Are you ready to go GLOCAL? Here are a few things you can learn from this “Marvel’s” experimentation strategy! [Monday: Marketing Marvels]
Miles Everson’s Business Builder Daily speaks to the heart of what great marketers, business leaders, and other professionals need to succeed in advertising, communications, managing their investments, career strategy, and more.
A Note from Miles Everson:
Hello! How are you doing today?
We hope all is well with you.
Let’s start the week with motivation from today’s “Marketing Marvel.” Every Monday, we talk about successful people in the business and marketing industries and highlight their contributions, life experiences, and insights.
In this article, we’ll focus on one of the top “marketers-slash-entrepreneurs” in the world.
Keep reading to learn more about this “Marvel,” particularly how he built a multimillion dollar business and made a BIG reputation in the world of digital marketing.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
Marketing Marvels
If you’ve been surfing the Web for articles about digital marketing, highly likely you’ve encountered the name, “Neil Patel.”
… or if you’re unfamiliar with him, you might have come across his works—be it one of his articles/blogs or the marketing tools he helped bring to life.
Here’s a brief background about this person…
Patel is a New York Times bestselling author. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the Web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine states he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world.
He was also acknowledged by former US President Barack Obama as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 in 2015. Additionally, the United Nations included him in the list of top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 in 2016.
Woah, these are A LOT of achievements… not all marketers can easily have one of these acknowledgements, let alone all of these accolades!
Photo from Talk Business
While Patel is widely known for his digital marketing and social media skills, his backstory goes far beyond that.
Let’s take a look at his humble beginnings and how he became an effective “marketer-slash-entrepreneur”…
Patel grew up surrounded and influenced by entrepreneurs in his family, and that gave him the drive to be successful too.
His first business venture started when he was a freshman in high school. At age 15, he sold burned movies and CDs to students for USD 2 to USD 5 each.
… but like some other “first ventures,” his business as a student didn’t last long. Because of that, he decided to immerse himself first in the business world by becoming a working student from high school to college.
As an employee at healthcare information system Quality Systems, Inc., Patel honed his marketing skills by being a door-to-door vacuum salesman. After gaining enough skills and knowing the ins and outs of business and marketing for a decade, he set up his own service business—outsourcing online marketing to an agency.
When he didn’t get the overall results (high click-through rates, open rates, engagement rates, etc.) he desired from the agency he built, he decided to study and learn online marketing on his own. This enabled him to improve his business’ offerings and provide consulting services for world-class organizations, present at various public speaking engagements, and develop new software such as:
- Crazy Egg (an analytics platform that tracks and optimizes website visitors’ behavior)
- Hello Bar (a WordPress plug-in for getting more Facebook likes)
- Kissmetrics (a person-based analytics platform that helps marketers identify, understand, and improve the metrics that drive their online businesses)
… and more.
Until now, Patel focuses on boosting his career through blogging, podcasting, and helping other businesses generate positive results from their marketing efforts.
—
Based on this brief background, you might be wondering:
“How did Patel learn quickly and grow his brand effectively?”
According to him, his success came—and still comes—from the right combination of skills, hustle, and experimentation.
Throughout his career, Patel has experienced many successes and that’s because he’s unafraid to try new and different strategies. The lesson you can learn from him?
You won’t always be successful at everything you try, but that somehow becomes a numbers game. Let’s say after trying a hundred tests for your brand, you might find 10 things that actually work. Aside from those 10 things, you’ll also accumulate a wealth of experiences and lessons from both your mistakes and achievements.
Take a look at two of the successful testings and experimentations Patel had. See how you can incorporate them into your own marketing strategies too!
- Experimenting with Instagram Ads
Photo from Softcube
In 2014, Patel set out to learn more about Instagram marketing. He wanted to test a hypothesis he had about entrepreneurs using aspirational, luxurious lifestyle marketing. He also had a theory about using Instagram accounts as a growth strategy.
To test both theories at the same time, he posted luxury item giveaways on his account and created sponsored posts. Through this, he learned that sponsored ads generated more interaction with online users than giveaway posts on the social media platform.
What else did he discover?
Sponsored posts help generate buzz.
In fact, he received word-of-mouth buzz through his experiment. This also led to a 71% increase in searches for his name and new conversations with other entrepreneurs!
Takeaway for Marketers: A little bit of buzz can be the beginning of a snowball effect that lasts longer than a specific campaign.
- Experimenting with Content Translation
Photo from Memsource
Content translation became a big deal for Patel after clicking on one online search result in 2015. However, seeing it was in a language he didn’t understand, he had no choice but to click the “Back” button.
This made him reflect on how much potential traffic he was also giving up by only creating content in the English language.
Because of that, he optimized his website content and made sure it’s translatable to 82 different languages.
The result?
Patel’s business website saw a 47% increase in overall traffic and a 60% increase in new users!
Takeaway for Marketers: It doesn’t hurt to think “glocal”—global + local. If your business is online, you must also think about your potential global audiences. Never assume that these consumers have translation tools built into their devices. As a business owner or marketer, you must make an effort to connect with them.
We hope you find these tests/experiments from Patel useful for your brand!
If you think you don’t have the time, experiences, or finances to experiment at the scale that Patel does, don’t worry! That doesn’t mean your brand will fail or you’re not a good marketer.
You don’t need to have the same budget, experience, or schedule as Patel to start marketing like him.
His business grew as big as it did through testing, experimenting with new tactics or strategies, and finding what worked for his brand. The right solution to his business’ growth varied from problem to problem, and the right solution wasn’t always the first one he tried.
By embracing the power of experimentation, he identified the most appropriate business approach or marketing strategy for his brand.
This can happen to you and your business too!
Through the mindset of experimentation and the right combination of skills and hustle, you will determine the most suitable marketing strategies and expand your reach not only on a local scale but also on a global scale.
“Create content that teaches. You can’t give up. You need to be consistently awesome.”
– Neil Patel
(This article is from The Business Builder Daily, a newsletter by The I Institute in collaboration with MBO Partners.)
About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Monday Marketing Marvels”
Too often, industry experts and the marketing press sing the praises of some brand or company’s marketing strategy.
… only for the audience to later find out that its product was a flop, or worse, that the brand or company went bankrupt.
The true ROI in marketing can’t be separated from the business as a whole.
What good is a marketing case study if one can’t prove that the company’s efforts actually paid off?
At the end of the day, either the entire business is successful or it isn’t. And the roles of marketing and communication are always paramount to that success.
Every Monday, we publish a case study that highlights the world’s greatest marketing strategies, marketers, and communicators.
However, the difference between our articles and the numerous ones out there is that we will always make certain that the firm really did generate and demonstrate earning power worthy of study in the first place (compliments of Valens Research’s finance group) in keeping with a person’s leadership skills in the area of marketing and/or communication.
We’ll also study the greatest marketing fails and analyze what they did wrong, or what they needed to improve. We all make our mistakes, but better we learn from others’ mistakes—and earlier, rather than later.
Hope you found this week’s marketing marvel interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next week’s Monday Marketing Marvels!
Cheers,
Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
Powered by Valens Research
www.valens-research.com
