Recorded voice: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neal Patel.

Eric Siu: In these next two episodes we're going to talk about, well, first my marketing strategy, and tomorrow it's going to be Neil's marketing strategy.

Neil Patel: Eric, what's your personal marketing strategy?

Eric Siu: My personal marking strategy, are we talking the long-term vision?

Neil Patel: Yeah, I want short-term and long-term. What are you planning on doing in the next few months? What are you doing [inaudible 00:00:48] next few months? What are you doing daily or having your team do daily, and what's your long-term vision?

Eric Siu: Yeah. Our team daily right now on the agency side we're just focused on continuing to deliver great client work. They're just focus on retaining. It's very simple with the agency business. It's you have great people and then it's services and sales at the end of the day. The main focus there is around getting the sales team ready, but what I've been working on for, we're talking before end of year, is getting myself 90, 95% out of the business, because we have the people in place that can keep the business growing, keep it running without me having to be involved in the day-to-day.

Neil Patel: Okay, and in the short run what are the specific tactics that they're doing?

Eric Siu: To succeed for clients?

Neil Patel: For yourselves, for your own company to grow.

Eric Siu: Oh yeah. Okay. For us what's working right now is a lot of the content marking stuff that you're seeing. The podcast stuff that we're doing, the video works really well, SEO works really well and here's another customer acquisition strategy. Believe it or not, if you actually do good work for your clients, you actually get referrals and you get cross-sells and up sells. That's where the real money comes from, because we have actually very similar to Neil, when we have a big client come in, let's say like it's like Uber for example. They might start small, but you know that they have a big war chest. If you can build the trust, if you can start doing really well for them right out the gate you're going to be able to expand into a really big account.

Neil Patel: Okay, so let's exclude the referral side for a minute. You mentioned three. Content marketing, podcasts and videos.

Eric Siu: Content marketing, podcasts, videos and SEO.

Neil Patel: I see. Okay. Out of those, what percentage of your revenue come from those channels?

Eric Siu: Yeah, so-

Neil Patel: Or leads or however you want to break it down.

Eric Siu: 15 to 20% comes from podcasting.

Neil Patel: Okay.

Eric Siu: That's split between Growth Everywhere and Marketing School for example. Sometimes people listen to both. Then almost none come from video right now, because video is a really new thing for us. We're talking six, seven months in, so we're still growing that. The most of the rest, I mean I would say 50% to 60% comes from the content marketing, SEO stuff that we're doing.

Neil Patel: Cool, and what's your long-term strategy? Or going actually back to that. You broke down the percentage. Where do you spend most your money on marketing? Is it SEO, content marketing or ...

Eric Siu: Content market and within that umbrella it is SEO, it's podcasts, video stuff. I just put it all in there.

Neil Patel: Cool. All right and long-term vision. What are you trying to do in the long run?

Eric Siu: Yeah, so long run, I actually spent ... Neil and I we're looking at this thing right now. It's called a vivid vision and I recommend you guys read that book by the way. It's about getting your entire vision out there and then throwing it in front of your team, throwing it in front the world. But the long-term vision is to have Single Grain, be self-sustaining. I want it to have to be a bed for hiring creative talent. Marketing talent, just fostering them and if they want to stay with the agency great. But what I found, and you know this as well, is people tend to poach great marketing talent from marking agencies. I want to build an ecosystem where they have the flexibility to move along different projects. If they want to move to something else, they're like, "Hey, I'm kind of getting sick of this. I want to work on something else." Great. We'll make that possible for you.

Neil Patel: Cool, and you've been doing Single Grain for three, four, five years?

Eric Siu: Yeah, it's been four years. I took the company over four years ago.

Neil Patel: Okay, so for four years, if you had to go back in time, you're already doing a ton of stuff in marketing. You have a long-term vision now. I can see the document. I'm assuming you just created this in May, right?

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: Which is this month. If you just created it in May and you had to go back four years, what would you have changed with your marketing if you had to do it all over again?

Eric Siu: I would focus on one area instead of trying to do too many things at once.

Neil Patel: What did you try to do when you first started when it came to marketing? Because technically right now you do more than you did when you first started Single Grain.

Eric Siu: Yeah, well we do a lot more, but in the very beginning ... Keep in mind in the very beginning we were getting all the leads from you.

Neil Patel: Oh yeah, that's true.

Eric Siu: Yeah. We had to do a lot of different things and throw spaghetti against the wall, but I would say instead of trying to ... What we tried to do it was like, "Okay, let's try paid ads, let's try all this different stuff. A lot of it didn't work and we're like, "Oh, let's try this different service." We just kept moving around and switching too quickly. I think that's the problem with a lot of marketing and sales and even business as well. People try to do too many things and they switch too quickly, because they're not patient enough. Now you see with Single Grain I've stuck through it for four years, and it's only four years still basically. We're still rolling it. I would stay patient and focus more and not try to do too many things.

Neil Patel: Cool. Those are all the questions I have. Anything else that you want to add from your end?

Eric Siu: Yeah, I think long-term vision, Neil and I have very ... Well, we'll see what he says next, but my long-term vision at least is to have different ... buy different businesses, incubate them, grow them and then eventually just continue. There's this organization actually in New York called [Loeb 00:05:38]. They basically call themselves a startup lab. I want to have the ability to do that, because like I mentioned a couple episodes ago, you know you have this ability. You're like a wizard. You can just grow businesses, take them and then optimize them and you have this playbook. That's what you want to do ultimately or that's what I want to do ultimately.

Neil Patel: Cool.

Eric Siu: All right.

Neil Patel: Well, there you guys have it. If you guys want the marketing tools go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. See you tomorrow.

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