How You Can Discover Affordable Marketing Channels That Have Huge Potential | Ep. #578

In episode #578, Eric and Neil talk about more affordable marketing avenues. Tune in to hear how you can spend less money marketing your business. 

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:

  • [00:27] Today’s Topic: How You Can Discover Affordable Marketing Channels That Have Huge Potential
  • [00:40] It’s important to figure out who your target audience is and where they “hang out”.
  • [00:58] Similar Web is a great way to see where your audience is. Alexa is another great option for this.
  • [01:30] It’s important to see how people are using things.
  • [01:45] The easiest marketing channels tend to get crowded fast, which causes cost to go up.
  • [02:00] Similar Web will also tell you about email lists.
  • [02:38] Neil likes to hit up websites directly.
  • [03:14] Most people in the marketing world are doing online transactions, which means face-to-face meetings carry more weight.
  • [03:54] Podcasting is underpriced attention.
  • [04:05] Podcast advertising is affordable based on metrics Eric and Neil have used.
  • [04:24] What’s old sometimes becomes new again.
  • [04:35] Direct mail is making a bit of a comeback.
  • [05:11] Neil pays for email blasts through various bloggers (he pays them to email their lists).
  • [05:45] You can do outreach to the blogs to work out custom deals.
  • [05:59] Only pay out Net 30 or Net 60.
  • [06:10] That’s it for today!
  • [06:13] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!

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The post How You Can Discover Affordable Marketing Channels That Have Huge Potential | Ep. #578 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 discover affordable marketing channels that have huge potential. Marketing, at the end of the day, is really about where all of the attention is. It's important to figure out where is your target audience hanging out, where do they congregate together? For example, in the context of let's say you're trying to do an ICO, which is an initial coin offering, which is related to cryptocurrency. Well, what's one of the most popular websites right now? It's CoinMarketCap, but how do you find those websites? Well, you can use a tool like SimilarWeb. That's SimilarWeb.com. You can look at certain categories. You can also use Alexa as well. They will show you the top websites for certain categories.
That's an easy way to see where the attention is and, also, at the same time, these are direct media buys. You have other options, too, where you can look at ... Yes, those are direct media buys first, but also looking at where the attention is on a ... Let's say you're trying to do Snapchat ads, for example. Maybe, in America, maybe it doesn't do that well, but maybe somewhere else, it does really well. It's important to see how people are using things. In Latin America versus United States versus Germany, for example, it's going to be different. I think it's really important to do your due diligence first, do some studying. There's a lot of reports all the time that you can read around this stuff, but look for the attention first. That's a really easy baseline to follow.

Neil Patel: The easiest marketing channels tend to get crowded fast, and that's what causes cost to go up. For example, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, easy to run, even Bing ads. Hence, the cost goes up really fast. If you're using Eric's similar web tactic to find the most popular websites, you can also see which ones of those sites have email lists within your space, have push notifications. Hitting up the webmasters takes a bit of time and convincing them to do a promotion for you, but when you pay them directly and you cut out the middle man, like Google and Facebook, they're keeping much more money, it's much more affordable for you, and for them, they're happy because they made more money. You can have them push traffic to your site using things like push notification, email marketing, which tends to convert a lot higher than banner ads. Plus, it's not as intrusive to their audience, so their users don't mind, the conversions are higher for you, and the cost is lower for you while they're making more.
That's how I grew a lot of my businesses, in which I hit up websites directly. Nathan, from ConvertKit, gave me a really good piece of advice the other day. When he went to market ConvertKit, and this has helped him to grow over 10 million a year in revenue, he started meeting with a lot of the popular "marketing publisher" within his space or, more so, publishers. He's looking for who controls the audience that he wants to reach, and he meets them in person, and he gave me a good piece of advice. He's like, "Most people in the marketing and advertising world, transactions are just done online. When you meet someone in person, it goes a very long way, and they're much more likely to push whatever product offer that you have once you build a relationship with them. Takes more time, but it's much more cost effective, and the results are great."

Eric Siu: The other thing also is when Neil and I were looking at our podcast analytics recently, and I think we both agreed that it might be a little skewed, but still the numbers are pretty fairly high. These are 5-10-minute podcasts, and we can see that the retention rate, at least reported by Apple, is 90%. It's probably lower than that, but it's still extremely high. We think about under-price attention. Podcasting seems to be under-price attention right now, and there aren't many platforms out there, and the "platforms" out there that allow you to do podcasts advertising is really just an agency with a bunch of sites at the end, so podcast advertising, that's something that's affordable based on what our metrics have told us.
Maybe look at your metrics. You might discover something or uncover something that makes sense and maybe something that you should pay attention to, as well.
The final thing I'll add before I finish is what's old sometimes becomes new again. People talk about crapping on, well, direct mail. Nobody reads direct mail anymore, da, da, da, da, da. That means more people are getting out of it. Well, that's your chance to get back into it. In some cases, I have seen direct mail work really well. I have seen examples of guys like Russell Brunson, for example, shipping something over to someone, and they open it up and it's a custom, it's a handwritten note, and that's, well, you think about the conversion on that one. I see something coming from FedEx, and it's a handwritten note, how am I going to feel? How are you going to feel from that, too?
Think about what's old that might work in today's world, again, and you might discover a new advantage. Neil?

Neil Patel: If you guys really want to grow and you don't want to spend money, you have to get creative. We always talk about testing. One strategy that I've used to grow each and every single one of my companies is to pay for email blasts. I'll go find every single popular blogger within my space, and I'll pay them for email blasts on an affiliate basis, so per signup, and this is a bit different than "affordable" advertising or traditional advertising because you're only paying for results, and when you only pay for results, the risk is really low on your end because you're not paying for someone who's coming to your site. You're paying for an actual signup or a paying customer.
When you have these affiliate deals, you can find them through networks. There's a ton out there. You can just Google affiliate networks to see them, or what you could end up doing is you can do outreach to all the sites within your space and work out custom deals, and you can offer them something like 30% commissions or 20% or 50% if you want to be crazy drastic, and you should only be paying out net 30 or net 60. That way, when someone drives you a signup and it's "fake" because you'll get some fog within there, you're not losing money and paying for that.

Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to check out our free marketing goodies for you, 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. 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.

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