In this video Eric Siu outlines seven marketing trends he expects to dominate 2021, offering practical advice and tool recommendations for each. He starts with the power of community, emphasizing the defensibility of building owned audiences and moving them into platforms like Facebook groups, Discord, Circle, or live events, and encourages documenting the journey publicly. He then discusses automated account‑based marketing, using tools such as metadata.io to target multiple decision‑makers across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and leveraging retargeting pixels in email. The third trend is GPT‑3, which he views as a useful but limited content‑generation aid—good for headlines and short copy but unlikely to replace human creativity. Fourth, influencer marketing is presented as underpriced attention, especially in niche verticals like gaming. Fifth, an omnichannel approach to content repurposing is highlighted, with dedicated roles for turning a single piece of content into dozens of assets across YouTube, IGTV, podcasts, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Sixth, the subscription economy (Substack, Patreon, OnlyFans) is identified as a growing revenue model, with Siu noting his own Marketing School Pro offering. Finally, SMS marketing is championed for its 90%+ open rates, with tools like community.com used for announcements and idea gathering. Throughout, Siu mixes instructional tone with enthusiastic encouragement, and ends with a call‑to‑action to comment, subscribe, and check out his upcoming book.
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Alright, so let's talk about the top marketing trends for 2021. Number 1 is the power of community. And what I mean by that is that one of the most defensible things you can do is to have a brand, to have a community, right? So, there's 4 types of leverage. There you have code, capital, media, and labor, okay? Media is something that not a lot of people, not enough people think about. So, the whole idea is that You go out there, you build an audience, whether it's on Instagram or your blog or podcast or whatever. And then afterwards you start to put those people into a community, whether they hang out in a Facebook group or Discord channel, whatever it is exactly. Or there's actually a tool called Circle. But there are a lot of great tools for helping things move to the next step in terms of, hey, people listen to you, but how do you actually get people to hang out with each other? And obviously there's the— there's— we're talking live events as well, which is for Marketing School. What we've done is We do have a community and we have a Facebook community, we have a WhatsApp group, but we also have a live community as well where we get together every couple months and that goes a long way because now you're actually— human beings want to be hanging out with other human beings that are like-minded. I think that's something that's very defensible that not enough people are thinking about. And even if you're just starting out right now, go ahead and document what you got going on, talk about your story, build in public, share what you're doing, share the numbers. People will become interested and you'll get some fans along the way. And people will see you grow up. It's like watching a reality show, right? A reality TV show. People either, they want to see you succeed and they wouldn't mind seeing you fail either because it's entertainment. That's number one. Number 2 is account-based marketing, but from an automated standpoint. So instead of just reaching out to, let's say I'm trying to reach out to Coca-Cola, instead of just reaching out to the VP of marketing, now I'm going to reach out to the accounts. I'm going to reach out to most of the decision makers on the marketing team or someone that's higher up, maybe director level plus. And, um, I might use a tool like metadata.io and this will automatically target my, my dream companies that I want to work with and it'll target them on LinkedIn, target them on Facebook. I believe Twitter is an option as well. And there's a whole host of other things you can do. When you email people, you can drop your retargeting pixel in there and then you can follow them around, nurture them with more content. But the whole idea here is that we have new technologies now. So let's go ahead and use those technologies and let's not be in the Stone Age, right? So this is a little bit of sales, a little bit of marketing as well. Number three is GPT three. So I'm a little skeptical of GPT three in its current form. I'm hopeful, but GPT three is basically the ability to help you create text, automated text, right? So it could be it can help you create headlines. It can actually write entire articles for you. And I've actually read articles where I couldn't tell the difference between a human being versus GPT three. So it is run by this company called OpenAI, and you can request beta access for it. Or maybe by the time you watch this, maybe it'll be open. My skepticism with this is that every, if everyone's using this, everyone's going to get to that, that parity level. And everyone's going to be churning out a bunch of useless content, right? I am hopeful in terms of this being good for maybe headline writing or tweet creation as well. I'm not sure about it actually being, because GPT-3 needs to pull from a lot of data. So human beings still need to create. So I think this is going to be something that's great in terms of helping simple content tasks, but like actual original pieces, completely original. I think we're still gonna need human beings and that's a good thing because human beings will take care of creativity. Let's let the machines take care of the scaling, all right? Number 4 is influencer marketing. And so, before you roll your eyes, obviously I live in LA so influencer marketing is, it's big around here. What I would say is it's still underpriced attention because if you go to, let's say I wanna work with gaming influencers, the attention is really underpriced right now in that if someone has millions of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of views per video, and they're charging a couple hundred dollars, that's a big arbitrage opportunity. So I'm not saying this is the same across the board. I'm just saying you might have an opportunity there depending on the industry that you're working in. All right. Number 5 is having— taking an omnichannel approach, which I've talked about. I do a trends video every year. Last year I talked about going omnichannel. If you have a piece of content like a YouTube video, chop it up, throw it on IGTV, chop it up into little shorter clip videos, YouTube, throw it up on podcasts as well, throw it up on Twitter, throw it up on LinkedIn. So one piece can become 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 pieces. And what I— the trend that I'm seeing more of now is that people understand that they need to make content, but more people are starting to hire people that specifically are geared towards repurposing content, right? So content repurposers, or you want to call them historical content marketers, whatever it is exactly. I'll give you an example. One of my buddies, he has 3 full-time people just dedicated to updating content on his website. And then he has like other people on the team that are dedicated to repurposing for other channels. And so, it's really important to be able to do that because if you think about it, when you're posting to social or when— let's say you're watching this video right now, one of my reasons for doing this video is to get more subscribers. What do subscribers get me? It gets me more reach. What does reach get me? It gets me more opportunities, right? So, I'm just trying to reach more people as I continue to teach. And then number 6 is There's a trend right now, whether you want to look at Substack or Patreon or OnlyFans, there is this subscription economy that's going on where people will create newsletter content or whatever video content and they'll charge you a monthly subscription. So I do think that's a trend. And that's actually something that we're doing with Marketing School, where we have a program called Marketing School Pro, where you pay a dollar and then we'll give you access to certain things and you pay after 14 days, you'll pay for the year. And that's something that our audience has asked for. And it just makes sense. We'll do a subscription. We'll see how it goes. And I think it's definitely worth checking out. If you think you're a good writer, go do a Substack. Think you're a good creator, go do Patreon. And OnlyFans, by the way, isn't just for adults, adult-only content. There's comedians that hang out on there as well. So just think about what makes sense to you and where your audience hangs out, and then you can create this kind of premium subscription content. And then last but not least, I want to talk about SMS marketing, right? Basically using a tool like community.com, or there's a whole host of other SMS tools you can use to just market to people because we know that text messages, there's a 90+% open rate. So obviously you don't want to abuse it. For us, when we use community.com, we just make announcements or we ask for topic ideas that people would like to see us cover. And that's basically it. But if we know that we have a weapon there and the open rates are a lot higher, and we know typical email open rates are 10%, just think of it this way. We have a list of, let's say we have a list of 100 people and open rate is 90%. That's actually, we're talking 9 times more effective than than an email list, right? Think of it that way. You don't need as many subscribers as an email list and the quality is a lot higher. All right, so let me know what you think I missed in the comments and don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button. And I got the book coming out, been working on it for years, levelingup.com if you want a free chapter of it. And if you want to buy it, you want to support me, just go to your favorite online retailer, like a retailer like an Amazon, just type in Leveling Up Eric Siu and we will catch you later.
