The Craziest Marketing Tactic Ever | Ep. #612

In episode #612, Eric and Neil discuss their craziest marketing schemes. Tune in to hear some out-there ideas that may work for you, as well.

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:

  • [00:27] Today’s Topic: The Craziest Marketing Tactic Ever
  • [00:36] The craziest thing Eric has ever done was bet an entire company (54 employees, 5 months of cash in the bank).
  • [01:02] He bet everything on video marketing in order to hit numbers.
  • [01:19] He was even surprised that it worked. The company now does $25 Million/year in business.
  • [01:39] At the same time, Neil was spending $20 to acquire a customer and generating $200.
  • [02:02] The craziest thing Neil has ever done was to launch the “Who is Neil Patel?” campaign. Though he got a lot of hate for it, it proved to be very successful.
  • [02:42] It caused everyone to Google his name, which made his brand query shoot up, his search traffic skyrocketed, and his ranking improved.
  • [03:12] You can achieve this by creating quizzes or paying celebrities to be part of an ad campaign, as examples.
  • [03:50] Marketing works whether people love or hate the campaign.
  • [04:32] Buying websites is another great way to improve your ranking.
  • [04:55] Eric wanted to rank for elder-care related keywords, so he bought out some elder-care sites.
  • [05:45] The site would then redirect to their main landing page.
  • [05:52] That’s it for today!
  • [06:01] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!

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The post The Craziest Marketing Tactic Ever | Ep. #612 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 [inaudible 00:00:09] 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 the craziest marketing tactics that we've each personally kind of experienced. So, I'll go ahead and start first. So, the craziest tactic I've done is betting an entire company, we're talking 54 people's families, five months of cash left in the bank. This company was about to go down but don't get me wrong, great team, great product, but it was really on me to decide on what I needed to do to hit numbers and just keep in mind, I was with this company for a little over a month and I was basically cut a serve notice that if I don't hit numbers that month, it would be time for me to go. So, I decided to bet the entire company, this crazy marketing tactic, I just bet it entirely on video marketing. So, it was an all in bet to gamble everyone's livelihood on this. Looking back on it, I'm kind of chuckling but at the time, I was pooping my pants and frankly, I was really surprised that it worked. This company was doing $2 million or $3 million a year in revenue at the time. Now they are doing about $25 million a year.

Neil Patel: And that's a crazy tactic and it's funny, at that point, Eric shared the numbers with me. This was years ago and I started getting to video marketing. It's still effective. At that time, I was spending one month's worth of revenue for someone who was paying like ten times whatever I was paying to acquire a customer. So, hypothetically, if I was spending $20 on video marketing to acquire a customer, I was generating at least $200. The ROI is so high from video marketing because everyone's too lazy to create a video, a pre-rolled video, before the regular YouTube videos being displayed.
So, my crazy marketing tactic that I've ever done, and some of you guys know this, is that Who Is Nail Patel? campaign. A lot of you guys ... I got a lot of hate for this 'cause like, "Hey, why are all these half naked models holding up 'Who is Neil Patel?'" What a lot of people don't realize is I paid makeup artists, I paid men, I paid women, I paid business people, but for some reason, people only saw the half naked women. The coolest one that I believe that was ever done was there was this really buff dude, probably weighed like 300 pounds, and he was like, "Who is Neil Patel?" And he wrote it on his chest and he kept waxing his chest and my name kept bouncing up and down. It was kinda hilarious and what that caused is everyone to just Google for my name, "Neil Patel", and "Who is Neil Patel?" And over time, my brand queries shot up. I did this campaign continuously for a few months and my search [inaudible 00:02:56] on Google skyrocketed, my rankings skyrocketed. Now, of course, if you don't continue building your brand after, your rankings do dip but because I kept cranking up more content and doing podcasting, doing videos and building up the brand long term, my rankings stayed up there and it worked really well.
You can do the same thing with quizzes, you can do the same thing by paying celebrities. You don't have to get that extreme. I didn't wanna get that extreme with the half naked models or whatever it is. I paid a agency to also help me out and they came up with a lot of those concepts. I regret it, I wouldn't do it again, but nonetheless, the content getting influencers to talk about you causes a lot of Google searches, which drastically can boost your search rankings.

Eric Siu: Not only that, I also think it's brilliant that so many people just started to hate on you and so many people started to write about it, so it not only worked from a positive standpoint and also from a Google standpoint but marketing works well, even if you have just a bunch of people talking about it, right?

Neil Patel: Yeah, I got so much hate.

Eric Siu: [inaudible 00:03:55] doesn't even care about that, that's the great part.

Neil Patel: Nah, I didn't really care about the hate but I didn't want people thinking like I'm trying to degrade women or anything like that. A lot of the girls who posted that kinda stuff were friends that they wanted to do it and they went crazier than I wanted but what could you do? I paid money, I told them the boundaries and some of them went riskier and it was too late when I went online. I didn't see it.

Eric Siu: I've met people actually, in LA, and then when the name Neil Patel is mentioned, it actually goes back to that campaign so that campaign, by definition, was successful.

Neil Patel: Yeah. So, it was successful by definition.

Eric Siu: Yeah. Just a couple more examples I think we can give. In terms of buying websites in the past to kind of capture the ranking and then pass it on to another website-

Neil Patel: You recently did that, right? Like two years ago.

Eric Siu: Two years ago, yeah.

Neil Patel: So, you had a elderly care site, without revealing the name, and you bought another elderly care site and what did you do?

Eric Siu: So, we captured a top rankings for what the elder site was ranking for.

Neil Patel: Yeah, but break down the process of how you did this, right? So, you wanted to rank for elderly care terms but before you bought the site, where were you ranking?

Eric Siu: It was not ranking for that keyword.

Neil Patel: Were you in the top 10? 100?

Eric Siu: Nope. Not even top 100.

Neil Patel: Okay. Top 1,000?

Eric Siu: Probably top 1,000.

Neil Patel: But you didn't know? You're not 100% sure.

Eric Siu: No. Yeah.

Neil Patel: Okay. And then, go from there.

Eric Siu: Yeah. So, what we did is we were looking at the top 10 results for specific keywords we were looking for and this one site just kept popping up over and over and over. We're like, okay. And we noticed that it wasn't being maintained. It was ranking for all these keywords. We were doing the research and so, what we finally did was, we did a Whoiz on that website just to find out what the email address was. I reach out to the guy twice and then he finally said he was open to talking. So, we spoke, I said, "Hey, are you interested in perhaps selling the website?" And he said yes, at an adequate price. We negotiated. I ended up buying the website for, I believe, about $10,000 and then we acquired the website, redirected it to the new site and then, boom. All of a sudden, we were ranking number five for that keyword.

Neil Patel: So, that's it. You have it. That's pretty much some of the craziest marketing stuff that we've done. We probably have tons more worse stories but we don't wanna keep going on and on 'cause some of them, we probably don't wanna reveal. If you want our daily marketing giveaways, go to singlebrain.com/giveaway. 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.

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