In episode #573, Eric and Neil explain why you can’t count on standardized techniques to grow your business. Tune in to hear why success is a numbers game.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: The One Thing That No Marketer Is Going to Tell You
- [00:35] The best tactics are not what’s in marketers’ podcasts and blogs.
- [01:10] Marketers will not share their number one “thing”.
- [01:40] Marketers won’t necessarily know how to grow your business; their tactics will be standardized.
- [02:19] Facebook was naturally awesome, your product may not be that good.
- [02:30] Even the best marketers may not know how to solve your growth issues.
- [02:50] It’s all experimentation and it’s a numbers game.
- [03:37] Marketers will steal each other’s tactics and try to use them, even though they may not work for their specific problem.
- [04:08] Make sure you have a system of process to follow when experimenting.
- [04:29] Don’t expect the world from marketers: what worked in the past, won’t work today; what worked for one business may not work for another.
- [05:22] That’s it for today!
- [05:25] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post The One Thing That No Marketer Is Going to Tell You | Ep. #573 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 dial 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: Today we are going to talk about the one thing that no marketer is going to tell you. The thing with marketers is that their best tactic, usually the stuff that you're hearing from either on podcast, or blog post, even on videos, for example, you're not getting the best of what they have. This is something where I've talked with Sean Ellis from Growth Hackers, previously was on the growth team on DropBox, on these other growth teams. The thing is, I remember talking to him, he's like, "Yeah, you know, Eric, at conferences it's hard to get people to reveal their best stuff, and even on these forums like Inbound.org, or GrowthHackers.com, where people share marketing secrets, and you're lucky if you get them to share it, you know, the 10% of what they know, right?" It is true. Marketers will not share their number one thing, because if everyone starts doing it, at the end of the day, while that means that tactic starts to become stale. Then you actually end up having to move to something else. They actually end up holding their secrets kind of close to the vest. That's one thing.
Neil Patel: With marketers, their best tactics typically aren't one that they also created on their own. It's ones that they learned about, reading, experimentation. Marketers won't necessarily know how to grow your business. The way they're going to tell you how to grow, and how to fix, is going to be standardized tactics that they know everyone uses within your space. Like, "Oh, you need to do SEO. Oh, you need to do more pay per click advertising. Oh, you're not running enough AB tests." When they get into things, they'll learn a lot. A lot of the tactics that they quote, unquote, thought would work, won't end up working. It's tons of experimentation. I don't care who you work with, it could be someone who ran marketing, or growth, at Facebook. When they run marketing or growth at your company, they won't necessarily be as successful.
There's a lot of things that they can't control. Such as, Facebook was naturally a popular and awesome product. Your product or service may not be that good. They also may end up finding out what worked three or four years ago, may not work now. Marketing is a ton of experimentation. Even the best marketers won't necessarily know how to solve your market problems, or hit your goals. Yes, they'll be better off at hitting them than you, assuming if you have very little to no marketing experience, but don't expect to just hire a marketer, and be like, "All right, now we're going to grow." It doesn't work that way. It's purely experimentation. You'll eventually see some things work, you'll see a lot of stuff not work, and it's a numbers game of just continually grinding things out. It's a lot of little things that add up to the big success or results when it comes to marketing.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and the one thing I'll say, I remember this morning I was reading a quote from Marcus Aurelius about something, about worrying about the only thing that you can control, which is between your ears, and not worrying about outside conditions. Yes, it's important to learn, it's important to listen to this podcast, and also share this podcast with other people. Yeah, just keep learning, keep reading, but ultimately you have to rely on yourself and what you can control. Eventually you'll figure it out on your own.
Just because somebody else is sharing a blog post, doesn't mean, and this is what I've seen with other people, especially other founders, is that they'll read a blog post, and they'll anecdotally make it into their own as if they ran the experiment. They'll tell their team to run it. That's not how it should be done, in my opinion. I think you think about all these little things, these little tactics, these little strategies, and then you think about how they might apply to your business in your context, because you have the most context, right? From there, you start to come up with hypotheses, and then you run these experiments. I really suggest running experimentation meetings at least biweekly with your team. Maybe if yourself starting up, just making sure that you're documenting this, and making sure that you have some kind of system and process that you follow.
That's how you're going to continue to grow. Because if you're not measuring it, you don't have a system, then ultimately you're kind of just going off gut feeling. Gut feeling, well, in the long term, it's not really going to help you get where you want to go.
Neil Patel: Eric and I have pretty much nailed everything when it comes to this topic. I don't know if Eric has any more, but whenever you're working with marketers, just don't expect the world. I don't care what they have on their Linked In, I don't care what they showed you that they've done in the past, what they do for you is going to be drastically different. What worked in the past, typically won't work today. What worked for amazing business like a Pinterest, or a Facebook, or a Google, won't necessarily work for your business. Those products, those services, naturally had things like product market that every one loved them. When you go and try to implement the same exact tactics on your business, you won't see the same results, and I can't emphasize this enough, the best thing you can do is just grind it out. Go do 100, 200, 300 small little marketing tasks. Eventually, it will add up and it will cause you to get much better success. It's a pure game of doing a ton of experiments, grinding it out, and continually doing that for a year before you see good results.
That's it for today, so before we go we have a special giveaway for you. It's SingleGrain.com/giveaway for marketing goodies. 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. 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: Today we are going to talk about the one thing that no marketer is going to tell you. The thing with marketers is that their best tactic, usually the stuff that you're hearing from either on podcast, or blog post, even on videos, for example, you're not getting the best of what they have. This is something where I've talked with Sean Ellis from Growth Hackers, previously was on the growth team on DropBox, on these other growth teams. The thing is, I remember talking to him, he's like, "Yeah, you know, Eric, at conferences it's hard to get people to reveal their best stuff, and even on these forums like Inbound.org, or GrowthHackers.com, where people share marketing secrets, and you're lucky if you get them to share it, you know, the 10% of what they know, right?" It is true. Marketers will not share their number one thing, because if everyone starts doing it, at the end of the day, while that means that tactic starts to become stale. Then you actually end up having to move to something else. They actually end up holding their secrets kind of close to the vest. That's one thing.
Neil Patel: With marketers, their best tactics typically aren't one that they also created on their own. It's ones that they learned about, reading, experimentation. Marketers won't necessarily know how to grow your business. The way they're going to tell you how to grow, and how to fix, is going to be standardized tactics that they know everyone uses within your space. Like, "Oh, you need to do SEO. Oh, you need to do more pay per click advertising. Oh, you're not running enough AB tests." When they get into things, they'll learn a lot. A lot of the tactics that they quote, unquote, thought would work, won't end up working. It's tons of experimentation. I don't care who you work with, it could be someone who ran marketing, or growth, at Facebook. When they run marketing or growth at your company, they won't necessarily be as successful.
There's a lot of things that they can't control. Such as, Facebook was naturally a popular and awesome product. Your product or service may not be that good. They also may end up finding out what worked three or four years ago, may not work now. Marketing is a ton of experimentation. Even the best marketers won't necessarily know how to solve your market problems, or hit your goals. Yes, they'll be better off at hitting them than you, assuming if you have very little to no marketing experience, but don't expect to just hire a marketer, and be like, "All right, now we're going to grow." It doesn't work that way. It's purely experimentation. You'll eventually see some things work, you'll see a lot of stuff not work, and it's a numbers game of just continually grinding things out. It's a lot of little things that add up to the big success or results when it comes to marketing.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and the one thing I'll say, I remember this morning I was reading a quote from Marcus Aurelius about something, about worrying about the only thing that you can control, which is between your ears, and not worrying about outside conditions. Yes, it's important to learn, it's important to listen to this podcast, and also share this podcast with other people. Yeah, just keep learning, keep reading, but ultimately you have to rely on yourself and what you can control. Eventually you'll figure it out on your own.
Just because somebody else is sharing a blog post, doesn't mean, and this is what I've seen with other people, especially other founders, is that they'll read a blog post, and they'll anecdotally make it into their own as if they ran the experiment. They'll tell their team to run it. That's not how it should be done, in my opinion. I think you think about all these little things, these little tactics, these little strategies, and then you think about how they might apply to your business in your context, because you have the most context, right? From there, you start to come up with hypotheses, and then you run these experiments. I really suggest running experimentation meetings at least biweekly with your team. Maybe if yourself starting up, just making sure that you're documenting this, and making sure that you have some kind of system and process that you follow.
That's how you're going to continue to grow. Because if you're not measuring it, you don't have a system, then ultimately you're kind of just going off gut feeling. Gut feeling, well, in the long term, it's not really going to help you get where you want to go.
Neil Patel: Eric and I have pretty much nailed everything when it comes to this topic. I don't know if Eric has any more, but whenever you're working with marketers, just don't expect the world. I don't care what they have on their Linked In, I don't care what they showed you that they've done in the past, what they do for you is going to be drastically different. What worked in the past, typically won't work today. What worked for amazing business like a Pinterest, or a Facebook, or a Google, won't necessarily work for your business. Those products, those services, naturally had things like product market that every one loved them. When you go and try to implement the same exact tactics on your business, you won't see the same results, and I can't emphasize this enough, the best thing you can do is just grind it out. Go do 100, 200, 300 small little marketing tasks. Eventually, it will add up and it will cause you to get much better success. It's a pure game of doing a ton of experiments, grinding it out, and continually doing that for a year before you see good results.
That's it for today, so before we go we have a special giveaway for you. It's SingleGrain.com/giveaway for marketing goodies. 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. 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.
