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 out market a multi-billion dollar company. You know what Neil? What's interesting, we talked about this maybe 10, 20 minutes ago, but we're looking at my shoes, the Allbirds, and we had a little conversation here about them versus Nike and Adidas.

Neil Patel: Allbirds are really popular. My buddy actually just got me them for my birthday.

Eric Siu: Oh, nice.

Neil Patel: Yeah.

Eric Siu: Yeah.

Neil Patel: And Allbirds-

Eric Siu: Do you wear them?

Neil Patel: No. I'm wearing dress shoes right now. Allbirds, they've raised a lot of money now. I think over a hundred million bucks. It's something ridiculous like that. I could be wrong.

Eric Siu: Well, now that you say that it's like I have to pull up-

Neil Patel: Yeah, we got to look it up.

Eric Siu: -crunch base really quick.

Neil Patel: I think it was like a hundred and thirty or a hundred and seventy or something ridiculous.

Eric Siu: Twenty-seven.

Neil Patel: Oh, okay. I was really off. But twenty-seven million. Still twenty-seven million more than most companies have. And you look at them, Nike and Adidas are shaking in their boots and we were actually discussing this. If I was Nike and Adidas what did I tell you that I would do?

Eric Siu: Make something similar and just undercut them.

Neil Patel: Yep, I would just charge fifty bucks instead of a hundred bucks. They charge a hundred?

Eric Siu: Hundred bucks.

Neil Patel: I would charge fifty bucks for the same shoe. And undercut them. Or like twenty or thirty bucks. And just really drive it in where it was like crush them. I'd even lose money to get them out of the market. Now again, I'm crazy and Eric's kind of crazy too and I don't mean that in a bad way but we'll do whatever to crunch our competition. Most big companies won't do that. Instead they'll be like, "Oh, let's just buy them out." But the reason people like Allbirds are succeeding really well is because they've built up amazing community.
Whenever you're releasing your business your first thousand buyers or your first thousand fans, your visits, the community, they're the most important people because that'll depend on who your next thousand or your next ten thousand or a hundred thousand are going to be. Your first thousand fans, community members, are the most important. Now to give you an example of this, Eric, when you bought those shoes you told me about them. Why do you think they're so awesome?

Eric Siu: Because A, they're really comfortable and B, they look cool and C, they're cheap.

Neil Patel: And how'd you find out about them?

Eric Siu: Same way I told you. Word of mouth and the guy that was explaining it to me was so enthusiastic about and I looked at it and I ordered it immediately because he was so enthusiastic about it and then I told you and I was really enthusiastic about it too.

Neil Patel: And how many other people have you mentioned Allbirds to?

Eric Siu: It's got to be at least 20.

Neil Patel: And that's crazy. And a lot of people ended up buying them. I didn't because I was too cheap.

Eric Siu: I have people on my team now that are wearing Allbirds because I keep talking about them.

Neil Patel: Are you serious?

Eric Siu: And when people look at it, like literally today earlier, we were recording at my friend's office and he's like, "What are those? What are those?" I get that question all the time. "What are those? They look so comfortable, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah." And they end up taking out their phone and buying it.

Neil Patel: Yeah, like Eric's wearing them right now. They look like gray moccasins that are super comfortable yet stylish yet funny enough, the camera's not low enough. For those of you guys that listen to the podcast, we also publish episodes with video on YouTube as well and Eric has matching gray socks as well.

Eric Siu: Yeah, that's why I got them. Because I keep wearing these gray socks because, well you don't need all the details, but it matches.

Neil Patel: Yeah, okay so going back to how your first thousand members or customers are super important, Eric, if you're building your community what would you do today to build your first thousand loyal followers?

Eric Siu: Well we gave a talk about what they did.

Neil Patel: Sure, what did they do?

Eric Siu: They ran a bunch of Facebook ads.

Neil Patel: All right, you can do Facebook ads. And if you target the right people, it works.

Eric Siu: We would talk about us too. I mean, what would I do? If I were to go back right now, I mean if I was starting from ground zero right now I would just crank away at podcasts.

Neil Patel: And what I would do is a multi-prong approach. I would first start off with looking for the influencers within my space because every space has influencers like the top tier influencers and they typically hang around in one or two or three places. Go to those places, start participating. From leaving comments, them tweeting at them, messaging them, helping them out, not asking for anything and then I would go to those top two or three places and I would just guest post there constantly and then submit content. Because what will happen is these high level influencers will be like, "Oh my god, I'm seeing Neil or Eric everywhere."
Technically they're not seeing me everywhere, they're just seeing me on the sites that they visit all the time because all the top influencers visit the main sites. They're going to have much more respect for you, they're more likely to follow you, they're going to be more supportive, and then when you're trying to release your product or service and generate sales, don't just release it even if it's done. Try to get their feedback. Let them be involved. Because when they're more involve, they're going to be much more passionate. They're going to be willing to promote you. They're going to be more willing to buy. They're going to be more willing to tell you how you're the best and everyone else sucks. And then from there things just start spreading.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and more people, onto Neil's point, more people tend to buy from influencers so full disclosure, I'm in investor in a company called Unity Influence, it's kind of like Google AdWords for influencer marketing. You could go out there and they would give you quotes on how it is to work with these influencers. If you're looking to launch a consumer product for example, this might be the right fit for you, or you could just reach out to them directly through DM but I mean, either way the audience that you're looking to reach, a lot of these people have the audience already so how do you go about there and build relationships with these people to get in front of these people and start to build up your fan base. Like Allbird started with Facebook ads but now they're working a lot ... If you look at their Instagram they're doing a great job there. That's how you can start to out market or out maneuver a multi-billion dollar, in this case two multi-billion dollar companies. Neil, anything else?

Neil Patel: That's it for mine.

Eric Siu: All right, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing goodies to go grow your business and we'll see you tomorrow.

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