The Ultimate Strategy Showdown for Traffic, Retargeting, and Referrals

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. a takeaway that they'd like to throw in? I think for Rebecca, if you wanted to start, it sounded like you had something that was on the tip of your tongue. I'm curious. And you guys have probably talked about this. And so if you have, just point me back to like maybe a session, if you happen to remember it, and I'll just listen to it. We're in lead generation, all that stuff. And the thing that constantly comes up, and so it comes up in all of your email too, is cold outbound prospecting and all the magical tools that everybody's selling with the, they're creating the AI emails and they'll practically send them and get you your own leads.

1:06We haven't seen this being successful, yet it's constantly touted as successful. And so I'm just not comfortable recommending it in the smaller B2B space. And I'm curious if somebody's actually like making money off this besides just charging people to do it. So Rebecca, is it more around like kind of who's crushing with cold outbound right now? I guess so. Yeah, I guess so. And I don't, crushing to me means somebody's helping a client make a lot of money versus they're just selling it like crazy and they're going to make money for about a year and then they're not. Anybody smashing with cold outbound right now?

1:43I can say I'm not. I tried it once. I am not. Rebecca, I did share a link in chat. That's a really good template um it's it's really like straight into the point but anybody feel free to jump in here okay thank you so we just started with that with the whole like r b2b clay uh warmly like automated outbound stuff with a consultant he set up i don't understand everything that's been set up but he walked us through the whole thing and we're actually getting meetings booked like we just started two months ago so we're we're still getting signals of traction but so far some of these logos that are responding in booking meetings are actually real, like legit companies we'd want to work with.

2:26So I think in like two to three months, I'll be able to tell you whether or not we actually closed revenue. David, that is really good to hear and encouraging. I did a test for our company and it was a smashing failure. So, but all those tools, all those tools that he just said. I'll show you a little workflow, David. David, finish your thought. Go ahead. I was going to say, I'm happy to intro you to the consultant, but I don't know if it's, it might be a little too early to like be confident in making that intro, but if you want to like learn about what they're saying. That's okay. I'll make my own mistakes.

2:58I'll make my own mistakes. Okay. I have a quick question for Rebecca. When you say it was not successful, like how long did you give it? Not long because the person wanted too much money. We were paid, we paid$4 ,000 over about maybe a month or two. and I just wasn't even seeing replies or anything. And this is someone who's very experienced in the space and is very into the whole HubSpot world and came recommended by somebody I trust and who knows what was going on, honestly. So I just shelved it and then my clients asked me about it and I'm like, I just don't know how I feel. So I need to get more comfortable.

3:37So that was one of my first questions I wrote down. Cool. I'm going to share my screen real quick. Thank you. David, to your point, this isn't going to necessarily work for everyone, but I was thinking about this. Here's my screen. So this is our Slack over here. We have a visitor Intel outreach channel. So this is retention.com and we're just pushing it to Slack. And then what we're doing, we used to have an automation set up for this. So for example, this visited our site. She's senior manager, SEM. We've actually paused all these automated outreach messages. And I actually think, you know, what we came up with is kind of tacky, this AI SEO thing.

4:14And I feel like AI is kind of played out now when people try to lead with it. But all that to say is like, we do lead score them. And then we're like, okay, the rationale for eight out of 10 is they're a senior manager in SEM. Okay. They visit this page on newsletter advertising. Now what we do instead, and even I do this sometimes is I'll just add them on LinkedIn. And I'll also, I'll send them an email, not just a, just not just like a connect note, but I'll send them an email tied to whatever, like, oh, they're interested in newsletter advertising oh by the way we talked about this over here or like here's this webinar over here that way we can build a deeper relationship um i think the hand-to-hand combat is where we generally find much higher response rates maybe like 30 40 percent or so um just know that you're probably gonna have to spend some in mails on it i think so and the tool you're using um which one are you using to sniff your visitors uh retention.com retention.com okay you said that at the top of it that is um that validates a lot for me to tell you the honest truth so thank you of course all right that's a that's a nice loaded one who else has got something wait why do you use retention dot com instead of rb2b or is it the same thing oh it's i use rb2b sorry yeah i use rb2b yeah yeah thank you david yeah peck you want to go uh sure uh yeah that's a question for eric um I know you invest a lot in marketing, YouTube, podcasts, everything.

5:36For single grain, where are your best customers? You know, if you had to stack rank your channels, where are your best customers coming from? Yeah, number one would be referral. And it's not even close. It's interesting because I met with another founder of a creative shop in my hometown, Arcadia, last week. And I was like, where is all your business coming from? I asked the same question. It's like, all of it comes from referral, right? But it's hard to scale that way. So referral would be the best. obviously, but then second and third, I would say the most predictable channels for us would probably be SEO and webinars.

6:07Um, and webinars to me is just a form of partnerships. I don't think enough of us here are doing it. Um, so what we do on our side with partnerships is like, Hey, like we have a couple of leads on our side. Um, we're going to send them to you. And we don't, we've talked about this on marketing school. We don't necessarily try to track them too much. Neil does the same thing. Um, but you just generally get a feeling like if I'm sending, like if I send four leads to David and he doesn't send me anything, like over time, I'm going to be like, okay, like, but we'll probably just start sending him less leads.

6:32And then we'll send it to people that do kind of reciprocate. And that works well. And then that leads to webinar partnerships and other types of like email. You can do like an email deal or something like that. And then SEO has kind of been the gift that keeps on giving. And I don't know about you guys, but like our traffic after the last update keeps moving up. So, you know, knock on wood, we can hold on to that. And then Peck, I'll add a bonus for you here. We're totally revamping our YouTube right now. And maybe my lesson of the week here before someone else has questions and feel free to raise your hand.

7:02We have a YouTube, we have a YouTube guy that works with like a couple of like billionaires who have YouTube channels, like Robert Kiyosaki, Ken McElroy. And, and he's helping us right now. His name's Josh, but what he's doing, he's like one, he's like, Eric, you know, I saw him at an event. I spoke at a couple of weeks ago. He's like, your YouTube channel is shit. I was like, tell me more. And he's like, yeah, you talk about all these different things, but like, it doesn't help your business. And like your, your, this sucks, that sucks, you know, and then I had him sit on my, a call with my team.

7:28Basically he's agreed now to help me repackage videos. And I'm going to show you what I mean by that. So what I mean by that is if I can share my screen over here, give me one second. I need to share the right thing. Okay, here we go. Okay. Can you guys see this? Yes. Okay. So all he does now is he'll write the idea for me. He'll come up with the ideas and he'll just send me like a word document like this. and then he'll come, he'll have like a couple of thumbnail concepts. And then here's a hook over here. And then I can basically go into, um, the video itself. I might need to do a little preparation.

8:03Um, he had one earlier today on me, me just kind of telling a story. And I, I basically like, I popped this up. I might've prepared for five minutes or so. And then it recorded like a 34 minute video straight. And, um, the thing with my channel is, is that I was interviewing people around like dating and finance and things like that. It started to kind of pollute my channel. Now I'm, I'm honing it a lot more. That being said, I had a dating one that came out yesterday. You guys all should watch it. It's fantastic. Um, but, but like, he's the last one right now. I'm just like, I'm talking to Seth Godin later this month.

8:33I'm talking to Anthony Pappoliano, but 80 % of my content is just going to be me. 20 % will be interviews and it's just going to be business and marketing. So my mistake last year was sure. I enjoyed these conversations with other people, but now I'm honing everything back into like, what's actually going to drive leads. Um, and I will say that some of these interviews actually do drive leads, but it's not the dating ones at the end of the day. So, yeah. That's funny. You mentioned that. Cause I noticed you did that dating one and I was like, what's the strategy here? Is this helping? Like, are you trying to go broader?

9:03So thank, thanks for sharing that. It's because I was confused and you answered my question. Yep. Yeah. And by the way, like that video from yesterday, we'll probably get like a hundred thousand views, if not more like his last one I did with him, 300 ,000 is because these guys all have good sound bites. And like, we do have ads in there, like mid-roll ads, like that, that helps as well. But what I found for like Instagram reels, for example, what actually got us leads. There's one video where I was telling Neil a story about this Laurel Piana store where you can get 70 % off in Italy. And then that one got like, I don't know, three or 4 million views or so.

9:37And I had a couple of people text me about it. And then, you know, these are like CMOs or C-level people at, you know, multi-billion dollar companies. And so that's a scenario where I think if you tell a good story and it's helpful, people will remember you. But if you're, if, if you're like interviewing someone else, you're propping them up. And that generally isn't that helpful for your business. And it's also more work on you too, as the interviewer. So just keep that in mind if you guys want to do that stuff. So Eric, wouldn't it make sense for you just to have a separate channel for the dating stuff that you're doing?

10:08Cause I mean, if you like that and it's fun. You know what I mean? I don't really, I don't know. The conversation's intriguing to me, but I don't know if I really like it a lot. I like conversations like this where we're talking about business and marketing. A lot was your conversations was new. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's those, I enjoy those a lot. So yeah. 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?

10:46She 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, great 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.

11:19So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. All right. Let's see. Go ahead, Hey, how's it going? Hey, so a client asked me this week if AI-generated content is getting hammered by Google or will be getting hammered by Google. So just kind of curious what everyone's thoughts are in that area. They can hammer that. Wow. This is all AI-generated, this section. And so what we've done just to make it actionable for you, Noman, is you can see over here, it dropped quite a bit. This is like, there's an update and then another update happened. But we've been very focused on the quality of these pages.

12:03And these are taken from transcripts of marketing school. And then we have a human in a loop that will write it out and just to really handle the last mile or two. And you can see now we're getting rewarded for the quality. And so I think a lot of people are thinking more so about quantity. still right now, quantity versus quality. I think people should think more about quality than quantity and not necessarily think about pumping out thousands of pages, but maybe it's like hundreds or so. And so, yeah, hopefully that helps. That's great. Thank you. We discussed this a couple of weeks ago. I think Alex was on the call and a few others.

12:39We talked about this actually. And I'm curious, like how much of that last mile is human? Like, is it 10 % 20 % I mean like 30 40 % yeah yeah I don't know David you have a content marketing agency um so I don't know if you want to speak to it we use some AI for like the beginning of like drafting and all of that but it's like maybe 80 % human but for our own website there definitely is AI content and it's a similar chart to what you just shared Eric we we're doing a lot of AI for our own marketing. Yep. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts.

13:19You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year. You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible.

13:52This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign 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 tool and make this Black Friday one to remember.

14:13Well, Ginger, your question was, can Josh help with super small businesses or does he work with A-listers? Right now, he does have like an A-lister vibe around him. He hasn't answered me directly, but I don't think I'm an A-lister. I think he just likes me. You're an A-lister, Eric. Come on. In the space of entrepreneurship and marketing, you are definitely an A-lister. I appreciate that. But yeah, I think eventually he'll open up more. but he's not cheap. I think he's only like 21 years old and he's charged like 25 grand a client. So he's got demand. So yeah. Awesome. I love it. Yeah. Cool. Who else we got?

14:46Can I ask a question actually on that recommendation that he made? Yeah. So the script was about you fired employees, how to prevent you being next. How does that translate into business yeah so now his his idea and that's a good question scott so the the the idea itself will bring in a larger audience but it is centered around ai um i just i was just like dude don't give me an ai title like i'm so sick and tired of them um so he's like okay well you replaced because i explained him he's so he called me yesterday he was like he's like okay tell me like some of the math behind it i'm like okay well um one of our developers started using cursor and then he increased his speed by 2x and then he said in the last year or two he's increased his efficiency by 3x okay then you have a multiplier there and then then there's like some other things we added this week it's like it's made him like even faster right so it's like um we're kind of doing the math behind we're like okay maybe like we've gotten you know seven or eight x faster overall and so we just kind of backed into backed into that that like random number so okay so the title is click baity but the but the text is the meat and potatoes of the video is actually you talking about your business the agency how you see okay okay and you know who's a good example scott i think um let me pull him up real quick so this is my friend um ken mckelroy and so josh works with this guy um let me pull this up real quick uh all right pulling it up and we'll go to you next kevin so this is ken over here all right so ken you can see he's got 425k subs and then let's just click on his channel and channel stats you know i think they're doing better like last month on the month before i think they had two or three million views or so but before that he was only getting like a hundred thousand views a month or so and then um then we had you know mr hero josh step in.

16:41So like some of his videos here, we'll get like a hundred K views, right? What my 10 ,000 tenants reveal about the economy. I'm buying 90 million in property. Here's how, right. Um, so decent amount of views for these, but his whole thing, Scott is he's trying to get more, um, qualified applicants to, to join his fund, right? Cause he he's a real estate investor. So it actually has increased. I would say it increased his output by like 21 X, um, in terms qualified applications. So there is business value from what he's getting.