8 Boring Marketing Strategies That Always Make Money

What if I told you that the boring marketing strategies are the ones that will lift your bottom line the most? In this video, I'm going to break down 8 boring marketing strategies that always make money. These strategies, old and new, continue to crush it in 2025. So whether you're a CMO or founder or marketer, these strategies will boost your bottom line no matter what's trending. We're going to cover old school strategies that continue to drive big ROI, newer tactics you need to embrace to stay ahead, the constant principles behind them all that will always make money. Let's dive in. So the first one that I love, tried and true, that will make you boatloads of money is hosting dinners and in-person events. Let me give you an example. I once hosted a dinner in San Francisco, and from that dinner, that's how we got clients such as Lyft. That is the power of dinners. Or even when I host in-person events— so I hosted an event a couple months ago, we had about 200 people come through in Miami, and it was a group of business operators. And from that one, we got a couple of clients as well. And the beauty of events is even Even though I'm an introvert, what I've learned over time is that you cannot beat face-to-face interaction, human to human. Again, if you're introverted, you're extroverted, we all desire human connection. It's built within us. And when you do it right, it always pays off. And so when I first started doing this, I hosted a dinner. I was like 26 years old. I didn't— by the way, I was broke. Okay. My first dinner, I had a half-eaten bag of chips. But the cool thing is I got everyone around the same level. So you want to make sure that you get everyone around the same level. That was the objective of that dinner. And then what happened was every person got 20 minutes to be in the hot seat and we all went around. Everyone was sharing what their challenge was and everyone kind of gave their feedback in like 2-minute increments, right? And that's what worked. Now for this in-person event, this larger event that I did that was recent, I just made sure that we brought in the best speakers possible, but I made sure that we had a lot of ample time for networking. So we had these diner rounds where we went to people's houses and then people hosted, where we went to restaurants, you know, we made sure we had more intimate groups of people, right? But in that scenario, everyone was a business operator and everyone was just, we kept it to one conversation and people were talking about, you know, things that they're interested in. It could be around AI, it could be around business, whatever it is, right? So you just gotta make sure that you theme whatever live event that you're doing. You got to make sure that people are around the same level. Ultimately, you curate the experience, right? What I can tell you here is that you just got to get started with it, because when I was 26, I had no idea how to do these, and I was very nervous to do it. But once you get over the first one, it becomes a lot easier, and then you can start hosting larger ones. You can start doing happy hours. You can start doing maybe events that have 75 to 100 people or so, 200 people or so. I like the more intimate environments. The more intimate interactions you can have, the better. And I would also recommend that if you're gonna host a dinner, for example, once you get to a point where you can afford to cover costs for people, just make it easy, because you just tell them, hey, I'm gonna host this dinner of 8 founders, and it's gonna be at this nice restaurant over here. And don't worry, you just show up, right? And then once they know that amazing people are coming, it's gonna be good conversation and it's gonna be free food as well. It's a no-brainer offer for them to accept and it makes it a lot easier, right? So I remember Ali Abdaal, you know, he's a YouTuber who's focused on productivity. He asked me how I built my network. He's like, you seem to know a lot of people. And I said, it's, it's more so that I was focused on connecting. And once you become the connector, you start to know everyone, right? Because naturally you're the connector, right? So always seek to provide a lot more value than what you get, and you're gonna get a lot more in return. All right. So part 2, if you want to reach a higher volume of people and do it at a lower cost than an in-person event, webinars are phenomenal. And even if you're in consumer, you can do lives, right? Live shopping, right? People like live shopping. It's starting to work really well in the United States, right? Has worked well in China for a long time. Webinars work really well if you're in B2B. And so as an example, my podcast co-host Neil, he makes about $400,000 per webinar that he does. And bear in mind, he has a large email list. But even for us, you know, we might not have the largest email list, but we pay to get people to our webinar. And plus we promote to our email list. And the last webinar that we did, we spent, let's say we spent $5,000 or so, and not everyone has to spend $5,000, but we're getting each webinar sign up for about $8, $9 or so. That's actually really good because it is targeting our ideal client profile and the lifetime value of our customer is— it's high, right? And so it's worth it for us to do webinars. But even if you do live shopping, we're talking TikTok, whether it's live webinars or live shopping, webinars crush it all day. I don't know why people don't do it more. I don't even know why we stopped doing it for a while. But I can tell you that from that one webinar, I believe It seems like we probably got at least 5 to 10 qualified leads from it. And that's, that's actually really good for us. And now we're actually looking at how do we ramp that even more because we know it works for us. Again, these are tried and true tactics. This is old marketing that still crushes it today. And sometimes what's old is new. Next up, section 3, I want to talk about what is a classic. It's a classic that consistently delivers, and that is email marketing. It's not sexy, but is the backbone of consistent revenue. Now, when you think about email marketing, the ROI— Litmus did a survey here. 2,000 marketers were surveyed and they found that the average ROI for email marketing was 36 to 1. In some cases, it's 45 to 1. It is such a good way not only drive continual value to your audience, because keep in mind, 99% of people are usually not in market to buy your solution. So you continue to nurture them and that's how you're going to get an ROI. And the beauty of this is email allows you to add more value to stay top of mind. And maybe every 4 to 5 emails that you send, you can start to ask for one thing directly, right? I'll share another story with you. There's a concept known as the 9-word email, and this 9-word email drove $100 million in revenue, and it's very simple. So this person was selling yachts, and oftentimes people aren't in market to buy a yacht. And so the simple 9-word email was, hey Eric, are you still in market to buy a yacht right now? That's all, because people are busy, people forget these things, and you can just send these every now and then. Even people that maybe you pitched on your services or your product, maybe you circle back 90 days later, hey, are you still in market to buy this, right? Or in some cases in the past, I would email my list and we'd get a lot of people signing up for it that were interested in a private event that Neil and I would do. We would say, hey, are you interested in hanging out with Neil Patel and Eric Siu in Beverly Hills. And we get a lot of signups that way, right? So that's what's worked out well for us in the past. But email marketing, I don't think it's going away. It's a nice way— like, if you have a lead magnet, you get people to opt in. Or if you have a cool app, you can get people to log in. It's often the first thing that people go for because the value of emails is so high. If you don't have a strong organic presence, maybe you're not good at SEO, maybe you're not good at Instagram, for example, well, that's okay. Again, like I mentioned earlier, you can go and on Meta ads, Google ads. You can buy these emails and you got to think about what numbers work for you. But I'll just tell you that, look, if it's 36 to 1 ROI, even it's a 10 to 1 ROI, you do this all day. You milk this as much as you can until you can't milk it anymore. Number 4 is direct mail. You might think direct mail is dead, but like I said earlier, what's old is new again because we're in the AI world. People like to receive physical things, right? And by the way, when you can send physical things that stand out, maybe you FedEx someone something, they're going to open it. Your open rate is going to be extremely high. So actually, a 2024 research done by market intelligence company Compare Media, they found that direct mail had the highest ROI of any marketing channel for 84% of 1,000+ employee companies. So this has continued to rise up from 67% in 2022. That is insane because again, people are so— by 2022, everyone's stuck at home, right? People are more used to receiving things. People like things that are customized to them. I remember now this is hardcore direct mail, but there's an example of someone in mergers and acquisitions that's trying to buy distressed companies. And what he does is he sends people customized swords, right? So these customized swords, they include a letter. The letter basically says that, hey, I know that you've been through war. I know that you've been through tough times. I know that you've had to fight through all this. How about you get a partner? And basically that's how he pitches these companies to buy them. And I believe that it was a 99% response rate that he had from sending out these swords. So think about how you can be creative in these situations. Direct mail works. I'll give you another example. I have a friend who has a direct mail company and he actually helped a recent president come up with messaging that totally crushed crushed it. I'm not going to say what the messaging is because I don't want this to be polarizing, but that is a message that everyone here in America at least has seen. Or I'm in America, but if you're not, you might have seen this around the world as well. But direct mail, he said that message absolutely smashed it. He thinks he made a big impact on that presidential election. Now, number 5 is a little newer. It's not decades old, but it is a little newer. And this is short-form video. Now, short-form is— you can get a lot of views, but people are like, well, how's it actually going to drive to my bottom line? Well, I actually think Clue.ly has done a good example of this. They know how to drive distribution. They know how to make viral short-form videos. So I'll give you an example here. So Clue.ly, what they do is they help you cheat on interviews, for example. Or imagine that you're on a virtual date, okay? So it's a gal and it's a guy. The guy's talking about football, okay? The gal has no clue. She doesn't know anything about football, but she has a heads-up display that shows talking about Neymar, right? Neymar, one of the football players, and like different, uh, why she likes Neymar, for example. So that allows her to keep the conversation going. Now, I remember that video got about 4 million views or so, but more importantly, everyone in the comments was like, what app is that? What app is that? What app is that? Right? And then everyone just keeps saying Clue.ly, Clue.ly, Clue.ly, Clue.ly. So then Clue.ly starts to occupy more mindshare. It starts to occupy more of the conversation. And obviously they're going to drive a lot more distribution. They're going to drive a lot more awareness, not only just from acquiring more customers, but also recruiting more influencers, recruiting more people. And that's what they've done. They've recruited about— at this point, they've recruited about 50 short-form video people and they want to continue to recruit more. And you can also recruit from communities such as WAP. There's a lot of these different places that you can recruit for, for your short-form content. Number 6, you got organic reach. So when you think about organic reach, you think about YouTube long-form, you think about LinkedIn, you think about X, whatever is relevant at the time. You want to maximize the shots on goal that you get, okay? So that's why I am focused so much on, on YouTube right now, because I think YouTube has so much long-term potential. But how good are the ideas do we have, okay? That matters a lot. How good is our packaging from a thumbnail From a headline standpoint, how good is the first 30-second retention? All that stuff matters. You have to learn how to play the game on these different platforms. But when you have organic reach, you want to maximize it because it's not going to be there forever. Eventually what happens is all organic reach goes down. I think about SEO from 15 years ago. SEO was very much the only organic game in town. And even SEO today, the website traffic that you're getting is getting cannibalized by AI overviews or AI mode. And so all this stuff is changing. So whenever you can strike when the iron is hot, you want to maximize that. So this has been happening for a while, but I don't think enough people are paying attention to distribution, especially founders. And they have to understand now it's not necessarily your product that's going to stand out over time because that is becoming more generally available to people. It is how do you go about getting— gaining distribution, right? You can do what the Clueless people do. Maybe it's a little more controversial, maybe it gets more headlines, or you can try to be more entertaining. And that's what it is. Real quick, if you are looking for a new gig and you're into marketing, we are hiring more AI-forward people at Single Grain. So we're looking to hire AI-forward paid media people, AI-forward SEO people, AI-forward salespeople. If you're looking to join a tech-enabled services business, which means a combination of technology, so SaaS and agency, then Single Grain is the company for you. So all you need to do is go to singlegrain.com/careers. You can refer your friends as well. I guarantee you this is going to be the best place for people to grow who want to be AI-forward and who want to be cutting edge when it comes to marketing. So again, singlegrain.com/careers. All right, number 7, you got search everywhere optimization. So wait, what is that? I thought SEO was search engine optimization. No, it's search everywhere optimization now. And that means that the attention is now everywhere. The last section I just talked about how SEO, the website traffic is getting cannibalized. Yeah, the game has changed. Attention is now everywhere. If you're trying to optimize for shopping, search on shopping is, oh wait, that's Amazon. Wait, that might be a little bit of Pinterest. Oh wait, I think I need to do YouTube too because it's the second largest search engine in the world. Oh, I think my community is hanging out on Reddit. So because attention is so disparate now, you have to think about where are your customers first and foremost. That's marketing 101. And second, how do you play the game well on these channels? Because SEO now is no longer just Google. It has changed. The attention has shifted over time. You've got to learn how to play the game, not only just with SEO but across the board. Even though website traffic is dying, I think the next 5 years you're still gonna have a great opportunity to create a lot more transactional content to rank higher because a lot more people are, are trying to throw away their SEO. They don't know what to do. What's happening now is people are getting less clicks, right? But that doesn't mean that website traffic is completely dead. You want to maximize it. You want to look at it as a cigar butt. You got a few more puffs left. You want to take a few more puffs, take advantage of that while you learn the games and nuances of the other channels where your customers are actually hanging out. So that now search everywhere optimization. You can no longer say you just want to do traditional SEO because the game has changed. Now, number 8, the last strategy of this series is podcasts. Now, podcasts have been around for a while and they might feel a little overplayed because you're seeing them everywhere. You see them in Reels, you see them on YouTube. But I'll tell you what, on YouTube alone, podcasts are receiving 1 billion views a month. And I'm talking about short form, okay, from podcast creators. And that number is continuing to steadily rise. Why do podcasts? Well, I'll tell you why. So when I record Marketing School, Marketing School is 80 minutes a week with my podcast co-host. Neil, and we get a lot of short-form clips from it. We also get mid-form clips. I like to call them mid-form. These are maybe 3 to 10 minutes or so. We can publish those to LinkedIn, we can publish those to X. The short-form, obviously you publish those to Snap, to YouTube Shorts, to Instagram Reels, to TikToks, and you're getting more shots on goal. And I look at social media— we talked about organic social media earlier— I look at organic social media as a slot machine. You just don't know what's gonna hit. And so right now I have one reel on my Instagram that came from the podcast that I with, with marketing school. And that one has— we're coming up on 800,000 views, and I think it'll continue to climb, maybe over a million or so. And you just don't know what's gonna hit, but that's getting you the awareness that you typically wouldn't expect, right? And you want that awareness because, again, 99% of people aren't in market to buy. And you want people who typically— by the way, when they think about an agency such as Single Grain or like our software Carrot, there's so many things going on, and you just need to kick the engine a little bit, kick their brain a little bit, just like, oh yeah, I actually need that Oh yeah, I actually need that product, right? The game here is you want to stay top of mind for people, and that's a combination of strategies that we mentioned from this series, right? Again, combine live webinars because there's gonna be a lot more slop that's being created on YouTube, right? A lot more slop with podcasts. And so how do you stand out from that? Well, the game's gonna continue to shift. Maybe you're doing more webinars, maybe you're doing more lives, right? I would say you want to revisit this video to think about, hey, what actually makes sense for me right now? What's actually changing? What doesn't make sense anymore? And that's the game with marketing. The goalposts are constantly shifting. All right, so that's it for this video. These strategies may seem quote unquote boring, right? But many of them have been delivering real measurable results for decades, and the newer ones are showing promise of a similar future. If you want to learn more about modern strategies that I'm implementing in my business, you want to check out my talk over here at the YPO Global Marketing Summit where I break things down.