Content vs Paid Ads: The Answer Is Both

You know that feeling when the strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is you. And it's due tomorrow. Breeze Assistant can help. It works right inside HubSpot. Drafting campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all grounded in your actual customer data. So you don't just create content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. 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, 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 man 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.

0:00

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 a roi? And you do everything that produces a 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 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 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 within our 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 Zapos. I thought that was very clever. Marketing and branding, it's not going to produce a direct roi, but it gets their 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.

1:04

What do you think you're spending rough range right now on paid media per month?

3:06

I don't know. For our own business? Yeah, not much. Maybe three, four or five million a year.

3:12

Yeah. So it's. And then when you think about the content, your, your content budget, what does it look like?

3:19

Nah, content includes email and things like that or. And website content. Or are you just talking about social content or. All.

3:25

All.

3:32

Maybe another 150amonth. So call it 1.8. So call it between everything we spend maybe 5 to 7 ish million dollars USD a year.

3:35

I'm. I'm only asking Neil because it's, it's about 28% of his overall marketing spend for his company. Right. Just looking at organ paid. So you have five of the seven goes to paid and then two of the seven, 28.5% goes to organic content.

3:43

Right.

3:59

So it very much isn't like an OR situation. I would say for us, we're not spending nearly enough as we should on, on paid and I paid.

3:59

Like it.

4:07

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?

4:07

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 I'm rounding per year on marketing efforts.

4:14

Yep. Great. So that's. And by, by the way, like, it's. We're not gonna talk about percentages here because they can get back into your revenue, but we'll just leave it as usually the percentage should be a lot higher.

4:31

So with your markings, 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, 1,000 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 dollars 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.

4:42

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, 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 gotta 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 from Forbes. So Joe Rogan 82 million. Right. And then you have TBPN, which is bought up 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. 40, 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,

6:19

but does Andrew Huberman get in trouble for something? I don't know, is Epstein or something like that or something?

7:11

He didn't know that was Peter Attia.

7:16

That was the other one. Yeah, yeah.

7:18

So what's interesting to me is like these are very much all personalities. I would say Scott Galloway is definitely entrepreneur, Andrew Huberman's partner with a lot of people. I'm trying to look at who else here would be considered an entrepreneur. Neil, who do you theory they're all

7:20

entrepreneurs at this point?

7:33

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, you can. 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, large organizations that they've been able to build? Yeah.

7:35

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 market cap and when I.

8:01

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8:19

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.

9:08

Yep. And I think, at least for. I'm speaking for you again, you 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.

9:36

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 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 and 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 gotta figure out what you wanna 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 in the fire and do better on their marketing.

10:04

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, but 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, when you're an operator, you kind of get to march to the beat of your own drum. And so I think it's. 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, 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, 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're brought in the CEO, how much did it just change the trajectory of your organization?

11:11

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 was, I was, I'm the one who starts a lot of the M and A conversations and I pass it a team. We have a team that does M and A as well. And he messaged me because he's a 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, the team has some hesitations on some of the deals that you may end up liking. And I was like, I'M 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 been 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. And 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 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.

12:24

Yep. 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.

14:16

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.

14:27

But my point, Neal, is when you know someone's really good, they deliver something in the first week or two. Right. Remember you had the fire that one guy, the mustache guy, and you fired him within the first week or two?

14:43

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.

14:52

Like, it's.

14:59

It's.

15:00

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?

15:00

No.

15:06

Exactly.

15:06

Yeah.

15:07

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. They want to, like, to Daniel's point, Neil, 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.

15:08