In episode #603, Eric and Neil discuss ways you should emulate HubSpot. Tune in to hear the ways in which HubSpot is successfully converting people into customers.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How to Growth Hack Your Company by Copying Hubspot
- [00:35] Eric had one of the HubSpot VP’s, David Cancil, who is now the CEO of Drift, on Growth Everywhere.
- [00:47] David said that Hubspot got a lot of its clients/sales from it website grader tool.
- [01:04] When it comes to software, you want to give away something everyone wants.
- [01:18] Even if you release a cheaper version of coveted software and give it away for free, you will get a lot more traffic.
- [01:43] You can even apply this to physical products.
- [02:10] “Marketing is a race to the bottom.” -Neil
- [02:25] Neil bought and re-launched UberSuggest; did little to no marketing; and offered free versions of his competitors apps or software.
- [02:50] Russell Brunson offered a free book for which you only had to pay shipping.
- [03:15] Outgrow is a great free tool you can use and customize to suit your needs.
- [03:35] Lead Quizzes and the book Ask help you figure out what kind of questions you should be asking your customers.
- [04:10] Quizzes aren’t effective unless the product is relevant to the result of the quiz.
- [05:05] Hubspot personalizes the site to each visitor and welcomes you back by name.
- [05:24] Personalizing the experience will help conversion rates.
- [05:35] Amazon is also good at personalizing their experience.
- [06:05] You can easily use Upwork or CodePen or Top Down to hire workers/developers.
- [06:35] Product tools are the best way to market.
- [07:15] That’s all for today!
- [07:18] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post How to Growth Hack Your Company by Copying Hubspot | Ep. #603 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile 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: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how you can growth hack your company by copying HubSpot. I can preface this by saying first I had one of the HubSpot VPs, David Cancel, who is now the CEO of Drift, and he was on the podcast, Growth Everywhere a while back, and he was talking about how HubSpot basically acquired a ton of its customers through its website, Grader Tool. Basically, they had a really good tool, and a lot of people were using it and got a lot of back links, got a lot of traffic, and that's how they drove a ton of leads, and this is something that a lot of people are utilizing, including Neal. Neil, I'll let you elaborate a little more maybe.
Neil Patel: When it comes to software, you want to figure out how you can give away something that everyone is paying for, and it doesn't have to be software, but that's a HubSpot, that's a Drift model. If you end up taking something that everyone else is charging for, and even if you release a ghetto version for free that's not that great, you can do extremely well. Don't look to create a better product than your competitors. Don't look to create the best solution out there. Instead, look at your industry, go figure out what people are giving away or, more so, charging for that everyone's using, and give away majority of it for free.
You can even do this with physical products. For example, there was a tongue cleaning company. I think it was called Orabrush or something like that. I'm getting the name wrong. True Ventures ended up funding it. What they ended up doing was they said, "Free tongue cleaner. Just pay for shipping." Everyone's like, "We normally have to pay for tongue cleaners. You're gonna give it away for free?" By giving just the farm away for free, you can crush your competition.
I've been talking to Eric over the last few months, and I've been telling him, "Hey, marketing is a race to the bottom." If you can end up just beating your competitors to the free punch and you have other products and services that you can upsell, you can crush them. For example, I have this tool called Ubersuggest. I bought it in 2017. I relaunched it in 2018, took me a long time. I gave away the features that keywordtool.io gives that are paid. I made them for free. My traffic on Ubersuggest literally doubled within 45 days. All I did was just crush my competitors by giving their paid stuff away for free. I did very little to no marketing at all.
Eric Siu: Just another example that we've talked about in the past is Russell Brunson with his free plus shipping book. He might write a new book, like Expert Secrets or whatever other book that he might have, and you just pay for the shipping. You might pay 9 bucks or 10 bucks, and then what happens afterwards is you're in his funnel, and he has a bunch of other stuff to sell you. If you're thinking, "Well, I don't have the time to write a book. I don't have the time to buy a tool. I'm not as rich as Neil," whatever, what you can do is there are tools out there you can use. Outgrow is one of the tools that you can use. They'll basically make you a calculator you can put on your website. You can use a widget, customize it to your needs. You can collect leads off of that. You can use Outgrow. The idea is maybe you write a nice piece of content, it's ranking well from a SEO perspective, and then you put that widget on there to collect more leads. That's one thing you can do.
The other thing you can do is use quizzes. You can use lead quizzes, and lead quizzes is going to help you ... Well, it's going to use ... If you learn the ... There's a book out there called Ask, and that's from Ryan Levesque, and then basically you can come up with ideas on what kind of questions you should be asking and then drive people down a certain kind of path. You can use lead quizzes or you can use Outgrow to make something simple for yourself and try to drive people into taking some kind of action for your business.
Neil Patel: With lead quizzes, at the end, people are going to ask for their responses of their survey or the results or whatever it's called, whatever you're creating your quiz around. Quizzes aren't effective unless the product or service that you're selling them is very relevant to their results. If someone was taking a weight loss quiz, and they're a man who's 60 pounds overweight versus a woman who's 10 pounds overweight, what they probably need to do within their diet, their exercise, is drastically different, not only because one's a man and one's a woman, but more so, their weight is drastically different from their ideal goals. If you make your results a specific saying, like, "Hey, you need to do this," and then you sell them a product that's very relevant to their results, you're much more likely to drive conversions versus if you say, "Hey, take a quiz," and then you drive everyone to the same type of product that's not too effective, and if you look at a lot of what HubSpot is doing within their marketing, they're getting pretty creative, from the quiz stuff to the tool stuff, but they're becoming really sophisticated.
One of my favorite strategies that they leverage is you go back to their website, and it'll say something like, "Welcome back, Neil." By personalizing the site, if you know that someone continually comes to your site and is looking for SEO articles or eCommerce articles or products related to dogs, why not show them the stuff that's most relevant to them? By personalizing the experience, not only will your conversions go up, but the person's going to be like, "Oh, wow, this is a much more friendly website. I'm bonding with it. I'm gonna keep coming back, and I'm much more likely to convert."
Amazon does that extremely well, too. They may not say, "Welcome back, Eric," or, "Welcome back, Neil," but Amazon shows you the products or services that they think you're most likely to buy, and they email you specific products and services that are most related to your buyer behavior and pattern.
Eric Siu: I think the final thing I can add to this is if you're probably wondering, "Well, I'm not gonna use an Outgrow. I'm not going to the lead quizzes. Where can I go find the people that can go build these simple tools to get going?" You can either go buy it, like Neil does. Neil's probably sourcing his own deals, but you want to go out there and build your own stuff, you can easily use a ... I don't like to use ... I mean Upwork is kind of an obvious choice, but I personally would go to other sites, like CodePen. That's C-O-D-E-P-E-N.io, or you can use Toptal, and Toptal has a really rigorous system of recruiting developers, or you can just find your own way, but you just got to find ... You got to find the right people to work with that understand what you're trying to do. Don't just hire any developer off the street. You got to really have a clear vision, and I'm not going to go too much into product here, but go ahead, Neil.
Neil Patel: With product, tools are the best way to market. Once you create it, you don't have to update it that often, and you just continually get more and more traffic. It's beat out quizzes. It's beat out text-based content. It's beat out video. It's beat out everything that I've tested, and if you don't have the money, just go search for scripts within your industry. There's scripts for everything, marketing, business, health, weight, mortgage calculators, whatever it may be. Someone's usually already created it. The web's been around for such a long time that you can buy these scripts for 15, 20, 100 bucks, $200. Get it on your server, your site. It's up and running and it'll continually produce results for you. You don't have to create something from scratch.
Eric Siu: Might be able to even go to GetHub and check some code out, too. Don't know, but, anyway, that's it for today, but if you want to check out our marketing goodies, go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway, and we will see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session 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.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how you can growth hack your company by copying HubSpot. I can preface this by saying first I had one of the HubSpot VPs, David Cancel, who is now the CEO of Drift, and he was on the podcast, Growth Everywhere a while back, and he was talking about how HubSpot basically acquired a ton of its customers through its website, Grader Tool. Basically, they had a really good tool, and a lot of people were using it and got a lot of back links, got a lot of traffic, and that's how they drove a ton of leads, and this is something that a lot of people are utilizing, including Neal. Neil, I'll let you elaborate a little more maybe.
Neil Patel: When it comes to software, you want to figure out how you can give away something that everyone is paying for, and it doesn't have to be software, but that's a HubSpot, that's a Drift model. If you end up taking something that everyone else is charging for, and even if you release a ghetto version for free that's not that great, you can do extremely well. Don't look to create a better product than your competitors. Don't look to create the best solution out there. Instead, look at your industry, go figure out what people are giving away or, more so, charging for that everyone's using, and give away majority of it for free.
You can even do this with physical products. For example, there was a tongue cleaning company. I think it was called Orabrush or something like that. I'm getting the name wrong. True Ventures ended up funding it. What they ended up doing was they said, "Free tongue cleaner. Just pay for shipping." Everyone's like, "We normally have to pay for tongue cleaners. You're gonna give it away for free?" By giving just the farm away for free, you can crush your competition.
I've been talking to Eric over the last few months, and I've been telling him, "Hey, marketing is a race to the bottom." If you can end up just beating your competitors to the free punch and you have other products and services that you can upsell, you can crush them. For example, I have this tool called Ubersuggest. I bought it in 2017. I relaunched it in 2018, took me a long time. I gave away the features that keywordtool.io gives that are paid. I made them for free. My traffic on Ubersuggest literally doubled within 45 days. All I did was just crush my competitors by giving their paid stuff away for free. I did very little to no marketing at all.
Eric Siu: Just another example that we've talked about in the past is Russell Brunson with his free plus shipping book. He might write a new book, like Expert Secrets or whatever other book that he might have, and you just pay for the shipping. You might pay 9 bucks or 10 bucks, and then what happens afterwards is you're in his funnel, and he has a bunch of other stuff to sell you. If you're thinking, "Well, I don't have the time to write a book. I don't have the time to buy a tool. I'm not as rich as Neil," whatever, what you can do is there are tools out there you can use. Outgrow is one of the tools that you can use. They'll basically make you a calculator you can put on your website. You can use a widget, customize it to your needs. You can collect leads off of that. You can use Outgrow. The idea is maybe you write a nice piece of content, it's ranking well from a SEO perspective, and then you put that widget on there to collect more leads. That's one thing you can do.
The other thing you can do is use quizzes. You can use lead quizzes, and lead quizzes is going to help you ... Well, it's going to use ... If you learn the ... There's a book out there called Ask, and that's from Ryan Levesque, and then basically you can come up with ideas on what kind of questions you should be asking and then drive people down a certain kind of path. You can use lead quizzes or you can use Outgrow to make something simple for yourself and try to drive people into taking some kind of action for your business.
Neil Patel: With lead quizzes, at the end, people are going to ask for their responses of their survey or the results or whatever it's called, whatever you're creating your quiz around. Quizzes aren't effective unless the product or service that you're selling them is very relevant to their results. If someone was taking a weight loss quiz, and they're a man who's 60 pounds overweight versus a woman who's 10 pounds overweight, what they probably need to do within their diet, their exercise, is drastically different, not only because one's a man and one's a woman, but more so, their weight is drastically different from their ideal goals. If you make your results a specific saying, like, "Hey, you need to do this," and then you sell them a product that's very relevant to their results, you're much more likely to drive conversions versus if you say, "Hey, take a quiz," and then you drive everyone to the same type of product that's not too effective, and if you look at a lot of what HubSpot is doing within their marketing, they're getting pretty creative, from the quiz stuff to the tool stuff, but they're becoming really sophisticated.
One of my favorite strategies that they leverage is you go back to their website, and it'll say something like, "Welcome back, Neil." By personalizing the site, if you know that someone continually comes to your site and is looking for SEO articles or eCommerce articles or products related to dogs, why not show them the stuff that's most relevant to them? By personalizing the experience, not only will your conversions go up, but the person's going to be like, "Oh, wow, this is a much more friendly website. I'm bonding with it. I'm gonna keep coming back, and I'm much more likely to convert."
Amazon does that extremely well, too. They may not say, "Welcome back, Eric," or, "Welcome back, Neil," but Amazon shows you the products or services that they think you're most likely to buy, and they email you specific products and services that are most related to your buyer behavior and pattern.
Eric Siu: I think the final thing I can add to this is if you're probably wondering, "Well, I'm not gonna use an Outgrow. I'm not going to the lead quizzes. Where can I go find the people that can go build these simple tools to get going?" You can either go buy it, like Neil does. Neil's probably sourcing his own deals, but you want to go out there and build your own stuff, you can easily use a ... I don't like to use ... I mean Upwork is kind of an obvious choice, but I personally would go to other sites, like CodePen. That's C-O-D-E-P-E-N.io, or you can use Toptal, and Toptal has a really rigorous system of recruiting developers, or you can just find your own way, but you just got to find ... You got to find the right people to work with that understand what you're trying to do. Don't just hire any developer off the street. You got to really have a clear vision, and I'm not going to go too much into product here, but go ahead, Neil.
Neil Patel: With product, tools are the best way to market. Once you create it, you don't have to update it that often, and you just continually get more and more traffic. It's beat out quizzes. It's beat out text-based content. It's beat out video. It's beat out everything that I've tested, and if you don't have the money, just go search for scripts within your industry. There's scripts for everything, marketing, business, health, weight, mortgage calculators, whatever it may be. Someone's usually already created it. The web's been around for such a long time that you can buy these scripts for 15, 20, 100 bucks, $200. Get it on your server, your site. It's up and running and it'll continually produce results for you. You don't have to create something from scratch.
Eric Siu: Might be able to even go to GetHub and check some code out, too. Don't know, but, anyway, that's it for today, but if you want to check out our marketing goodies, go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway, and we will see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session 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.