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In this post, I’ll tell you how to evaluate digital marketing strategy in this time of uncertainty.

Eric Siu is a digital marketing agency owner and strategist who runs a modest, multi-million dollar empire that includes a SaaS company called ClickFlow (an SEO Experimentation Tool), a SaaS digital marketing agency, and a portfolio of mega profitable, digital marketing-oriented online media properties that collectively draw millions of unique monthly visitors.

That’s right. Millions of uniques every month.

Eric Siu is a living, walking case study if you want to know how to start a digital marketing agency or a SaaS company from scratch.

And if you just want a few digital marketing tips to grow your startup, Eric is a geek famous, living legend. 

I caught up with him and shared how he creates successful digital marketing strategies to generate qualified B2B leads for clients, what considerations go into growth hacking, the basics of website marketing, and how to develop a digital marketing program to drive software trials for SaaS offerings.

Siu grew his digital advertising agency from nothing, and today he represents some of the biggest SaaS brands in the world, including Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber. Nuff said. 

Single Grain specializes in ROI-focused marketing programs that generate sales accepted leads for complex B2B SaaS subscriptions.

Eric Siu is a big believer in product lead growth, which usually means offering a free version of a premium service to give people a way to try your product without having to bleed excessive customer service resources trying to get functional.  Let them churn and support customers with the where-with-all to be successful.  

According to a conversation Siu had with HubSpot VP marketing Keiran Flanigan, it wasn’t until HubSpot introduced an entry-level, freemium product that their business took off.

Impact of Digital Marketing

Orbit Media just published a study with Drew McLellan about the impact of COVID-19 on digital marketing spends, and it showed B2C getting hit much harder than B2B, although marketing across the board is way down. 

Siu spoke about the impact of the pandemic on ClickFlow and Single Grain. But his recommendations for what marketers should do at this point may be counterintuitive to many listeners because it’s far from what most people seem to be doing. 

Listen to the podcast if you want to hear what he’s doing to get through this rough patch.

I will share what he said about his discussions with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, who are essentially writing this year off.  But he thinks that when business resumes, don’t expect to see the same aggressive approach to paid media as a primary traffic source. 

Instead, expect to see start-ups and change-ups take a more innovative approach to digital media marketing, and closer look at owned and shared media, like this.

Digital Transformation’s iPhone Moment

For a lot of companies who still haven’t gotten their arms around digital transformation — meaning they don’t have a digital business infrastructure or much sophistication around revenue operations —  the pandemic has accelerated the need for adoption big time, and now is really the time to go big or go home.

Now is the time to re-examine your digital infrastructure and ensure you have the tools to process transactions and deliver products and services online. Whether you take a best-of-breed, point solution or vertically integrated approach, it’s a mad rush right now to get yourself situated. 

Check out this digital transformation primer post I wrote about digital transformation strategy last year.

Which Owned Media Channels Deliver Best?

Owned media marketing is Eric’s sweet spot.  He has two podcasts (Leveling Up and Marketing School with Neil Patel), a blog, and a YouTube Channel. 

In terms of which channels work best at demand and lead generation, here’s what Eric has to say about his owned media channels:

Lead Generation from Blogging and SEO

It’s important to realize that publishing a blog and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand.

If what you’re looking to do is generate leads, then it’s important to embrace popular language so that people can find you when they’re searching for types of products and services you have, even if they don’t know you.  

Doing that means researching keywords and phrases most likely to be searched by qualified prospects.

Eric’s team invests the time to search and optimize important articles; as a result, they see 50% of their leads come from organic search.  His blog is the number one search result for “podcast advertising” and other high-volume terms with strong purchase intent.

Lead Generation from Speaking and Networking

Eric estimates 35% of his leads come through speaking at conferences, which isn’t happening anymore, and networking add events, which also no longer exist due to the pandemic.

But Eric is a subject matter expert and thought leader in digital marketing, and once we have containment, no doubt this category will continue to yield rewards for him.

Lead Generation from Podcasts

So this is interesting. Only 15% of his leads come from podcasting, but they’re his best leads because they’re pre-qualified, having listened to him for so long and developed a relationship with him and an affinity for his style through listening. He also said leads that come in via podcast close faster and spend more.

I don’t want to date myself, but I started my first podcast on the record online in 2005. It led to a best-selling book and a ton of Consulting internationally with federal government agencies, military commands and some of the biggest companies in the world.

I’m so glad to hear my experience is not a fluke. Eric also shared that Marketing School generates nearly $800k in annual advertising revenue.

Lead Generation via YouTube

Eric’s YouTube channel has 36,000 subscribers, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at. But he doesn’t consider it a big audience. Interestingly enough, he tailors the content on YouTube to appeal to beginners and folks who may not be able to hire his digital marketing agency but may be good ClickFlow customers or Marketing School listeners.In terms of what works best on YouTube he recommends making your videos 10 minutes or longer, since YouTube’s algorithm looks to drive total viewing time, and shorter videos result in shorter viewing times. When it comes to headlines, he says spend 80% of your time getting your headline right. The headline is way more important than the body text.

We spoke a bit about mega influencer Gary Vaynerchuk’s Tik Tok Channel, and Eric shared some inside information on how Gary Vee is feeding that channel. He also advises aspiring marketers to look at Tik Tok as potential channel for lead generation. 

I’ve been watching a lot of Tik Tok lately and was encouraged to see that getting an audience is possible even if you don’t look great in a bikini.

Preferred Digital Marketing Tech Stack

Figuring out which digital marketing tools to go with can be brain damage. I was so frustrated with the process of finding an online news and social media monitoring platform that I wrote 54 page, vendor-neutral Media Monitoring white paper so I could make a good choice.

Johnny Bentwood at Golin shared his preferred free PR tech stack back on a recent episode of the Earned Media Podcast.

But this is Eric Siu’s preferred martech stack:

• Hull.io – Data alignment and enrichment
• Outreach – Sales Enablement
• Intercom – Customer messaging
• Stripe – Ecommerce
• ProfitWell – Subscription growth

Eric Siu is a really impressive guy, who has made it on his own and plays by his own rules. But despite his success, he’s gracious and humble, and speaking with him was a pleasure.

There are a lot of digital marketing agencies out there. But there aren’t many you necessarily want to hang with. Eric is one of those people. He’s relaxed, easygoing, and not full of himself, even though, given his extraordinary success, he may be entitled to be so.

He mentioned that he’s currently doing free 15-minute consultations with companies about how they are adapting to The New Normal.