"2018 Inbound Marketing Trends Ft. Eric Siu" (Inbound Success Ep. 20)

What are the top trends that will influence inbound marketers’ ability to be successful in 2018? 

That’s the question I set out to answer in this week’s interview with famed marketer and podcaster, Eric Siu. 

Eric is the CEO of Single Grain, a marketing agency focused on helping companies to grow their online revenue; the Founder of Growth Everywhere, a website and podcast that provide entrepreneurs with tools to grow both personally and professionally; as well as the co-host (with Neil Patel) of Marketing School, a daily podcast that provides marketers with actionable tips and insights.

Eric has been on my list of top marketing influencers for some time now, so I was excited to talk with him about what he sees as the top trends that will shape how we do inbound marketing in the future.

Listen to the podcast to hear what Eric thinks will influence inbound marketers in 2018, or read the show notes below for a quick summary.

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome to The Inbound Success Podcast. This is Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Eric Siu, the CEO of Single Grain, co-host of the Marketing School Podcast and the founder of Growth Everywhere. Welcome, Eric.

Eric Siu (guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Thanks for being on. I’m excited to have you. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Eric: Like you mentioned, I run a marketing agency called Single Grain. So we mostly focus on paid advertising and SEO, and we get to work with a lot of technology clients like Uber, Amazon, even Lyft as well. And you know the Growth Everywhere podcast – I’ve been doing that for about four years, and I get to interview great entrepreneurs such as people that have invented the little credit card stripe you have on the back of your credit cards, and you know really smart people. I also co-host Marketing School with Neil Patel. We’ve been doing that for a little over a year now and then I also have a SaaS SEO tool called Click Flow. I stay busy around the world of marketing, so happy to be here.

Kathleen: I was going to say, you are a very busy guy. I think we can have a whole separate podcast on time management!

Eric: Yeah, totally.

Kathleen: I just listened to your Marketing School podcast with Neil on buying back your time so we can have a separate discussion about that, but we’re going to put that on hold because you have generously agreed to be the first guest to kick off 2018 on this podcast. And what I really want to focus on is what you see as the big trends coming in 2018 for marketers and what’s going to really contribute to the success of inbound marketing as we enter the new year?

Eric: Yeah, so I think what Neil and I have been talking about on the Marketing School podcast a lot, perhaps not in the next year but for sure a lot more automation is going to be happening. So you know when people talk about AI, machine learning, and also kind of general AI, general AI is basically robots that are going to be smarter than us or talking maybe. Could be you know 15, 20 plus years out but you know the fact of the matter is a lot of jobs are going to be replaced through automation, right, whether it’s automating videos or just writing content, making things a lot easier and then so we can focus on things that are higher impact. I think that’s coming but kind of in the near term future.

Neil and I have been investing a lot of resources into video, so we’re building out video capabilities as an agency but also if you go to his YouTube channel and my YouTube channel, we’ve put significant time and resources into investing there and also making ads through video too. Because the fact of the matter is you and I, even though this is not a video podcast, we have our video on right now and it’s a lot more personal and you can tell kind of what’s going on too and you build more of a relationship versus just being a voice.

Kathleen: Yeah, I love that. It definitely helps to be able to look somebody in the eye when you’re speaking to them as opposed to just having the audio and doing it over the phone.

Eric: Right.

Kathleen: I’d love to start by digging into the topic of AI a little bit more. That was the first thing that you mentioned and I feel like there’s a lot of talk going on about that in the world of marketing and people have been discussing this possibility that some jobs will be replaced by robots. So if you had a child who was in college or entering college – I have a couple of them – what would be your advice if they said they were interested in a career in marketing as to what to focus on so that they did not fall victim to being replaced by a robot?

Eric: Yeah, you know this is interesting. One of our clients had about 520 million dollars invested in them and they are a toy – it’s a STEM toy that teaches kids how to code. During a Christmas family gathering a couple days ago I was looking at some of my cousins’ kids – they have kids now, I don’t have kids yet. But it’s like, okay, well you know when they’re like four, five years old I’m going to buy a couple of those toys and give them that because they’re actually going to use it and they’re going to get smarter.

My background comes from online education. I used to work at a company called Treehouse, taught people how to do coding, web design, so that is required at least in my hypothetical future house. So I think there has to be coding. Look at Mark Cuban, right? He’s a billionaire and doesn’t have to learn other stuff, but he’s still teaching himself how to do Python so he doesn’t get left in the dust, right, so he knows what’s going on. I think coding without a doubt has to happen. There’s just so many resources out there. I’m seeing like some schools in Chicago where coding is required now in high school. So that would be the first thing.

Kathleen: It’s very interesting because when I talk to younger people who are interested in going into marketing, what I often hear is that they love the creative side of it and you know they watch Mad Men and they think of it as like this creative brainstorm, and a lot of the people that go into marketing tend to be people who say “oh I really don’t like math” or “I wasn’t a science kid and so I’m going to be a marketer.” From what you’re saying and also from some of the things that I’ve been observing, it does sound like that is a somewhat old-fashioned notion of marketing and while there still is absolutely creativity involved, it seems to me that you can’t be that person who says “I just don’t like math and science and I’m going to ignore that and be the creative.” I’d love to get your thoughts on that.

Eric: Yeah, so I think growing up we’re kind of instilled that we’re not good at certain things. It’s the same thing in business right? People like to compare themselves to other peoples’ highlight reels on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or whatever. But maybe those people are practicing more, maybe they weren’t good in the beginning right? So I remember growing up I always gravitated more towards writing. I just liked English more than math and my parents were always like yeah you’re not good at math, da da da, whatever. But then I mean, you just start practicing more and more, and you just naturally get better. It’s kind of cliché. So I still think, yeah, coding is going to be required. And I see a lot of people that code that aren’t necessarily “good at math” so I just think it’s an excuse at the end of the day and you’ve just got to suck it up.

Kathleen: I also think marketing is one of those disciplines that if you’re not a committed lifelong learner, you’re going to fall behind regardless and so you have to constantly be challenging yourself and stretching yourself. So with AI … our listeners are a mix of agency people, in-house marketers, etc., maybe not all from really big brands so they have limited budgets … what are some accessible AI tools that you think they might bear looking into by the type of listener we have.

Eric: Yeah, so there’s this one that uses natural language processing, which is a segment of AI. But basically here’s the high level of it. The tool is called Automated Insights and I think one of their tools is called Wordsmith or something. But you know there’s a lot of companies like the Associated Press, you know they publish a ton of news, they might take financial stats, might take sports stats. It just makes life a lot easier so you don’t have to hire like someone like a human to do it. It just pulls out the stats, makes it into a really readable format and all of a sudden they have three, four thousand plus unique pieces of content per month and it’s only going to get better, right. This is just the beginning. You know it’s just pulling stats right now to make it barely readable so I think that has a long way to go but that’s just one thing that can be done that is kind of a sub-segment of AI.

Kathleen: Yeah, I’ve seen some interesting analysis tools also. I just did a demo last week of Atomic Reach, which is doing some pretty cool things in analyzing marketing content to determine what level of emotional input into tone strikes the strongest chord and what length of posts, etc. So a lot of that analysis that we used to have to do very manually is now starting to be accomplished via artificial intelligence.

Eric: Yup.

Kathleen: One resource I would definitely point listeners to if you haven’t checked it out, is Paul Roetzer, who is doing some great work with his Marketing AI institute. They’re doing a ton of research on all the different tools out there so that’s a great website with lots of really helpful information.

Okay so AI … we’ve kind of checked that box, talked about that a little bit. Video, that was the second thing I think you mentioned. Tell me a little bit more. I mean video has been kind of a hot topic for the last year or two, how do you see that continuing to evolve in 2018?

Eric: Yeah, so I think it just depends on the style, right? So you know you look at the Gary Vee’s out there, you know everybody, especially everybody in an agency where, it’s funny I talk to a lot of agency owners and everybody wants to build a 100 million dollar agency now, right, just because he says it all the time. So I think that he certainly had that kind of effect, you know the documenting works for him. But the kind of videos Neil and I tend to do it’s Neil does a lot of how-to videos. It just depends on your style, right. He likes how-to, he’s got a really private life. I do how-to, I’ll do some Vlogs too, I might do some interview series. So I like to try, for me, I like to throw a bunch of things against the wall and see what sticks.

Also, I think that the other thing around if you’re doing video you probably want to grow a YouTube channel. Maybe you know when you think about, I’ve talked to a couple other YouTube people and you know they say yeah it’s a tough slog to get to the first 10 thousand subscribers but once you get to the first 10 thousand it’s really easy to just start growing from there. 10 thousand to 100 thousand, then 100 thousand plus. But it just takes time. So that’s kind of the recurring theme and when I was recording the podcast with Neil yesterday, what we found ourselves saying for a couple episodes for becoming an overnight success or achieving your goals, it just takes time at the end of the day. And I think a lot of people just, yeah, just stop comparing yourself to other people all the time.

Kathleen: Any tips for brands or agencies that are starting to invest in YouTube and are in the middle of that tough slog? You know other than “hey, have patience and wait it out,” anything that you’ve seen work really well?

Eric: Yeah. So look at your analytics, you want to look at your watch time definitely, and you want to look at your retention rate, right. What you can do is, let’s say you have this really long-winded introduction and you see you lose 50% of your listeners throughout the introduction, you know you need to fix that intro. Maybe that becomes 20% in the future and then your retention rate starts to get better, people start to get more interested. You also have to make sure you’re publishing on a consistent schedule too, right. Right now the top YouTubers they’re publishing one, two, three times a day. It’s like if you’re going to do something you better be consistent with it and you better be willing to stick it through for a long time and not see any returns for a while.

Kathleen: Yeah and it’s interesting that you mentioned testing out different formats because I interviewed Ameer Rosic a few weeks ago and he’s got a huge YouTube following; he’s got like 150 thousand followers. I was asking him that same question and he said the same thing, which was to test out different formats because you can’t assume that just because a longer form Vlog worked really well for somebody else it’s going to work for your audience.

Eric: Well yeah. He really took off after he started publishing cryptocurrency kind of videos or blockchain videos. So you know, riding the wave too always works from a marketing perspective.

Kathleen:  On Marketing School, I listened to you and Neil talk about being everywhere – the importance of being everywhere these days. One of the things that I’ve been observing is Facebook’s move to really reward native video that’s uploaded directly to the platform instead of, for example, sharing your YouTube video on Facebook. So if you’re somebody who wants to build a following on YouTube but is also actively trying to build their following on Facebook and wants to leverage the video they’re creating for YouTube on Facebook, any advice for how to balance cannibalizing your own audience through those two platforms?

Eric: On YouTube there’s a tool called TubeBuddy that allows you to also publish to Facebook. So when you’re uploading a video you can also publish to Facebook. That’s not exactly sharing – it is publishing to your channel and you can see how that performs. We’ve been doing that just in the last couple weeks and the videos get a decent amount of views, some even more than what we’re seeing on YouTube. Then kind of similar to that note, we just submitted our videos to be on YouTube Watch too because we see some other people like Grant Cardone appearing on Facebook Watch. So that’s something to take a look at as well.

Kathleen: Yeah, it seems like YouTube is introducing a lot of really neat tools for brands that are committed to video but in my understanding is that a lot of them are not accessible until you reach a certain follower count, I believe is it 10 thousand?

Eric: Yeah. So there are different tiers. I mean there’s a thousand, I think there’s 10 thousand and 100 thousand. But the tool I’m talking about is accessible to everyone. You’ve got TubeBuddy and then there’s another one called VidIQ. They’re both very similar, they’re competitors. But there’s a lot of tools in there like creating thumbnails, publishing to Facebook, finding the right tags, seeing what you’re ranking for, things like that.

Kathleen: Great. So outside of video and AI, any other strategies that you’re seeing work really well for inbound marketers?

Eric: Yeah, so podcasting like what you’re doing right now. It’s no secret the fact that I’m doing that Marketing School podcast is because of my first podcast. But you know same kind of thing, it’s tough slog. Most people give up way too early. Podcasting has led to many great things. If I just look at Marketing School, the fact that we’re taking those podcasts and someone’s writing the show notes and they’re being published on the agency website, which has a pretty high domain authority, we bumped our traffic up by 25 to 30%. And then, at the same time, it’s led to speaking gigs, great relationships, clients as well, just a lot of things that you wouldn’t expect. You’re basically building relationships at scale, which is why I like podcasts and why I like video.

Kathleen: Yeah and I find it’s always surprising when and how people are listening to the podcast. One of the things I love the most about it is when I meet somebody who I’ve never met before and they tell me a story like I was dropping my kid off at school and listening to you talk about X or I was grocery shopping or you know I’m in the car, and I feel like it really does lend itself so well to how mobile we’re all becoming today.

Eric: It’s extremely personal. I mean when I was speaking at a conference in Amsterdam, a girl raised her hand during Q&A and then she was like “Eric just want to let you know that I listen to Marketing School in the shower.” I was like “okay?”

Kathleen: All of a sudden it conjures up all kinds of interesting images.

Eric: Yeah.

Kathleen: Well I will admit I was listening to you and Neil yesterday as I was lifting weights so …

Eric: Hey, yeah.

Kathleen: There you go. Yeah, one of the other things I heard you talking about on the podcast was simplifying your funnel. This is something I’m really interested in. There are so many tools available to us now as marketers. My agency happens to be a HubSpot partner, but there’s also Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, you name it. There’s so many that allow marketers, if they so choose, to get really complicated with their funnels, their workflows etc. And I think it is easy to fall victim to the notion that the more complicated you make it, the more effective it’s going to be. But you had a really interesting discussion that was the counterpoint to that and I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.

Eric: Yeah. I forgot what we said exactly but maybe it’ll just kind of come out naturally here. Neil uses ConvertKit, I use Drip. And Drip is a really simplified version of like Infusionsoft for example. And Infusionsoft can do a lot of stuff that Marketo does, right – a lot of complex tagging, logic, things like that. But especially when you’re starting out, you don’t need to get that complex because, like, how much is that really going to move the needle for you?

So I recommend making a general nurture sequence, maybe the first email can find out who your customer is exactly, give a little introduction to you, and then afterward just send them a high-value kind of evergreen piece of content, which is what we do with podcasts for example. And then from time to time we’ll broadcast an announcement for a webinar or something like that, but there’s no need to say in the very beginning “oh if he clicks this button he needs to be moved to this service” and then you start kind of doing all these little kind of minor things and it becomes a super convoluted monster when you could have been spending that time on more higher leverage activities as a business owner.

Kathleen: Right. The law of diminishing returns definitely applies to workflow complexity.

Eric: Right.

Kathleen: So other things I’m curious about from your perspective… content. Obviously, a lot more content is being created these days. I feel like six years ago when I was talking about inbound marketing nobody had heard of it, but now it’s extremely widely adopted. Any particular trends you’re seeing as far as what enables a brand that wants to thrive through content creation to be successful?

Eric: Yeah. Let’s start with podcasts first. Everyone has a unique spin on their podcast and I think with Marketing School, one of the reasons it succeeds is because we do it every single day and it’s a very short format. So it’s something that has its kind of unique spin and then with Tim Ferris‘ stuff, he’s talking to really hard to access people and these interviews can go for two to three hours sometimes. So it’s the unique spin that you have, right?

And then with Growth Everywhere, the other podcast, I’m able to talk with executives about the entrepreneurial journey but also dig deep into marketing and personal habits. So if you can have something unique and you stick with it, great.

That doesn’t just apply to podcasts, it applies to video too. If you look at Grant Cardone, he’s very personable, a great speaker, funny guy. So whatever you can, apply to it and then you’re going to start to build an audience over time. It’s not like Growth Everywhere was built over one night. I was spending six hours a week on it in the very beginning while I was trying to save this company, which I just took over at the time.

Was the juice worth the squeeze in one year? No, but that’s when people would have given up. I was only getting nine downloads a day after the first year. I kept going for another year, I was only getting 30 downloads a day. So you would think after one year I should give up, but after two years, like, I’m stupid for continuing to go on after 30 downloads. But if I didn’t go on, it wouldn’t have led to getting up to 100,000 downloads a month and wouldn’t have led to Marketing School, which gets about 600,000 downloads a month.

Kathleen: Yeah, I love that story and it’s very personally applicable because I had a podcast before and it wasn’t specific enough. I learned that lesson pretty quickly so it wasn’t going to develop a really big following. And that was why I changed gears and started this one. And this is still a very young podcast; we’re approaching our 20th episode. But I was just telling this story because I actually did publish a Christmas episode, this comes out on Christmas, and it was funny I heard that you guys did as well. A part of it was to be consistent and one of the things I talked about was that even if nobody ever listens, I love doing this because I learn so much and I feel like that’s a piece of it too. You have to love what you’re doing and it has to be something that nourishes you because then it gives you that patience that you need to wait for it to pay off. And if it’s going to nourish you, it’s going to nourish some other people. You’re going to find your people out there eventually.

Eric: 100%.

Kathleen: So what about paid online advertising? I feel like that landscape has changed dramatically in the last year.

Eric: Yeah.

Kathleen: Between paid social, traditional Google pay per click, retargeting, programmatic, native, there’s so much going on, what do you see as holding the greatest potential for brands?

Eric: What we’ve been noticing more and more is you can’t just drive people to the product page and get them to buy off paid social. Clicks are becoming more and more expensive on Facebook and Google as more and more people go online. This is why we’re putting more resources into video. So what is effective is to drive people to a video piece of content. When they see the video, you can retarget them after they watch 10 seconds, 25% of the video or so on.

You’re basically getting visits for really cheap. You’re building that audience and then you can build lookalikes off that both on YouTube and Facebook, and then you can get them to take an action afterwards. After they’ve gotten to know you a little bit, they start to understand what you’re about. Or maybe you can have a free offer for them first, instead of saying “come buy my stuff “because everything is relationship-based. Those that can actually build a relationship quickly versus saying “hey come buy my stuff,” those are the ones that are going to do better in the long-term.

It’s like what you’re doing right now. You’re building a relationship with the audience with podcasts. It just takes time. I think people just need to be more patient, and this is something I tell my paid advertising team. It’s not all direct response all the time. You know, when I first started learning digital marketing it was like “oh we have the internet now there’s no need for brand marketing.” Now it’s kind of shifting to the other side where you actually need that stuff. It’s important. You can’t just think about direct response all the time because the intangibles matter.

Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. And would your advice differ if you were giving it to a B2B company as opposed to B2C? I know Single Grain is B2B but you’re working with a lot of B2C brands as clients, so I’m curious how you see that differing.

Eric: For B2B I think it’s the same thing. We work with a lot of SaaS companies, and we typically will drive them to a lead magnet first. So like with the billing company we work with, like it’s freaking subscription billing, right? We drive them to a lead magnet that’s interesting to people and it does well in terms of hitting their goals, driving leads that are at an acceptable cost per acquisition. And we do something similar for an applicant tracking system company we work with and sometimes we might drive them to a lead magnet or a webinar, like an on-demand webinar, and that works well. Webinars still work really well for B2B even though they’re kind of becoming more saturated.

Kathleen: Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing. A few years ago e-books were hot and now it’s like you have to beg to get people to download some of these e-books because there’s so much crappy content out there and people have become very skeptical of whether it’s worth giving their email address out for an e-book that may wind up being really crappy. So one of the things that we’ve seen is a trend towards putting the e-book right on the page and then not only are you giving the content away, but you’re getting all the organic SEO value out of that keyword-rich content. And then you can just say “If you want to print it out, put your email address here and we’ll send you a PDF.” And because people know it’s good content, they’re much more likely to convert on it so it’s a little counterintuitive, but seems to work pretty well.

Great. Any other last tips you want to share besides the ones you’ve given us?

Eric: No, I think with marketing you just have to – and I’ll keep repeating this – you just have to stick with it. The reason I keep saying stick with it is because I came back from Japan about three weeks ago and I met up with this group that I’m. It’s a worldwide entrepreneur’s organization called Entrepreneur’s Organization. One of the guys in my group is a Japanese guy, and he’s being running his marketing agency for 20 plus years. The first year or two it was just him and within the first five years there was just him and a couple of employees. The business is now a publicly traded company in Japan and it does $200 million USD per year. And he’s added a lot of things certainly, but I was like, “So why do Japanese stick with their businesses longer?” Because he introduced me to a couple other people, and they’ve all being doing their business 20 plus years. He’s like, “Well, we’re not like Americans where we can just sell our business easily.” They really can’t do that and so they just stick with it longer and you see what happens, it just compounds; it’s like investing.

Kathleen: That’s interesting so it’s like they have to make it work because they don’t have any other option.

Eric: Right.

Kathleen: So when you look out at the world today of marketing, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well, company or individual?

Eric: Yeah, so obviously my podcast co-host Neil, he’s very prolific with his content production. Even though a lot of it’s not him writing it anymore, it’s still compounding on itself. And then yesterday we were just sitting recording. To have that kind of commitment where we spend three to four hours, two times a month driving to a studio and he has to fly back from certain places, I have to fly back from certain places just to get that done, that just shows what kind of commitment it takes to be successful as he is with content marketing.

I also like where Tai Lopez and Grant Cardone are. I’m not saying I’m 100% in agreement with what they do, but I do respect their work ethic because they’re just, again, they’re very prolific, they’ve got great personalities, they know how to get their audience going. And that’s the important thing with marketing, you have to know who your target audience is and what really kind of makes them tick, and they both know how to do that really well.

Kathleen: Awesome. And any bigger brands that you think are really crushing it?

Eric: When it comes to content marketing I think Red Bull always does really unique things. I’m sure there’s a lot of other ones.

Kathleen: And speaking of big brands, I’ve got to ask you this question because I’m from an agency and you mentioned when we were starting out that you’re doing work for Uber and for Lyft. How do you work for competing brands and do it in a way that you can really kill it for both of them and be effective and put up that Chinese wall? I’d love to hear a little bit about how you handle that.

Eric: I mean when I’ve talked to other people at large agencies, what they’ll typically say is that the same team that works on Uber is not going to be the same team that works on Lyft. They’re going to be in separate rooms so to speak. And what’s good for us in working with these two companies, is that we work with two different divisions that are really not competitive. It’s two kind of completely different things. You’d think like they’re both just ridesharing how are they different, right? But they are fairly different. So that actually helped us win the deal with Lyft seeing that Uber was one of the clients. So sometimes it does help to see that kind of validation.

Kathleen: Yeah, it’s an interesting balance because I feel like you do learn so much from working a particular industry and it’s almost a shame that you can’t leverage everything you’ve learned to do better for somebody else. But in doing better for somebody else how does that affect your first client? It’s something I’m fascinated by having been in the agency world for 15 years.

Eric: That’s a really good point because the fact of the matter is a lot of agencies try to be full service, they try to work with everyone. I think especially in the beginning it’s really important to kind of niche down. So for us, our sweet spot is software as a service and education companies. Sometimes we’ll work with bigger brands but it’s harder because you have to keep relearning everything each time and it’s just like starting over again. It’s like the same thing, like things compound if you just kind of focus in and if you focus in you can actually charge more because that’s one of your unique selling points. Like we just focus on SaaS companies and that’s why we charge more because we have this proven playbook versus saying we work with everybody.

Kathleen: Yeah, it’s always fascinating too on the prospect side because I speak with prospective clients and I would say 50% of the time they say “I want to see that you’ve worked with companies in my industry so that I get that understanding of what we do.” An example is we work with a lot of cybersecurity companies and they’re like “we want to know that you know cyber.” But then there’s the other half that say “I want to make sure you’re NOT working with anybody else in my area because I don’t want there to be any hint of competition.” So it’s always interesting to see the mindset that the prospective client comes with as well.

Eric: Totally.

Kathleen: All right, last question for you. You’re somebody who’s involved in so many different things and obviously testing out new strategies and approaches and taking risks. Where do you go to educate yourself about marketing and to stay abreast of the latest thinking?

Eric: I have this Chrome add-on called Panda and what it does is I can open up three columns for feeds that I like reading. So I’ve got Growth Hackers, I have Inbound.org, those are good sites where people are just publishing new stuff all the time. And then I have Hacker News and then sometimes I’ll switch over to The Verge or things like that. But it’s just a feed, right? So those two are really good enough. If you just want to focus on two, I recommend Growth Hackers and inbound.org. And then I have Feedly which has a bunch of subscriptions too, whether it’s entrepreneurship or marketing, where I can just scroll through it and then I can click on things and I can save it to my Pocket. Pocket is my reader. Basically I can save things for later. Those are just a couple things that I do that kind of keep me up to date.

Kathleen: Great. Well, thanks for sharing those. Those are really good tips. So if somebody has some questions for you about anything you’ve mentioned here, what’s the best way for them to find you online?

Eric: Yeah, they can just email me directly. It’s Eric E-R-I-C @singlegrain.com.

Kathleen: All right and I’ll put that link in the show notes. Last question for you. What social platforms are you most active on?

Eric: When I look at my phone, it shows a lot of time spent on Instagram. But I would say I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter, that’s where I’ve become the most educated because I very much curate who I follow. And then YouTube just because we’re constantly trying to optimize that. So Twitter would probably be number one and then Instagram just on time spent, and then yeah you have YouTube, just to kind of continue to tweak things.

Kathleen: I love that. Twitter is the most misunderstood platform. I feel like that’s the one I hear the most complaints about, the most people saying they’ve abandoned it. But I feel like you do. I mean I have a really small list of influencers I follow – you’re on my influencer list – and I feel like as long as I can keep up with that list on Twitter, I stay fresh on what’s happening and it’s been great …

Eric: Because it filters out a lot of the junk out there too. So this is why there’s no real reason for me, at least for me, to watch the news because the big things really pop up on Twitter.

Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. This has been really interesting. I’m glad we had an opportunity to connect and that you were able to share some of the things you’re seeing for 2018. Again, I’m going to summarize a lot of this in the show notes so go check those out if you have a chance.

If you like what you’ve heard today, I would love it if you could give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever podcasting platform you happen to prefer. Lastly, if you know somebody doing really kickass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I’d love to interview them. Thanks so much. Thanks, Eric.

Eric: Thank you.

Want to stay updated when the podcast is released?

Drop us your name and email address below and we’ll send you the show notes every Monday!  

Source link