Neil Patel is the founder of Crazyegg and Kissmetrics, marketing analytics firms that helps small businesses increase customer conversions. His blog Quicksprout is a startups handbook. If you want to know how to recover from losing millions of dollars – Neil talks about it. If you want to know how to market your business – Neil talks about it. If you need to know how to navigate the web to build your business – Neil’s blog will show you.
1.You are a very well known entrepreneur with a very popular blog. If you were starting today as a new entrepreneur with a new idea and no audience, what would the top three tips to get your inbound marketing strategy started?
I would do the following things:
A. Create a product or service that solves a pain. The most successful web companies tend to be the ones that are solving a problem. Creating another me-too company makes marketing difficult, while creating a company that solves a new pain is easy to market.
B. Blogging is a great way to drive leads. When blogging just don’t talk about your product or service, but talk about the pain your potential customers are experiencing and how they can solve it.
C. Writing whitepapers and free guides are a great way to collect email addresses. You can then use those email addresses to then market your product or services to.
2.Many social media experts say that in order to succeed in business today, you need to produce great content. However, there is a lot of great blogs/websites/etc that no one reads. What content distribution and PR advice do you have for both startups and mature companies that want to grow?
I would use Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon as they are very popular social sites and they are easier to leverage than sites like Digg. The easiest way to leverage these social sites is to:
* Participate in the community. This way you can learn and understand what social users like.
* Write really good content because crappy content doesn’t do well on the social web.
3. Crazyegg and Kissmetrics are in the very competitive analytic niches. How much of your time and energy is focused on your competitors? As a follow up, you’re new venture, Kissmetrics seems to be taking on Google’s free analytics tool. What advice do you have for taking on the 800 pound gorilla?
Very little effort is focused on our competitors. Instead we focus on building a good product that solves our customers problems.
Taking on an 800 pound guerilla is never easy, but the thing you need to do is find their weaknesses and turn them into your strengths. For example Google moves slow because they are a large company… so we try and move quickly which helps us meet the current market demands.
4.What marketing trends do you see on the horizon that small business owners should keep an eye out for?
Freemium models are starting to really take off. In today’s world there are a lot of options for people so you have to give something away for free. You don’t have to give away the farm, but if you build some trust and show that you have a good product or service, you can get people to upgrade for more features.
5.And finally, what is the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make when they are marketing their products and services?
They don’t track conversions! If you are advertising in 10 different channels and your revenue starts going up, it doesn’t mean everything is good. You have to figure out what advertising channels are profitable and which ones aren’t. This way you can increase your ROI by spending more money on channels that are working for you.
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