How Pray.com Does Marketing (They Have a Multi Billion Dollar Opportunity!!)

Today we are going to talk about how Prey does marketing. But before we talk about this, before we talk about this, whatever channel you're coming from, especially if you're coming from YouTube, hit the bell button if you wanna get notified. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button too. Subscribe whatever platform you are coming from if you wanna grow both professionally and personally. So Prey, this is my friend's company, Steve Gattena, and I've known him for a couple years, and I thought it would be fun, you know, during this holiday season, Uh, to talk about this business around, um, God. By the way, I'm not religious at all. Pray.com, what they basically do— let's take a look at their homepage over here first— is that they are the— they're the number one app for daily prayer and bedtime Bible stories. All right, so the way this business works is you can, you can basically sign into your community. So whatever church you're part of, You can sign up and then everyone can kind of engage with each other. So I think, look, when you talk about things such as pets, for example, right, people are fanatics about their pets. When you talk about religion, when you talk about politics, people are fanatic, fanatical about those things, right? There is immense potential to build communities within pray.com. I mean, look at that domain, pray. Come on, you have the power of, of God behind this business. There's no way it shouldn't work. We will start first by basically taking a look at their SEO. So basically we're scoring them on 5 different things: SEO, content, conversion rate optimization, paid media, and then we're looking at their general marketing too. If you're religious, you're, you're doing prayers, right? And then you might want to engage with other people. So it's perfect because it's something that you do every day. It's something that you believe in. Uh, it makes sense to have something like this, right? And then people are like this, look, after weeks of doctor visits and lab tests, I'm officially cancer-free. Look, people are like, you know, putting in prayers and they're liking it. Um, and you can give to your community too. You can donate to your community. If you have a community in the suburbs somewhere, um, and you have, you don't know how to do online marketing, you just make a community on pray.com and then basically pray.com will take a percentage of those donations. And then imagine like there's so many communities out there and they don't know what to do. Pray.com, they, their job is to ultimately build such a large online platform that, you know, everyone's just going to go to them when they want to create a community, right? If we open up Ahrefs, this is our SEO tool. We can see for pray.com, it's a really good domain name. Their domain rating, which is the orange section over here, it's only 53 out of 100. It's not that high, right? The higher domain rating that you have, the better. So if you're like 70 to 80 or so and you're pray.com, you can be damn sure that when people start to publish communities and there's a lot of user-generated content coming out, it's just going to naturally grow on its own. So an example of that might be TripAdvisor or might be Yelp where people are just writing reviews all the time and they just get bigger and bigger and bigger. They have all these different locations, they have all these different reviews. It's just a community that kind of continues to serve itself and serve other people. And it's easy, easily discoverable by search. Their biggest opportunity by far is in SEO. There's no reason SEO shouldn't work for them. It's crazy that SEO doesn't work. What I wanna draw your attention to here is domain rating's not that high, And referring domains, they only have 300 domains linking to them. Something is wrong here. Um, that's not that many different websites linking to you and they only rank for 16,000 keywords. You're telling me that there's so many different prey keywords, there's so many different communities. You're telling me that there's only 16,000 keywords that you can rank for. There's something wrong there. Okay. Traffic value is only $9,700 per month, meaning if I pay Google for that traffic, uh, I'd be paying $9,700 a month, which is actually not that much in spend in the grand scheme, right? So if we click this over here, sure, organic search, it looks like they're going up, but they should be growing exponentially right now. Something is wrong. All right, so let's take a look at their top pages and we can see that they actually do rank for some, some communities, right? So you can see over here, Hosanna Lakeville sounds like it's a community and then House of Hope Atlanta. That sounds like a community too. And so here's the idea. They rank number 10 for that keyword. If their domain rating or domain authority, whatever you want to call it, is so high, they should be top 2 or 3. Because if you look at the Yelps of the world, you look at the TripAdvisor of the world, usually when you're searching for a destination, they're usually ranking in the top 3 for that. If I just search like Punta Mita hotels, let's see how that goes. So you have the ads up here, you know, and then we scroll down, you have TripAdvisor's number 1 and the organic result. Expedia is number 4. So point proven, right? If your domain authority is so strong, you start to rank for those things. So when we, when we go back over here, it's like, okay, sure, you're ranking number 10 for these and there's a lot of possibilities. You know, this keyword gets 14,000 searches a month, you rank number 15 for it. So you're within striking distance on a lot of these. And when I say you're, I mean pray.com. It's like, okay, but how do you get more communities? How do you rank for more of those communities? But also from a content perspective, What type of content can you produce? Because I'm telling you right now, like anything that's religion related, it gets a lot of search volume because how many people religious in the world? Like a ton of people, right? From an SEO perspective, I'll give them a 2 out of 20 on this. Honestly, it's very early days, but if I'm running the company, SEO is a huge priority. I'm going out there, I'm hiring a really good SEO person like full time that understands technical SEO, that understands how to scale a large website. I would pull this person from a large company. Like a TripAdvisor or Yelp and saying, hey look, this is the opportunity right now. Like we got to go and I'm going to pay you good money for this. You know, if I need to pay like $150,000 to $200,000 to $250,000 for this person, give fat bonuses, like I do it because I bet a lot on this thing because this is quote unquote free traffic. You know what you do with that traffic once they come to your site, then you collect more emails, you market to those people, you remarket to those people, you use a consumer customer data platform like Lytics. And the sky's the limit. There's no way this shouldn't be successful. God, Steve, you should just make me an advisor. This is it on the on the on the SEO side. Two out of twenty. This is probably the lowest score we've given today. Sorry. The next part we're going to look at is the content portion over here. So let's go back. I mean, let's let's look at what they're doing. Let's look at Abundant Living Family Church. Okay, look Rancho Cucamonga. Well, you know, the question is this kind of goes back to SEO is like why aren't there breadcrumbs? Breadcrumbs meaning You know, we're under where it says Abundant Living Family Church. Why doesn't it have a structure where there's breadcrumbs leading from home to California to Rancho Cucamonga to Abundant Living Family Church? Because then you get a lot more internal links. You do that for every single community. You know, at the end of the day, how are search engines going to find all these pages? I think they have a lot of great developers. I think they have good designers. I don't think they have any person really kind of gunning on the SEO side right now. And that is super important for a site like this. And it's everything, right? We scroll down here. Actually, this community is fairly engaged. Really, there's something here because people are fanatics about their communities, about taking their kids to church. Like their life revolves around that. You can bet they're going to be donating and they're going to be really engaged. Um, you just have to make it easy for search engines to make it easy for these people to find their communities. Uh, at the end of the day, from a content perspective, I think with the communities, I think they're doing a good job, right? Um, you know, but what I would say is if I hit praydaily.com, okay, they make you download an app. Okay, fine. The question is, where's the blog? Where's the content? If Pray had a content team and they had an SEO, a really strong SEO, you know, just relying on the, you know, hey, like we're just going to build it and hope that they come, not going to work. Link profile is really weak right now. The app, sure, like it's super competitive to be like, an app that people continue to come back to. By the way, you get a strong SEO that understands App Store optimization too. Great, right? I mean, look, they have a lot of good user-generated content. I think they could be doing so much more internally to capture that search volume and then drive people into their communities. But from a content perspective, 10 out of 20. The next thing is general marketing. This kind of goes into CRO a little bit too, but if I look at the top right, that's usually when you want to— you want a person to take action is start listening to the right call to action. If it is the call to action, We need to contrast that a little more because right now it's a white box, right? Can we make it purple to call that out a little more? This website's supposed to be the guide, right? What does start listening mean? I'm kind of not sure what I'm going to get from that, right? So if I hit on start listening over here, start your subscription. Okay. Unlock premium audio. So it takes you right into it. Question here on the general marketing side is like, look, it's $50 a year. Can we do like a 7-day trial or something like that? I like how there's like unlock premium audio, but how do we drive people into maybe like, A seven-day trial, or like give them a little more social proof on this page before trying to drive them to getting them to take an action and pull out fifty bucks. Maybe collect some emails before before we try to drive people directly to start listing because I can guarantee you right now conversion rate on this is not that good. If we look at their socials, sure, you know they have twenty-three thousand followers and they're pushing a lot of content out. They're just sharing a lot of these Romans six two three. They're not publishing much to Twitter and I guarantee you like a lot of their audience is hanging out on Twitter. They probably need someone that's good on the social side too because something like this would do really well on just all the social channels across the board. So from a general marketing perspective, like the site is very minimalistic. Um, there's not a lot going on, going on. And I think the fact that people are trying to drive them directly to taking an action, there needs to be more context. There needs to be more of a story. Before people take out their hard-earned dollars. If I were to rate them on general marketing, 10 out of 20. I've been talking about CRO a little bit too, but how about we try to date the customer a little bit? We can look, we can throw up a Facebook chatbot, collect their information, market to them on Facebook because we know they hang out on Facebook, market. We can use a tool like ManyChat, hit them up with SMS, hit them up on email, hit them up on Facebook. We can collect all of that when we collect their information and we can drive them through a funnel. Um, and then try to just chat, chat with them, right? It's like, Hey, like what are you looking for? Are you looking to list a community? Are you looking to, um, are you looking to find a community? Like what are the main actions? And then try to drive them down that funnel, right? Or you can use a chatbot like Intercom. Intercom, you can use Drift, whatever it is exactly, right? So from a conversion perspective, I just think there's a lot of room to grow. 8 out of 20. So the last one is paid ads. Pray.com. Oh, I'm sorry. There's nothing on the pray.com advertising side. Uh, I cannot pull anything up right now. Let's see if we can pull anything up on Facebook ad library. So let's pull that up and then, um, let's look at Pray.com, 12,000 likes. Looks like they are running ads. Um, and the ads aren't too bad by the way. It's inspiring Bible stories. And, um, they're just trying to get people to install the apps. So it looks like they're primarily trying to drive app installs right now. Um, that might be working for them, but I just think, look, there's such a big opportunity on the, on the things that I've talked about that are going to bolster what you're doing from, from an advertising perspective. Advertising is you turn off the pump, your business is done. So how do you keep it going? And so, but you, if you bolster it with, with really strong search, like I have a friend, his business does about $15 million a year. We spend a good amount on ads, but like a lot of it's bolstered on search. I have another, another property I own, like the entire business is bolstered on search. I look at Single Grain, our business wouldn't be here if we were not strong on the search side of things. And marketing is a very competitive niche. So, you know, we look at how they're doing on Facebook side. Sure, like I get it, they're trying to drive app installs, but you can do more than that, right? Like on the Google side of things, why aren't there, why aren't there Google app ads? Why aren't there YouTube ads for driving app installs? There's a lot that can be done over there. There should be display ads too because something like this is so broad that you can actually leverage something like Outbrain or Taboola. When I think about from an advertising perspective, like what can be done on the TV side too? What can be done on the podcast side too? That's exciting, right? But again, like when I think about a company that is VC backed, what tends to happen is, you know, the board will say, hey look, let's start spending money on ads. You know, it's a formula. And this is why the entrepreneurs that I hang out with that understand search really well and understand business, like they are the strongest by far. Um, because it's such a strong advantage and they know how to leverage it. Most people don't know how to leverage it and it's, it's, it's a gift from God, right? That you can actually leverage search. So from a paid media standpoint, I would give them 10 out of 20. So if we total everything up, we would basically get 40 out of 100. When you look at the TripAdvisor and the Yelp of the world, There is no reason a site like this should not succeed. I mean, my God, if you gave it to me, it would be magic. We are actually doing a premium podcast for leveling up right now. Go to singlegrain.com/pro and you can sign up. We have a bunch of different tiers where we're testing out where we can do like monthly ask me anything, like a WhatsApp group. There's a lot that goes into that and we have an ad-free version as well. So go to singlegrain.com/pro, check it out, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.