Marketing Trends That You Should Pay Attention In 2021 | With Expert Neil Patel

I think you know you talked about this in your blog and your YouTube channel, and obviously people listening in, if you haven't checked out Neil Patel on YouTube and his blog at NP Digital, check that out. But how would you say digital marketing is changing and has changed in the in the last year? And I mean. What are maybe some hot marketing trends right now that people are maybe not paying as much attention to and maybe is less competitive?

So the big thing that people aren't paying attention to that they should is, I would say, conversion optimization. So how much do you know about conversion optimization? Assuming a good amount?

Yeah, a little bit.

What's funny is when we're looking at all the trends and all the stuff that's going on right now, ad costs are going up, SEO costs are going up, marketing is becoming super competitive. Conversion optimization right now is the least sexiest topic, but it's the highest leverage. The second thing that people aren't paying attention to right now that they should be is, what is it called, voice search. So when we look at voice search, Alexa, all these devices, at least in the US and UK, they're very prevalent. And when you think about it, OC&C, they're a company that did analysis on how much money is going to be spent on voice search. from commerce, it's well into the billions, tens of billions over the next few years. And the percentage of people was shocking. It was in the double-digit percentiles of the people in the US and UK that have these devices that have already made a purchase through voice search. I thought it was crazy. I was just like, huh, no one's really paying attention to voice commerce. It's going to be massive.

So people are saying, hey Alexa, order me a new toilet paper, or something like that.

Seriously, they really are. A bottle of water, and it gives you options, right? Because there's Google Home, there's Alexa. I forgot what the Apple one's called, Apple Pod or something like that.

There's a few. Very cool. So CRO, I love that. Yeah, that's kind of our first playbook when we do an acquisition. That's the easiest quick win that people don't pay attention to. Headline on homepage being one of them. Is there any one or two others that you really like to quickly change to test out?

Email, any email stuff, exit popups, collecting emails and drip them. I like taking the checkout flows and taking them from one step to two step. That's usually a quick test. Sometimes that provides like a 10% lift. If you have a sign-in flow, give them options to sign in with Google or sign in with Facebook. We found that that increases conversions as well. Have you guys been buying a lot of businesses recently?

Yeah. I mean, we're in LOI right now of a pretty big company right now based out of Israel actually. So it's been fun. So unconventional. If you mention one kind of marketing company we're working with right now, it's a called Postalitics, and they do direct mail marketing, right? So actual mailer pieces. And they, you know, now it's pretty cool. You can actually track it. You can see open rate integrates with your CRM. Um, I don't know, what's your thoughts on that? Have you, have you tested any of that stuff?

I have. It can work out really well. We've seen it work really well in places like Australia. Uh, the problem right now with the market in M&A is everything's expensive. Like, I don't know if that's what you're seeing. Like, all the prices are just through the roof.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're not— you know, like this one, we're looking at something like a 5x ARR. I mean, but it's also growing like 100% year over year, so it's, it's tough. And I don't know where these people are getting these, these, uh, information that either there's just a lot of buyers out there right now or there's just a lot of like—

5x ARR, are they even profitable?

They're profitable, yeah.

Okay, so they may have like 20% margin, but you still have to pay 5x. That's an expensive buy.

It ends up being something like an 8x EBITDA. Yeah, but it's not too bad just because they're growing, right? They've been growing like crazy.

I'm assuming less than $2 million in revenue then?

No, they're over— I think they're at $2.5 or $3, I think. So it's actually decent. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, being a leader in the content space, I know we've heard this kind of saying, being a leader of content in specific segment is a sign that you're probably the leader in the space of all other aspects. Do you agree with that thought? And what's your—

No.

No?

I'm the leader in content, or I shouldn't say I'm the leader. I'm one of the leaders in content and marketing. But if I look at marketing agencies, we're one of the smallest. Look at iProspect, look at Performics, look at Tenuity. There's so many brands out there that are much larger than us. And you know what's funny? So many of your readers or listeners probably never heard of some of these brands, but you know what? At this point, some of them like Performics, multi-billion-dollar organizations with 4,000 employees plus, right?

So content is still not king? What is it that sets them as leaders?

Have you heard of Performics?

Performics? No. Is it P-E-R-F-O-R-M-I-X?

Okay, so I'm more known for marketing than Performics.

Right, 100%.

Okay? More people know me. I get millions of visitors to my site. They don't. I think they have like 4,000 employees who must be making more money, right?

What are they doing? It's not the marketing, it's something else they're doing, right? Or it's not the content anyways. Good sales.

It's been around for a long time, old school business enterprise. There's a lot of people who aren't well known that print cash.

Yeah, I've heard of a few SaaS companies now that I've talked to who their entire Kind of growth, like $10 million plus ARR, and all they've done is just one channel which has just been outbound sales, right? And they do zero marketing. And yeah, it just shows you that sometimes they're thinking about doing marketing but they're like, hey, we found something that's working, and they keep just doubling down on it. They don't have to.

I know SaaS companies who people have never heard of that do $40-50 million in revenue. They've been around for over 10 years. They get little to no traffic to the site and they grow 100% through outbound sales.

Yeah, there you go.

And we're just like, what? And then we look at all the ones that do content marketing stuff, we're like, oh, they must be massive. We're like, well, the guys who do pure outbound are like 5, 6 times larger even though no one knows who they are. So it's like, who really is winning?

Yeah. SEO, I don't know. I mean, is that still pretty hot right now? Would you still kind of focus on that if I'm a SaaS company? Is that something you would do?

Yeah, I think you need to do everything as a SaaS company. SEO, content marketing, social media, outbound. I don't think there's one right or wrong approach. I think you take omnichannel approach. That's how you win.

I agree. So you mentioned, you know, acquisitions right now, you're looking at some being super expensive. What are you typically looking at? Um, you know, what's expensive for you right now?

Anything that's like 10x or more in EBITDA.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's even— uh, is there a certain size you look for right now? Is there, um, minimum?

We're flexible. Ideally more revenue. Ideally, we want companies that are doing like $5 to $20 million in revenue.

$5 to $10 million in revenue? Cool. What's your thoughts on that HubSpot acquisition of The Hustle? How do you see them helping their bottom line? I personally love the deal, but curious how you look at it.

I don't know, honestly, right? Maybe they have future plans or integration or— I have no idea. But HubSpot's so massive, it's a drop in the bucket. They're worth like $27 billion or something like that. So when you look at it from a financial standpoint, it wasn't actually a big acquisition. Compared to the overall value.

Okay, so still too early to say. Um, what's your opinion, say, let's say, you know, SaaS companies right now, typically, you know, speak to a lot of them, they're looking to do, uh, you know, smaller acquisitions within their same vertical or, you know, kind of competitors. Uh, if a SaaS company is looking to acquire maybe media companies as part of their growth strategy, what should they be looking for in terms of, you know, overall strategic alignment?

Right audience. If you look at a media company, just because they have visitors in your space doesn't mean they're a right fit. You really have to look at the audience and be like, is that your ideal customer? For example, if I'm looking to acquire a marketing blog and they have so many small businesses reading them, mainly ones that are just starting up and have no money, they could have a million readers a month, but I'm not going to close much revenue from that because All our customers ideally do in the millions in revenue already, if not way more, right? So it's like, just because someone has an audience base doesn't mean it's the right fit. And I think people really take that for granted. They just look at media and they're like, oh, you got all these readers, I'm going to convert some of them. Most of them aren't your ideal customer, even if they're in your same industry.

Would you do some kind of test beforehand? Let's say you're looking at a site like that, early marketers, helping them start off, and then you say, okay, maybe there's something here, maybe part of their audience could be good for MyFit. Would you say, hey, let's run like an affiliate program or an email blast, or what would you do? Create like a custom landing page and test it out for a bit?

Surveys, talk to some of their readers, whatever you can do, right? Some people may be open to it, some people may not. Uh, you could— if they're a media company, before you're interested in buying them, just try to buy ad spots, see if you can make the ad spots convert. Like, you can do little simple things like that.

Just sponsored ads on their site? Yeah, that's a good idea. What are some, maybe say 3 key actions you take after investing in a company to add value and help them thrive? So I know you've done it with Ubersuggest and a couple of others. What are maybe 3 things that are quick wins that I always like to apply in your playbook?

We don't look at it that way anymore. I used to. More so right now we look at how can it fit within the core business? Would our existing customers buy that product or service? Can we throw our sales team and biz dev team at that business and scale it out? So we're in a little bit of a different model. We're not buying for a financial arbitrage. We're more buying to grow our existing core business.

Do you factor that in the valuation? So you mentioned like 10x EBITDA, and then you're saying, okay, if, but If they have the perfect audience and we know by leveraging their audience we're going to get an uplift of double our revenue, for example, would you factor that in?

Yes, but it's a little bit different. Our playbook is more so we look at a business and we say, if we integrate it into our company, how many of our customers and our sales teams and all that can we pitch and grow that other business because our customers are demanding what they offer and we don't have it?

Got it. So instead of you having to build it, you're acquiring that technology.

And ideally at this point, we're not looking to buy something to fix or optimize. We're looking for something that we can bolt onto our existing business and take all our customer base and sell the services of that new business or that product. Taking all our sales reps, all our biz dev people, and then go and sell that business and then go make it bigger, right? Because if our customers demand it, it's an easy way to grow.