Will Podcasting Drive You More Customers?

0:00Here's the question. The question for everyone here. So Neil and I are talking about how to grow a podcast, why you should start a podcast in 2025. five. The question, the million dollar question is, will podcasting drive you more customers? A podcast like this, I don't think it'll drive you customers in quantity or enough for the time and effort and cost. If you actually put a cost on our hourly time, I think if you have a very specific podcast, yes, because doing a podcast on something like marketing, most of the audience is going to be people who are looking for information. And the way you monetize is, yes, every once in a while, you'll get some revenue from it from a customer.

0:41But the real revenue driver is advertising revenue. I'm assuming you agree with that. You know, I was actually pleasantly surprised when I look at the leads, because we have ads for your agency, for Carrot. Like we rotate a couple of things for this podcast, right? And I look at the leads and I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of YouTube and a lot of podcasts and a couple of enterprise companies for Carrot. It's from this podcast. and then when I talk to them, it's like they know me. They're kind of shell-shocked that I'm on the sales call and they're like, hey, thank you so much, man. You taught me marketing, blah, blah, blah.

1:11They're like director of demand gens at these companies that have raised either a lot of money or they have thousands and thousands of employees. I would have answered you a couple months ago, but I'm pleasantly surprised. For sales teams to ask people, we get people saying they listen to the podcast, but it's typically not directly attributed for them coming to the podcast and they've learned about us before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What we find is, and the people who come through the podcast, because we've gotten a few customers over the years, they're typically not large. So it's not working out well for us from a revenue standpoint.

1:49It's great for branding, but to try to get like a$2 million contract from someone listening to the podcast, it's just tough. I just look at it as whether it's you're doing this podcast with CMOs or this, this to me is just a touch point of the many touch points that they have to go through. But again, just looking at it recently, I'm like, whoa, these are really big companies. Oracle, the other day. But think about it this way, right? Forget just the company, but look at the contract size. Because if you get hit up by Oracle, for them to send you a million,$2 million contract, it usually has to go through procurement and it has to go through RFP process.

2:22This wouldn't be agency. This is... For the software. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what we found is if you're interviewing CMOs, a lot of them get to know you and they'll include you in future RFP processes. It doesn't mean you're going to get the business, but we have a really high close rate on RFPs. And we see that as a massive ROI channel compounding over, call it three plus years. We actually first ran this experiment in Brazil. We interviewed the McDonald's CMO, Unilever, Marink's idea. And it's worked extremely well. And then we started doing it in the United States. But again, it's a really long play and it works if you're going whale hunting and you want enterprise.

3:02But if you want enterprise revenue, B2B from a podcast, that is actually very tough unless you're going after a very specific audience, like what I'm doing, going after CMOs versus this at marketing school. But there's different purposes for different types of podcasts. Like I think this is great for brand recognition and building relationships. Yep. By the way, okay, so those are our three episodes on podcasting, but I want to talk about the middle market opportunity. Do you know what that is? I'm assuming you mean not enterprise, not small businesses in the middle. So this guy, Brent Beshore, he has a private equity company called Permanent Equity, and he does his shareholder letter every year.

3:41So he basically talks about acquiring lower middle market companies is the best opportunity to build wealth right now. So this is for general population. Excuse me. So there are 350 ,000 US companies classified as lower middle market, which is 5 million to 100 million in annual revenue. The ecosystem is highly inefficient due to size and lack of institutional interest in these companies. So typically private equity wants 100 million plus, right? And so it says the biggest variable to success here is operation expertise. If you can endure the day-to-day ups and downs of running a business, you can acquire a profitable business and reap the rewards.

4:21So it shows here the number of businesses, we're talking 5 million to 100 million or so, you have about 300 ,000 or so. In the United States. In the United States, yeah. And then under 500 ,000, you have like 14 million. And then you have like these over here, like a billion plus, you have 5 ,300, 500 million to a billion, 4 ,100. So it just shows - 100 million plus, 100 million to 500 is what, 24 ,000? Yeah. 24 ,000. So this is interesting because I just listened to a podcast recently, speaking about listening to podcasts. This guy bought a$13 million company and with no money down, it was 3 million EBITDA, 3.5 million EBITDA.

5:00Okay. And the way he structured a deal was this company had, he had this company had real estate. So he did a sale lease back, which is he, he sold the real estate and then he leased it back. Okay. So that covered 10 million. And then he took the inventory, took out a loan against the inventory, and that covered all of the payment. And I'm just like, yeah, I mean, that guy's a perfect example. $13 million,$3.5 million EBITDA, and he got it for no money down. I think we're going to see a lot more of this. So I think it's an interesting discussion. It's creative. If you can do creative financing like that, you're great.

5:35The other thing is, I bet you he's also the one running the business. He's not. Really? He's not. Which is, I don't, he sounds inexperienced with operating. I think that's going to come back to bite him. He's like, I'm just going to focus on buying other businesses. I'm not going to be a CEO. I'm going to hire a CEO, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just going to buy four or five of these. And this is the first one that he did. Good luck with that. I don't think that's going to go well. In most of these cases, you ideally want to be an operator. He should focus on that business. That was such a good deal.

6:02He should make it work before he looks at another one and he should get hands-on. It's not that easy to operate. It's not. And what you want to do when you buy these is you want to keep the operating team there and you want to get trained up by them, learn everything and then improve upon the business over time. By the way, the founders are staying with the company for the next two years or so. Ideally, he would be there with them. And he's like, oh, I live in Florida. And then they're up in Connecticut. I'm like, you should be up in Connecticut all the time. You should just actually move to Connecticut temporarily and make it work.

6:32So I think, look, there is a middle market opportunity. I think buying businesses in general, we both talked about it on this podcast. And I think if you find a good deal, great. but you have the most incentive to make it work. So please be involved. Don't just follow what all these other people say about hiring an operator. It's not that easy. No, it's not that easy at all. On a side note for your carrot, is it carrot or carrot? What do you call it? Carrot, A-B-M? K-A-R-R-O-T. Okay, carrot, A-B-M. Have you guys tried running message ads in Google? No. So, you know, in Google, you can use message assets in your ads to make it so someone can just directly WhatsApp you and communicate with you.

7:18Google the WhatsApp? Uh-huh. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, you should try it out. It converts really well for B2B. Especially enterprise. Nice. Assuming you're going very specific with your keywords. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And you're targeting. This is interesting. I'm going to send it to the team right now. Yeah, try it out. Most B2B companies don't run it. But as long as you have someone on sales and you can do WhatsApp, You're golden. Yeah. Sending it. All right. You pick a topic while I send this. Oh, did you see how going viral can hurt you? No. The Oreo experiment? No. This is the Oreo experiment from the Super Bowl, right?

7:55A couple of years ago. What was the Oreo experiment from the Super Bowl? You don't remember? Okay. So the Ravens were playing the Niners and then the Super Bowl blacked out during halftime. And then Oreo capitalized and made these Oreo-like ads. And they got a lot of reach. No. Okay, what is this? So Oreo recently has been going viral all over the social web. This is Google chat ads, right? What do you call them? Message ads. Okay. Just Google. Tell them to Google, like Google message ads connecting to WhatsApp. They'll find it. I don't know the exact name, but it works. Okay, cool. Message assets, something like that.

8:31Got it. Dude, I haven't actually gone in to try to actually run an ad. I just tell my team to go do it. Yeah. Okay, how do you follow up with them? I follow up an hour later being like, is it done? With a happy face, right? No. How's it going? Is it out? Do people ever push back to you when you're just pushing them like this? If they push back, I find another person in the organization to do a part of me. That's good. And I usually know who's going to get it done at the time frame I want before I even reach out. So you push until they push back and then you push someone else until they push back and you go back to pushing the original person.

9:09no if i if i try to push the original person and they don't do it i won't go back to them period because you're just like oh i can't count on you not i can't count on you you can do certain things look not everyone in their job is great at everything people are really good at certain things nobody's great at everything exactly so if i need someone to execute really fast i actually look for the person first off who's scrappy and can execute and i'll go to them directly or i'll ask an executive in the company who is the person who gave that for me really fast. And I go to them and it usually works out.

9:41If not, I'll tell them it didn't work out. Who's your next person on the list that I can go to that can just get it done? Who can I bother next? Yes. And I usually don't know a lot of these people. I'd be like, hey, can you put me on a text introduction? I don't ask for an email. I don't ask for a team's introduction. I just want a text introduction and I call them right then and there. I can't say, like, this is so underrated. The ability, like Neil's ability, this it's I wouldn't even call it pushing because that sounds negative. It's just checking in the ability to check in consistently and to remember that it pushes the company so much faster.

10:11And it's very underrated. Yeah, it's very underrated. Yeah, it actually is what causes a lot of our growth. Yeah, not enough people talk about this. It works really well. I don't know why people don't do it. Dude, back in our like mid 20s or so, I think I was like 24 years old. Remember I was helping Crazy Egg for a little bit. Yeah. I didn't deal with checking with me every day. Yeah. Yeah. It's like clockwork. Some people I check in with like five, six times a day. This is me like 25 years old, by the way, I've been running. And then if I don't get the answers, the results I want, I'm like, you're done next person.

10:40All right. What do you want to go? So, okay. The Oreo experiment going back to it. So on the social web, people have been taking Oreos and they've been taking a blow torch. All right. Oh yeah. And then cooking a Oreo because there's a lot of food chemicals or whatever they want to call it that Oreo uses to make their cookies. So they do it on like one second, five seconds, and then one's like three minutes. So they take a cookie, quite a few cookies, they line them up. They'll do one second, then two seconds, then like five seconds, then 10 seconds, then 20 seconds, then 30 seconds. And they're putting it behind cardboard because you're using a blowtorch.

11:15You can't just put it on like a piece of paper. It's going to easily catch on fire. And what they're finding with one second, like the Oreo looks the same. You go all the way to 30 seconds, the Oreo roughly looks the same. It hasn't burned much at all. It didn't really burn really at all. And it's the back, which is wood, is burning up, but the Oreo still looks edible. How bad do you think that is for their marketing? People are like, what the heck? This thing won't even flame up? Yeah. Should I even be putting it in my body? Yeah. That's virality really hurting Oreo. And I think this will hurt their sales.

11:51It went for a minute on the last one. It turned red, the Oreo. I did not see the minute. I've seen up to 30 seconds. Oh, you got tired of watching it. How many views did that get? Because I watched that video. This was weeks ago when I watched this. Oh, there's tons of them. That's what I'm saying. It's going viral. No, no, not just reposting. Many people are posting. People are creating their own Oreo experiments and doing this. They think it's funny. So this is like billions of views. Probably. My guess is billions at this point. Wow. And it's in multiple languages too because I'm talking to my team in Portuguese.

12:18Like, yeah, you don't see it. It's so cool. I'm going to do it with my kids. And I'm like, uh-huh. You shared this on Seed Oil Scout. Yeah, Seed Oil Scout, that's a legit app that tells you what has seed oil and what doesn't. And so a lot of people follow that. But it's kind of crazy to think about Oreos not burning. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to eat an Oreo ever again. When's the last time you ate an Oreo? I can't even remember. Yeah, exactly. But I probably have had in the last 12 months cookies and cream ice cream. Wow. And the thing is, they can't really sue anybody for this. No, it's reality.

12:50Yeah. Put clean ingredients in your product, make it taste good, and it will then burn. Wow. Okay. All right. I think that's true, right? Yep. Well, hey, hey, hey, I got another Coca-Cola one for you because we're talking about food right now. Do you want to know how Coca-Cola went from a$4 billion company to$150 billion company with one question? They just gave it many, many years and they didn't even need a question. They've just been in business such a long time. You continually generate more revenue. No. What percentage of the entire liquid market do we have? So before, in the 1980s, Coca-Cola was doing pretty well.

13:26They had 45 % market share of total soft drinks market. But the CEO, he asked two questions ahead of that. But the main question is, what percentage of the entire liquid market do we have? When the answer to the question was only a paltry 2%, they realized they can't just target the soft drink market. They have to go way larger than that. And so that's when Coca-Cola grew from$4 billion in 1981 to roughly$150 billion in 1997. So they had 45 % of the Coke or carbonated drink market. And then they decided to go out of soft drinks and they just went after the beverage market. And they only owned 2%.

14:04And I don't know what they own today percentage-wise, but it can't be 45 % or anything like that of the total beverage market. It's too large. No. But I bet you they're in the, call it single digits or low double digits, I guess. But it's a massive market. We saw in the 90s, I mean, they expanded into like, you know, sports drinks. They expanded into like Aquafina or Dazani, right? Yeah. And then I think now they own like a couple of like - There's like the Gatorades, the Propels. I don't know which ones. I don't think they own Gatorade. Powerade or whatever. Vitamin water. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:36Right? Healthy versions. And there's energy drinks. And the list just goes on and on and on. Yeah. I mean, one, they either invented things or they went on an acquisition spree. But I think this just flipped everything for them. It's like, okay, we're not just going to go soft drink. We're going to go everything. Yeah. So no, that's true. That's the one question. 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.

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16:47With Shopify on your side. Sign 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. We still got to go like two more. All right, let's talk about the impact of Reddit answers. I'm curious on this one. You have a tweet on this. So Reddit just launched their own LLM search engine. You saw that, right? Yeah. I haven't quite used it yet. I think we can talk about our reaction to this, but it aggregates and summarizes relevant responses across threads. And so I think this is interesting because for me, even actually this morning, I was at the gym and I got bored and this is in between sets.

17:30I was looking at the jiu-jitsu section, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu section. And the communities are very vibrant in there. They're very engaging and they're sharing crazy stuff, like injuries they're having and all these things. So you're getting raw responses from people that you can mostly trust. And so I think Reddit is one of the best places to go to if you want real feedback from users that actually participate in this stuff. Yeah. I think Reddit is a great place to go for not just community feedback, but building relationships with your crazy, diehard customers. And when I say crazy, I mean that in a good way.

18:04people who just love a brand or hate them. And you can turn the haters into lovers. But I think Reddit is a really underutilized social network that not enough marketers leverage. And the reason they don't is they're worried that, oh, what if people say negative things? Well, people can say negative things anywhere on the web. They can leave negative reviews. They can create hateful websites that just talk crap about you. And funny enough, a lot of them just keep popping up and then they ask you for money to take it down. Yeah. I mean, look, this is, I think we're going to see a lot. Look, Grok does this with Twitter.

18:37Okay. I think a lot, if you have a lot of data, Wikipedia will probably do this as well. Eventually. Yes. I think they got to reallocate how they spend their money because there's a lot of inefficiencies. I could be wrong. The last article I read. Well, we saw how much they spent on DEI. It's a large chunk of the budget. Server cost was like 3 million a year or something like that. And then it was like 50, 60 million dollars a year towards other stuff. Yeah, and if you want to spend$50 million,$60 million or have DEI programs, that's fine. But you should make sure you're spending the majority of your money to improve the business and improve the experience for your customers before anything else.

19:15I'm just looking at the sidebar here. It says FBI closes diversity office ahead of Trump's inauguration. So I think we're going to see costs. Yeah, I think we're going to see it. There's going to be cost cutting. Yeah. Dude, the market's tough. If you're not optimizing for what's best for your customer, you're going to end up losing to someone who does. So what I told my people team is not that diversity isn't important, but more so you have to focus on the mission of the company. If you start to have two different missions, people get distracted and it's already hard enough to do one company.

19:47So if you have two or three different missions, you're fighting for all these different things. It makes work really hard and makes it unfun because you have to focus on too many things at once. The way I look at diversity, especially in marketing, is if you have people from all different types of groups, religions, countries, nationalities, skin colors, et cetera, they can bring a unique perspective when you're doing marketing campaigns, which is amazing and great. And as recruiters, you should go search out there for the best people, no matter what skin color they are. But at the end of the day, you want to hire the people who are the best.

20:23It doesn't matter if their skin color is different than what you may be used to, or if they're a guy or a girl, or they're gender neutral, just hire the best person for the job. If you hire the best person for a job, your company should grow and you should see the best results. Look, if you're hiring someone based on merit, usually what ends up happening is diversity is built in. Because the reality is in a very competitive market, especially in technology, for example, it's very competitive, right? You actually can't afford to be racist. You have to hire the best person possible, and it forces you to be colorblind, right?

20:52This is assuming you are racist, which I think is like, if you are racist, it doesn't quite make sense. If you're a smart person, it really doesn't quite make sense. You just want to work with the smartest people and you want to build the coolest things. And so you actually don't have time to be racist. So I'll ask you a question. You take a guess on what I did. A few years ago, I was on an offsite meeting and it was for one of our divisions. And quite a few people were there. It was all leadership. There was this guy who was running it. He was running that whole division. He was in charge of it in essence.

21:24So every time I asked him questions, he passed it off to the person who was underneath him, who was a female. And he kept doing that. What do you think that made me think right away when he kept doing that? The female's more competent. Uh-huh. What do you think I ended up doing? You promoted her and fired him. Yes. Yeah. Didn't care about race, skin color, female, male. I'm like, oh, she's more qualified. People look up to her. And I can tell that people go to her for answers and for solutions. I'm like, I don't want that guy running anything. He doesn't know the answers. I want the person who does.

21:57I don't care what skin color, you know, gender she is. She is competent. She is qualified. She should have that role. You want to know Netflix's philosophy when it comes to hiring? What? Adequate performance gets a generous severance package. I love it. That's a line I've been repeating to everyone, to my people team. Adequate performance gets a generous severance package. You're a startup. you don't have to do generous severance package. Netflix is publicly traded. They probably do. It's interesting. I told the team, they're like, I don't know about generous. I'm like, adequate performance gets a severance package.

22:30There you go. But of course, you should look out for people. You don't want anyone else. Of course. And by the way, I told my team, nobody gets any joy in having to let someone go. It's actually our fault for making that hire in the first place. And so we want to make sure that they're taken care of. They can do their best work somewhere else, all jokes aside, because they will do their best work somewhere else. And you don't want to make them miserable in your company. So, and I've seen Eric lay people off and then he'll hit his friends up saying, Hey, do you want this person? They're really good at X, Y, and Z.