7 insights from 2-hours Tim Soulo's interview with Neil Patel
You can hate or love Neil Patel, but you should read this!
Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs interviewed Neil Patel, Founder of NP Digital.
Usually, I don’t see Neil’s videos about marketing on YouTube because they always look too emotional and too banal for me.
However, after the first minutes of this podcast, I understood that this is a different story. Neil was honest, and open-minded and shared a lot of things he didn’t share before.
That’s why I decided to write a summary of the most important ideas from the video.
I highly recommend it to you, especially if you are running your agency.
Here is the link to the podcast on YouTube.
Neil's quotes:
1/ NP Digital is a $100mln+ business.
60-70% of revenue is from agencies, and 30-40% is from software.
2/ Most agencies can't grow more than $1-2mln ARR for one reason.
They think that the hardest part is sales (which is true too). However, the biggest leverage is in the decreasing churn.
Usually, agencies are happy when they retain customers for 1-2 years. This is a bad result; you should try to achieve 5-7 years of retention.
To do that you should:
provide more than one service (not only SEO);
focusing on enterprise customers;
be in the game for a long time.
3/ Ubersuggest is so cheap and the only SEO software that suggests lifetime deals for two reasons.
to get customers who can't afford Semrush and Ahrefs;
to get on the radars of the employees of the big corporations
If Microsoft earns billions a year, it doesn't mean their employees can spend money easily on any software they want.
Being so cheap helps such employees spend their own money on Ubersuggest and turn them into brand champions, which makes an impact when NP Digital agency works on converting big corporations for digital marketing services with 5-6 figure contracts.
4/ To get more enterprise customers you need to change your mindset about revenue per employee metric.
It would help if you had a bigger customer success and sales department (Neil to Tim about getting more enterprise customers for Ahrefs).
5/ The main reason why most agencies can't get enough enterprise customers is because they aren't available in regions.
Big brands are global. They have many divisions and departments in different countries. When they have to choose which agency they will work with, they choose somebody who has experts in every specific region they operate.
6/ Most enterprise businesses are done from relationships.
And we at NP Digital don't build them. We hire people who already have them. We hire people from WPP, Dentsu, etc.
7/ Most of my content online is very tactical. It's true.
The reason we create basic content is that most people in organizations aren’t CMOs and VPs. They're junior marketers, they learn, and they do research.
Over time, 10-15 years, these keep getting promoted and leave companies. They have some sort of loyalty because they learn stuff with you.
Tim’s quotes:
1/ Sam Oh estimates that around 10% of all Ahrefs' sign-ups are from our YouTube channel.
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