7 Nifty Marketing Ideas

Today we are going to talk about 7 nifty marketing ideas for 2020 guaranteed to help you grow. So I'm going to start with the very first one over here. And by the way, I mean this comes from a lot of the experience that we do around Marketing School, um, which is the podcast that we have. So the first one that's worked really well for us is guest carousels. Carousels work really well on Instagram and they also work really well on LinkedIn. So what I can do is I can just have a carousel of 7 different, uh, each carousel is a different marketing idea. And those do well because they get engagement. You can post it for yourself, you can post your own carousel. But imagine if I don't have a big following on Instagram, which I don't, it's only about 6,000 followers or so. What you can do is you can go to someone that has maybe 20,000 or 100,000 followers or so and say, hey, look, I've done content like this before. I've done this carousel. Do you mind if I do it for you? And if they say yes, then you can say, hey, okay, here's the carousel. Here's the copy that you can write for your audience. You want to do everything for them, right? So if I go to a designer, I actually did this with a guy that has a design background, Christo, and he's got 250,000 followers or so. I said, hey, can I do this guest carousel with you? And he said yes. I gave him 5 ideas or so, so I kind of did the work for him. And then once he said yes, my team worked really hard on it, and then we worked on the carousel, and then I wrote the copy for him, and then he sent it out. You know, all the work was done for you, and then he just you know, sent it out and we gained about 600 followers or so, which is big for our 6,000, uh, relatively big compared to the size of our account. He's actually done guest carousel before with someone else posted. He gained about 5,000 followers or so. And I think the person that did get guest carousel gained about 2,000. So I would do that and then I would carry that over to how do you make that work for LinkedIn? Like when I post for LinkedIn and I do the carousels, those work really well, but I can just find someone on LinkedIn and say, hey, they've got a big following. I'm gonna do a guest carousel for them. As a matter of fact, these people that write all this content on LinkedIn all the time, I'll take their top 3, top 4, top 5 posts or so, and I'll say, you know what, why don't I just consolidate it, do something like I did right now? It's gonna get a lot more reach. How would you like that? Of course you're gonna like that. We all want to grow, right? The second thing is you want to take an omnichannel approach. Taking the carousel approach and carrying it over to LinkedIn, that's omnichannel because I'm just repurposing what I've done already and just moving it over, and that works really well. This video can easily become a podcast, which is exactly what we do. We take this video, we move it to a podcast, it can become a long-form blog post as well, and then we might push it to Twitter. We can take the carousel, we can push it to Pinterest too. There's a lot we can do with this, right? So you wanna take an omnichannel approach because people are looking at so many different channels nowadays. One second they might be hanging out on Spotify, like they're watching Netflix, they're listening to Spotify, and then next second they're on TikTok over there, and next second they're listening to a podcast. You don't even know what they're doing. Take the omnichannel approach, And you're gonna get the most bang for your buck, 'cause you don't wanna have all your eggs in one basket, especially moving into the roaring 20s. You wanna make sure that your ass is covered. So number 3, mini events. So the podcast I do, Marketing School, I do it with my co-host, who's another marketer named Neil Patel, and we've started doing mini events, meaning that we will take our community and say, hey guys, we're doing an event, we're doing, ours are in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, but we gather about 50 to 100 people together and we just talk about how we can help grow their businesses, right? We get the right people together, we do events together, we have good dinners together. And what you wanna do is you wanna take all of the online influence that you have and move it into an offline community because that goes a lot further. Because when you build a relationship with someone, it's not just an online touchpoint. The online touchpoints are important, but when you make it in person, even if you interact for 5 to 10 minutes or so, those people are very grateful. And if you can help them in those 5 to 10 minutes, it goes a long way. You don't even have to think about things coming back to you. People will repay you in some way, shape, or form. Like, don't even think about what you're going to get from it. Just know that you're going to get something back from, from creating those, those in-person touchpoints. Cause that's what I think it's truly all about. Number 4 is product-led growth. So the best example of this is a company called HubSpot. At HubSpot, they give away their CRM, which is a customer relationship management tool. They give that away for free, whereas in the past people tried to charge for it. Now previously, I remember talking to one of their, um, their general managers at HubSpot. 99% of the company was against giving away their product for free because they previously charged for it. Now keep in mind, they're a big company, they're a publicly traded company, and when they made that change, they actually started growing a lot faster. So what I'm basically saying is you give away a product for free. Even for us, uh, I have a software called ClickFlow. We actually have a freemium version launching, which you can actually go to clickflow.com/content-dk. It's our content decay tool and we're giving that part away for free because we want people to come in, we want them to get the value from it and then maybe they can upgrade later. So we want them to basically, we want them to get a taste of it. And then the same thing with HubSpot, they have a lot of different upsells and cross-sells that they can, once they get you in there, they know that they have you hooked and then from there they know they can close you for a much bigger deal. If you can't buy a product right now, just go to 1kprojects.com. So the number 1, kprojects.com. You can try to go buy stuff there. There's a lot of code out there that you can leverage for developers that don't want their products anymore, or you can go hire a developer out there to help you build something, or you can build a simple widget too. You have a lot of different options. Be more creative. It's much harder to build a product and give it away for free than it is to build, uh, well, in general, to build like an ebook or to give away like a blog post, right? Blog posts are generally free. If you're going to do something, give away a product that works really well. That's why a lot of companies, especially a lot of software as a service companies, are doing that. Number 5, sure, you can have your email list, But also think about leveraging Messenger. Also think about leveraging, you can use web notifications too. We use subscribers.com and we love it, but you have a lot of ways of notifying people. Text message is great too. You can use a tool like community.com. I found that when we, when people apply for the mini event that Neil and I do, we automatically text them. The response rate is like 65, 70% or so because people love that and I can actually respond to them from within the tools that I'm using. And we use FrontApp and we use Twilio. to kind of combine a text message with that. Number 6, for those of you that are trying to get clients, everyone is trying to do consulting. Everyone is trying to get clients. I think there's over, God, I think it's 57,000 consultants or so in the Los Angeles area. And Los Angeles is pretty big, but there's a lot of consultants out there, right? So the thing, the thing that you can do is if I'm reaching out to a CEO, I might say, hey, um, I have some data. I have some data for you, right? And so I can just say, and then basically the data can be like a quick study. I can show how they're doing versus their competitors or whatever, but I can, A, I know that I've got their attention because I know what their interest is. So I have some data on your industry. Okay, boom, got their attention with the subject line. Second thing is I do the work upfront. So instead of saying, hey, would you like me to do the report for you? I pay more attention to people when they reach out to me and the work's already done. Instead of saying, would you like me to do this for you? And you can see my examples here. That's more work on my end. But if you did the work for me and you show me that you understand what I'm looking for, that you've done the research already, all you have to do is stand out a little more. Just do a little more and then that goes a long way. So 7, if you are looking to do any form of account-based marketing, you don't need— account-based marketing is just basically like if I'm targeting Coca-Cola, I can target the entire marketing department or maybe the marketing executives and then I'm not just hitting one person but I'm hitting multiple people on the account, which to me is still just marketing. Or sales. What you can do nowadays, you don't need to buy some expensive sales tool, but you can find these people's emails. You can use something like Clearbit, and then what you can basically do is you can use a tool like Airtable, and Airtable can basically, once you put, you find the email addresses, put the information into Airtable, and automatically that information from Airtable, you can use an email tool like Sendible or anything like that, and then it'll automatically start sending those people based on the email addresses that you inputted. And the first name that you inputted. So you don't need to buy any crazy software tool. We personally, like, I like using Mixmax just because we pay for it right now, but there's a lot of no-code alternatives right now that you can use. Airtable, you can use Zapier to combine all the tools that you have, and then you can go from there. So by the way, let me know which nifty marketing idea you like the most, or if you think I'm missing a nifty marketing idea, drop it in the comments below as well. If you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there because it's going to help you grow. And don't forget to, Subscribe and hit the bell button if you're coming from YouTube, or subscribe from anywhere. All right, so that is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.