Save your company from social media overwhelm with Agorapulse from Paris.

Feeling buried under notifications across all your social accounts? Wish you could easily manage posting while tracking ROI? Emeric Ernoult, CEO of social media management platform Agorapulse, shares how he solved this digital chaos.

Learn how Emeric bootstrapped from nothing to $24M revenue and 31,000 clients. Hear why targeting micro-influencers and SEO ultimately drove early traction for Agorapulse. Find out how their unique social media attribution links purchases to platforms and individual posts.

Emeric also explains common social media mistakes, like simply repurposing content without fueling engagement. Get his advice on when NOT to prioritize social, plus tips for transitioning inbound marketing to outbound as you scale.

If uncoordinated social media makes you want to log off for good, don’t miss this episode. Emeric’s story will inspire you to strategically streamline your online presence.

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Transcript

Jim James (00:01.699)
Hey, bonjour. Welcome. Bienvenue to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, where we're going to Paris today. Because if you've ever suffered the challenge of overwhelm, where you've got lots and lots of social media channels, all sending you notifications, and you're trying to manage all of those, you'll know how difficult that is. And today we're going to talk to Emeric Ernoult who is the CEO and founder of a company called Agorapulse, who solved that problem. We're going to talk to them about how they build their business and bootstrapped it

from zero to now $24 million a year in revenue with 170 staff around the world. And with over 31,000 clients solving the problem, social media overwhelmed. But importantly, he's also got a secret, which is a secret source he's gonna tell us about, which is how you measure ROI from your social media. Emeric, welcome to the show.

Emeric Ernoult (00:52.138)
Well, Jim, thank you for having me. Already summarized everything perfectly. Thank you.

Jim James (00:56.842)
I'm only summarizing what you're going to help us to understand and I hope my French wasn't too embarrassing there for us.

Emeric Ernoult (01:03.198)
Your French was perfect.

Jim James (01:07.547)
Okay, so I won't do any more of my basic English schoolboy language. Emeric tell us about Agorapulse because so many of us have got more than one social media channel. And then we suffer from going in and out of all the different platforms and trying to prioritize especially if we then have VA's for example managing those for us. We create content but we don't really then manage the conversation and the follow up afterwards because it becomes overwhelming.

Tell us about Agorapulse and the solution that you've created.

Emeric Ernoult (01:37.342)
Yeah. So it's the problem we discovered, you know, 12 years ago when we started the company is exactly the one you described. It's, it's a bit overwhelming. It's all over the place. You have to log in, log out in many different platforms, many different places. And, uh, back in the days, there were no native tools to do none of that. Today, there are native tools that are helping you, um, you know, post on, on schedule content. You can, you have a scheduler on LinkedIn, you have a scheduler on Twitter. You have one on Meta as well. So.

It's better now, but it's still a bit complicated. And if you have a team and if you have a lot of activity on those social profiles, and if you want to measure thing in one central place, it's still a big problem. And software like ours, we're not the only one in the space. Obviously, you can see that Sprout social is one of our competitors, Hootsuite buffer, like there were all these software. They are helping you taking that overwhelm and that social media chaos, out of, out of your world and giving you effect efficiency and

an effective way to do it faster and do it better. But, um, that's the, that's the main value prop, but we also have this, as you mentioned, this unique value prop, because otherwise we could be compared and say, what's your difference with this one? Oh, our color is a little bit different. Our interface a little bit better. Our support is more responsive. No, there's one thing that we do that they don't do, which is measuring their return on investment, their ROI of your social media work and, um,

I like, I shared with you, I filed a patent in the US for this. So it has to be legit, right? It's very hard to do. It's really hard. It's a very hard, it's a new language to me, everything. And I, as I share with you, I used to be a lawyer. So I speak lawyer, but not patent lawyer. It's a very, very specific language and way of describing things, but we did that. Um, and, uh, I'm pretty, I'm pretty happy about what we've done because we are able to, when you connect your GA four Google analytics account.

Jim James (03:06.327)
Yeah, congratulations. That's fantastic.

Emeric Ernoult (03:29.514)
We are able to look at conversion and revenue, you know, it's a platform by platform profile by profile content, piece of content by piece of content, member by team member. So we can go very deep into what each action that you do on social is bringing value to your business. And that's a big, um, that's my vision. I want to help businesses to see the value of social media work.

Jim James (03:50.063)
Emeric, that sounds amazing because so many people now are creating content and also creating social media content using AI. So there's this proliferation of content. Tell us how do you then, if you like, track that through the funnel? Because if you've got so many pieces of content going out, for example, on LinkedIn, maybe on X, maybe a video on YouTube, for a practical point of view, how are you tracking all of those different pieces through Agorapulse?

Emeric Ernoult (04:19.19)
Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, we didn't reinvent a wheel that was already existing. There was a wheel that was doing it for email marketing and marketing automation and for paid advertising. When you look at paid advertising or email marketing, they're already tracking all of this coming from different emails and different email campaigns and different ads and different platforms and different ad campaigns and ad creatives. That variety already exists in email marketing and paid.

And the way they're tracking it, we're simply not apply to organic social. And we took those principles and those technologies and applied them to organic social, adapting them to organic social. And that's, that's simply what we've done. Like take something that works somewhere else that were never implemented on organic social. And, and giving the same results, basically allowing you to go very granular on what works and what doesn't work before all you had on Google analytics was this is what you got on Facebook. But,

what if you have 112 Facebook pages, like some of our customers. Whoa, you don't know which one is bringing what, because you don't know. It's you only have a big number for Facebook, but nothing else. So like we, we brought the granularity of the measurement.

Jim James (05:28.463)
So to be clear with Agorapulse, people can be scheduling their content online across multiple platforms. It's distributed, but also there's measurement and tracking all the way through to, I guess, to shopping carts and stuff like that, is that right? Yeah. Okay. That's magic. And I had to ask you this at this point, because it sounds like a panacea. Is this only for big companies or can SMEs afford this as well, Emeric?

Emeric Ernoult (05:42.582)
Yeah, to the traffic back to their website and what they sell. Absolutely.

Emeric Ernoult (05:56.846)
It's a good question. Interestingly enough, the customers of ours who are crushing it at generating revenue on social are mostly small businesses because small businesses are more flexible in trying social as a channel, as a way to grow their business. And some of them, when they have a big community of fans, like, just to give you one example, I mentioned that example with you earlier, we have one of our customers who sells

plant-based medicine and people who cure themselves or Treat their health issues with plant-based made medicine are passionate about this because they don't they don't want the drugs They don't want the traditional drugs that doctors are prescribing. They want the plants because they feel it's more healthy It's it's better for their it's better overall for their body and them and their and their loved ones So they're very passionate about it. They talk about it. They ask questions about it like they're

It's more than just a way to cure themselves. It's a way to live. And so there are a lot of online communities, people support each other and so on and so forth. So social for this company was an obvious choice of as a channel. And that's how they build their business. And they're generating somewhere near to like $75K a month on Instagram alone, which is crazy when you think about it and it's, it is a small business, but they're absolutely crushing it on Instagram and Facebook.

It's a Facebook group and an Instagram account that are doing the best for them. And, uh, they're very small business, like they're, I think 12 or 13 people. So you don't have to be big. Actually, I would argue that the bigger you are, the more difficult it is to take, you know, to go and invest in social, to create a revenue generating channel. And also the bigger you get, the more customer, like for us, for example, our revenue now is so big than for social led revenue to have a dent.

Jim James (07:29.248)
Yeah.

Emeric Ernoult (07:47.716)
It would have to be really, really big, which makes it even more challenging.

Jim James (07:51.611)
Yeah, and we'll talk about that later, won't we, Emeric, about how, you know, as you get bigger and bigger as a company, the client size often grows as well and requires a different kind of marketing strategy. We'll talk about that in a little while, but basically for 49 euro a month, somebody could get access to Agorapulse and both manage their social but also to track the ROI on their socials. That's a really fantastic.

Emeric Ernoult (08:17.038)
Yeah.

Jim James (08:17.459)
Well, it's a great ROI if I can say that there, memory. That's wonderful. You did touch out there on a client. You're in a fairly unique position because you've been running Agorapulse for over a decade now to know what doesn't work. Can I ask you with your position, having seen so many clients, obviously it's, you don't track their data, but you get to see trends and so on. Some mistakes that you think some companies are making

when it comes to social and expecting an ROI from that.

Emeric Ernoult (08:51.398)
Yeah. Well, the biggest mistake I see is that people treat social as just a channel to regurgitate their content. Like, Hey, here we have a new blog post. Let's, let's post it on Facebook and Twitter and, and whatever. Um, and not try to trigger conversations or try to capture the audience's interests, uh, based on that content.

So that's the biggest mistake I see. Hey, here's, we have a piece of content. Let's distribute it through all the channels. Let's send our newsletter. Let's send it into our customers, through our in-app message in our app. Let's put it on Facebook. Let's put it on Twitter. That's usually a big mistake because people, when people see stuff coming to them from social, it's just a link and a quick title. They're not gonna be excited. So it's, you have to find a way to

make your social content engaging. I mean, people want to go and ask a question or answer something or have some sort of a comment, you know, like a conversation about it when you, when you're triggering that, then you, you're actually increasing your score in the algorithm, you're being seen more and, and people's interest gets, gets higher than where you're just trying, Hey, click on my stuff, here's my stuff, please go check it out.

Jim James (10:06.848)
Yeah.

Emeric Ernoult (10:07.874)
So that's the biggest mistake. And it's hard to do though, and it's a lot of work. So I understand why people don't do that and go the simple route of just posting, clicking, copy, pasting, and you're done. And the second mistake I've seen is that people prioritizing social when they should not because it's not the right channel for them now. It's too early for them. They have other channels they should be focusing on.

And I, like I, like I told you, you know, in my early days, I focused on SEO content and influencers. I didn't do anything on social for at least two, three years until, until three, four million, uh, of revenue. And it was the right thing for us to do because that's where we got our initial traction. I probably wouldn't have my initial traction on social. And I also think it was not my forte as a person.

My forte was on content creation and relationship with real relationship with real life people. So I went to conferences and I build relationships with people who had an audience, that's how we got started. And, or it could be the opposite. Like people, it would be the right thing for them, but they don't, they don't, they don't see it and they don't, and they don't think about investing in it. So for example, if you are, you know, if you are doing something that's, that's relating to home improvement and you're, you don't have a strong Pinterest strategy, you're probably missing a lot because Pinterest is absolutely amazing for

home improvement, decoration, and all that kind of stuff. My wife spends her days on Pinterest, like, oh, look at this, look at that, what do you think? And that's how she thinks most of the product she buys for our home improvement needs. So if you're not present in my wife's journey on Pinterest, you're missing her money, basically.

Jim James (11:38.963)
Yeah. I guess it's interesting as well, maybe during lockdown and COVID, a lot of people became very comfortable with social and content creation and agencies and now AI creating content and it's easy to kind of remain remote. The other day on a Facebook group, someone was talking about creating mailing lists and getting thousands of mailing lists. I said, you could just buy people donuts and coffee. We used to go and meet people

and not worry about thousands, but having some high value conversations. But as you rightly said, Emeric, every business needs a different strategy. And in a way, that's what keeps us all guessing. But now you've been running this business for a decade, for 10 years before that, you had some trials and you kindly shared earlier some that didn't work, but you've managed to build Agorapulse into a brilliant machine. As an entrepreneur, let's just talk about what you've been doing.

Emeric Ernoult (12:17.23)
Yeah.

Jim James (12:37.519)
How have you managed to then build this business up? Because it's grown, you know, with 30,000 customers, it's changed, hasn't it? As well, tell us how you're managing the transition and how you're helping to grow the business now.

Emeric Ernoult (12:52.758)
Yeah, it's changed drastically several times, not just once, but at least two or three times. I'm going to give you a very, very high level answer, but I think it's also a very important answer. As a business owner to all of those who listen to us right now, you are not the right person to take your business to the next step. You have to become that person. And I was not, I was not 10 years ago, the person I am today. If you take me 10 years ago and you put me in my position right now, my business will fail.

Because I need, I would need to learn all the stuff I've learned in the past 10 years. And the hard thing with this is that you don't know what you don't know. So you don't know what you, what's your blind angle, your blind spot. You don't know what you're missing. So you have to surround yourself with people who know that and going to, are going to help you figure it out that these are peers or coaches or, or mentors or, you know, training groups, like whatever it is, you have to invest in yourself and investing in yourself. I mean, we talk about

books earlier, like reading books, listening to podcasts and confronting yourself with what is the closest to the better version of yourself that you have to become. And that is, that is a constant effort that you have to invest into as a business owner. And if you don't do that, there's no doubt that you're not going to take your business to the next level.

Jim James (14:10.787)
Emeric, you've plainly done that and you've managed to grow at the same sort of rate and stage as you've grown at Agora. When it comes to getting the business noticed, is there anything that you think that you could share that hasn't gone quite as planned? Plainly you've matured, the business has matured, but along the way, would there be one of those lessons, one of those mistakes that you could share with us?

Emeric Ernoult (14:40.082)
Yeah, I think we've all made that mistake, but most people make that mistake of spreading yourself too thin in the things that you do to be noticed in the channels that you invest in to get visibility and to get in people's homes or in people's offices. We all do too much.

Which is a hard one because in order to find the things that are going to be really efficient for you, you still have to try a lot and fail a lot until you find the right thing. So it is that very difficult balance of doing enough. So you find the stuff that works and not doing too much or you're not spreading yourself too thin and diluting your time and energy into the stuff that's not bringing any, anything. If I had to give some hints to, to do the difference between the two is. Be very aware of what you're really good at and what you're not

really good at. I was good at creating content. So content and SEO was my forte in the early years. That's what basically took us from zero to a million, 200K a month. And I'm good at relationship. I'm good at building rapport and relationship with people. So I basically took my butt, put it in planes and went to the US to all conferences, marketing conferences, social media conferences I could go to and started building relationships with influencers in my space who had an audience, who had a blog, who had a podcast and gave me

a share of voice in their own world. So give me visibility that those were the two things that I were really good at. And I focused on those things and that took us from zero to breaking even. And, uh, after that, once we broke even, I started to have, Hey, now I have more money and have more, more resources and more people. And then we started to do too much. Very probably. Yeah.

Jim James (16:23.212)
So, just to refresh that then, so you're saying that in the early days, rather than doing lots of social media posting about Agorapulse, you went and met people that were potential clients or were influencers that had an audience and you were interviewed by them or you got articles into their communities that you contributed. How did that work?

Emeric Ernoult (16:44.082)
I, yeah, I, I give them my product for free. Uh, in the early days, my product was not good enough, so they didn't care, but maybe my product became better and better and better after some time. They say, oh, now it's really good. And I kept pushing and say, Hey, I'm, I want to show you the new version, the new stuff, the new thing. And eventually they all used it eventually. And, uh, and they mentioned it and because they were using it, they became the best promoter of the product because they enjoyed using it and they liked using it and then they kept mentioning it on social and on blog posts,

giving me backlinks and sending me traffic and mentioning it on stage at conferences. So that's basically what I did. It took a lot of time from the day I started to do that until the day it really was working, probably three years went by. So it takes a lot of patience, which is not something entrepreneurs have. I certainly am not patient. But I realized very early on that if I, basically my product was not great in the early days and I knew that.

Jim James (17:31.931)
Heheheheheheh

Emeric Ernoult (17:40.47)
And I really early, early in the days, I realized that if I am not investing in building the system to basically, to let the world know when my product is great, when it will be great, nobody will care. Nobody will know. So I have to build a system to let people know about how great my product is before my product is actually great. And that's probably one of the hardest thing to do is having this long-term view of

In three years, when my product will be amazing, how will I know, how will I let the world know that it's now amazing if I have not built the relationship, the network, the backlinks, the SEO, like all the things, the traffic, all the things that are going to allow me to seize that opportunity when the product is ready. So I had to basically work as if the product was ready when it was not. So when it was, I had the audience.

Jim James (18:32.035)
Oh, that's fascinating. So you say really laying the groundwork. When you say system, is there something you are using as a CRM for that, or do you mean just in a sense of personal presence and relationships?

Emeric Ernoult (18:43.662)
Yeah, for me, it was really driving traffic to our website. Driving traffic to our website for the right keywords and the right values and the right problems, even though you are not yet solving those problems and having those values, but anticipating the fact that we'll have them at one point, I need to have the traffic already coming in. They will be disappointed for a while, but once I'll have the value and I'll solve the problem, the traffic will already be there.

And the influencers will already be talking about me and so on and so forth. So it was inbound. Like, you know, we, our business was built on an inbound SMB inbound engine. So people coming to me because they find me online and then they do a free trial and then they subscribe and that, and I build that engine before the product was ready to get to take it on.

Jim James (19:27.067)
That's wonderful. Now, as the business has changed, and sort of move to our last question, is that as the business has changed and you've grown, yeah, has there been a change in strategy? Is there one thing you can suggest as people grow their business, the nature of the business changes, doesn't it? And the organizationally it changes, marketing positioning changes, and something, Emeric, I know you could share there.

Emeric Ernoult (19:32.662)
Yeah, a lot.

Emeric Ernoult (19:48.85)
Yeah. I mean, that's the one thing that you can, you can always be guaranteed will happen. Change. You can absolutely be guaranteed that your business in five years will be very different from your business today, which is probably already very different from your business five years ago. If there's one thing that you have to be, if there's one guarantee in business life is change, like it's not going to be the same, the people are going to be different, the product is going to have to evolve a lot and so on and so forth. So.

Yeah, we have changed a lot that role applied to us as well. And the change for us was we had to move from SMB inbound to more mean markets outbound. When I say outbound, I mean, go and proactively bring people in your world that are the people you know are ideal customer for you and not what we did in the past, which is create those SEO and that presence online and that presence on review sites so people find you when they search online and eventually go and try you.

That is great, but gives you very little control about who you attract. And when you grow and you need to, OK, now I need to attract retail companies with 500 employees and more in Western Europe and North America that have at least 30 different locations. You're not going to attract these if you don't proactively identify who they are and go after them. With your marketing, with your campaigns, with your emails, with your LinkedIn message, with your online events, with everything you do on the marketing side.

So that's what we do now before we say, hey, let's do an event and see who comes. Today we say, hey, let's do an event with that type of persona in that type of industry who had that type of problem because we talked to them and we know, and we're going to go after them and invite them one by one. Basically that's the big change. If I, if I summarize it to the extreme, that's the change.

Jim James (21:19.995)
Yeah.

Jim James (21:34.095)
Oh, Yeah. So moving really from a mass marketing, almost FMCG to really to traditional or traditional industrial marketing strategy. Emeric, I know if I can ask you as our sort of final couple of questions, what about a book or a podcast book and a podcast that you can say has inspired you as you've grown Agorapulse?

Emeric Ernoult (21:42.351)
Yep.

Emeric Ernoult (21:56.662)
Yeah. So as we were discussing that, I, and I told you, I read too many books. It's hard for me to come with one book. I looked at my audible. I have 112 books on my audible that I listened to in the past two years. So I read a lot of book and listened to a lot of books. There's one that stuck with me that I like really, uh, I like a lot. I like a lot of them, but this one really good is the book about, uh, the story of Netflix, no rules from Reed Hastings. And I liked this book very much because Netflix, first of all, Netflix story is great. It's great. It's, it's entertaining to read

because it's a company we all know and it was a very interesting and challenging history and story. And you learn a ton about talent and culture and how to attract people and retain people and just retain the best and how you do that. I applied a lot of this philosophy to my own business, especially on the talent density and talent retention and the podcast. So I picked a book and a podcast. I also listened to a bazillion podcasts.

But one I enjoy a lot is a podcast from Leila Hormozi. And, um, you know, you mentioned Leila is married to a guy named Alex Hormozi. They're very, very interesting couple. They're amazing at business owners and business builders at less than 30 years old, they had more money than I'll ever have in my entire life, but beyond, which is not important to them, which was, which was something I love about them, but they, they don't, they're not in the business for the money. They're in the business to become the best version of themselves and how

Jim James (23:13.463)
Yeah.

Emeric Ernoult (23:23.074)
how they can become that and what's the path there. And that's what I love about their view of the world. And Leila's podcast is very much about operating the business, like be a business operator. And she's really re-articulated. She's really good. The way she explains things resonates with me all the time. I learned so much from her, and she's 20 years younger than me. But I've learned so much from her that it's crazy. So I highly recommend her podcast.

Jim James (23:45.039)
Hehehehe

Well, Emeric, thanks for that and giving two. That's fantastic. That's two gifts, not more than just one. If you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

Emeric Ernoult (23:57.958)
On LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the best place. That's the only social network I'm still active on and I actually enjoy LinkedIn. And if you send me an invite on LinkedIn by just adding a note, say, 'Hey, I listened to you on that podcast.' So I, so I can accept you because I get a bunch of LinkedIn invite that people I don't know. I tend not to accept them. So if, if you want to connect with me, that's the way you just tell me where you heard about me and you heard from me and I'll happily connect with you and, and ask me anything you want. I'll be happy to try to help if I can.

Jim James (24:25.175)
Wonderful and will put Emeric's details in the show notes, but it's Ernoult, which is Ernoult, sorry. That's right. You better say it properly.

Emeric Ernoult (24:31.099)
E-R-N-O-U-L-T.

Emeric Ernoult (24:35.654)
E-R-N-O-U-L-T, Ernoult.

Jim James (24:38.519)
El Nú. Okay, right. Perfect. Emeric, thank you for joining me and really talk about how you can solve a problem that affects all of us that have got social media, but also introducing the idea that you can track ROI from social media, which would actually give you a reason to decide whether to do social media or not, wouldn't it? Right. So thank you so much.

Emeric Ernoult (24:57.266)
Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you figure out that it's not a good channel for you, then I'm happy to help you figure this out.

Jim James (25:05.807)
That's wonderful. Thank you for joining me today. Merci bien.

Emeric Ernoult (25:08.002)
Thank you, Jim. Merci beaucoup.

Jim James (25:10.795)
So we've been listening to Emeric, we've gone to Paris and a beautiful place and a fantastic business and solving a real problem for really everybody. I hope you've enjoyed this show. And if you have, please do give this show a review and do follow on your play because it really, really helps me to know what you think about the show. And also do please share it with a fellow Unnoticed Opener. And until we meet again, I just do encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening to me, Jim James here in the UK with Emeric Enroult in

Paris. Au Revoir.