Why you can't trust agencies, Power of words, Why depth and non-obvious content crush everything else, and Cable TV business crumbles

0:00Jason Lemkin has this one over here. basically the question we have is can you trust agencies and we're biased because we're both agency owners right so jason lemkin says so many founders are crestfallen when i tell them hiring an agency to do sales or demand gen for them in the early days has a zero percent chance of working this just never works no some outbound agency can't magically get you 100 plus qualified leads especially when no one has ever heard of you and you have no brand can they run some generic cadences for you yes will that work well will that will that work with 1000 plus better known vendors in your space?

0:33No. And no, some marketing agency can't magically reach out to the 200 plus top prospects with just the right high ROI pitch for you. They can make you some videos and they can give you some strategy, quote unquote, tips. But what you need is truly qualified leads that can buy. 0 % chance some agency can do that for your startup. What do we think about this? Funny enough, when most startups hit us up and they haven't started anything, we don't take them on as a customer. Because they haven't reached product market fit. we tell them they need to figure the basics out and we can come in and scale and fine tune whatever they did.

1:04We tell them we're not going to build your business for you. Once you figure out the funnel and you have product market fit then we can talk, right? We don't like working with companies that are pre-revenue and I agree with him. I think companies need to go and figure it out. It's just like with sales. I've been in the startup world where you hire sales consultants and try to get them to do it. We've tried paying for this. We've done this a lot. It doesn't work. But what works is if you can get some traction Paying agencies, whether it's in sales and marketing, they can help you fine tune and grow faster.

1:33But they can't just come in and wave a magic wand and solve all your problems for you. You need to build a foundation and they can grow upon that foundation and make it stronger and better, but they need a foundation. They can't start with nothing. But the turd is a turd. So you polish a turd, it's still a turd, right? So it still smells. It still smells, yeah, absolutely. So, but by the way, I don't know about you. I've hired a lot of these I figured multiple times I'll give them a chance like oh my god you're going to get me thousands of qualified leads a month it never works out so whatever seems too good to be true usually is too good to be true and what we realized as we're approaching our 40s is you just have to put in the work for a very long period of time for many many years for decades yeah and grind it out that's what people don't want to do that's a real problem any shortcut we've tried to take has never worked out for us.

2:27I can't think of one that's worked out for me. I've actually done a lot of shortcuts that worked out by making me short-term income, but it's never worked out for me in the long run. And a setback, if I actually took the long approach from day one, I would have done way better. And a great example of this is I remember when I had affiliate sites back in the day, I would do deals with WordPress theme sites and make them put like web hosting and all these links or online poker in the footer. I would climb to the top of the rankings in google you had on make a killing yeah and eventually i would get hit and there goes that income but if i took the slow and steady route and the correct approach and built value and grew my ranks organically i would have made way less money in the short run but in the long run i would have cleaned up and weighed not just more revenue but more profit you know shortcuts going back to what we talked about earlier in this podcast shortcuts are a way of forcing things and again when you try to force the outcome, forces work against you, right?

3:23You got one over here on the power of words. Yeah. So I saw this interesting video on X and it was this blind person. I know it was stage, but it was this blind person who had this cardboard next to him and it said, I'm blind and please help. And they had a little jar or a can hoping that people would give money. Everyone walks by, no one gives money. Again, I'm pretty sure this is stage 99 % sure. i'll tell you something after so then this girl comes by sees the sign she says can i and she takes it rewrites it flips it around and she changes the words you can't see it but everyone starts walking by and money starts pouring in so the guy wants to know what she did and pretty much she changed the wording from i'm blind and please help she switched over the cardboard which was blank on the opposite side.

4:13And she wrote, it's a beautiful day and I can't see it. Right. It just shows you, and we've tested a lot in marketing words, have a big impact. I'm blind and please help to, I it's a beautiful day and I can't see it. Isn't going to mean the difference from$0 raise. If you're trying to get money to a million dollars, kind of like what the video is showing, I'm exaggerating on the amount of money. It was probably from zero to call it a hundred bucks or something. But what ends up happening is, is when you use positivity in marketing, we see it have a much better impact than when you use negative words.

4:45So this original video is the first video I saved on YouTube. And it's a guy where he's doing this and that someone changes the copy. So this is, this also shows like the meta thing here is take what works, just redo it again. Right. How many views does this get? 179 K. Oh, this was a, it was a sub view because the original video got 20 million views. That's another tactic. It's a response to another video and it's still got 179 ,000 views. That's a tactic right now. Some people are posting this video that will get a lot of views and then under it, you'll see a lot more videos that are posted too.

5:23Copywriting 101, it's how do you get into someone's psychology and how do you... When you say, instead of like, please help me, it's more about you, you, you, you, you. But when you talk about it's a beautiful day, that's something that everyone can kind of feel yeah it's the feelings that get people to convert it's a feeling because you're like it's a beautiful day everyone's like yeah you're right it's a beautiful day and then by you saying i can't and i can't see it it makes you as an individual appreciate the day you're like you know what i am blessed today's amazing day yeah let me give some money i gotta 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?

6:06She 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 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.

6:39So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. We want to talk about why depth and non-obvious content crushes everything else. When you think about on, when I shared the Laurel Piana, that store, not many people knew about it. That's why that one did well. By the way, the people liking it, there's people that own a ton of restaurants and stuff, restaurant groups in Miami. I was like, oh, these people are liking it, right? Because it's a non-obvious insight. And so, for example, when you share data that other people don't have and it does really well, it's because it's a non-obvious insight.

7:09So what we found is, again, not going shortcuts again, but when we spend a little more time on a post and it's in-depth and it has maybe really interesting data, it's going to do a lot better. That being said, I have a lot of shots on goal with these reels. We never know what's going to do well. That's more like a slot machine. But when you're going to do something like a case study, for example, you do a lot of these on Twitter. Some of them do really well. Yeah, but it's a numbers game, hit or miss. But you got to put in the energy and you got to talk about stuff that you believe most people haven't seen before.

7:39It may be out there, but if you believe most people have already seen it, it will not do well. Yeah, and you're not going to get it all the time, by the way. On this podcast, we cover a lot of topics. I think today we covered like 14 or 15 topics or so. We still have a lot that we didn't cover. It was probably like another like 10 plus that we didn't cover. It's a nice log I built up. but like sometimes the non-obvious thing sometimes you don't even know what the non-obvious thing is going to be sometimes I think the one that's going to perform doesn't perform but the one that I thought had no chance is the one that takes off I did not expect the Loro Piano one to do as well me neither, I thought that was whatever I did not expect the what was it, Chick-fil-A one?

8:17to do well? was it Chick-fil-A or no, it's another burger joint? no, that was Shake Shack I didn't expect the Shake Shack one to do well me neither, because you just never know But it is a non-obvious insight, especially it's a consumer thing too. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I saw a clip of you and I, and I was talking about the Honda Odyssey. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Deadpool and Roverine one. Yeah, that didn't do well. No. What's funny is I told so many people that, have you seen the Honda Odyssey and Deadpool? And everyone just looks at me and is like, who cares? Why do you care? I'm like, I have one.

8:51It's amazing. It was in that movie. It did really well in the movie. It lasted a very long time. It took a beating. Hondas, very reliable. Ryan Reynolds, I think, talked it up too. Because Ryan Reynolds was selling Kias. He was a car salesman. And then he was like the Honda Odyssey. Oh, no. He hated the Honda Odyssey. He hated the Honda. I haven't seen the movie. It's a good movie. It's pretty funny. Dude, I just learned about something new. Have you heard of the Bel Air Circuit? What's that? There's Bel Air Circuit. I think it's Bel Air Cinema as well. Bel Air Cinema. belair cinema.com this is the option oh there's belair circuit there used to be red carpet dude did you know if you had a home theater you can end up getting you have to have a movie quality projector like from the movie theaters did you know you can get all the latest movies depending on which um studios they have deals with right in your home right when they come out the same day are you gonna do that for your new home i just got a quote on it dude so the quote you want to guess how much it costs 50 uh 50 000 for the project the projector let's call it 150 000 projector oh my god that's good that's not the real cost though 100 grand up front and that here's my problem with it the 100 grand up front okay but then 20k usd and movie credit which you get for the first year but it only covers between five and ten titles no so i'm like so you're telling me i gotta pay between two thousand and four thousand dollars per title like it's okay who do you think pays for this uh so this a lot of the celebrities have it uh-huh but they don't have to pay ridiculous fees because there's celebrities in there in the movies and they get direct deals with uh studios sorry i just can't but i'm not a celebrity and then end of year one for membership it's sixteen thousand dollars yearly to cover the services if they told me 100k up front 20 grand a year and you can just watch unlimited movies that come out on theater you don't have to go to theater i would have done it for 100 grand up front and then 20 a year yeah not two to four thousand dollars per movie that's ridiculous i'd rather just go drive to the movie theater in my honda odyssey legit car by the way and do it at the century city mall yeah yeah and pay my 20 for a movie ticket i want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global.

11:26They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. I think it's a good place for us to end on this one. So Axios did one a little bit ago. So cable TV as a business is crumbling. So Paramount Global on Thursday took a$6 billion write down on its cable TV business. The day after Warner Brothers, Discovery did the same for$9 billion. So why it matters. Both companies are struggling to convince Wall Street that their streaming bets will make up for those losses.

12:01Paramount Global stock tanked 12 % in after hours trading. Warner Brothers fell 9 % to an all-time low after its earning release. And so between the lines over here, both companies were created as a result of mega mergers, yet neither are considered big enough to compete with big tech for streaming dominance. So I don't know. It's tough times here. I don't pay for cable anymore. In fact, the only thing I pay for is for cable, I guess, is YouTube TV. Me too. Yeah. I just pay for the basic. I don't pay for the premium movie channels. I don't know. $65? Whatever. It used to be like$29. I don't know.

12:35It's gone up a lot. But I pay for Disney, Netflix, HBO or Max now. What else? Paramount. Peacock. Mm-hmm. Prime. Yeah. I think I'm missing one or two still. Yeah. But they're all price hiking a little bit too. Hulu, I pay for Hulu as well. Yep. So Hulu, Disney, ESPN Plus are together. So Disney posted a profit across the streaming division for the first time. Max began turning a quarterly profit last year. And then Paramount announced its streaming arm posted a profit for the first time last quarter, even though it lost so much money, I guess, overall. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested.

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13:48This black Friday joined 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 school and make this black Friday one to remember. So anyway, times are changing. Do you pay for Apple TV? I do. Yeah, I pay for that too. But here's the crazy thing. If you look at these providers, now they're just releasing new movies like Netflix had the Mark Wahlberg movie that came out, Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry. This is a good pastime. I watch it while I was sleeping.

14:22Watched it while you're sleeping? Well, right, like falling asleep. I don't know how you do that. Neil does this thing where like he works and watches the movie and then he actually retains the whole movie. I don't know how you do that. I usually have to watch the movie three or four times. Oh. okay never mind never mind i thought you're doing something like never mind guys he watches it four times well i'm like falling asleep like just in bed i can retain the movie because i'm just doing like i'm usually reading like cnbc articles in bed while i'm watching a movie so it's not a big then i can just watch it one time for your eyes a blue light before bed i don't mind it not good for your sleep do you have 20 20 vision i have i i still have my lasik do you know there's a trade off with LASIK.

15:02This will be the last thing, guys. There's always a trade-off to everything. You know LASIK, they basically shave off a little slice of your... Yeah, I have LASIK as well. If I use my eyes too much, I've been waking by 3.30, right? 3.34. By 7 p.m., my eyes hurt like hell if I've been using the computer a lot because your eyes get dry. I don't use eye drops. Do you? I don't have dry eye problems. My eyes don't get tired. Must be me. I don't know. I also paid an arm and a leg to one of the best LASIK eye drops. when I did it, I don't know, like 15-ish grand. Oh, I got a discount. I gave it one to an Asian person.

15:38$3 ,000. But my eyes work great and I don't have bright eye problems. Damn it. All right, guys, that is it for today. Please go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Please help us balance out the people that don't like the new format. Tell us you like the new format. All right. We'll see you guys later.