The Older Your Company The Better Your Marketing

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- That typically is their best form of marketing.
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You need a great product,
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you need a great service.
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The longer you're in business,
the better off your marketing's going to do
just because more people are going to get to know your brand.
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- All right, so we're going to talk about how
if your company's older, the better your marketing is.
- So most people believe the way you grow a business
through marketing is you do SEO, you do social media,
you end up doing a lot of branded campaigns,
and just over time, through paid advertising
and all these channels combined,
you end up creating a big business.
We work with a lot of enterprise businesses, Eric,
and a lot of Fortune 1000 companies.
Do you know where they get
majority of their business from, Eric?
- Enterprise companies?
- B2B, B2C, just Fortune 1000 companies.
- Sales.
- Okay, outside of sales,
what marketing channel specifically
is helping them generate their most revenue?
- Brand.
- Yes, and they got the brand from just being in business
for a very long time.
Their best marketing tends to be a combination
of word of mouth, referrals,
or people just knowing their brand.
And that just happens by being in business
for a very, very long time.
Everyone believes that you and your marketing
needs to be so perfect and amazing.
If you're trying to generate the most sales,
that's not true.
You need a great product, you need a great service.
And the longer you're in business,
the better off your marketing's going to do
just because more people are going to get to know your brand.
Now, don't get me wrong, SEO, paid advertising,
email marketing, text message marketing,
like all the channels out there, they can help.
It's not like they're going to hurt
but what really helps businesses grow?
Like, when we look at a lot of the Fortune 1000 companies
we work for, word of mouth marketing,
people knowing their brand, and referrals
is by far literally the number one way
most of them generate their revenue and it's consistent.
Good economy, bad economy, B2B, B2C, doesn't matter.
That typically is their best form of marketing.
And that happens by just being in business
for not five years, not 10 years,
you're talking about 20 plus years.
- It takes...
The key thing is not even just with marketing,
but with business.
The longer you stay in business, the more you learn,
the more you stay focused, the more you lock in,
and the more you build something
that has higher enterprise value.
- That's right.
And, you know, you just got to stick it out
for more than 10 years.
I've really found that, you know, at the five-year mark,
things really do change
but the 10 plus year mark is when things really get better
and that branding just kicks in,
and word of mouth, and referrals.
That's assuming you have a good product or service.
If your product or service sucks,
it doesn't matter if you're in business for 30 years,
it's not going to do that well.
- Key thing here is when we talk about
the concept of thinking of decades,
it very much applies here, not even just for business,
but for marketing.
The longer your business can stay in business
and do a good job for your customers,
the easier your marketing is going to be.
- What's funny is,
years and years ago when I was running KISSmetrics,
where's money for that startup?
The startup ended up failing a while ago
and I don't know how old that startup is now,
you know, in theory, if you had it when we started it.
But let's say, call it 10 plus years ago.
Yeah, I'm like, it's pretty much debt
and I don't know if they ended up buying it out.
I remember back then, we were trying to generate revenue
through any means necessary
so my founder and I wouldn't have to keep getting diluted.
So I was doing outbound.
So I'd head up people, like, the Airbnb founder
would be like, "Hey, I can help you with the SEO."
Got a meeting, got a contract.
I believe the contract was for $240,000 for the first year,
somewhere around there.
This was a long time ago.
Airbnb wasn't publicly created. They were really tiny.
Do you know how they're generating most of their revenue
even at that time, a few years into the business?
- SEO, no?
- Nope, not SEO.
Most of their SEO traffic came from the term Airbnb.
Most of their...
They were doing paid advertising.
Paid advertising wasn't responsible
for majority of the revenue.
It was good product
and their brand just kept getting bigger and bigger.
And most of the enterprise companies we look at,
yes, marketing, advertising, it all helps them grow.
But what really helps these companies grow,
which sounds counterintuitive because Eric and I
own advertising agencies,
is just, A, creating a great product or great service,
which ideally disrupts the market.
And B, being in business for a long time.
- I remember, I've tried to do courses in the past
where the gist of the course was it's going to take time.
And that never does well.
Like, people want results very quickly.
- No.
They all want it right now.
If you tell anyone it's going to take time,
they hate it but it's the truth.
And at least that's what I like preaching
and that's what you like preaching.
Well, cool. That's it for this episode.
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and tune in next time for "Marketing School."
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