In this Marketing School Live episode, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss practical steps for newcomers to digital marketing and the strategic choice between personal and corporate branding. They advise aspiring marketers to gain experience through unpaid work, internships, and certifications such as Google Ads and Facebook Blueprint, emphasizing hustle and tangible proof of skill (e.g., long-form content). The conversation then shifts to branding, where both agree that building a corporate brand (e.g., Single Grain) offers higher valuation multiples and longevity compared to a personal brand, which can die with its founder. They illustrate this with examples like Tony Robbins and discuss acquisition preferences, arguing that buyers prefer companies over individuals because companies retain value beyond a single person. The episode blends actionable career guidance with strategic branding insights for marketers and entrepreneurs.
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If you were coming out of college right now or wanting to make a move to digital marketing from an unrelated career, what advice would you have or where to begin? Episode 10 of our podcast talks about this, what you need to do exactly, but I actually just talked to somebody earlier that came from our Meetup page. I think if you're looking to start, you don't necessarily have to go to college or anything like that. Neil and I are actually pretty against that. Work for someone for free, right? I mean, when I first started out, I offered to I learned first and then I went to somebody else, offered to work for free, started getting my feet wet, got an internship, learned a lot. They gave me a lot of training, a lot of courses. There's a bunch of those people out there. I mean, even for us right now, we're always looking to hire more talented marketers, especially paid advertising people. And we're realizing now that we actually need to set training up where people can go into Digital Marketer and their training course so they have a really strong library. Even the AdWords certification, I think just to prove that you've done it when you haven't established any credibility, it shows that you've done something, right? Or the same thing with with Facebook Blueprint. So I think those things are important and then also getting them to prove, show that they're scrappy, right? We had one guy from our team that wrote like an 8,000-word post on Medium before joining our team. That's the kind of hustle that we expect.
You pretty much answered it. Just go out there and go test shit out and learn and then go get a job.
Ooh, Neil, you're gonna like this one. Is there a better between personal branding or business branding? E.g., neilpatel.com versus singlegrain.com.
You want to go first or me?
Well, I already know your answer, so you go.
What are you going to say?
You're going to go with the company.
Yeah. So he knows me quite well. We've known each other for I think 6, 7 years?
Yeah.
So Eric's brand is Single Grain. My brand is Neil Patel. Okay, let me ask you guys a question. If you guys were Google here and you were acquiring a company, Would you rather buy a person or would you rather buy another company?
Company.
Company. Why would you not want to buy a person?
Because the person is smart and they leave.
That's right. This is why Tony Robbins has a hard time selling his business. Tony Robbins can make cash and his brand could be a cash cow and hopefully Tony stays around for a very long time, but once Tony passes away, what happens to the business? Yeah, there's still maybe some money coming in, but it pretty much dies with him. That's what happens with personal brands. You want to have a corporate brand. Don't brand yourself personally like I did.
Oops.
All right. I didn't try. I just had a site and it got traffic.
So— And plus it's a bigger multiple, right?
It's what?
It's a bigger multiple when you're selling a corporation versus a personal brand.
That's correct. I'm worth as much as revenue I drive from Neil Patel. Versus a company can sell for 3, 4x profit or revenue. Do not focus on a personal brand. I don't know why everyone wants to be popular and famous. I'm not saying I am.
This is coming from a guy that has a company called ImKindOfABigDeal.LLC.
Yeah, that's true. Touché. The only reason I have it is it's supposed to be a name of a book on personal branding and it would start off being like, hey, you know, the person who's kind of a big deal isn't me, it's actually you. And I was going to motivate people into building their brand because the best way to get a promotion in the corporate world, from what I've seen from the outside, is being well-known. People pay a lot for brands.
We're doing Marketing School Live here in the Cross Campus building in downtown LA, and it's a chance for us to get to meet our fans and our 6 million downloads after, what, a little over a year?
