of sharing. That's the future, I think, things like that, where there's reward, risk, you know, honey, we got all these ways people buy things now and they're getting information.

19:25They're willing to share to get rewards. You know, the tokenization of things is, in my opinion, some of the future stuff, but it's not here yet for sure. But I'm always, I'm kind of, you know, the 80, 20 rule, 80 % has got to be tried and true. 20 % is innovation, you know, and, and our methodology. And so by talking innovation with our clients, it keeps them close to my trusted advisor. And, but we're doing the practical stuff. Like we're rolling out AI chat bots for a lot of our clients right now. They love it, but they were still, they took, it's been six months. You know, they, what is it?

20:02How does it work? Let's try it out. Let's do it side by side with our customer service agents. And, you know, they're getting leads from it now because the AI is just feeding, answering all the questions somebody has that they wouldn't ask a human. And they become exhausted with all the questions. They go, I'm ready to buy. Can someone call me? You know, kind of thing. And where they didn't get that before from a regular chat relationship. So anyways, those are a lot of the things I saw from your question. Hopefully that helps.