647: Leverage the Lighthouse Strategy to Attract High-Profile Clients | Dennis Yu

Ready to explore and build groundbreaking digital marketing strategies?

In this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast, Jeff Tomlin welcomes Dennis Yu, a digital marketing expert and pioneer in search engine technology. 

With a background in search engine engineering and advertising, Dennis has managed over a billion dollars in ad spend for enterprise clients like Nike and Red Bull. He is known for developing the “6 Phase Dollar a Day Program,” a streamlined approach to digital marketing strategies. 

Dennis shares insights on customer acquisition costs, the importance of high customer lifetime value, and the power of the lighthouse strategy for agency growth. He also discusses the $1-a-day strategy for testing and scaling digital marketing campaigns. Tune in to gain practical strategies and tips from Dennis’ extensive experience in the digital marketing space! 

Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5.5+ million local businesses through 60,000+ channel partners. Learn more about Vendasta and we can help your organization or learn more about Vendasta’s Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) are making up to $10,000 off referrals. Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Leverage the Lighthouse Strategy to Attract High-Profile Clients

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: Welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast! Our show features successful sales leaders, marketers, thought leaders and entrepreneurs who will inspire you with their success stories. Each episode is packed with practical strategies, as our guests share their secrets to achieving their dreams. Listen in to learn the highlights of their remarkable accomplishments and get tips to revamp, rework, and reimagine your business. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer, or aspiring entrepreneur, the Conquer Local Podcast is your ultimate guide to dominating your local market. Tune in now to take your business to the next level! 

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Dennis Yu.

Dennis is a digital marketing expert with a background in search engine engineering and advertising. As an early pioneer in search engine technology, Dennis has an extensive track record of success in the digital space. He’s managed over a billion dollars in ad spend for major clients like Nike and Red Bull, showcasing his expertise in driving impactful marketing campaigns.

In his current role, Dennis is known for developing the “6 Phase Dollar a Day Program,” a streamlined approach for  focusing on practical, real-world digital marketing strategies. This program is particularly renowned among digital marketing agencies for its effectiveness in lead generation and business growth.

With a career spanning significant advancements in digital marketing, Dennis brings a wealth of experience and a no-nonsense approach to his teachings and strategies. He is a resource for agencies looking to enhance their digital presence and drive substantial results in their advertising efforts.

Get ready Conquerors for Dennis Yu coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Customer Acquisition Costs Rise, but Focus on High Customer Lifetime Value.

Jeff Tomlin: Dennis Yu, welcome back to the Conquer Local Podcast. Hey, it’s always great to see you, and just want to say thanks for taking some time out of your busy day. I know you’re all over the place right now. Thanks for joining us.

Dennis Yu: Good to see you, Mr. Jeff.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, for anyone that doesn’t know how much Dennis travels. How many days out of the year are you on the road?

Dennis Yu: 200.

Jeff Tomlin: 200, easy. Easy. He’s calling in right now to the podcast from Sydney, Australia, and then you’re off to another continent after that. I’m sure to another speaking engagement. So thanks again, for taking some time. By the way, I saw on your Twitter feed, you were listening to RFK speak, and counting the number of Secret Service agents that were protecting him. Whereabouts was that?

Dennis Yu: That was in Las Vegas last week.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, he had an entourage around him. They’re taking care of him.

Dennis Yu: Yeah, yeah. It’s insane. I would never want to be that famous.

Jeff Tomlin: No kidding. No kidding. Well, you’re probably getting there. Hey, I wanted to start out with a little bit of a trend. OpenView Ventures just came out with their most recent benchmarks in the SaaS space. One of the things that they note is that customer acquisition costs are up. Customer retention over this last year for companies, is typically down. So in terms of trends that are impacting digital marketers, are you seeing the same sort of thing? What else can you layer onto that?

Dennis Yu: Look, the cost of acquisition’s gone up every year in the last 30 years in digital marketing because of the cost of traffic, because of the cost of the people, because of the competition, because whatever. But, all that really means is if you’re good at what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter because it’s all about having great LTV.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: So if you really take care of your clients and they don’t cancel on you, you can afford to pay more than anyone else. And in fact, you want the cost of acquisitions to be higher because you want to squeeze out your competitors. If you’re really good at what you do, you’re not really worried about advertising, or the cost of people, or whatnot, because you know you’re going to hold onto them and not churn them out in 90 days.

Smaller Agencies Scale by Improving Efficiency and Minimizing Client Churn.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. Are you finding people that are dealing with smaller clients having to go upmarket to work with customers, like an ideal customer profile that has a larger lifetime value?

Dennis Yu: I think it’s less about a different customer base, and it’s more about being able to be efficient, and have low churn. One of my friends, Josh Nelson, runs Plumber HVAC as an agency, he’s at $6 million a year ARR now.

Jeff Tomlin: Wow.

Dennis Yu: I think a few years ago, he had only 50 or 60 clients, now he’s maybe 300, 400 clients. He’s just tuned his operations where it’s not that he’s charging more, he’s just able to do it at scale.

Jeff Tomlin: By the way, the last time you were on here, you talked about your lighthouse strategy. The story you just said, that’s a great example of someone that’s found a niche, and sounds like he’s just crushing it.

Dennis Yu: Yeah. The lighthouse strategy, I think it’s not a fad. I think it’s the most powerful technique, and strategy that any agency can use. I’ll give you a few examples from my own direct experience because that’s what we like to speak from. I have a friend, Tom Ferry, he’s the number one real estate coach. He’s got 400,000 real estate agents that follow him. If you’re a real estate agent, you know who he is. We’ve done a master class together, we’ve done training together because he’s got that audience. I’m not a real estate agent, I’ve never bought or sold a house. But, because I’ve been on with Tom Ferry, content that we put out together resonates with that audience. It’s like remarketing without me necessarily having someone else’s list. It’s as if I have their list. And thus, by putting an agency under that lighthouse’s name, then you instantly can be anyone else who’s an agency because you have the top figurehead as the leader of the agency.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Leverage Influencers’ Names for Agencies, like Roger Wakefield’s Plumbing Success.

Dennis Yu: I look at Roger Wakefield, he’s a friend of mine. He’s a plumber. He runs a large plumbing company. I think they’re like $13 million a year, in Dallas. He happens to have a YouTube channel with a million followers. So if you have a broken toilet, or whatever it is, you probably have seen his videos.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: We have put services under his name. Why wouldn’t you take the top chiropractor, the top dentist, the top whatever, and put an agency under that name? Because you know, Richard Branson has, what, 700 Virgin whatever companies?

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: You think he really owns all those Virgin companies? No, he’s just licensing his name.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: It certainly makes sense, if you have the best-known person in that category, the best-known plastic surgeon, all the other plastic surgeons are going to know who that plastic surgeon is, and then you just cut him 5% or whatever it is as a royalty. So we’ve done that in several verticals. It’s not even fair because I don’t know anything about plastic surgery, or liposuction, or rhinoplasty, or whatever it is. But we put it under that person’s name … Why not, right? Assuming you could provide the results, it’s well documented, you have a good reputation, you have good fulfillments with all it, all of that.

Plumber Gains a Million Subscribers and 200 Million Views on YouTube.

Jeff Tomlin: It’s incredible. By the way, I saw you sharing out the story about the plumber. What, he just hit a million views on his YouTube channel?

Dennis Yu: A million subscribers, and 200 million views or so. Yeah.

Jeff Tomlin: Who would think that someone in that type of profession could gain that type of awareness and traffic? It’s really incredible, actually.

Dennis Yu: Well, look at what he’s done. He is a master plumber. That’s a term, I didn’t realize that was a thing.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: Not just he’s a good plumber, there’s a term called master plumber. And he’s literally, for years, he’s been making videos on what happens when the drain is clogged, what happens when there’s poop in there, what happens when you’re building a new house, every one of these situations. And because he’s dedicated, because he’s scaled a real business as a plumber, he’s teaching other people how you can get a career in the trades. So he and I actually shared the same mission of creating jobs for young adults. And because so many people have learned how to become a plumber, how to build a career by following him, then it certainly makes sense that the next step is that he can do this at scale and help agencies as well. His own agency, on top of that. But if you’re good at what you do, there’s a larger mission, right?

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: So people follow … Everyone who’s a plumber knows who this guy is because they’ve grown their careers and their businesses at scale with him.

Perceived Value, Lighthouse Strategy, and Enterprise Client Acquisition.

Jeff Tomlin: Incredible. Dennis, you work with some really, really big brands as well. Like Nike, Rosetta Stone, Golden State Warriors. Those are really big enterprises. Well, I have two questions for you. Number one, is there a common thread that has brought some of those big brands to you, like a specific type of thing that they’re looking for? And number two, when you’re working with a brand of that size, how does your approach differ from working with someone that’s a local business or a smaller agency?

Dennis Yu: Yeah. To those two questions, I’ll answer it in a slightly different way. There’s your perceived value, and then there’s your actual value. The whole point of lead gen and acquisition is they need to perceive that you are the best. That you actually deliver great results. You could be the best SEO website, social media, whatever you are, you could actually be the best, but if they don’t perceive you as being different from all these other folks in a legitimate, authentic way, they’re not going to want to work with you. So the lighthouse strategy we talked about before, I think, is the easiest way to create the perceived value. There’s two things, well I guess three, that I think do this. For the more enterprise clients, you have to do more of it.

First off, if you want the larger enterprise clients, you have to have enterprise clients. The way we got Nike was we did marketing for Adidas. Because some of the campaigns that we ran for Adidas for the Olympics, Nike saw them. You know they’re in the same city, right?

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: Google and Yahoo are in the same city. All these companies in a competitive category are in the same place. They said, “We saw what you did with Adidas. Can you come in and consult for us?” And at first, I thought, “Oh, it’s a competitive thing. Why would I?” It was okay. We had All State Insurance and State Farm together. At one time, we had Red Bull, Monster Energy, and Rockstar all at the same time, as clients. I went to my attorney and I said, “Can we do this?” And he said, “Dennis when you have two in the same category, that’s called a conflict of interest. But when you have three or more, it’s called a practice.” Because they want to.

Jeff Tomlin: Oh, there you go.

Lighthouse Strategy Attracts Big Clients, Builds Relationships and Publishes Results Effectively.

Dennis Yu: Big agencies, as you know, conflict agencies. But, it was the work that we did for Adidas that caused Nike to reach out to us as an inbound marketing. It wasn’t because we had sales reps using AI tools to send out outreach, or because we sponsored the big conference, or because we paid someone. It was simply the reputation that came from the lighthouse strategy. If you’re really good in sports, for example, then you’re going to attract more of the same kind of thing. The bottom line is with enterprise, a lot of people think it’s this moat, this castle you have to somehow beat down the walls to get inside and pillage everybody like a barbarian or something. No. It’s based on relationships, just at scale. There are more relationships. The way we got the Golden State Warriors is because of what we did for Nike, and because of a lot of the friends that are in common between these different companies. When the new head of marketing, the new CMO came in to the Golden State Warriors, my friend Kenny Lowery, said, “Dennis, you’re the first person I called because I have this big challenge and I know that I can trust you. I happen to see what you did for Nike, and we want to do the same kinds of things, and drive sales. Other people said you can’t drive sales using social media and Facebook ads, and I know that you can do that, so come in and help us do that, build a team.” So number one is having other enterprise clients like that, that you uplift as a lighthouse client. Number two, this is one that I almost never see agencies do, is you publish the results of that lighthouse and you elevate them. So with the Golden State Warriors as a client, because at one point, they were the number one sports team in terms of marketing. Better than Manchester United, all the other teams out there. I had a chance to keynote at a big conference, and the organizers invited me and they said, “Hey, last year, Richard Branson was the opening keynote inside the stadium. This year, we’re inviting you to be the opening keynote.” I’m like, “I’m not Richard Branson, but sure, why not? You’re going to pay me a lot of money- and fly me to Europe, and all this.”

Jeff Tomlin: Take it.

Head of Golden State Warriors Shares Success Checklist and a Valuable Approach.

Dennis Yu: I said, “You know, I’ll take that but I’m going to offer you something better. I’ll come and open, but then I’m going to invite the head of marketing for the Golden State Warriors, the number one, most-winning team in the NBA, and have him present how he created a dominant brand.” Not just dominant in sports, but on the rival level of other brands like Starbucks, or Disney, or one of the other major brands. How he built the brand and built sales, and built the list, and all that. And then, this was my Trojan horse, because by having the CMO of the Golden State Warriors speak on stage and say how they did that, they naturally were saying, “Here’s the checklist that we use. Let’s log in. Here’s the campaigns, here’s our analytics, here’s our sales, here’s how we organized. Here’s how our team is laid out.” And what he’s really doing was talking about what it was like working with Dennis’ team. But it wasn’t a testimonial.

Do you see the difference, Jeff?

Jeff Tomlin: Of course.

Dennis Yu: All these other agencies are trying to do testimonials. “Oh, we love Vendasta so much, Vendasta’s so good.” Yeah, I agree with all those. But that’s not helpful, that’s a testimonial. Instead, “Here’s how I use Vendasta to grow my seven-figure agency in the chiropractic space.” True story.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: I grew a seven-figure agency using Vendasta, snapshot report, and all the different tools in there. So that was actually helpful. When you have your lighthouse talk about you, following a particular checklist that you then share, so that everyone else in the NBA, Mark Zuckerberg and these other guys shared our checklist. “Here’s the checklist that the Golden State Warriors used to set up remarketing audiences, and drive LTV by having repeat ticket purchasers and merchandise buyers.”

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: Then, it’s real value. So the lighthouse plus honouring the lighthouse, sharing the checklist. They published a set of videos, SOPs, task-by-task way of doing things is what agencies, for some reason, most of them don’t do.

Believable testimonials and CMO Presence Adds Real Credibility in Marketing Strategies.

Jeff Tomlin: Dennis, I love that story. It reminds me of this book that I had read a long time ago in my work career. I think the name of the book was How to Jumpstart Your Business Brain. It was by Doug Hall, anyways. One of the things he talked about was having a real reason to believe. He talked about the idea that people don’t believe testimonials, people can just make that shit up and put it out there.

Dennis Yu: Exactly.

Jeff Tomlin: But, you put the CMO of the Golden State Warriors up on stage, and people believe that because he’s up there, in the flesh. So all of a sudden, it’s extremely believable and definitely a differentiator, that’s for sure.

Dennis Yu: Well, I’ll give you an example. Last week, I was in Dallas. I was the closing keynote at another conference. I invited my friend Thomas Ballantyne to co-keynote with me. He runs the marketing for Bulwark Pest Control, which is one of the largest pest control companies in the United States. I think they’re in 30 states. They absolutely dominate with SEO. SEO is 70% of their business. So you type in bugs, spiders, pigeons, whatever, they’re number one there. Ahead of Orkin and all these other places. So let me ask you, Jeff. What carries more credibility for someone who owns a pest control company? Because there’s 20,000 pest control companies out there. Me saying, “Hey, let me tell you, here are the five tips on how to do SEO if you’re a pest control company.” Or, Thomas Ballantyne saying, “This is how we do it at Bulwark Pest Control.”

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, a real reason to believe. He did it.

Dennis Yu: Yeah. It’s not that I’m afraid of speaking, it’s just I prefer having the person they trust say, “This is how we did it. Let me log into my Google Analytics, let me show you exactly how we built our campaigns. I’m not just going to talk about it, I’m going to log in and show you exactly how it is.” He’ll say, “And by the way, we worked with Dennis, and blah, blah, blah.”

Elevate Others, Share Success Strategies, and be Transparent in Marketing Approaches.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: All it takes is that one moment where I’m standing next to him and he acknowledges me.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: That’s it. The other 99% of the time, he’s talking about all this. It makes him look good. We’re publishing a book together, he’s the main author, and I’m the co-author. Why wouldn’t this guy who’s the CMO at this company, why wouldn’t he want to accept this gift from me that has no strings? It’s elevating his career, it generates more SEO for him. It’s public speaking, I’m paying for all of it. Why wouldn’t he?

Jeff Tomlin: I really think people are really hungry for recipes. They go out, and they look for not just a recipe, but they look for the best recipe. They don’t want to hear all the background about it and the fluff, they just want the recipe and they want to believe it. They want to think it’s the best. I really believe that.

Dennis Yu: Yeah. The best recipe is the one that you’ve implemented yourself many times. So all the other agencies out there, I’m asking them, why don’t you elevate your best client and make them look good? And show one, two, three, four, this is how we did it. There’s so secret. “Oh, SEO is the secret, mystical, proprietary thing.” No. “This is how we use ChatGPT to generate articles and repurpose videos. This is how we hire VAs from the Philippines to do this thing at scale. This is exactly the script that we use.” Just give it away.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: That’s what’s worked for us.

$1-a-day Strategy remains Effective for Low-Cost and Diverse Content Testing.

Jeff Tomlin: That’s great. Dennis, I never have enough time when I sit down and chat with you. There were a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about before we ran out of time.

One thing that made you really well known is your $ 1-a-day strategy.

Dennis Yu: Yeah.

Jeff Tomlin: I know a lot of businesses use it now. Is it still the $ 1-a-day strategy? Is it still applicable today? Has the scale of it just changed?

Dennis Yu: Some people said inflation, it should be $2 a day. It’s still $1 a day. I know all the dollar stores have turned into a $5 store. It is $1 a day because … Or, it’s whatever the minimum budget is that allows you to test. Because $1 a day is a testing strategy. Because everything’s moved towards video, we have to put lots of videos out there. But, you could have a video that’s 10 minutes long, you could have a video that … If people leave you in the first two seconds of the video, it doesn’t matter what happens in the rest of the video.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, 100%.

Dennis Yu: What we’re really using with $1 a day is batch testing at low cost, lots of different creatives, and making sure that we can get people past the first two seconds. Then, we optimize for conversion. One of my friends, Lindy Olsen, she runs World Gym Australia. She runs the digital marketing for their chain of 100s of … You probably have heard of them. There’s probably one in your city, say one in Saskatoon. I don’t know. But, it’s a major fitness gym chain, and she’s been running $1 a day. She told me this yesterday because she spoke at this conference that we’re at. In particular, on TikTok, she found that some famous musicians were working out at the gym. World Gym is where Arnold Schwarzenegger and these guys, this is the original bodybuilder gym. These musicians that were recently well-known were doing workouts and whatnot. She reached out to them saying, “Hey, I’d love to boost that post that you have.”

TikTok has something called spark ads, so you can boost someone else’s post. And she did, reused that content and drove tons and tons of gym signups. Drove more followers, not just on TikTok, but all the other channels. But had she not used the $1 a day technique to boost other people’s posts, because you can do that on Facebook and TikTok. Not just the brand’s post.

Boosting Others Posts using the $1-a-day Strategy for Scalable and Evergreen Digital Marketing. 

Jeff Tomlin: Very cool.

Dennis Yu: It behaves differently when you boost someone else’s post. For the same reason, it behaves differently when Roger Wakefield talks about me, versus me talking about me.

Jeff Tomlin: Right, right.

Dennis Yu: When we found a winner, we put more money against it and they’ve run evergreen. We’ve had ads that we’ve run from 10 years ago that still run today. They started at $1 a day, and some of them, they went to $1 million a day. You probably saw the one with Rosetta Stone, where we did all this testing, and found the winner. Then, put $1 million against it on Black Friday. $1 million a day against it on Black Friday.

Jeff Tomlin: Amazing.

Dennis Yu: But it’s a testing strategy.

Test at Scale and Future Focus should be on Reputation Amid AI Content.

Jeff Tomlin: I love the strategy. I know a ton of people are now using your strategy. Probably not enough, if everyone in the world isn’t, because no matter how smart you think you are at coming up with different types of messaging, you’re never going to get it right the first time. Or, probably not the second time. Don’t put your eggs in just a very small basket, you need to test more, and you need to test at scale to find your winner. I love the strategy so I’m glad we got a minute to touch on that. Another thing I wanted to ask you about, Dennis. You look out into the future, here. A lot has changed in the digital marketing landscape. Well, a lot changes every year, but we like to talk about change and what’s changed, especially here on the podcast. So you look out a year or two down the road. What do you think the big change is that we’re going to be talking about?

Dennis Yu: So there’s a first and second-order effect. The first-order effect is everyone’s using these AI tools to AstroTurf the world with tons and tons of videos, and webpages, and messages, and whatever. I think everyone sees that coming as a first-order effect. The second-order effect is the folks who are going to win when every website has thousands of articles, or whatever, and videos are easy to edit, is whoever has the best reputation is going to stand out above the noise. So ironically, in talking with the leaders in AI and what they think, they all have told me and I agree, that whoever has the best reputation, and is most empathetic, is ultimately going to stand out when it’s super easy to mass-create content using whatever the latest tool is.

Jeff Tomlin: That makes a lot of sense. You probably saw that coming when AI’s been introduced into search because instead of giving you a whole bunch of different results, you ask Google now on your voice search and it gives you the answer. Not just an answer, it gives you the answer.

Dennis Yu: Yeah.

Reputation is Crucial because Google Watches for AI Content Abuse and Warns Against Spam.

Jeff Tomlin: I can totally see that … I think that you’re right. You look out, the people with the strongest reputation are going to win because you have to be the answer.

Dennis Yu: So yesterday, I met the … The reason why I came to the search conference was I wanted to spend time with the head of search quality at Google.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: This guy, who I’m not supposed to mention his name, but if you look at my Facebook you’ll see I took a picture with him and he said it was okay. He’s in charge of search quality at Google. He said that right now … Most of the things, I’m not allowed to repeat, but I’ll paraphrase. He said that “Yes, Google sees that lots of people are using AI tools to generate blog posts, location service pages, all that kind of stuff.” Right now, they are not penalizing people for using that. But that is not permission to just willy-nilly go and spam, because they will catch you. They will. They are working on a very hard problem. They said it’s very easy to identify GPT4 content, for example. For any particular model, Anthropic, Bard, whatever. But to identify AI content in general is a more difficult thing that they’ve been working on. But when they solve that problem, I’ll ask the question. Do you think, Jeff, there will be a penalty? For people that are just using it for the sake of trying to trick the search engine, and are not following the EEAT guidelines.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. That’s something to think about.

Dennis Yu: This has been true every year. Every tool, people abuse the tool. They get away with it by black hatting, or tricking, or whatever.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Focus on Building Reputation, Serving Clients and Inbound Approach over Beating Algorithms.

Dennis Yu: Eventually, it gets caught up because there’s some new release and they get crushed. Don’t you think that’s going to happen here, too? Every year for the past 20 years-

Jeff Tomlin: It always does.

Dennis Yu: This has happened.

Jeff Tomlin: It always does. It doesn’t pay to try to beat the engine. So your message is-

Dennis Yu: Right.

Jeff Tomlin: Build an amazing reputation and be the answer.

Dennis Yu: Take care of your clients. You build the reputation by, A, doing a good job.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: B, making the clients look good by putting them on your podcast not as a testimonial, but actually making them look good. And then, C, publishing all that stuff. Put a book … We have books that we’ve created with our clients and it’s just great. Then you don’t have to worry about sales teams that are just cold calling, and doing that kind of thing. The clients come to you. It truly is an inbound world.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

Dennis Yu: Stand out among all the noise.

Getting in Touch with Dennis Yu 

Jeff Tomlin: Dennis, there’s a boatload of amazing takeaways, as always with our always-too-short conversation. What’s next on the horizon for you over the next little while here?

Dennis Yu: I’m going to Pakistan, and this is helping as part of our mission to create a million jobs. We’ve created a quarter-million jobs in the Philippines. I think Pakistan is the next Philippines. These guys are all learning how to implement the content factory. The floor stage is the content factory, which starts from raw video, turns it into articles, videos, YouTubes, social media snippets, and then $1 a day ads. We think the content factory is the most legitimate and efficient way to do SEO.

Jeff Tomlin: Dennis, if people wanted to get a hold of you and they have more questions, how do they interact with you?

Dennis Yu: Google me and you’ll see my LinkedIn, my website, my Facebook, and my TikTok. Whatever it is, I’ll happily answer any kind of question you have. I always reply it might take me a few days. But I always reply, I always want to see how everyone’s growing. I remember what it was like trying to grow an agency, trying to get the first few clients, trying to hire a sales team, trying to do all these different things. I’m here to help other people.

Jeff Tomlin: Dennis Yu, a consummate professional and a wealth of knowledge. Thanks so much for taking a few moments out of your busy day to spend with us on the Conquer Local Podcast. I bid you safe travels, my friend.

Dennis Yu: I’m honoured to spend time with you, Jeff. Awesome, you’re the best.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: Always a pleasure speaking with our friend Dennis Yu. A bunch of valuable anecdotes and lessons. The first takeaway is utilize the Lighthouse Strategy for agency growth. He spoke about the power of the lighthouse strategy. It’s when you align your agency with a top figurehead in a specific niche. This will position your agency as an authority and attract high-profile clients, exemplified by his success with Nike, Red Bull and the Golden State Warriors.

The second takeaway is the First and Second Order Effects in Digital Marketing. Dennis discussed the evolving landscape of digital marketing, highlighting the first-order effect of widespread AI tool adoption and the second-order effect of reputation becoming paramount. Building a strong reputation, leveraging AI ethically, and prioritizing client success are keys to long-term success in the dynamic digital marketing field.
If you enjoyed Dennis Yu’s episode discussing Lead Generation, check out our previous episodes from the archives. Check out Episode 644: Scaling Global Brands to 10+ Figures Using Omnichannel Marketing with Justin Brenner or Episode 625: Building a Strong C-Suite Community with Jeffrey Hayzlett