In episode #561, Eric and Neil discuss how you can market your business for under $1,000. Tune in to hear how you can market your business for free!
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How to Market Your Business for Less Than $1,000
- [00:47] “Hand-to-hand combat” works in the beginning (making interpersonal connections).
- [01:17] It’s all about using cash flow from your first few deals to invest in basic marketing concepts.
- [01:43] Find people (via social media) who are unhappy with their marketing service and pitch them.
- [02:13] Offer free marketing in exchange for their positive testimonials.
- [02:24] One customer took a screenshot of his analytics and passed that on to other VCs.
- [02:45] Digital Telepathy did work for big names for free in exchange for having their name on the client’s website.
- [03:48] Look at Twitter List and Similar Web to get started.
- [03:57] Hunter.io is good for email marketing.
- [04:01] You can set up a mail-merge using GMASS.
- [04:12] There are plenty of free versions of helpful tools.
- [04:24] Listen to Eric’s other podcast, Growth Everywhere, to hear from your competitors and how they have succeeded.
- [05:00] Copy other people’s tried and true methods!
- [05:25] One person listened to an episode of Growth Everywhere to pick up tips and now has a seven-figure business in Barcelona.
- [06:19] That’s it for today!
- [06:20] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special giveaway!
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The post How to Market Your Business for Less Than $1,000 | Ep. #561 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
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 to market your business for less than $1,000. So I'll get this one out of the way quickly. Every single person I've talked to, over 300 entrepreneurs on the Growth Everywhere podcast, I always ask them, how did you go about starting the business? How did you get the first 100 customers or so? Always, always, always, sales or marketing, whatever, it's always hand to hand combat in the beginning right? In the past, Neil and I have talked about reaching out to influencers, relationships, going to events. Even if you can't even afford to go to the event, you can at least hang out in a networking area and talk to people. I know a ton of people that do that. That's one way to go about it.
It's about being really scrappy in the beginning, and you don't have to spend money to do that right? That's how you can start growing in the very beginning and, well Neil, what else do you have?
Neil Patel: At the beginning, it's all about just getting manual deals, or customers like Eric's mentioning, and then using that cash flow to grow faster. You don't want to start spending the first $1,000 on paid ads, you don't want to spend it SCO, not content marketing, or social media marketing, or anything like that. You want to do basic marketing things like going on Twitter and seeing what people are saying about your competition. If anyone's unhappy, you hit them up, you help them out, you try to get them to convert over to you. If people are leaving raving reviews about your customer, great. Go find ones who are leaving terrible reviews. Go find those people, give them your product or service for free, or give them a little bit in exchange for talking about how you guys are amazing.
The other thing that I did when I was starting off and I didn't have much money, and it's a bit unique for us because we're a marketing company, but you can do this if you're a design shop or any service based business, we went out there, went to all the influencers like Tech Crunch, Mashable, Gawker Media Network, which is no longer around, we offer them free marketing in exchange for telling people how we did the marketing, showcasing the results, and that lead to a lot of customers. I remember Michael [Airington 00:02:23] did a screenshot of his Google on [inaudible 00:02:24] Traffic increase that we provided and sent it to VCs like Union Square Ventures and being like, "Oh these guys are awesome and you should hire them." Right? Actually I don't think it was Union Square, but it was somewhere in Philadelphia or someone like that. It was a decent sized venture fund.
And that strategy worked really well to generate new business. You can do the same thing. My friend Chuck from Digital Telepathy started doing designs for people like Tim Ferris or Eric Reese for free in exchange for putting a badge on their site saying, designed by Digital Telepathy. You don't have to spend money to market, you can give free services. It doesn't cost you anything, just your time, and it's a great was to continually get new inbound leads.
Eric Siu: Yeah and I think about the other scrappy things you can do. I mean one person we hired actually DM'd me on Instagram and that eventually lead to a conversation, and now he works at the company. And so let's think about these things where it's out of the box and trying to reach people where you know they're probably paying attention. So especially millennials, they're probably using Instagram, and well maybe even younger people. I think it's just about who you're trying to reach and finding the right people at the right time. So it's, where are these people hanging out right? If it's something related to, you know, bitcoin or crypto currencies, maybe CoinMarketCap right, or maybe not that one, maybe Cointelegraph. So you've got to be really smart and kind of analyze where these people are in the first place.
I recommend, you know, looking at Twitter list. You can even look at similar web tools like that and just get started right. And I think if you're looking to find emails, things like that, well you can definitely use things like Hunter.io, or you know, find that email, and you can set up a mail merge using Gmass, so that's G-M-A-S-S and just mail these people right. There's all these tools out there. There's a lot of free versions that can help get you started. There's no reason, I think, especially if you're listening to this podcast, there's no reason why anybody can't succeed. I think it's just a matter of putting in the work.
Neil Patel: Yeah and Eric has a podcast called Growth Everywhere. You should be listening to all those episodes or go through it and find your closest competitors, listen to them talk about their strategies for growing and copy the ones that are working. I also look at all my competitors, I Google the founders names and type in like podcast at the end, see all the interviews that they did. They talk about things like their revenue, how they grew, how they got started, the strategies that they used when they're bootstrapped and they had no money. By just listening to your competitors talk, which I wouldn't do it myself but, you know like I wouldn't give all my company data on a podcast, other people love doing it, and you should just go listen to all of those because they want the press.
And you know what? Start copying what's working for them and replicate it in your business. It's simple, it's easy, it's effective, and it's one of the best strategies versus doing a guessing game and be like, "Hmm, how am I going to grow?" Versus, "Oh this worked for all my competitors so I might as well copy it, and they even outlined their whole exact strategy in the Growth Everywhere podcast, so I'm just going to copy it to a T."
Eric Siu: That's exactly what one of the guys ... so the guy that found the company Find That Email, he listened to the podcast I did with Kyle Porter from Sales Loft, and he basically built a very similar business in Barcelona, and I think it does close to seven figures right now, which is really great in Barcelona right. He's got a really great life for himself, but literally he listened to that and, you know, it's taken him to the next level. So there's so much to be able to download because, when people are on a podcast, they kind of feel accountable to reveal the nuggets, or otherwise they're just wasting everyone's time.
Neil Patel: That's actually kind of sick how someone will listen to one of your podcasts, and they did the execution and created a decent sized business. The biggest thing that Eric and I see, is everyone talks about, "Yeah we're going to do all this marketing stuff and we're going to grow." And you give them all the information, very few people take action. But the cool part of what Eric just said, is people are trying to take action from his podcasts. And if someone else can do it, you should just go out and check out the Growth Everywhere podcast and try to do the same thing.
Eric Siu: Great. So before we go, we have marketing goodies for you. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more and we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: 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: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about how to market your business for less than $1,000. So I'll get this one out of the way quickly. Every single person I've talked to, over 300 entrepreneurs on the Growth Everywhere podcast, I always ask them, how did you go about starting the business? How did you get the first 100 customers or so? Always, always, always, sales or marketing, whatever, it's always hand to hand combat in the beginning right? In the past, Neil and I have talked about reaching out to influencers, relationships, going to events. Even if you can't even afford to go to the event, you can at least hang out in a networking area and talk to people. I know a ton of people that do that. That's one way to go about it.
It's about being really scrappy in the beginning, and you don't have to spend money to do that right? That's how you can start growing in the very beginning and, well Neil, what else do you have?
Neil Patel: At the beginning, it's all about just getting manual deals, or customers like Eric's mentioning, and then using that cash flow to grow faster. You don't want to start spending the first $1,000 on paid ads, you don't want to spend it SCO, not content marketing, or social media marketing, or anything like that. You want to do basic marketing things like going on Twitter and seeing what people are saying about your competition. If anyone's unhappy, you hit them up, you help them out, you try to get them to convert over to you. If people are leaving raving reviews about your customer, great. Go find ones who are leaving terrible reviews. Go find those people, give them your product or service for free, or give them a little bit in exchange for talking about how you guys are amazing.
The other thing that I did when I was starting off and I didn't have much money, and it's a bit unique for us because we're a marketing company, but you can do this if you're a design shop or any service based business, we went out there, went to all the influencers like Tech Crunch, Mashable, Gawker Media Network, which is no longer around, we offer them free marketing in exchange for telling people how we did the marketing, showcasing the results, and that lead to a lot of customers. I remember Michael [Airington 00:02:23] did a screenshot of his Google on [inaudible 00:02:24] Traffic increase that we provided and sent it to VCs like Union Square Ventures and being like, "Oh these guys are awesome and you should hire them." Right? Actually I don't think it was Union Square, but it was somewhere in Philadelphia or someone like that. It was a decent sized venture fund.
And that strategy worked really well to generate new business. You can do the same thing. My friend Chuck from Digital Telepathy started doing designs for people like Tim Ferris or Eric Reese for free in exchange for putting a badge on their site saying, designed by Digital Telepathy. You don't have to spend money to market, you can give free services. It doesn't cost you anything, just your time, and it's a great was to continually get new inbound leads.
Eric Siu: Yeah and I think about the other scrappy things you can do. I mean one person we hired actually DM'd me on Instagram and that eventually lead to a conversation, and now he works at the company. And so let's think about these things where it's out of the box and trying to reach people where you know they're probably paying attention. So especially millennials, they're probably using Instagram, and well maybe even younger people. I think it's just about who you're trying to reach and finding the right people at the right time. So it's, where are these people hanging out right? If it's something related to, you know, bitcoin or crypto currencies, maybe CoinMarketCap right, or maybe not that one, maybe Cointelegraph. So you've got to be really smart and kind of analyze where these people are in the first place.
I recommend, you know, looking at Twitter list. You can even look at similar web tools like that and just get started right. And I think if you're looking to find emails, things like that, well you can definitely use things like Hunter.io, or you know, find that email, and you can set up a mail merge using Gmass, so that's G-M-A-S-S and just mail these people right. There's all these tools out there. There's a lot of free versions that can help get you started. There's no reason, I think, especially if you're listening to this podcast, there's no reason why anybody can't succeed. I think it's just a matter of putting in the work.
Neil Patel: Yeah and Eric has a podcast called Growth Everywhere. You should be listening to all those episodes or go through it and find your closest competitors, listen to them talk about their strategies for growing and copy the ones that are working. I also look at all my competitors, I Google the founders names and type in like podcast at the end, see all the interviews that they did. They talk about things like their revenue, how they grew, how they got started, the strategies that they used when they're bootstrapped and they had no money. By just listening to your competitors talk, which I wouldn't do it myself but, you know like I wouldn't give all my company data on a podcast, other people love doing it, and you should just go listen to all of those because they want the press.
And you know what? Start copying what's working for them and replicate it in your business. It's simple, it's easy, it's effective, and it's one of the best strategies versus doing a guessing game and be like, "Hmm, how am I going to grow?" Versus, "Oh this worked for all my competitors so I might as well copy it, and they even outlined their whole exact strategy in the Growth Everywhere podcast, so I'm just going to copy it to a T."
Eric Siu: That's exactly what one of the guys ... so the guy that found the company Find That Email, he listened to the podcast I did with Kyle Porter from Sales Loft, and he basically built a very similar business in Barcelona, and I think it does close to seven figures right now, which is really great in Barcelona right. He's got a really great life for himself, but literally he listened to that and, you know, it's taken him to the next level. So there's so much to be able to download because, when people are on a podcast, they kind of feel accountable to reveal the nuggets, or otherwise they're just wasting everyone's time.
Neil Patel: That's actually kind of sick how someone will listen to one of your podcasts, and they did the execution and created a decent sized business. The biggest thing that Eric and I see, is everyone talks about, "Yeah we're going to do all this marketing stuff and we're going to grow." And you give them all the information, very few people take action. But the cool part of what Eric just said, is people are trying to take action from his podcasts. And if someone else can do it, you should just go out and check out the Growth Everywhere podcast and try to do the same thing.
Eric Siu: Great. So before we go, we have marketing goodies for you. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more and we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: 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.