In episode #622, Eric and Neil discuss what you can do when you run out of marketing ideas. Tune in to hear where you can find inspiration to get you out of a rut.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: Running Out of Marketing Ideas? Do this
- [00:45] Eric opens Feedly, which has a bunch of marketing blogs, which can give him a bunch of ideas.
- [01:17] Nuzzle takes all of his Twitter followers and shows him who they are following.
- [01:34] Basically, go out and research in order to get new ideas.
- [01:47] Instead of doing more things, improve what you are already doing.
- [01:53] Try using Buzzsumo, SEMRush, AHREFS in order to see what your competitors are doing.
- [02:14] Re-write your competitors work and improve upon it.
- [02:46] Whatrunswhere shows you what banner ads your competitors are leveraging.
- [03:15] Keep things fresh: go look at your channels and update/upgrade them.
- [03:42] CROwdsource your ideas!
- [04:50] Listen to competitors’ podcasts, which will give you great ideas. Find out their numbers, see what’s working, and leverage this information to your advantage.
- [05:32] Eric did an episode of Growth Everywhere and his interviewee’s competitor was listening and reached out to Eric.
- [06:01] The competitor picked up some useful info, just from listening to the podcast.
- [06:25] That’s all for today!
- [06:29] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
Leave some feedback:
- What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below.
- Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.
Connect with us:
The post Running Out of Marketing Ideas? Do this | Ep. #622 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 what you should do if you're running out of marketing ideas. So even though you're listening to this podcast every single day, there's so much marketing information out there, sometimes you just run out of ideas, sometimes you run out of content ideas. So, for me, at least to get this conversation started, what I do when I'm looking for more marketing ideas, it's very simple. I open my app, I open Feedly. Feedly is subscribed to a bunch of marketing blogs I like to follow. So, for example, we have Marketing Land, we have Seth's Building Blog, we have a bunch of different marketing ... my favorite marketing blog's in there. It could be like Quick Sprout, as well, and Search Engine Land. So I have a bunch of them condensed. That way I can just scroll through their feed and then from there, I can just hold my thumb down and it'll automatically save to my read it later app, and I just have all these marketing ideas in there.
So there's a bunch of case studies that I want to get to later and also, at the same time, I use another app called Nuzzle. Nuzzle, it looks at all my Twitter followers and looks at the things that people are sharing the most, and I mostly follow marketers on Twitter and entrepreneurs. And I can get a lot of different ideas there. So the gist of this is, it doesn't matter, you don't have to use these apps but you're going out there, you're learning and you're pulling from different ideas and you're repurposing them into your own thing. That's how you get new ideas. You don't necessarily have to be original all the time because, at the end of the day, most of the stuff in world is really not that original.
Neil Patel: Go look at what you're already doing in marketing and, instead of trying to do more things, just make what you're doing better. If you're doing content marketing, go to Buzz Sumo, type in competitor URLs, type in keywords within your industry, see what's working and consider writing similar type of content.
You can also use [inaudible 00:02:02] and SEM Rush. See what your competitors are ranking for on Google, type in their URLs, see what their most popular pages are, look to see if you've covered those topics on your website, and rewrite all of those pages that your competitors have that you don't, and make them five, ten times more detailed. You can do similar things with paid advertising. You're doing paid ads? Your competitors are. You can use tools like SEM Rush, put in competitor URLs, see all the keywords that they're bidding on. You can see the history and how long they've been bidding on those keywords. Check to see if you're bidding on any of those. Test them out.
There's so many tools out there that helps you see what your competitors are doing and you can just start copying and getting ideas from that. Heck, if they're doing better ads, you can even do things like, what's that tool? What runs where?
Eric Siu: WhatRunsWhere.
Neil Patel: Yeah. WhatRunsWhere. WhatRunsWhere shows you all the banner ads that your competitors are leveraging and you can go get ideas from that. So whatever it may be, you don't have to start new marketing channels. If you're running out of ideas, look to what you're already doing and focus on, first, improving them. You may think, "Oh, we've already tapped out." Well, no. Marketing changes consistently each and every single day, or month or year, whatever it may be, you pick the timeframe. But most industries change on a monthly basis. Just keep things fresh. Go look at your old existing channels and make them better.
Eric Siu: And to build on Neil's example, talking about the old stuff. Also, think about what's worked in the past in terms of marketing. Radio, TV, all the other stuff. Direct mail, as well. The stuff that people are kind of shying away from now. Well, that becomes new again because people are moving away from it. That's something to consider.
Now the other thing you can do is, let's say you have a team, or let's say you have an email list, you can crowd source your ideas too. So, an example of this might be, if I'm looking to create a bunch of content ideas or topic ideas, it doesn't always have to be just me. You can bring your team in a room, let's say you have five people, and everyone is supposed to bring five ideas or ten ideas to the table. And then, all of a sudden, you have 50 topic ideas. Maybe you select half, maybe you select 10% or so. That's still better than you having to figure everything out on your own and putting all the onus on yourself. Neil and I talked about the importance of building team all the time. It's in your best interests to utilize your team too.
And the final thing I'll say, from my end, is the concept of group. So, whether it's hanging out with like-minded people, building your own Mastermind. You can Google MastermindTalks PDF to learn how to figure out your own agenda, if you want to do a Mastermind. Get a group of like-minded people together, seven, eight, ten people or so. Meet up once a month, talk about different ideas out there. That's how you get new marketing ideas, because it could be people in different industries. They can be trying different things that you never heard of. They're more creative than you, they think differently. Every human being is different, so that's how you can get new ideas.
Neil Patel: The last idea for me is, listen to people's podcasts. Specifically, your competitors' episodes. Your competitors may not have a podcast, but they've been interviewed on other people's podcasts and you can listen to them. Eric, you've interviewed a lot of businesses. Do businesses reveal their revenue numbers in most of your episodes?
Eric Siu: Yeah. A good portion. Yes.
Neil Patel: Do they like bragging and showing how successful they are, and how they got there?
Eric Siu: Totally. Growth rates, employee size, all this stuff.
Neil Patel: I'm not saying you should reveal your numbers but you should listen to all the episodes that your competitors are on, all the podcasts that they've been interviewed on. Go try to find out their numbers, find out what they're doing, see what's working for them and copy. If they're silly enough to reveal that data, you should use it to your advantage.
Eric Siu: Dude. Just to give two examples to the audience. I did this one interview with a Quest Nutrition CEO and then one of the CEOs of Labrada, one of their competitors, was listening and he reached out to me directly. And so, guess what? So these people, A - that's validation that people listen to this stuff, B - it actually can lead to opportunities, if you start your own podcast.
Neil Patel: And what was the Quest CEO saying that they did?
Eric Siu: They were talking about how they went about marketing in the early days and then how they're using a lot of Reddit in the beginning. That gave them some ideas too. Like that one little nugget for Labrada's like, "Oh, damn. Maybe we should be doing Reddit," is gold to them.
Neil Patel: Yes. You know its funny about I bought a Quest bar the other day, for like one of the very first time. I opened it and there was mold on it. I kid you not.
Eric Siu: Wow. Yeah, I've never seen that before, but I've given you a bunch of Quest bars.
Neil Patel: Yeah, I know. Now, I'll never buy ... But I bought my own cause you used to give it to me every time we'd record podcasts and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, it fills me up."
Eric Siu: Oh no.
Neil Patel: Now, I'll never do it again.
Eric Siu: Yup. But, anyway, that's what we got for you today. And, if you want to go get our marketing goodies, you should go get them. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll 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 what you should do if you're running out of marketing ideas. So even though you're listening to this podcast every single day, there's so much marketing information out there, sometimes you just run out of ideas, sometimes you run out of content ideas. So, for me, at least to get this conversation started, what I do when I'm looking for more marketing ideas, it's very simple. I open my app, I open Feedly. Feedly is subscribed to a bunch of marketing blogs I like to follow. So, for example, we have Marketing Land, we have Seth's Building Blog, we have a bunch of different marketing ... my favorite marketing blog's in there. It could be like Quick Sprout, as well, and Search Engine Land. So I have a bunch of them condensed. That way I can just scroll through their feed and then from there, I can just hold my thumb down and it'll automatically save to my read it later app, and I just have all these marketing ideas in there.
So there's a bunch of case studies that I want to get to later and also, at the same time, I use another app called Nuzzle. Nuzzle, it looks at all my Twitter followers and looks at the things that people are sharing the most, and I mostly follow marketers on Twitter and entrepreneurs. And I can get a lot of different ideas there. So the gist of this is, it doesn't matter, you don't have to use these apps but you're going out there, you're learning and you're pulling from different ideas and you're repurposing them into your own thing. That's how you get new ideas. You don't necessarily have to be original all the time because, at the end of the day, most of the stuff in world is really not that original.
Neil Patel: Go look at what you're already doing in marketing and, instead of trying to do more things, just make what you're doing better. If you're doing content marketing, go to Buzz Sumo, type in competitor URLs, type in keywords within your industry, see what's working and consider writing similar type of content.
You can also use [inaudible 00:02:02] and SEM Rush. See what your competitors are ranking for on Google, type in their URLs, see what their most popular pages are, look to see if you've covered those topics on your website, and rewrite all of those pages that your competitors have that you don't, and make them five, ten times more detailed. You can do similar things with paid advertising. You're doing paid ads? Your competitors are. You can use tools like SEM Rush, put in competitor URLs, see all the keywords that they're bidding on. You can see the history and how long they've been bidding on those keywords. Check to see if you're bidding on any of those. Test them out.
There's so many tools out there that helps you see what your competitors are doing and you can just start copying and getting ideas from that. Heck, if they're doing better ads, you can even do things like, what's that tool? What runs where?
Eric Siu: WhatRunsWhere.
Neil Patel: Yeah. WhatRunsWhere. WhatRunsWhere shows you all the banner ads that your competitors are leveraging and you can go get ideas from that. So whatever it may be, you don't have to start new marketing channels. If you're running out of ideas, look to what you're already doing and focus on, first, improving them. You may think, "Oh, we've already tapped out." Well, no. Marketing changes consistently each and every single day, or month or year, whatever it may be, you pick the timeframe. But most industries change on a monthly basis. Just keep things fresh. Go look at your old existing channels and make them better.
Eric Siu: And to build on Neil's example, talking about the old stuff. Also, think about what's worked in the past in terms of marketing. Radio, TV, all the other stuff. Direct mail, as well. The stuff that people are kind of shying away from now. Well, that becomes new again because people are moving away from it. That's something to consider.
Now the other thing you can do is, let's say you have a team, or let's say you have an email list, you can crowd source your ideas too. So, an example of this might be, if I'm looking to create a bunch of content ideas or topic ideas, it doesn't always have to be just me. You can bring your team in a room, let's say you have five people, and everyone is supposed to bring five ideas or ten ideas to the table. And then, all of a sudden, you have 50 topic ideas. Maybe you select half, maybe you select 10% or so. That's still better than you having to figure everything out on your own and putting all the onus on yourself. Neil and I talked about the importance of building team all the time. It's in your best interests to utilize your team too.
And the final thing I'll say, from my end, is the concept of group. So, whether it's hanging out with like-minded people, building your own Mastermind. You can Google MastermindTalks PDF to learn how to figure out your own agenda, if you want to do a Mastermind. Get a group of like-minded people together, seven, eight, ten people or so. Meet up once a month, talk about different ideas out there. That's how you get new marketing ideas, because it could be people in different industries. They can be trying different things that you never heard of. They're more creative than you, they think differently. Every human being is different, so that's how you can get new ideas.
Neil Patel: The last idea for me is, listen to people's podcasts. Specifically, your competitors' episodes. Your competitors may not have a podcast, but they've been interviewed on other people's podcasts and you can listen to them. Eric, you've interviewed a lot of businesses. Do businesses reveal their revenue numbers in most of your episodes?
Eric Siu: Yeah. A good portion. Yes.
Neil Patel: Do they like bragging and showing how successful they are, and how they got there?
Eric Siu: Totally. Growth rates, employee size, all this stuff.
Neil Patel: I'm not saying you should reveal your numbers but you should listen to all the episodes that your competitors are on, all the podcasts that they've been interviewed on. Go try to find out their numbers, find out what they're doing, see what's working for them and copy. If they're silly enough to reveal that data, you should use it to your advantage.
Eric Siu: Dude. Just to give two examples to the audience. I did this one interview with a Quest Nutrition CEO and then one of the CEOs of Labrada, one of their competitors, was listening and he reached out to me directly. And so, guess what? So these people, A - that's validation that people listen to this stuff, B - it actually can lead to opportunities, if you start your own podcast.
Neil Patel: And what was the Quest CEO saying that they did?
Eric Siu: They were talking about how they went about marketing in the early days and then how they're using a lot of Reddit in the beginning. That gave them some ideas too. Like that one little nugget for Labrada's like, "Oh, damn. Maybe we should be doing Reddit," is gold to them.
Neil Patel: Yes. You know its funny about I bought a Quest bar the other day, for like one of the very first time. I opened it and there was mold on it. I kid you not.
Eric Siu: Wow. Yeah, I've never seen that before, but I've given you a bunch of Quest bars.
Neil Patel: Yeah, I know. Now, I'll never buy ... But I bought my own cause you used to give it to me every time we'd record podcasts and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, it fills me up."
Eric Siu: Oh no.
Neil Patel: Now, I'll never do it again.
Eric Siu: Yup. But, anyway, that's what we got for you today. And, if you want to go get our marketing goodies, you should go get them. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll 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.
