The best marketing strategy to use in 2019
Eric Siu explains content sprouting: take one piece of content like a live video, then repurpose it into blog posts, podcasts, social clips, ads, and emails to reach audiences across channels. He walks through how to simulcast on multiple platforms, transcribe video into long-form posts, and use paid retargeting to amplify the same core idea.
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Here we are. And you know what's different today? Behold, we have all the books filled up here. We gotta fill up this section over here, but long hard work to get the books over here from my apartment. But today, today we're gonna talk about the best marketing strategy that you can use for this year and beyond. So what is that strategy exactly? And I'm trying to look at the bookshelf here to see kind of who's employing that strategy right now. And by the way, as you guys come in right now, what do you guys think the best marketing strategy is for this year and beyond? Curious to get your thoughts, curious to know kind of where you're coming from. Hello, Anil. Manav, I'm sure you're in here somewhere. And so the best marketing strategy, as I look at this bookshelf over here and we wait for some more people to come in, who is doing a really good job with that strategy? Hmm. Who could it possibly be? So I would say in the world of, let's see, entrepreneurship, this book and this book, these stand out right here. So this book over here, this book is called Get a Grip, and then I talk about the book Traction a lot from Gino Wickman. And then this book over here, this one's from John Doerr. This one's called Measure What Matters. And he did a TED Talk last year. So when I was at TED last year attending, he had a TED Talk. And he's a very popular venture capitalist. He does a lot of writings as well. And you see a lot of his interviews, right? So you kind of see him everywhere. This too, like in the entrepreneur world, traction is a framework a lot of people use, or they might use like a modification of that, which might be like scaling up. But the point is, these people, they're not just They're not just doing interviews, but they're in books as well, right? So the strategy— Do not disturb. Okay, cool. So I'm now on do not disturb, but anyway, so the strategy we're talking about is the omnichannel marketing approach, or what we're calling the content sprouting approach, because nowadays there's so much attention being, coming from all these different sources. Like, there's so many things vying for your attention, right? So when you're watching, for me, when I watch Netflix, sometimes I'll take out my phone and start watching YouTube videos, right? It's very counterintuitive, but if I get bored while watching Netflix, I might just turn on my YouTube, and I might just go do something else. Then all of a sudden I'm watching an Instagram video. And especially those people that have, you know, all their notifications on, they get distracted every minute, right? So how are you supposed to get people's attention when you're getting distracted every single minute? So the key thing is being omnichannel. So, you know, people talk about the rule of 7 a lot, right? So it's like, you know, people need to see your brand 7 times before they decide to take an action. The omnichannel approach is saying the numbers now are up to, you know, 14 or 15 times people need to see your brand to take an action, right? You know, you guys are seeing me on YouTube right now, and we're working on getting our simulcasting, our live fix, so we can go live on Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube at the same time, 'cause we're trying to be in 4 different areas at once. And then this live video, and we're probably gonna do this with this live video, we're probably going to make it into a longer form post, right? So good morning, Manav, there you are, good to see you. So, you know, the content sprouting approach is we're taking a seed piece of content like this, Right? And then we're making it into a longer-form piece of content like a blog post, and then we're making it into audio too. So this is gonna go on to the Growth Everywhere podcast as well. So we're trying to take content further, but we're also saying, hey, look, just because we spent the time for this one seed piece of content doesn't mean we can't hit people in other channels, right? Just because you see it right here doesn't mean other people aren't gonna see it on other channels. Anil is talking about how to rank your website on Google. Athens said solid book recommendations. Anil, I'll answer your question another time. But yeah, I mean, those of you that are just joining right now, look, these books, these guys, this guy John Doerr, he has a book right here. He spoke on the TED stage. He does a lot of kind of video interviews. He does a lot of kind of written content as well. Even him as a venture capitalist, super busy, he's taking this content sprouting approach, right? That TED Talk that was 15 minutes was basically the basis of this book, which is a couple hundred pages, right? And then Traction, The guy wrote Traction, and then the Traction over here, Get a Grip, okay? He has a couple books, it's not just this one. He has Rocket Fuel, he has Traction, and he has this book over here. And he speaks at, you know, various kind of entrepreneur stages. Well, now that's a really good idea. I'm gonna save questions for the end. So I'll present content, and then I'll answer questions in the end. But I do like engaging while we go through it, 'cause I feel like it's a very kind of human element. But yeah, I mean, look. I'm gonna be harping on this content sprouting approach, 'cause I think one live video just isn't enough, and I'm gonna give more and more examples as we go on through the year. But, you look at the Growth Everywhere podcast, that's the weekly entrepreneur interview I was doing. For the last 2, 3 years or so, I was just repeating interviews I was doing. Tuesday through Sundays, I was just repeating interviews I've done, because I thought they were helpful for people, and people still like that. And I surveyed my audience recently, I was like, do you guys actually want me to take videos that I've done from YouTube and then put it to audio as well? And then people said they're open to it. And, but they still like the old episodes too, which I found interesting. But the difficult thing for me with the Growth Everywhere podcast was it basically plateaued, you know? At its high point, maybe it reached about 75,000, 90,000 downloads a month, but right now it's about 50,000 to 60,000, right? And I love that audience because I feel like that audience is more entrepreneurial, it's more affluent. So, you know, I'm trying to think like, how can I add more value to that audience? Well, it's like, okay, well Eric, you're already doing content on YouTube every day. If you're doing these lives and you're doing these videos, Why can't you just publish that to your Growth Everywhere podcast too? So you can add more value to people, right? So I encourage you to think about, you know, if you're gonna do content, like maybe you're starting out in the beginning, maybe you decide you wanna start with podcasts, start with podcasts. Get it right, take a year or two, get it right, and then start thinking about how you can sprout that content into different forms, different pieces. And so that's gonna help you go longer, and it's gonna help more people discover you. Because when I went to Japan, I'll give you an example, When I was in Japan, when these group of Japanese people graciously invited me to dinner, and they told me they don't really listen to me on YouTube, which I found fascinating. They don't really listen, they don't really use podcast apps, they just listen on YouTube. So just because you don't consume content in a certain way doesn't mean other people don't consume it that way. And it's not gonna take you that much more effort to do so. You don't need to build like a giant team or anything like that. You could have like, you know, you could have a virtual assistant, or you can have contractors helping you, and you can take this content sprouting approach and really go from seed, seed piece of content, which is one piece, you sprout it into multiple pieces of content, and then you pollinate it, right? With this video, I'm probably gonna pollinate it, I'm probably gonna push it to our email list, and try to promote it a little more and see what happens, right? All these little things help. So Adrian says, and well, welcome again, Adrian, I see that you've added a thumbnail this time. But Adrian says he's never listened to any podcast, right? So that's another thing. Like, take that into account and think about what actually resonates with you first. So if you're good at audio, do audio first. If you're good at video, do video first. But that video can easily convert to audio. And guess what? You can use a service like Rev, rev.com, and then you can get it transcribed, right? Get it transcribed and then maybe have like a— you could hire a journalism major because in the United States at least, journalism majors are struggling to find jobs and then they can help you write. That piece of content and make it better. They have the caption already, they can make it into a long-form post. Manav says, listen to Akimbo. I think that's from Seth Godin. I definitely recommend it. Seth Godin is another example too. For the longest time, he was only doing his Typeform blog. For the longest time. Now he has a podcast. Now he has online courses, right? But he's still a very focused guy, but he's decided that he wants to hit other areas too. He also, you know, does video interviews too. Afton says, do you send out your content to your connections with the LinkedIn bot, or is that overkill? So Athens, what I will say is we do publish this to LinkedIn, but when we publish old videos, when we just, or like a podcast, like when we just shoot it to LinkedIn, it doesn't work as well as when we post natively, okay? So when I say post natively, what I mean is after this video, I'm going to go write like a custom description, okay? So like I thought of it, I'm gonna try to ask a question as well. And I might post this video, or I might make a brand new one, 'cause it only takes me like, you know, 5 or 10 minutes to make this video. But I can tell you the last couple weeks, even those of you starting out, I don't have a lot of followers on LinkedIn. I might have like, I don't know, like 10,000 or so. Okay, that makes it seem like it's big, but it's not that hard to get 10,000. That's my point. Anand, very nice to see you. But my point is, you know, when we start to get a little more focused in terms of how we're writing our descriptions and posting natively to LinkedIn and having an idea, and the reason I'm making these faces is because I'm about to sneeze, but it's not coming out. When I started doing that, we were getting, you know, 5,000 to 6,000 views at the high point. 5,000 to 6,000 views per post that we were putting up, right? Now, the difference is, when we were just pushing our Marketing School daily episodes out, if we're lucky, like usually they're averaging, you know, 200 to 300 views, right? If we're lucky, it might go up to 600 or 700 views. But, when we're engaging, like get people to comment, write something engaging, it starts to do a lot better, right? 'Cause these are social platforms. So if you're gonna do it to Instagram, think about how you can get people to engage, right? And this is why we're doing these lives, because people write a lot more comments, people stay a lot longer, the watch time's a little better on YouTube. So you got to think about, okay, what do people care about on each individual platform? How do I get them to engage? Because these platforms want you to stay on them longer. That way you're gonna get rewarded at the end of the day, right? And you might say, look, Eric, I just don't have time for this, I need to run the business. I agree, take your business operations first, but when you have a little more time to think about marketing, or you can delegate this out to somebody else, you got to take this content sprouting approach. Otherwise you're gonna have trouble getting people's attention. And attention is, look, look at Netflix, they're spending billions and billions of dollars on programming. Amazon's spending billions and billions of dollars on programming. If you look at all the media companies out there, you look at the channels, these movie companies, they're all controlling your attention at the end of the day. And even if you can get a little slice of that, you can become a little micro brand or a micro celebrity, it's gonna be very powerful for you because you have a lot more control in your business and you can go a lot further because you have that control. If you don't have that control, then you are, you're ceding, you're basically, you're basically being, you're not going to have the leverage you need to hit the goals that you want to hit. No matter how big or small your goals are, you are gonna be in trouble, right? But if you have the attention, people are always gonna respect you at the end of the day. Like, I'll tell you this, if you can have this omnichannel approach, and let's say the business, you know, knock on wood, the business doesn't do that well, Guess what? You can still find a really nice paying job at the end of the day because people respect you for who you are. They respect the work that you put in. They respect the consistency. And there's no way— I even told my parents the other day, I was having dinner with them, I was like, Mom and Dad, there's no way, right, if anybody is able to kind of build their own little mini brand or become a little mini celebrity, there's no way that you can fail, right? So that's just how I see it in my mind. Let's assume I become incapacitated. I just, I think nobody, including myself, can completely fail if you're able to kind of complete, like, go down this omnichannel, this content sprouting approach. And you guys might be thinking, well, you know, I'm watching this video right now, I don't have anything I can put out. And I would say, look, you know, I've only been in this marketing space for what, 8 years? Yeah, 8 years. I've been doing this online marketing stuff for 8 years, right? And like other people have been doing it way longer. But you know, the perception is that I've been doing it way longer. It's only because I'm constantly like putting content out, and it's not because I'm like really good or anything like that. It's just because you know I try to provide as much value as I can. That's the number one thing I think about. So when you think about oh, I can't provide value, just think about or I'm not going to be good. I would challenge you to say hey, don't even about your ego because that's your ego, right? Oh, I'm not going to be good. Forget about you. Just think about the value you can add to other people, right? Because look, I say right a lot. I say I have a lot of us and ums. But, you know, at the same time, the audience continues to grow, right? But you gotta take this content sprouting approach. Again, seed with a piece of content, and then sprout, right? I'm kind of like drawing it out right now. And then pollinate. I don't know how to pollinate, but that's— all right? Pollinate is basically promoting. Manal's question was, what's the best kind of marketing? Well, the best marketing strategy is content sprouting for this year and beyond. But I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna focus on for this year. It's a lot of, we're gonna keep doing podcasts, 'cause our podcast is now on trending, the Marketing School trending for about 1.2 million downloads a month. We are going to continue to publish, we're gonna improve on our blog, longer form content, well-researched, we're talking 3,500 to 4,000 words per post. And we are going to throw our live event for Marketing School, because we are, we said after we hit a million, we're gonna throw the live event. Live events are another form of content marketing, so we're gonna do more of those. We are gonna continue to run paid ads, because running paid ads when you already have content going, and you just retarget people, it's a lot cheaper, so I like doing that. Webinars, we're probably gonna continue doing, but it's probably like a new one once every quarter or so. Speaking, I've kind of dialed it back a little bit. What I'll say for you, for those of you that are kind of starting speaking, maybe think about, hey, if I'm gonna travel somewhere, what kind of ROI is it gonna give me? If you don't think it's gonna be a really high ROI, I would challenge you to— and even if it's a really cool place, don't go, right? Because last year I went to a couple places in Europe, and I knew it wasn't gonna be a good ROI, but I just wanted to kind of travel. But it's a huge time suck, especially when you are the one that's kind of driving the business. And, you know, your team's obviously driving the business, but if you're like driving a lot of important functions in the business, you got to take that into account as well. I want to get really good at content creation. Any tips? Madhav, I'm gonna give you a boring, a boring answer to that. It's you just get started and you suck. You suck for the first year, you suck for the second year, you probably suck for the third year too. Let me have some tea. It's pretty good. So you're gonna suck. Like, I remember my first blog was ericosu.net and I just wrote about like whatever. I didn't really find my voice until later, but then I started realizing like if I just talk about business and entrepreneurship, it's gonna get better and better. And eventually that became Growth Everywhere, okay? So I would even venture to say that the first 4 or 5 years, I was just pretty bad. For me personally, it takes me a while to really start to get rolling on things. I remember the other day, I was doing a session with Entrepreneurs Organization, and we started doing our live kind of marketing group, which is worldwide. We started doing it on Zoom. And one guy joined the group, he said he's been following me for a couple years, and he said, you know, Eric, you're really starting to find your voice now, and you know, I've been following you for a couple years. My point of saying that is it's gonna take you a while to find your voice. And Manav, I appreciate you reaching out. I need to again, I need to forward your email over to you know our our content team. And look, work for free for people in the beginning. Like that even if you work for free for like two or three months or so, it's so worth it. Like an internship. So Manav says, according to you, sucking in the beginning is the key to success. I would conclude might sound funny but true. I wouldn't put it that way. That sounds a little. Yeah. The key is not sucking, okay? Let's just put it that way. The key is to improve. Continue to improve, continue to get better. Know that you're not gonna be good in the beginning, and I would say take— try as hard as you can to take your ego out of the game. The more you can take your ego out of the game, worrying, oh my god, I don't look pretty, oh my god, uh, you know, I'm gonna suck, oh my god, what if they're gonna judge me? You know what? People are gonna judge you. People are gonna think you suck. People are probably gonna think you look ugly too, because you know what? People comment on our YouTube videos sometimes, and the more followers we get, the more haters we get too. But you know, sometimes people are like, Eric, you know, your eye bags, it really looks like you don't get any rest. You gotta take care of your health, man. Well, those are genetic, bro. But what is Athens saying? I market for some reputable personality brands with classes. They're trying to scale Jordan Belfort. Athens, I didn't see the whole question. I'm gonna need you to repeat the question, maybe like a shorter one, and then I can answer it for you. But honestly, guys, look, take ego Even if it's like one little piece of micro piece of value, okay? So think about it that way. What can I do to add value? What can I seed first as you know part of the content sprouting method? And then later, later when you start to get better, think about sprouting. Later start to think about pollinating, right? And then you can start to layer things on top of each other, and then things start to compound. And you know, I used to think a couple of years ago. I was like getting a couple hundred thousand visits to their blog. Yeah, we don't do any advertising or promotions on our podcast. Well, not completely right. And I was actually giving you the numbers. Neil and I were just saying like if we advertise on our podcast right now, if we allowed advertisers, we would probably make about $800,000 or $900,000. And so that's another thing, right? It's like if I looked at it a couple years ago, I could never get a couple hundred. I was like Man, if I can make a couple hundred thousand dollars on the podcast, no way, I'm not like the other people. I can't get that, you know, even 6 figures downloads a month or even like 7 figures. My blog, no way I can get 6 figures, right? But lo and behold, you keep going and then all of a sudden the numbers just happen and then you look behind, it's like all the work that all adds up and then it gets you to the result that you're at, right? So, that's why I'm like the numbers, whether it's like revenue or traffic or whatever, those are all great numbers because it shows, it's a scorekeeper to show how really good you are. with these things. And keep in mind, don't compare with people like the really good marketers out there that are getting a ton of traffic, right? Don't even compare with like, you know, you might say, you might have zero subscribers, hello, Raj, right now on YouTube, and you might say, Eric has a lot of subscribers on YouTube, 15,000. To me, I'm probably looking at someone that's at, right? So you're always looking at the next level above, that's good for motivation, but don't let that deter you from getting started. Because eventually, everyone like, it's not eventually, but everyone starts somewhere, And eventually you get better and better and better, and then all of a sudden you're gonna be like, "Wow, I have 100,000 visits a month. Wow, I have 200,000 visits a month. I have a million downloads a month to my podcast," and you're gonna be there. Okay, so slow and steady wins the race. I don't really have a sexy answer. I'm not gonna say let's go viral, right? You know, this book over here is from my friend Sean Ellis. You know.
