How Peloton Does Marketing

In this clip, we are going to talk about how Peloton does marketing. But before we do, if you like clips on entrepreneurship, marketing, and growth, don't forget, whatever channel you're coming from, don't forget to subscribe. So Peloton, I actually got a Peloton bike about 2 months ago, and today I hit my 50th ride actually. And I remember in the morning I was doing the ride, and then at the very end, uh, the instructor called out my name, right? Um, I was like, oh, happy 50th, right? And I saw people giving me high fives today, so that was great too. So it comes at an opportune time. Peloton. Is, you know, the way this business works is they sell different workout equipment to you. So you might pay $2,000, $3,000 or so, and you can finance it. You can pay like, you know, $50, $60 a month or something like that. And then you end up paying this monthly subscription fee. So you pay $39 a month, at least for the bike. They also have a treadmill as well, and they have other types of workouts. Like there's meditation classes, there's weight training. It's great because it's gamified. It's, you're constantly competing with yourself or you're competing with people in the room. Where you're competing with your friends and you're hitting streaks all the time. I find myself always sharing my workouts with my friends just to get the competitive juices going. And so they are a great business overall, and that's why they, that's why they deserve to IPO. And that's why they beat out, that's why they beat out SoulCycle. So IPOing is, you know, becoming a publicly traded company. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to score Peloton on 5 different things. I'm going to score them on SEO, content, general marketing, conversion rate optimization, and paid ads. So I'm looking at how they do marketing from a digital perspective. A company that has gone public is a company that's really good. It's a solid company, right? So I'm looking at their homepage right now and this is above the fold and I do actually like the videos of people moving, right? You can actually see it in action. It's like different settings, different types of people, different workouts in here and you just get it immediately, right? And it's game-changing cardio comes home. Like the headline is crystal clear and like as I said before, David Ogilvy said 80 cents on a dollar is already spent on the headline. All right, so it has get the bike, get the tread. You have 2 options to go with, right? It's crystal clear how this works. They do have, as we go through their site, they have a chat button on the bottom. It looks like they're using Drift and we're coming down here. The best cardio machine on the planet. Boom, there's a testimonial right there. Try the bike worry-free for 30 days. Boom, automatically you take out the worry in people like how much is it gonna cost? You know, Can we try it for free? Right? You're taking away kind of the objections that they have. Bring the Peloton bike home for no money down. Boom. Taking the objections away. 'Cause for a lot of people, price is going to be the biggest objection. So bring the Peloton bike home for no money down. Learn more. $58 a month for 39 months, $0 APR financing, no money down, right? Experience Peloton at a showroom near you. So, oh, I'm not sure if I want to invest so much in this thing. Great. You know what? Go to the local mall, try it out. You can go for a test run or a test ride. And they're just defeating all the objections on the homepage, okay? Now, as we scroll down here, they have, you can start a live chat, they have a support center, they're collecting emails, and you can see they have a good footer, so they're making use of their footer from an SEO perspective, and then they have their Instagram, their social buttons on the very bottom. So YouTube's a big thing for them, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, okay? Now, why don't we take a look at, let's say, their bike page over here. Take a look at their bike page, and as we scroll down, you can see, again, there's more social proof, right? You can see it's 4.8 out of 5, that's their rating. More social proof, like USA Today, Good Housekeeping. You can watch a film on it too. And, um, you know, design is solid. You can actually see it in action. Boom, there's a popup here. Like they're making uses, they're making use of popups too. And in the top right corner you can see it's a scrolling navigation and it shows the price right there. You can buy it upfront or you pay it, you can, you can finance it and you can just buy it right there. Um, they talk about the home trial reviews, all this other stuff, right? So, This is just looking at the website itself. I want to look at their SEO. And right now, I mean, Peloton, they're still a fairly new company. I think they started in maybe 2012 or so. And so what you can see here is domain rating is 75 out of 100. Okay. So, you know, each level you go to, I mean, you know, 100 is the best. 75 is pretty decent. Um, our, our blog alone is at 77. Um, they have about 4,700, uh, basically let's just call it 5,000 websites linking to them. Which is decent. And, um, their traffic value is $135,000. So if they're paying for their traffic on Google, just their organic traffic, they'd be paying $135,000 a month. And we can now see, let's take a look at the top pages on their site and see the type of stuff that they rank for, right? So they rank for Peloton treadmill. A lot of this is branded. So let's do Peloton over here and then let's hit any target and then let's only look at keywords. And let's see what pops up over here. So they rank for cycling class, they rank for, um, they rank for their instructor's name. So some of these instructors I follow, like Robin and Ali Love, um, Peloton shoes, international mall. A lot of these keywords are actually fairly irrelevant. Um, so they could use a little more help from a link building perspective. And we'll take a look at their content in a second as well. But also looking at the keywords that they rank for, uh, domain authority is decent. So there's probably something off right now in terms of, um, you know, their content marketing strategy because SEO and content go hand in hand. So I would say, you know, if we go back and look at their overview, um, we, what we can look at is we can also look at, you know, who their top competitors are in the space, right? So if I scroll down here, um, actually let's look at this organic search. You can see that the, the blue graph over here, they basically flatlined. Um, it's not really going up or down. Um, I will say though, they are ranking for a lot more organic keywords, which is great. So maybe they are investing into, um, into SEO. But if I want to look, their traffic value is $135,000, right? If I went to bicycling.com in Ahrefs, so let's do that. Let's look at their overview. They have 17,000 domains linking to them. Their domain rating is 79. They rank for 700,000 keywords and their traffic value is $719,000. Okay. So that, that's the depth. I mean, you can just look at, um, or not the depth, but the gap in difference between their competitors and you can see, They rank for performance bike, folding bike, mountain bike, Tour de France, fat tire bike, and things like that. Okay? So they're way ahead from an SEO and content perspective. Now, if we go back to the Peloton website, if we, we don't see a blog at the top. Usually I like to have some type of blog or resources that people can check out. It's purely for them, it's coming from like a sales perspective, right? So what I would look at is, I do wanna take a look at the reviews. Let's see what's going on here from a reviews perspective. So they put all the reviews here. That's great from an SEO perspective. You always have a new, a lot of new user-generated content that's coming to the site. So that's good. And then when we come down over here, let's take a look at their, um, you can see their blog is right there. I'm trying to see if they have any other resources. Doesn't seem like it. So let's click on the blog, blog.onepeloton.com. I would prefer that the blog is not on a subdomain because it has been shown in the past. I've done this in the past too. Where if you put on a subdomain instead of a subfolder, the traffic can go down 5 to 10% or so. So onepeloton.com, ideally slash blog instead of blog.onepeloton. And here's, here's the thing, we're coming down here. So it says make a change in your life by taking these 3 steps. I will guarantee you that there's probably not a lot of people that are just typing in that kind of keyword. I'm not saying you should always think about keywords, but at least, you know, have a sense of how the volume is, what, how that keyword, or the topic opportunity is. If, you know, a topic like make a change in your life by taking these 3 steps, that's very vague, right? I think that's very inspirational, which is maybe what they're trying to do as a brand. Um, so we come down here, September 18th, um, figure out where your fear is rooted, visualize it, right? Um, which is vague to me and, uh, consider the cost, right? So I'm sorry, but this is garbage. This is a garbage piece of content. Okay. This piece of content, I mean, there's like one link in it, right? Ideally when you have a piece of content, it's helpful. It has a lot more utility to people. It's something that's evergreen. You know, people are willing to share, share it because it makes them look smart. Um, people want to share it with their loved ones, right? So 15 of our favorite Peloton workout mantras, like that is, that doesn't give me utility. Like I'm not going to, first of all, I'm not going to share mantras with people. Like who cares? I'm sorry, content person. They could be doing a lot better job when it comes to content because if you see my other teardowns of how like Adobe does marketing, they've got, publishers, they got really helpful content. Even if you look at MailChimp, really helpful content. You want to add value to people when you're creating content. Like there's so many things you can talk about when it comes to, uh, you know, working out, right? It's eating healthy ties in with working out, right? Sleeping well, the types of workouts that you're doing, the different tools, the different apps that you can use when it comes to working out. Like that's helpful too. And you get more and more traffic and you collect more and more emails. And I think that they're kind of, they're not kind of, they're really missing the mark on this. They have, again, they have a good domain authority. Or a good domain rating. And if, if you know, they create good content, more and more people are going to link to it. And if they create cool widgets, like maybe it's a quiz, you know, what kind of writer are you, right? Even a BMI calculator. There's a lot of those out there. Like a lot of people like to link to useful quizzes or, you know, calculators that are out there. So here's what I'm going to do from an SEO standpoint. I am going to give them a 14 out of 20. Now from a content standpoint, look, the website content is cool. But in terms of the helpful content and the content supporting SEO, I think they're really missing the mark here. So I'm going to give them a 12 out of 20 overall because I think the website does carry from a sales perspective. It does kind of carry over. And from a general marketing perspective, you know, looking at their, looking at their website again, it's really, really well done. They really put in a lot on branding. Um, it really makes a lot of sense that the website flows. And, um, I think from a general marketing perspective, uh, I would give them an 18 out of 20. And from a conversion rate optimization standpoint, again, they've got the right call to actions. Like, you know, the, I would say, look, there's a buy button here and there's a submit, but it's the same color. You probably want to change that up a little, contrast it. But honestly, I wouldn't harp too much on it because they're just button colors. Um, but you do want to, you know, dumb it down for people. You want to simplify it quite a bit. You know, I'm not, I'm not too much of a button colors person, but that does stand out to me. Um, I do like how the pricing is like right there. It's crystal clear. And again, they're covering all these objections. You know, when you go to the homepage over here, it's, hey, this is what we do exactly. We're game-changing cardio, right? From a CRO perspective, again, there's testimonials, there is social proof, they're hitting all the objections. I just think that's huge. And they have an app as well. You know, they're using a chatbot in the bottom right. Like, this is a high-dollar purchase, so having people there to support them is helpful. And I have seen them use pop-ups as well. So from a CRO perspective, I would give them an 18 out of 20. And then now finally we'll take a look at paid media so we can see onepeloton.com over here. Again, when I use a tool like Adbeat, I am looking at the trends. Sure, it says they're spending $2.3 million in the last 180 days. I take that with a grain of salt because oftentimes they're spending way more than that. But I am looking at the trends here and it looks like they are ramping up their spend. It's kind of spiking and they're spending a lot on YouTube, which makes a lot of sense because this is very visual. When you, when you hit their website, it's very visual, right? And YouTube, $1.3 million, Google, $669K, and then direct buys, $372K. So again, these ratios are probably correct for the most part, but the spend numbers are going to be off. So they're spending a lot on Google, right? They're spending a lot on YouTube just to educate people because a product like this, it requires product education. Google makes a lot of sense because people are searching for bikes all the time. So they're fulfilling that, um, that intent. And then as we come down here, they're spending money on programmatic, they're spending money on Amazon. It makes sense. You know, a lot of their spend is going towards the big markets, right? Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. And now let's take a look at their top ads. Like, I guarantee you, like, even before looking at this, I'm just like, vast majority of it is going to be video, right? I'm looking at this one over here. They've been running this one for a while and seen for 60 days over here. This is a PCMag Editor's Choice and they just basically take social proof and they just put it in as an ad. So I think that's great. There's a testimonial in here, it's rated, and then they're just sharing that ad and they've been using it for a while. 300 by 600, that's their display ad. We'll come down here. You can see that they're actually, they're running on Google Display as well, just the text. And they have a lot of native ads running too. Oh, and video ads too. Let's take a look at their video ads. This one's been running for about 66 days. That's their longest standing one. And, um, that's been longer than their typical Google Display ad. And check this one out. This is for their treadmill right here. This is a video and they have been, they just started running this one. It seems like they're spending a lot of money here. Um, it won't load right now, but you can kind of, you kind of get the gist of it. So $662K has been spent on this and this is advertising their new treadmill. I can see their other campaigns here. There's a Forbes bike review they've been running for 266 days. Okay. I'm just trying to see how serious they are when it comes to advertising. Um, apparently I can't pull up the data, but what I will say is based on the trends and based on where I'm seeing these, like where I'm seeing them spend, it makes a lot of sense. They know their target market. They know it takes product education. And, um, you know, I can't see how they're doing on Facebook, but it does seem like they're spreading their spend across pretty well. It seems like Amazon would make a lot of sense. So I would, you know, I would venture to bet that maybe Amazon would be something that they might want to spend more on because Amazon has video ads. And, um, coming down here, um, looking at this, when I think about advertising, they probably do this already, but buyscreen.com, they probably sell ads there. So how do I basically plaster that entire site because they have the intention already. So how do I take over that intention? If I'm not going to do this content and SEO game, if I don't, if I don't want to own that, maybe plaster your site with ads first, see how they perform. And if it performs really well, then I'll just buy the website. That's what I would do from a strategic perspective. And right down here too, it shows similar recommended profiles. Like any of these sites that you think you can buy ads from or any of these competitors, look at where they're buying ads from as well. So that's what I would say. So from a paid ad standpoint, I would rate them an 18 out of 20. So if we total everything up at the end of the day, They get an 80 out of 100. And what happened was the content score really dragged them down. They should be at a 90 or so, but content really, really, really hurt them. So that's what I'm gonna say, 80 out of 100 for Peloton. I love the product. I talk about it all the time. And let me know what you think I missed. Let me know if you agree or disagree with me. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, whatever platform you are coming from. And don't forget to check out the next video over there if you're coming from YouTube. And we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.