Lesson: Content Marketing with Neil Patel

Step #10 Internet Marketing: Online marketing tips & techniques

Internet marketing works for almost every single business that I've seen. The only ones that I haven't seen it work for are companies who may provide jet engine parts. Right, something that's so unique that most people aren't going to use you unless they already know you, or there's not too much quantity.

For example, if you're selling airplanes online, such as big Boeing 737s, I don't think Internet marketing is going to work. There's not too many airplane providers. Either someone's going to go to Boeing to buy a plane, or they're not. It doesn't matter what you put online that's going to convince someone to either buy that plane or not buy that plane.

The one thing most people overlook the most in social media marketing is that you got to engage with your community. So most people think that, "Hey I got a following on Facebook, I got a lot of friends, and I’m just going to end up posting." And yes, you can do that, but if you aren't engaging on other people's walls, if you aren't commenting, if you aren't responding to people that are commenting on your posts, you'll find that over a period of six months to a year that the amount of shares you get, the amount of likes you get, the amount of comments you get per post, will decrease.

So with social media I spend roughly a hour a day cultivating, building up the community, engaging, etc. As a startup you should try to do as much as possible in-house, because you need to have marketing internal, it should be a core competency, it should be something you guys always think about. If you don't have specific knowledge sets, you can always hire a consultant to come in and teach your team how to do specific things, but you should try to do as much as possible in-house.

Other than my own businesses, a few other companies that do a great job with marketing are HubSpot, Moz, Marketo is actually doing a decent job now. They're slowly ramping up. Unbounce isn't doing that bad either. But those are the main ones that are actually crushing it online. And funny enough, most of them are marketing companies, but if you look at it those are the ones who tend to have the staff and the expertise on how to do it. Now if you fast forward to two or three years from now, you'll see a lot more businesses doing it. It's just going to take a bit more time before they all catch up.