WooCommerce SEO migration disaster, Content creators are the modern form of demand gen, and Value of top 100 B2B brands up by 10% vs. last year, study finds

0:00By the way, going back to SEO again, did you see the WooCommerce SEO migration disaster? No. So, okay. WooCommerce, they are, would you call them a plugin for WordPress where it helps enable WordPress sites to do e-commerce? That's basically what it is at the end of the day, yeah? Yeah, it's a plugin that just makes your WordPress more like Shopify, but it's not as good. Yeah. So Cyrus Shepard on Twitter said this, Crazy, five months after completing a major domain migration, WooCommerce will revert the entire thing after traffic goes south. This after assembling a group of SEO experts and consultants, quote unquote.

0:38Got to be honest, the chance of things going worse after a second migration is easily greater than zero. So basically in this graph over here, they basically migrated from WooCommerce to Woo.com. And traffic just tanked, like completely fell off a cliff, like basically to zero. And now they seem to have switched back.

1:02It seems like they just reversed back in November of 2023. The traffic is coming back slowly, but it's still maybe 40 % of what it was before. That sucks, but from the grand scheme of things, WordPress can drive most assignments from WordPress.com. Yeah. It's such a big business. You get what I mean. I totally agree, right? Yeah, you shouldn't botch these migrations, and it's important to do them right because you're just losing extra revenue. Oh, you're so lucky your drink didn't spill into your laptop. But with the WordPress migration, with the site migrations, yeah, ideally you want your traffic to go up or at least stay the same.

1:40For a business of that size, I don't think it matters too much. But again, I would have been pissed and I would have had someone fix it right away. Yeah, you would have gone apeshit. I would have gone apeshit. Yeah, they just bought a business for$125 million, was it? I don't remember. Yeah, no, the article ended up coming out. I think it was. Yeah, they'll be fine. I mean, but this is stuff that, this is just what happens when companies don't take SEO seriously. Like a migration's really hard. Translation can get complicated too. Like all these things that you want to do at scale, you want to make sure that you're talking to the right people at the end of the day.

2:14WordPress owner acquires Beeper, the app that briefly brought iMessage to Android, $125 million. And then they bought, was it text.com? Text.com. They bought that last October. Oh, yeah. So they're going on a little spree. Yeah, now they want to do content, not just on a blog. They also want to do it through messaging. But I don't think that's that much of a big pain. Like, sometimes people just start buying stupid stuff. So, dude, you have an iPhone. I have an iPhone. Do you really care if you text Android people and it's on iMessage? Nope. Me neither. I text them. It goes through. Why do I need to buy an app that has multi-service messaging app?

2:58Who cares? Reading that Amazon book, Working Backwards, you know why the Fire Phone failed? Why? They were all gung-ho on this one feature with the Fire Phone. Sorry to cut you off. What is the Fire Phone? This is when Amazon launched a phone. They were trying to compete with the iPhone and everything. And Jeff Bezos was really sold on it. In fact, he was the one that helped push the narrative through to get this product out there. What they were selling was this four-dimensional camera that can do all these things. You can scan your sunglasses and you'll see it in all these different views. But nobody gives a crap about that.

3:38All you care about is, with your iPhone, you care about the ecosystem, the apps, the usability of it, all these things. So that's where they missed the mark because they didn't do customer development. They thought that the feature that they had was so game-changing that, But, well, at the end of the day, even when they sold it at a really high price, but eventually they got to a point where they're just like, we should just give this away and try to get people to sign up to Prime. Even then, when they started to give it away, nobody wanted it. Dude, it reminds me of like the snap goggles. Everyone's like, oh, these are really cool.

4:08You can take pictures. I had a pair. I'm like, who's going to? Okay, Eric bought it. He's testing for probably marketing purposes. But who really wants to buy goggles just to take pictures? It's just like, no. I could just bust out my phone and click a picture. Because Garbals also didn't look that good. You know, it's kind of like the meta ones. So the meta ones, they look cool. I mean, I think they kind of look like this, right? So you wear these sunglasses. Are those Ray-Bans? No. But the Ray-Bans, it's the same thing as the Snap thing, where you can hit it and it'll take like a 60-second story.

4:38Wait, are they Tom Ford? No. But they're not Tom Ford. But anyway, if you can do that, it's kind of cool. On command, I can hit it. It just, I think it was too early for its time. And plus, not many people use Snap. What I'm looking for is imagine wearing a pair of glasses like Ray-Bans or anything like that and getting what you get in Apple's Vision Pro right in front of your face. That'll sell like crazy. If that was sold today for$20 ,000, I would pay the money for it. Yep. Yeah. So it's the convenience of it. It's the usability of it. And it helps you create content a lot more naturally. That's why we would pay for it too.

5:19That's a big reason. I think it would also make life better. Yeah. You know, I don't know about you, but like when I walk around, you can't wear a big. Yeah. Not just wear that, but like, I'm always curious about things. And sometimes my wife always tells me like, she'll like elbow me, like we're in like a store and I'm like, so how many sales do you guys do per day? What's your monthly revenue? What portion is cash? Which portion? And she's like, Neil, they think you're going to rob them. You can't talk like this. You almost like, I'm just curious to learn about their business. Yeah. it's like it'll be an assistant that follows you around so I think we'll eventually get there yeah so on a side note oh crap my there you go my sheet just disappeared it's okay I can take it from here so you want to know so Chamath said this recently he said that content creators are the new form of demand gen did you see that did you listen to the recent all in I did not so which is interesting because when you think about you think about shumat polyhepatia mark andreason you think about brad gerstner right bill gurley for example these are all well-known vcs they all they've all done very well for themselves do they need more money not necessarily do they want more deals yeah they do um so they're creating podcasts they're writing newsletters they're doing all they're making little communities and i think it's interesting because it's marketing is getting harder and when you look at the creator payout 70 % growing year on year, it's going to continue to compound even more.

6:45The question is, are creators the next form of demand gen? And we see from our side, we're seeing a continued rise in interest in influencer marketing. It's funny. I do think creators are amazing demand gen, a way to attract more demand. We've shifted how we look at marketing. A lot of times we used to look at platforms like Instagram, especially when it comes to social Instagram or TikTok, we no longer look at platforms like Instagram or TikTok, unless it's like for paid ads. But for organic, we mainly focus on the people. Who are the people that are gaining the attention and are they relevant enough for the product or service that we have?

7:28And can we work with them because they can generate demand. Look at Mr. Beast and how much demand he generates for chocolate or burgers or whatever it is that he wants to sell that day. And I'm assuming when you work with these influencers, you're just taking a cut. Like, let's say I charge$100 ,000. You probably just take 10 % or something like that, right? No. Typically, it's a fee to do all the work and outreach and stuff like that. Oh, you're doing cost plus. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. So you're not taking a cut on whatever the influencer charges. It depends. A lot of times it's cost plus. Sometimes it is a cut.

8:02It depends on the corporation and how they're structured and they want it to be done internally. Got it. Yeah. So it's a collaboration. Yeah. Because for some companies, they're just like, here's your budget. This is the ROI we're expecting. We want you to go spend it. We don't want to pay you any fees. Take it from the budget. And then some are like, no, we want you to tell us what your fees are. And either way, we're transparent in both ways. But just certain organizations are like, I need it done this way for accounting or internal purposes to get approval. And we're like, all right, that's fine.

8:34Everyone has their own incentives. But yeah. All right. Real quick. I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO. But we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at six figures, seven figures, eight figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency.

9:06And you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. There is, we do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. and you can, at least with the online community, you can counsel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the podcast. On that note, speaking of demand gen and brands, did you see the value of the top 100 B2B brands are up 10 % versus last year? This is from Marketing Week? No, I haven't seen it. Yeah, so B2B companies have been doubling down on branding.

9:42Everyone's like, oh, the economy's struggling. It's a bad time. People are pulling back. Yes, they may be pulling back on certain sales or marketing spend, but a lot of them have been doubling down on marketing efforts that help with brand growth. And it shows that the value of their brands are up 10%. When people are running scared, they're hitting the market harder because they see potential growth opportunities. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful. Yeah, the Warren Buffett quote. And it makes sense too, because what's happened over the last year and a half, two years, actually it's been roughly two years in the market started getting bad.

10:23At first, everyone was afraid and they're cutting back and people are like, oh, we're kind of getting used to this environment. Business still isn't that bad. Yeah. Let's keep spending and doubling down and gobble up more market share when things are cheaper. That's what happens. So typically what happens when people are become, this is why Warren Buffett has such a big cash pile, right? He's waiting for things to get really bad. Who knows when that day comes, right? Knock on wood. But that's when he's going to deploy a huge chunk of his capital. And so he's going to become greedy when others are fearful.

10:51I'm kind of seeing this more in business right now where entrepreneurs have been sitting on the side for a while. And we've all been like a little fearful for a while. And now it's kind of like, okay, it kind of now seems like a good time to maybe start going for it a little bit. And that's what's happening. Dude, I think this is the best time in the economy. And again, this is not financial advice, but I think this is one of the best times in the economy to double down and just go hard on marketing, buying up other competitors. Yeah. Dude, that's where the opportunities are, right? It's just like a lot of people are shy or they're struggling and they're shy because they've been down for quite a bit and they just are depressed and they're just like, look, I don't want to get up.

11:33I don't want to keep going. I don't want to push too much harder. And we're buying companies right now from founders who are burnt out. No joke. Like we're going to close a deal next month. Great founders, great company. They work with amazing brands. Founders are staying. They work with amazing brands like Levi's and Domino's and Grand Hyatt and Grab and Reynolds and Canon, like real enterprise brands. And a lot of the founders are just burnt out and they're just want to be part of a larger organization that can help them. Two lessons there. One, yes, go buy them when they're burnt out and probably when things are a little tougher so you can get a better multiple or better valuation, I should say.

12:16The other thing is if you can keep the founders amazing because the founders usually, there's a lot of brand, not brand equity, but a lot of goodwill is built up with the founders at the end of the day. And the other thing is, by the way, don't think that you can't afford these things. There's a lot of different ways to do these deals, right? You can take money from your balance sheet. You can sell or finance. You can trade equity or roll them into your company, right? There's a lot of ways to do these deals. It's SBA financing. SBA financing. That's up to$5 million, right? You have to buy the whole thing though.

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15:01But Eric, who's done a few deals in the past, creative, you got outside debt partners, you got SBA loans, and you've done seller-based financing. All the things, all the creative things. But with specific deals, you've done a combination of all of them just for even one deal, right? Yep. And you can get really creative. You don't have to just take one route. If something gives you part of the money but not everything, you can add a few more things in there to make a deal work.

15:34Oftentimes with agencies, if you keep the founders, usually there's a three to four year, it's not an ad back. What do you call it? Earn out. They usually still have equity in it. They don't want to just walk away from it. Because they want the founders to have some skin in the game. They don't want to just walk off into the sunset. Because they need that founder. Because there's a lot of information they know. Because when you're buying a company, by the way, you're getting their best face. You really don't know all the skeletons in the closet. So ideally, you can keep the founder on. So we're going to end it.

16:06Go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster. That's the community that Neil and I have. We're like, community is everything. We think it's the next funnel, the next way of growing your audience through community. Check it out. Don't forget to rate, rate, subscribe. It helps grow. Let us know what you continue to think about these long form episodes. And we'll see you in the next episode.