Eric Siu: 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 Siu. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School, I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about seven types of marketing that are long-term plays. I'm going to steal this one before Neil does, content marketing, number one. Long-term play by far, it's going to take you 12 to 18 months to really see something happen, and in my case with the Growth Everywhere podcast, it took me two and a half to three years to start to see any kind of traction at all. So if you're doing content, it's going to take you a long time but it's worth the investment, because look at where Neil's at. All content marketing.

Neil Patel: And now I'm going to steal this one from Eric. Podcasts, it's a long-term play. You're not going to do well in the first 30, 60, or even six months. It's a over one-year type of play, it's great for brand building, just look at Timothy [Ferriss 00:01:06]. Eric has the Growth Everywhere podcast, it's taken him over a year before he had decent traction. It's a long play but it does work.

Eric Siu: Yeah, number three is around the link building. Link building is going to take you a long time, which is why with most people that want to work with us, they say, "Oh, you know, let's try a three-month contract." It doesn't work for us, it's at least a six to twelve month kind of journey to start to see results with link building. If you can't do that, it's the same thing. The analogy I give people is if we're going to do surgery for you, do you want us to stop midway? It doesn't work like that right? Why would we cut ourselves short to shoot you in the foot and shoot ourselves in the foot? That's just not how it works, so link-building, a very long-term play.

Neil Patel: And if Eric pitches you that, then you should come back to him with, "Well, if you're going to do surgery for me, I would have you do it in the same day. I wouldn't do surgery over six months."

Eric Siu: Wow, don't use that on me.

Neil Patel: Yeah, use it on him. Let's see what he comes back with next. Number four, anything that's branded campaign, so like TV advertising, magazine advertising, right? And actually for number four, let's just make it press, so anything press-related is usually long term, it won't give you instant boost right away. But typically after year of getting press, it builds more trustworthiness, and then it converts way better.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and number five, on the note of branding, let's think about video, right? Video is long-term play too because that's basically content marketing, so when you look at the YouTube channels out there ... I was talking to a friend that has about 300,000 subscribers. She said the first zero to ten thousand or so is actually the hardest thing. Once you get past the first 10,000 or so, there starts to become an inflection point and you start to grow from there. So with YouTube it's oftentimes that you might only have five or ten videos that are really the ones that bring people into your channel, and then you have the other ones that start to build a brand over time. But with YouTube it's the same thing, you have to commit long-term and nowadays the really big channels, they're doing two to three videos a day because YouTube is rewarding people that are constantly bringing them to the channel and keeping them on that platform, so video, YouTube, whatever, takes a long time.

Neil Patel: Yeah. Number six, influencer marketing. Influencers can keep promoting your products or services but it's a long-term strategy. You're not going to get results from it in the next month or even two months. It's funny, I see a lot of people being like, "Oh, we're going to go on Instagram and advertise our product everywhere." It's like, "Yes, you only have one month's worth of budget allocated towards this, it's not going to work. You need at least six months to a year."

Eric Siu: Yeah, and number seven, you could buy emails at the end of the day, but if you're looking to do any kind of content marketing strategy and you're layering it on with email, email is the highest ROI or one of the highest ROI activities that you can be doing, but it does take time to build an email list, and you look at Neil's list. How many people do you have right now?

Neil Patel: I don't know, hundreds and thousands?

Eric Siu: Hundreds of thousands, how long did it take you to get there?

Neil Patel: Years and years, because my email list is all subscribed.

Eric Siu: Yeah, years and years to get there, so it is a long-term play, but it is again one of the highest ROI activities that you can be doing. Again, a lot of this stuff just takes time at the end of the day. You can't expect marketing to just work for you, just like if you get in a relationship, you can't expect that it'll just be all sunshine and flowers, and expect it to go from zero to one hundred really quickly, right? It just take time.
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