Growth Is Getting Harder (And What You Can Do About It) | Ep. #366

In Episode #366, Eric and Neil discuss how growth is getting harder and what you can do about it. In terms of marketing, it seems that everything repeats itself. Now, more than ever, is the time to get CREATIVE in order to stand out. Tune in to learn how you can deal with the fast-paced, competitive market out there and the importance of keeping it fresh and original. 

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: Growth Is Getting Harder (And What You Can Do About It)
  • 00:36 – Today’s episode is inspired by Uber’s Andrew Chen who is well known in the growth network
  • 00:55 – CPCs and the rise of ad blockers are getting higher
    • 01:18 – “As growth gets harder, you have no choice but to get more creative”
  • 01:24 – The main way to grow is to think outside the box and go after different channels
  • 01:43 – Facebook has a saturation point and the ad prices are higher
  • 01:57 – Aside from the sending people to landing pages from your Facebook ads, take your people to educational/press type articles
  • 02:15 – It will all come down to CREATIVITY
  • 02:38 – Everyone is getting smarter in regards to growth
    • 02:50 – The competition is tougher
  • 03:09 – Facebook and Google are still on the top list of apps
  • 03:19 – Develop your own brand to stand out
  • 03:37 – Building your brand with corporate personnel
    • 03:50 – Amazon’s customers are loyal therefore, they will always have high conversion rates
    • 04:08 – Beats by Dre entered a saturated market, but still manages to make sales
      • 04:21 – Beats by Dre has a great design that becomes part of one’s lifestyle
      • 04:30 – They pay celebrities to use Beats by Dre
    • 04:40 – Alternatively, you can give out equity in exchange for promotion
      • 04:45 – Vitamin Water gave out equity to promote their product
    • 05:05 – Social media channels are copying each other
    • 05:24 – You have to figure out a way to differentiate yourself from the competitors
    • 06:00 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which helps you increase your conversion rate
    • 06:45 – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

  1. Leverage all channels that are available to grow your brand.
  2. The more creative you are, the more you will be able to adapt to the market and compete.
  3. Giving out equity is another way you can promote your brand.

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Full Transcript of The Episode

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 Siu.

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're going to talk about how growth is getting harder, and what you can actually do about it. So, this is from an essay that's actually inspired by Uber's Andrew Chen, who's well known in the growth industry, we can call it, or the growth network, and he makes some good points. Everything's kind of consolidating,[inaudible 00:00:49] competition on paid app to pay channels like Facebook and Google ... it's just getting harder and harder. The CPCs are getting higher and higher, and that's just how it is with these platforms. And if you think about it, the rise of ad-blocking is getting higher and higher too, so overall, growth is getting harder.

Neil Patel: Google are going to release something that allows you to do ad-blocking, or they're planning to, it's one or the other.

Eric Siu: Yeah. The question is, what can you do about it? What are your thoughts around growth getting harder?

Neil Patel: As growth gets harder, you have no choice but to get more creative, and I know that sounds cheesy, but it's true: the main way to grow is by thinking outside the box and going after channels or [inaudible 00:01:29] that others aren't leveraging. For example, if everyone's leveraging [inaudible 00:01:33] based programs, they're not going to be as effective. If everyone's on Facebook advertising, and they are, since mid 2017, Facebook hit a saturation point where there's more advertisers than inventory, which has been causing the prices to skyrocket. Sure, is Facebook ads still worth the leveraging? Yes, but you need to get more creative. So instead of, let's say, doing your traditional Facebook campaigns where you send people to your landing pages, you can take something out of the affiliate playbook and send them to educational slash press type articles that pitch your product in a more aggressive banner, in still a nice friendly way, and that tends to convert a lot better, and the cost per clicks are a lot cheaper than if you just send them to a product landing page.
But it all comes down to creativity. You don't necessarily have to spend more money, but it's thinking outside the box. And just like anything, there's always new things that'll continually come up as long as you're willing to be creative.

Eric Siu: I want to touch upon a couple more points from this article. Another good point here is on the superior tooling out there. You have tools out there like mix panel, [inaudible 00:02:35] and things like that. Everybody's getting a lot smarter on growth. Neil's publishing a lot of content all the time, he's speaking at events ... it's become ... same thing with SaaS. You know Jason Lemkin has published a lot of stuff around it, so ... the competition's getting tougher, so the question is, like Neil's saying, how do you actually stand out at the end of the day, because also people are becoming blind to banners, or blocking banners as well, and if you actually look at it, from a standpoint of who owns mobile, if you look at the top smartphone apps, 2016 for example, the top 8, guess who they're owned by. Facebook and Google. So if you want one thing that you can do to actually stand out, something that Neil and I talk about is developing your own brand and standing out. And Neil's producing ... he's doing videos, he's doing podcasts, he's doing a lot of content. These are things where he's not completely reliant on one channel, and the brand is one thing that's very defensible at the end of the day.

Neil Patel: Yeah, Eric makes a good point about the brand. What's cool is, about building a brand, whether it's corporate or personal, once your brand is strong enough, your conversion rates go through the roof. It's not about copy, it's not about images or designs ... sure, those things help too, but having a strong brand, and here's an extreme example, Amazon: it doesn't matter what AV test they do, sure, some of them are gonna help increase conversion and some of them may hurt, but because a brand has such strong affinity and loyalty, they're gonna have high conversions. So you have to go above and beyond, and start doing something different.
For example, Beats by Dre entered a really saturated market that was competitive: the headphone market. So when they're going up against people like Bose, their way of differentiating is, one, making their designs really cool, hip. That way all the young people want to end up using them. Two, they didn't just say, hey, if you want headphones you gotta buy Beats by Dre, they made it part of a lifestyle, a movement. They paid each and every single celebrity out there to start using their products and services. Sure, you may not be able to do what they're doing, but you could give these people equity in your company in exchange for promoting it. There is a lot of cool stuff you can do to promote your brand that doesn't require cash up front. Vitamin Water did the same thing too. They didn't just pay all these celebrities money to promote Vitamin Water, they gave them equity because it was a more economical solution for them, especially when they were starting out and didn't have as much money.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and the final point here is about smarter and faster competitors. If you look at Snapchat versus Facebook, well guess what. You look at WhatsApp, you look at Instagram, you look at the Facebook app, even Facebook Messenger, you have stories across all of them now. Competitors are getting really good about ...Whatever, they're just going to copy each other, which basically means your competitors are going to copy you as well. So again, you have to figure out how to differentiate yourself as here.
A couple more examples: Dropbox, getting copied by Google Drive. Slack getting copied by Microsoft Team. Yesword getting copied by HubSpot Sales. So how do you differentiate yourself? Anything else to add?

Neil Patel: No, pretty much covered it all. The big point is: get creative, we may not have the exact solution for you, no-one has, you have to think outside the box and figure it out on your own and I know that sucks, you can learn from others but it really is about getting super creative with whatever you're trying to push out there.

Eric Siu: Alright, so that's it for today, but we do have a special giveaway, which is Neil's tool. Neil, what is it?

Neil Patel: If you want more conversions from your site, it's a great tool to use. It's a visual analytics tool. It shows you where people are clicking on your site, where they're not; it shows you mass recordings of how people are engaging with your site so you can see the flows people are taking before they convert. It even shows you if your call to action buttons are too low, if people are scrolling far enough to get to them, or if they're even seeing them. And, you can make changes within [inaudible 00:06:25], the easy WYSIWYG editor, and, with a few clicks of a button, you can even run AV tests.

Eric Siu: So if you want to get in on this giveaway, we're giving away one per week, and you can actually get multiple entries, and I'll leave that to you to read the details, but just go to single grain dot com slash giveaway, and go in there, get multiple entries, and hopefully you win. So that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This section of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.

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