Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric [Su 00:00:17].

Eric Su: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric [Su 00:00:26].

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Su: And today, we're gonna talk about four fundamental things you need to master marketing. Neil, what's number one?

Neil Patel: Sure. Number one is consistency. And I'm not talking about consistency when it becomes a marketer. I'm talking about consistency when it comes to running tests. Everyone's like, "Oh, I know the best way to get ranked on Google," or, "How to create a funnel," or, "How to optimize conversions," or, "Do paid advertising." You know what? Conditions change. Algorithms change within Google. Facebook algorithms change so social media marketing becomes harder. Paid advertising becomes more competitive and expensive. Competitors learn more using new technology and they don't have all this dead weight, so they're able to move faster, right?
But what I've found is, in marketing what works years ago probably won't work today. So you need to constantly run experimentation. By being consistent with your experimentation - let's say running one experiment every single week - yeah, you're gonna have a lot of failures, but you're also gonna learn what's not working and what is working. And one interesting thing that's happen to me is, what's worked in the past ... I ran tests. Like for example, getting people to sign up on my website. I'm like, "Huh, why ask them for a name and email? Why not just use Google Authentication?" They click the button and then I have all their information.
Well, marketing conditions change. People are worried about privacy. That worked extremely well in the past, and now I found out to hurt my conversions versus just asking for name and email address, right? So get super consistent with your testing and try to run at least one marketing experiment every single week. And it's okay if most of them fail.

Eric Su: Number two is having a growth mindset. So marketing. We're constantly learning. We're constantly evolving all the time because we're evolving with the technologies, right? So you look at this a year ago, this podcast didn't exist. You look at recently, Neil and I weren't doing videos until recently, right? Well things are changing all the time. To Neil's point, we're experimenting all the time. But you have to have a growth mindset and be open to learning things. You can't be closed off and say, "Oh, I've tried all that before. I don't think it's the right fit for us." Whatever. We're always open to trying new things, but also, at the same time, we're very quick at cutting things as well. So having a growth mindset, just looking at your peers, who you can learn from, just getting better all the time and not being closed off, that's super important.

Neil Patel: Number three. Be data driven. I meet marketers way too many times that'll be like, "Oh, my god. This looks so cool," or, "This is amazing." That's not what builds amazing marketing campaigns. The numbers is all that matters. Of course, you don't want to do anything shady or unethical. But marketing comes down to numbers. I spent X dollars and I made Y dollars. Or here's my design and it converts at A, right? I don't know whatever conversion rate. You pick a number. But the point I'm trying to make is, you have to be numbers driven. If you're not looking at the data and then making tweaks from there, you won't succeed.
I was recently talking with my team about a new design that we're trying to release and they all gave me a big list of changes that they want. None of it was educated. None of it was based off of data. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of them know marketing so it's not bad feedback. But they're telling me to make change based on what they think is cool and they're using gut reactions versus doing research and using data. And if you don't have data, that's okay. There's other people in your industry who have written articles showcasing their data. They've even been on podcast interviews and they talk about their numbers. Go and listen to all this stuff. Go do your research. Go look for other peoples' data because that'll help you make more educated decisions.

Eric Su: Number four. Last but not least, think about the process. Here's a really good process to look over. Look at Google to Toyota system. That's their entire process about how they build cars. It's no different than when you think about ... Look at this podcast we're doing right now. There's a certain podcast process where basically we have to come up with the topics first, both of us have to approve. We need to decide what ad to read as well. We need to decide who handles the show notes afterwards, who edits it, where are we going to meet up, and all this kind of stuff.
All this stuff is a process and when you don't systematize it, things become really difficult for yourself. When you do systematize it, other people can follow it, other people can take it over as well. Let's say you get sick or whatever, and things can keep going. It's the same thing. There's a lot of things. Content promotion. Content production. All the stuff around marketing requires a process and it just can't live in your head. I think a lot of marketers tend to think like that and that's why things are really disorganized and things don't operate like a machine. You gotta think like a process and you've gotta build that machine. That way, you can scale.
So before we go, we have an episode that we want to mention about problem solvers, and this is part of the entrepreneur network, podcast network. And this is about the Hello Fresh CEO and how they use marketing cohorts and also used a ... How they basically increased their customer retention as well. And they just recently filed to go public, so they're probably doing a couple things right. So if you want to listen in, just go to [singlerain.com/fresh 00:05:24]. And we'll see you tomorrow.

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