- Hey, so fun fact.
Sujan Patel over here, actually wrote a book
called The Growth Playbook, or something like that.
I'll let him explain what it is.
But it actually got a ton of downloads,
and he actually did really well,
in terms of, growing that growth playbook.
So in this video, we're actually gonna talk about
Sujan Patel's growth framework for 2019.
My name is Eric Siu of the agency, Single Grain,
and co-founder of Click Flow.
And Sujan Patel here is the co-founder of Web Profits.
So Sujan, what do you got?
- So hey everyone.
Very, very excited to have talking to you about this
because this is where I get to reflect on
everything I've done well, poorly,
and it's been released, and what's actually worked.
So I own eight companies, one of which is Web Profits,
the agency, and then seven SaaS companies.
So I look back at the year, and I'm like
what do we do as an organization?
What marketing has worked? What hasn't worked?
And so, in 2018 we spent probably around $300,000,
give or take $10k or so, on content,
creating content, the marketing of content,
meaning like, so let's call that advertising,
Outbrain, Facebook ads, we spent some on software,
you know, just to maintain and do the marketing
that we wanna do, email marketing,
marketing automation, chat box, what have you.
We've done lots and lots and link building.
So let's call that all SEO.
We've done some paid advertising,
whether it's through Facebook ads, Google AdWords.
We've done a lots and lots of outbound,
and still call that marketing,
even though it might be more sales generated.
We did a lot, a lot of video,
and then we've driven around, a little over
a million visitors, to Web Profits
and our core properties.
And I'm not talking about like random visitors
to blog posts or whatnot, I'm saying actual high intent.
But, there's actually only a couple things of that
that actually worked. Can you guess, what do you think?
What do you think, out of everything I said, worked?
- [Eric] Let's see.
- The video, written content, Facebook ads.
- [Eric] Written content definitely works.
And then I kinda tie SEO with that as well.
- Yeah, so I would say nothing we did in 2018
contributed to those million visitors that came to the--
- Nothing.
- Nothing. It was all the things that we did in 2016 and 17.
- Ah, yeah.
- So it was refreshing,
and you guys had mentioned this on your
Marketing School Podcast many times.
It was mostly updating old content
that drove most of the visitors.
And it was actually two pieces of content,
when I look across eight companies,
eight different websites,
two pieces of content that drove about 75%
of the extra million visitors in traffic.
- That's huge. Actually, I was looking at
new blankets and new pillows,
and I was looking at The Wirecutter the other day,
what I found in all of those articles,
like best pillow, they just kept updating over
and over and over, which is why they rank
for millions and millions of keywords.
So I'm not surprised that that's worked out well for Sujan.
Is there anything else?
- Yeah, so it was actually
laying the foundation for next year.
When I figured this out, it was probably around
like summer time.
I was like wow, nothing I'm doing is working.
And you would think as a marketer,
that's like a horrible sign.
It wasn't that, that nothing I was doing was working.
It's actually the other way around.
Things I'm doing take a lot longer
than I anticipated to work.
We talked about this in our previous video.
18-24 months to see content marketing work.
Content marketing is working, it just took
a whole lot longer than I anticipated.
When I first started doing content marketing,
it was a lot less time, six months.
So what I'm really focusing on,
and I'm gonna continue to double down on is,
the foundational work.
I'll give you an example.
Mailshake, on of our SaaS companies, targeting sales people,
it's an outbound sales tool,
we're laying down--
and we spent from July and we're gonna continue this--
all the foundational work, all the high intent key words
that sales people would search for,
we're writing content on.
And we're gonna continue to iterate on,
and we're actually already seeing success in,
but it's just not where you would see it.
It's not in our analytics yet.
It's on page five Google,
it's one of our hundred articles
that gets traffic every month.
Not the highest, probably one of the lowest,
and we're doubling down on that.
So we're creating all this foundational--
- So you're seeding it first,
and you're seeing what goes well,
and then you're upgrading it.
- Yeah, and then what we'll essentially do,
we're creating, we are gonna be creating a book on this,
and an eBook on all these things combined.
We're creating all of the individual chapters
and sections of this book,
and if it starts to trickle out as it plays out,
we're gonna put this into a giant kinda book.
It's almost like the reverse of a 10x piece of content.
Instead of creating the piece of content first,
and then pushing it and promoting it,
because the ROI is not there for us.
We're creating individual pieces,
and as it starts to unfold, we'll put the book
and 10x pieces of content together.
- That's a really good point.
That's actually what we're planning to do
with the Marketing School Podcast too.
Just 'cause it's like everyday.
So, look, it's the seed and grow.
You should just coin that term.
- [Sujan] Seed and grow.
- Seed and grow, there you go.
- Fits well with Single Grain. - Oh yeah, it does.
Seed and grow, there you go.
You got it from this video first.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
- Yeah, so one of the other things that we're doing in 2019
is we're really looking for, and doubling down in our ICP,
our ideal customer profile.
We're looking at what they actually care about,
and I'm taking out the marketing stats,
and the details of how much traffic does this drive.
I'm looking at like, okay,
at Mailshake, we're targeting a sales person,
an SDR, sales manager, VP of Sales, what have you.
There are different types of roles
that sales person would be in.
And I'm thinking about what kind of content
would be thought provoking for them?
What are the struggles they're going for?
Struggles in their day.
What are the things they're looking for?
Where are they hanging out?
And I'm actually trying to just go after content
that really fits those folks.
So I don't care if it has high volume or what not,
I wanna really strike their emotions in their hearts.
- Cool, so there you have it. There's just a couple things,
there's like a million different things
I guarantee you that Sujan is planning for 2019.
But leave the comments, let us know what you think,
what you plan to do in terms of growing in 2019.
Don't forget to also subscribe as well.
And that's it for this series.
Don't forget to check out the next video that's coming
from this wonderful channel,
where you get to learn about growth,
and just cool stuff that's gonna help make you amazing.
Bye.