The Best Alternative to Facebook Ads (Hint: It's Not Google) | Ep. #807

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about the best alternative to Facebook ads. Hint, it's not Google. So there's a couple different things that you can do here. And the key thing here, Neil and I were just talking about this a second ago, is being creative. Neil, what is it? We can call it different phrases. There's different words for this too.

Yeah, the industry knows it as growth hacking. You look at companies like Dropbox, Slack, they've leveraged growth hacking techniques like referral-based programs, using invite flows, figuring out how to optimize their onboarding to grow faster. Companies like Amazon, instead of spending all their money on marketing, what they do is their creative strategy is just undercut everyone on price. Companies like Zappos, their version of growth was you come in, you buy a shoe from Zappos, a lot of times, They'll just automatically upgrade you to second-day air or next-day air for free. And they started doing this back before there was Amazon Prime and that was all popular. So if you look at a lot of these concepts, they're not necessarily standard in which one way is to grow. It's more so you have to get creative and figure out what other people within your niche and industry aren't doing yet.

Yeah, so a mutual friend of ours, his company does $150 million a year. And he's built— he comes from— his background is in hosting. And then he opened the, that the, like a website security company as well. And then he's got this other company and, you know, really a lot of his business has come from channel partnerships, kind of what Neil's alluding to. But this one is, we can also call this affiliate marketing too, because the deal behind this is that a lot of these other people out there, when you're building a service or a product, for example, They have your customers already. So why is it that you need to reinvent the wheel and pay a lot of money for ads when you can actually just go to these people, build a good relationship, and then figure out how you guys can both win on a solid partnership?

Yeah, it's all about getting super creative and figuring out what you can do that others aren't. Most people think that you have to come up with these ideas, which is false. Now, a lot of other people also believe that you can just copy Dropbox and what worked for them will work for you, which in most cases is also false. But what you want to do is you want to see what's working for other people that aren't in your industry. Take those concepts and see if you can apply them to your industry. And that's what's unique because when something hasn't been tested in your space yet, it's much more likely to work versus if you test something that people have already used time and time again within your space.

Yeah, and this is why I don't particularly like it. I mean, unless you're building like a Facebook or you're building a Google, a very scalable business that has great network effects, I would, if you're starting out, really focus on, we can call them growth hacking techniques. We can call them doing channel partnerships, different types of programs. I would focus on that, right? That way, actually, I was just looking at a report this morning, Buffer, which does about, I think, $18 million annual recurring revenue, their SaaS product. And in the tweet I was looking at, the tweet that was linking to the blog post, they only spent in the last month, they only spent $3,000 on ads. Where did all the other marketing dollars go to? Right? So, you know, a lot of these companies out there, they're realizing nowadays that they can't just rely on Facebook ads because what happens is Facebook or Google actually is, you know, over time the ads are going to get more and more expensive. So what do you do? How can you build something defensive— defensible? And, you know, doing Dropbox types of referral programs or doing channel partnerships is a way to get leverage, to build leverage, to make sure that you're not just relying on these types of, you know, channels like Facebook ads.

So what Eric and I thought would be interesting during this episode would be to discuss some of the creative growth strategies that we use to grow our companies. And some of them may not be like mind-shocking, where you're like, oh my God, this is crazy. But I bet you, you guys aren't doing all of these. So I'll start off. One simple thing that I do to continually get more traffic to my websites is using push notifications. You've seen them, everyone's familiar with them. But very few people take the time to use push notifications on your site. There's a lot of free tools out there. Go and check any of them out. But it's a simple way to get more repeat visitors. Think of the rule of 7. Someone sees your brand 7 times, they're much more likely to convert.

Yeah, so let's see, what else do I have on my end that's— what did we talk about recently? I'm trying to think.

Well, what do you do that's creative that no one else does?

I mean, I think we do everything that everyone does.

Not necessarily. What's your chat strategy? Most people don't use your chat strategy to generate more leads and customers.

Okay. Yeah. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about chat. So if you go to, actually, if you go to marketingschool.io or if you go to singlegrain.com right now, we have these little chats set up, right? And the way that they're set up, it's not just, hey, do you want to chat with us? We actually have custom bots set up. that are intended to generate a conversation with somebody and then guide them to the right people. So these types of chatbots will basically segment you into the right funnel. So for example, if you're interested in Neil's marketing courses, we'll put you in a segment, right? Or if you're interested in services, for example, we'll put you into a different segment. But the idea behind that is that you're leveraging what you have already, and then you're leveraging the power of the bot. So you don't need to have a human being there all the time. So that's one thing that we do to drive leads. And we actually got a sale actually within a couple of days from someone that was looking for services immediately. And that was someone that reached out during like a random time in the early AM. So it does work.

And another strategy that I use that most people don't is I consider free tools, not just a quote unquote freemium type of play. I look at it as a marketing play by releasing stuff for free that other people charge for. And I do this with a tool called Ubersuggest. I'm getting now around 5,000 brand queries per day. Just from people Googling the term Ubersuggest because I'm giving away a free tool that most people charge for. That's another hack I use. And I know Eric and I were talking a bit about this earlier before we started the podcast episode. Another hack that we both use, and Eric will go into this, is what we're doing with marketing school and our free event.

Yeah, so actually this dovetails into our ending actually. So around our free event, what we're trying to do right now is, well, we're trying to get more ratings, reviews, and shares to help grow our audience faster. And what we're doing is we're putting a carrot in front of people. We're saying, hey, look, if you're able to help us grow this podcast from— we're now on track for about 800,000 downloads a month, right?

Yeah, 800, 850, something like that. I don't know. It's somewhere there. By the time this episode comes out, hopefully it's higher than that.

Because you're going to help us get there.

That's right.

If you're watching the video, I'm giving you a thumbs up right now. But point is, we're trying to get to a million, right? We started doing this promotion at about like 750 or so. And what we did was basically start to ask. We said, hey, look, we're going to ask. But at the same time, when we hit this 1 million number, We're going to do a live event, both Neil and I, where we're going to be in LA and you guys can all show up. The point is, when you— it's almost like a quid pro quo thing, right? You know, we scratch your back, you scratch ours kind of thing. And you can apply the same kind of concept to marketing.

Yeah, and our overall concept of this was, if you help us get to 1 million listens a month, we'll throw a free event. No one has to pay, free food. We're not going to pay for your travel over to the event. It's going to be held in Los Angeles. But the purpose is, and we'll livestream it too, just in case if some of you guys can't attend or if we can't livestream, we'll at least record it and push that out online. But the purpose of this is for us, we felt that was a better growth hack than just paying for ads and sending that to our podcast. We're like, you send ads, yeah, we're getting people, but that's not really helping people. We'd rather spend that money that we would have paid for ads to just throw an event and help you guys all out for free, teach you more marketing stuff. As well as give you guys some amazing networking opportunities.

Actually, Neil, that's a good point. One of the episodes we did probably about, I want to say 4 to 6 weeks ago, was about how to make an irresistible offer. So, the fact that we're doing this event for free where typically we might charge ahead, like we've done the survey where people will pay $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 to spend like a day or two with us, we're doing it completely free. So, it's a good offer. Yeah.

So, instead of charging $1,000 a ticket like most conferences, it's free.

Yep. There you go. So that is it for today. And by the way, you got to help us get there right now. Like Neil mentioned, we're at about 800, 850 or so, somewhere around that range. We got to get to a million within a 30-day period. Go to marketingschool.io/stats to check how we're doing. But what you got to do is you got to rate, review, subscribe this podcast. Say whatever you want. It could be a 1-star, it could be a 5-star, whatever. But we'd like a 5-star. And we will see you tomorrow.

Bye.