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's we're going to talk about how traveling helps you become a better marketer. So I'll kick things off. I actually just got back from my trip in Japan two days ago, and being there has given me a lot of perspective. When I traveled there I had the fortunate opportunity of ... there's a listener of this podcast, Jeff Crawford, invited me to speak at something and I got to meet a lot of Japanese marketers. And I learned different things about Japan, like how LinkedIn is not popular there, how people are very traditional there when it comes to the workforce. So that alone is a good insight. And I also learned that blood type's very important to them. So as a marketer I get these insights being there that I just otherwise wouldn't know of.
And I also learned at the same time that people there, they work really hard. Like the guy I talked to that I met from Entrepreneurs' Organization, his people, the Japanese are known for working maybe even too hard. He has his people working from 7:00 a.m. and they go home at 10:00 p.m. or so. So that alone just teaches me kind of the differences, the nuances between these different countries. And then there's some things that I see that are really efficient about the Japanese culture, how these people work, how the marketers work, how things are seen there. And I get to integrate that into my own life around kind of business and marketing at the same time. Do we need to be working those amount of hours? Probably not. But are they doing some things really efficiently that I can probably take over and integrate? Absolutely. And I'll elaborate on that in a second.

Neil Patel: Yeah, Eric makes a good point. I've traveled all around the world. I don't even know how many countries I've been to. But I've learned so much because ... See, everyone thinks that oh, United States, it's amazing, it's an awesome country. And it is, don't get us wrong. We love the US. We live here. And it really is the land of opportunity. But the majority of the people in this world do not live in the United States. Out of the seven-plus billion people that are here, the United States has three hundred-plus million of them. So we don't make up the majority. Yes, our GDP is high, but we don't make up the majority. If you really want to learn how the majority of the world works and how to market to them, you have to travel.
For example, I learned in Brazil that they don't trust Brazilians. They prefer buying from Americans over Brazilians. Or I learned that in Brazil when you're selling products and you're marketing, you always have to break things into payment plans. And I was like why would you do that? And Brazil, unlike the United States, when they do payment plans, they have to by law continually pay each of those payments. And the credit card companies will give you all the money upfront and charge them over a period of 12 or 24 months, which is pretty cool, and it makes marketing much more effective and allows you to spend more money on paid ads. And I've learned different things in different regions. But without traveling you won't know how people are and operate in the cultures and what affects them to purchase or build trust within a brand.
Even the United States, yes, we're American and we love this place, but United States is a melting pot of so many different cultures and ethnicities, so even if you're just focusing on the US market, by traveling abroad, and even to different places within the United States, like if you're trying to market to people in Nebraska, their way of life and how they operate and live is totally different than someone living in Los Angeles, California. But understanding that and seeing that will help you figure out how you can maximize your marketing and even generate more revenue.

Eric Siu: Yeah. So just to give you a couple more examples. The Japanese, everybody that I met there, a lot of people there will ... you're kind of, especially in their service business ... The place that I spoke at was a marketing agency, and I met with the CEO for a little bit. We talked and he's like, "Oh, I gotta go." I was like, "Oh, where are you going?" And he's like ... it was about 7:30, 8:00 p.m. ... he was like, "I've gotta go entertain the clients." So in the Japanese culture, it's about taking the clients all the time, going out drinking with them and so on and so forth. But the reason why that's important, why I really respect that, is because I know that, especially in the services industry over here, that when you take the client out, when you actually meet them in person and you aren't just sitting behind a screen all the time, you build an actual relationship, and that increases the amount of business that you can do and it also leads to other opportunities that you just wouldn't otherwise expect.
But over there, the Japanese culture, they're taking the clients out all the time, they're befriending them. They've also very loyal, too. Like the big agencies over there, like the Dentsus for example, people stick with them forever because that's just the thing. You end up signing with an agency, you start to build that relationship, and that is for years and years and years. It's not like over here in the States where you sign with a client and then maybe in three months or so, six months or so, if you're not doing a good job, they can you. There's plus and minuses to both sides. I see the merit in canning someone if they're not doing their work. But I also see the merit in building a relationship for the long term because that's what it's all about at the end of the day. We're all human. We like to build relationships with each other, and that's how we scale.

Neil Patel: Yeah, speaking of Japan, with my software company, Crazy, we learned something interesting. The cost to acquire a customer in Japan costs us more than it does in the United States. The conversion, though, of a trial to a paid customer in Japan is way higher. In Japan, culturally they don't believe in charging back or canceling. If they like something and they do their research, they're there and they pay for it and they pay for the long run. Our LTV in Japan is almost double than what it is in the United States. That's a huge difference. So when we were running the numbers, at first we were like oh, whoa, it's not worth it. And then when we were looking at the LTV, we were like oh, this makes sense. And I didn't understand why until I started to understand their culture. I was like oh, we should just do what we're doing in Japan everywhere. And that doesn't work. It's not like we were doing anything unique. It was their culture. And without knowing that, we wouldn't be able to adjust our marketing to specific regions.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and so when you look at Salesforce, huge, huge company, their biggest customer base is the United States. Number two is Japan. And it's very similar to what Neil was talking about, so I highly recommend looking into that a little bit more. And just to give you a final example, and Neil definitely has more specifics here around his travels, but when I'm in Amsterdam, for example, or when I'm in Germany, for example, I can tell that, especially the Germans, they're very efficient. They get to the point. They get things done. They're great. That's why they're one of the strongest countries in the world. And the same thing when I'm in Amsterdam, for example, people are laid back, but they still work really hard. So my point of saying this all is that traveling gives you perspective that you otherwise wouldn't know, and the perspective is ... you take these little things and you take these little tweaks and implement them into your own life, and that's going to help you grow.

Neil Patel: Yeah, so I think we've pretty much covered everything in this episode. And Eric has a little bonus for you guys.

Eric Siu: The little bonus is just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway, and that's the special giveaway for you. So just go there, check it out, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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