Content vs Paid Ads: The Answer Is Both

Content versus paid ads. So more so organic content versus paid ads because I was listening to a debate with these. One guy's really big on paid media.

The other one's really big on organic content. And I'm just listening to these guys argue on this podcast. And I'm just like, this is so stupid. Like it's one guy's like, oh yeah, you know, with organic,

you can't do X, Y, and Z on paid media. Like you can scale to the moon and it's exponential. And then, you know, there's key manner risk if you're doing organic.

Like while that all might be true, I think the answer at the end of the day, Content versus paid ads? I think the answer is both. Totally. We run paid ads. We do content. I think you should

do everything that you can end up doing that's profitable. And this debate in marketing that's been going on for years, oh, this is better than this. Marketing is about

what's better. Marketing is about what can I do that produces an ROI? And you do everything that produces an ROI, and then you consider cutting the stuff

that doesn't. The reason I say you consider cutting the stuff that doesn 't, I put a chart on this a while ago, or maybe it's not live yet. It was on X.

I got the data from Nielsen and actually the chart goes out on it. I actually think tomorrow. Let's actually see. Yeah, it's scheduled for tomorrow. So I have a chart from Nielsen

and it talks about how 1% increase in brand awareness reduces short-term CAC by roughly 1%. So it's even. So a lot of things like branding and brand awareness

that gets your brand out there, You're just like, man, we're investing all this money. We're trying to build a solid brand with an R space, kind of like Nike, right?

That's at least what we're trying to do. And it's expensive, and it doesn't produce a media ROI. But in the long run, we do believe it'll reduce our CAC. It's just some of these things will show a negative ROI,

and you can use a lot of different tools or people or AI to help analyze some of these things and be like, oh no, you may need to cut this. It's differences of opinions,

and you need to figure out what works for you. Like you look at Airbnb, you go fly on. Any airplane, a lot of times on the TV monitors, you'll see commercials for Airbnb before the plane takes

off. Or back in the day before Zappos got sold to Amazon, the shoe e-commerce site, in the TSA section, when you're going to the airport, you would have to take off your shoes.

There was no TSA pre-back then. And there would be a tray, and the tray had imprints of where you put your shoes, and it would say Zappos. I thought that was very clever marketing and branding.

It's not going to produce a direct ROI, but it gets your brand out there. And some of those things, You got to determine if your company wants to invest in

them, even if it's too hard to showcase the ROI on it, at least in the first few years. What do you think you're spending rough range right now on paid media per month?

I don't know, for our own business? Yeah. Not much, maybe three, four, five million a year. Yeah. So it's it. And then when you think about the content,

your content budget, what does it look like? Uh, content includes email and things like that, or, and website content, or you just talk About social content or all?

All. Maybe another 150 a month, so call it 1.8. So call it between everything. We spend maybe five to seven-ish million dollars USD a year . So I'm only asking Neil because it's about 28% of his

overall marketing spend for his company, right? Just look at organic and paid. So you have five of the seven goes to paid, and then two of the seven, 28.5%, goes to organic content, right?

So it very much is in like an or situation. I would say for us, we're not spending nearly enough as we should on paid. And paid, like it works, right?

Like both of them work. Why would you not do it more? And you guys are still running paid for your webinars too, right? I don't know. And I know we have a third marketing bucket that we didn't

talk about, which is in person. Let's call it another 1.5 to 2 million. So let's say we spend somewhere between 7 and 9-ish million rounding per year.

On marketing efforts. Yeah, great. So that's, and by the way, like it's, we're not going to talk about percentages here because they need to get back into your revenue, but we'll just leave it as

usually the percentage should be a lot higher. So with your marketing. Well, we don't spend as much because what we found is we actually used to invest more into marketing than we do now.

But when you're moving upstream and your goal is to get, let's call it more global 1000 contracts, a lot of marketing doesn't get you those contracts. What we found gets us those contracts faster is just buying

companies in regions that we're not doing as well in or we're not as big in or we're not in at all that have those contracts and then just landing and expanding

and then taking their brand, doing a ton of press and marketing, how we acquired them and then convert their name over into our name. And that ends up

getting us what we're looking for and it's just much quicker than spending all the on marketing. And Eric nailed it earlier. I'm not saying that's the best approach

or the worst approach. I've been an entrepreneur at this point for 25, 26 years. So I'm able to do a lot of this kind of stuff where I wasn 't financially able to do this stuff

like 10, 15 years ago as much. And it's just easier for me to do this kind of stuff than it is to build it from scratch and spend the money. Because the issue that we face, and you guys all know this,

when you're doing marketing, not only does it cost money, but it takes a long time. And we found, and it, for us at our scale, it does help us grow, but it takes us

longer to get growth than it does to just go and buy it. So we found it to be easier to just buy the growth combined with doing organic marketing. Yep. All right. So that actually, we're talking about ROI,

right? So Neil, I wanted to call this, I saw this this morning when I was at the gym, but I wanted to show you this because Let's talk about the ROI of podcasting because you and I,

we've been doing this podcast. It's got to be close to 10 years now, which is kind of insane to say because it's gone by so quickly. But these are the highest paid podcasters here, okay?

So this is from Forbes. So Joe Rogan, 82 million, right? And then you have TBPN, which is bought out by OpenAI. So apparently, I guess it's 70 million.

And then Diary of a CEO, I didn't know it was 45 million bucks a year. Ashley Flowers, Crime Junkie, 42 million. That's crazy. Like, just these numbers are crazy.

Smart list, 37. Here's some other ones that you probably have seen. So, Andrew Huberman, 18 million a year. And you have Scott Galloway, 19 million. Tucker Carlson, 20 million or so, right?

So I think this is really interesting. But did Andrew Huberman get in trouble for something? I don't know, is it Epstein or something like that? He didn't, no, that was Peter Attia.

That was the other one. Yeah, yeah. So what's interesting to me is like, these are very much all personalities. I would say Scott Galloway is definitely an entrepreneur.

Andrew Huberman is partnered with a lot of people. I'm trying to look at who else here would be considered an entrepreneur, Neil. Who do you see? In theory, they're all entrepreneurs at this point.

Yeah, well, I guess so. They're probably invested in a lot of things. But the reason, what I'm really saying is like, who here is a business operator, right?

You can argue that these two probably are business operators. And Steven's been a business operator as well. But also, you know, this is really healthy revenue, like I

'll say that. But, you know, how many people can we say that have podcasts that have led to, you know, large organizations that they 've been able to build?

Yeah, and you look at this, the number one podcast rated here, and this is probably just looking at English. There could be some other languages that people may be

dominating, like in Chinese or Mandarin or Mandarin, but in China specifically. That could be making more, I don't know. But you nailed it. I look at MarketCap, and when I look at...

Neil. Has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

Ad agencies, it's like I can't even count on two hands. It won't even fit for all the ad agencies I know doing nine figures plus in revenue. There's so many of them.

You can't even count them. And there's so many of them that I never even heard their names before. It's just such a massive market. And what I found is it's easier to just go and go into a

big market and be a small fish than it is to go into a smaller market and try to be one of the bigger fishes. Yep. And I think at least for, I'm speaking for you again,

correct me if I'm wrong here, but like I enjoy the operating piece more than the content creation piece. As much as I enjoy and love doing this podcast,

it's good, it's been fun. And surely it's definitely helped. I just want to call that the way we're doing it right now is very much to generate more brand awareness, ultimately.

And it's to help our businesses primarily. So we're operators first, content creators second. Yeah, same with me. Look, I don't mind creating content.

I think it's fun, especially this podcast because Eric and I have been friends for such a long time. Some of the content that I create, I don't always enjoy. Just being transparent because sometimes you have to create

stuff that you don't want to create. But it's just like being an entrepreneur. You're going to always have to do stuff that you don't like . It's the nature of the game.

My kid's watching TV. I don't know if you heard the yelling. So, but yeah, like I spend more time on M&A and I enjoy it because it's like, oh, I found this company.

Oh, they're doing 12 million in revenue and they really want to sell and I can get a deal that works out for them and me. And I'm like, cool. Like it moves the needle much more.

It's just like to organically generate 12 million in revenue takes a lot longer. And it's like, wait, how many of these can I buy a year? You know, and then I found that it just works better for me

. But you just got to figure out what you want. end up doing. And I look at a lot of these things as they 're all intertwined. It's just like, wait, I can buy a company that's doing really well, but is

doing a crappy job marketing themselves. And I can just put more fuel on the fire and do better on their marketing. It's all different games and there's different levels to

the games. And so the challenge is if you're all in as a content creator and there's no knock, I'm just saying the challenge with being a content creator.

So like if William wants to be a content creator, for example, he wants to be an influencer. You got to go deeper and deeper. And then people start telling you all these things to do.

Like when daddy has to tell you what to do, William, and you have to listen to him, right? That's not fun, right? So like, but when you're an operator, you kind of get to march to

the beat of your own drum. And so I think there's no perfect solution, right? There's only trade-offs at the end of the day. And I prefer to deal with the trade-offs that we have

to deal with right now. So there's no right or wrong, it's just what your preference is. So Neil, the final thing I think we can touch upon here before we go, I talked about

earlier about recruiting versus management. So we just did content versus paid ads. And so I kind of said, hey. Hey, look, if you don't want to deal with as many people

headaches, you should spend more time on recruiting. When I say you, I really mean your organization. So if you're starting out, maybe it's you in the beginning,

but I've just found that recruiting, especially when you're smaller, it is one of the highest leverage activities because, Neil, let's just look at you for a second.

When you were brought in the CEO, how much did it just change the trajectory of your organization? It changed a lot. And I was having a conversation with him yesterday

because we were going over some deals. And he was telling me because I'm the one who starts a lot of the M&A conversations and I passed it to the team.

We have a team that does M&A as well. And he messaged me because he's the CEO and he's very direct with me. He's like, hey, I know you're looking at some deals

that you may end up liking. The team has some hesitations on some of the deals that you may end up liking . And I was like, look, dude, you know I try not to interfere.

He's like, yeah, he's like, you let me run the show and he 's like, it's. in a great, you know, relationship. And he's like, yeah. So I'm like, here's the thing.

I'm just here to find deals and I'll tell you which ones financially I'm okay with. You guys can decide which ones you want to do or you guys can bring more to the table.

I'll never tell you which ones to buy, but I have the right to veto if I don't want to spend my own money on something. He's like, totally agree. But I'm like, I'm never going to have you do something that you don't want

because you're going to have to end up running it anyways. He's like, cool. He's like, I figured. And I'm like, yeah, we're on the same page. I'm like, he's like, yeah, he's like, the team was just

telling me. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, no one needs to worry. He's like, I figured, but he's like, I just want to have a conversation with you on it. But that example there, on a day-to-day basis,

like Eric knows I had a family emergency come up, so I had to watch my kids by myself for, I don't know how long, it could be a few days, it could be a week or two until, you know, things get

sorted here. And like all of a sudden I'm able to drop everything and my team deals with anything and And nothing skips a beat. I was on a Disney cruise for one minute, William.

I was on a Disney cruise for roughly a week and I barely did any work and nothing skipped a beat, right? And like what Eric pointed out, recruiting, spending the right time,

getting the right people is priceless. Yeah. And by the way, I'll just say this. When you found the right person, there's no need to wait a month or whatever.

Usually you'll see in the first week or two if they're that damn good. That's what I found. Yeah. And I'll try to get them right away, But sometimes getting the right people,

what I found, especially if they're higher up, it takes a while because sometimes in their contracts, they have really long notice periods where sometimes some of them even have to give

like six months to nine months notice periods. It's ridiculously long. But my point, Neil, is when you know someone's really good, they deliver something in the first week or two, right?

Remember you had to fire that one guy, the mustache guy, and you fired him but in the first week or two. Yeah, I feel bad that I had to do that, but yes.

Yeah. I didn't mean to laugh about that, but it didn't work right away. too. Like, it's once you get the feeling, that feeling's almost never wrong. In fact, that feeling has never been wrong for me, Neil.

Has it been wrong for you? No. Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, that's food for thought for you all. Like, I know we're talking about marketing here, but the

more time you spend time on recruiting amazing marketing or salespeople or really anybody, the less time you have to manage because the best people, they don't want to be managed, right?

They want to, like, to Neil's point, Neil's CEO, you let me do my own thing. That's the key, right? People don't want, like, the greatest people don't want to

be told what to do. if you want to work with the greatest people. So that is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.