Announcer: 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 you can beat your competition when they have more money and have been in business longer. Neil, you've done this a couple of times. What are your thoughts?

Neil Patel: I just give voice stuff for a cheaper price.

Eric Siu: And he still keeps doing it. He's crazy.

Neil Patel: People say I'm crazy all the time, but it works. Because if you can't compete with them because they have more money than you, you can undercut them. Think of it this way, if a company is worth billions of dollars, I'm going to extreme case, and they make all their money because they charge a certain amount per product, do you think they can just reduce their prices by half? Of course they can't. If they do that, their stock price is going to get crushed, their valuation's going to get crushed, they have no choice but to maintain their pricing, if not even increase them over time. So what you're better off doing is going out there, technology is way cheaper these days, using newest and greatest technology because your competitors are probably on some old-school archaic shit and just undercut them on price. For example I'm going to be doing this with Moz. Moz charges $99 a month minimum for their SEO tool. I'm not just going to undercut the price, I'm just going to release it for free.

Eric Siu: Damn.

Neil Patel: By using a lot of the APIs out there, I can do what they're doing for hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on server cost for, I kid you not, under $10,000. It's so much cheaper these days compared to what it used to be when companies started at 5, 10, 15 years ago.

Eric Siu: Yeah, think about it this way, here's an analogy, Neil is a speedboat. He's moving really quickly, is able to make decisions quickly. These are the companies, they have raised money, they have investors, they have a board, they have an executive team. Neil can be really flexible, he can move really quickly. These other companies cannot move as quickly, especially if they are a publicly traded company. So the thing is also from my end I think about going where they aren't going in terms of marketing. So look, there's a ton of marketing agencies out there, but the way we do marketing, not just for me, but also for Neil as well is we do it in a different way. You don't see a lot of these other marketing agencies doing content marketing, doing podcasts, speaking at events, and also releasing tools. We just to zig where people are zagging. So if you can think about a creative approach where these other companies, which they probably aren't doing things, because every company has problems, go into that crevice where you think there's opportunity, jump in there, and then you can take advantage as well.

Neil Patel: One thing that Eric mentioned that really helps you beat your competition when you have less money is speed. If you can execute, you can experiment faster than them, you're going to be better off. And you can use a lot of growth hacking techniques to really grow. Look at Dropbox. They weren't the first in this space, but Dropbox made it free, and they used a referral program to get more and more users. So take your existing users and get them to help promote you and offer them a benefit when they promote you. That's one of the best ways to grow without having to spend an arm and a leg on marketing. And I'm trying to integrate referral programs even in my blog content. I'm like okay if someone can get me more readers within the marketing space and they convert into email sign-ups or newsletters, what can I offer them for free that they can't get elsewhere? It's kind of crazy thinking but that kind of stuff is what works and allows you to be your competitors without spending as much money as them.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and the key here is I recommend reading a book called Zero to One from Peter Thiel, and it's about being contrarian. So the way Neil has approached marketing and just even how he does business in general is contrary into most people. It's a different approach, and well it works well for him. The final thing I'll say for my end is, we talked about it a couple episodes ago, but it's relevant to this subject or this topic, when you want to beat your competition, if you're starting out it's easier for you to start nicheing down, nicheing down in terms of the type of customer that you're going for, the type of service or the type of product that you provide. You start small first, and then you grow from there. Start with a foundation. Same thing with a content foundation, which I talked about a couple episodes too is, start with the foundation first, grow from there, and you'll do better over time because it's easier, it's simpler to do, and well it's not confusing to all the people that are working with you.

Neil Patel: And the last piece of advice that I have on my end for you guys is when you compete with bigger companies, look at what they're not focusing on. For example if they're not focusing on SMBs, that's where you should focus first. Or if they're focusing purely on the English market, majority of the people in this world don't live in the United States or the UK or Canada or Australia, they're in places like China, Japan, Latin America. In Brazil, less than 4% of the population speaks English.
Translating your services, your products into Portuguese allows you to win businesses in those regions, and it's not that competitive. Sure they don't have as much money, but you're not competing with a ton of other businesses. And if you're not competing with a ton of other businesses, you can grow extremely fast. And that's why I've gotten into international expansion. In the United States, yes I'm competing with a lot of other companies with more money. But overseas, I'm not really competing with anyone. Yeah, the revenue is not as great, but because there's no competition, I'm winning most of the business, and in general, I think I'm actually going to make more in these regions than I could from the US just because of the competition. It's a simple strategy, it's not expensive, and it works. So that's pretty much it for today's episode of Marketing School, I hope you guys come back tomorrow, and for our daily marketing giveaway please check out singlegrain.com/giveaway. See you tomorrow.

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