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If you're wondering what is growth marketing or what is a growth marketer, this post is for you.

Digital marketer, entrepreneur & angel investor Neil Patel

I’m a Los Angeles-based digital marketing consultant, and I had the honor of connecting with global lead generation and demand generation master Neil Patel.

He graciously walked me step-by-step through what it takes to be a growth marketer.  As an SEO consultant and content marketer myself, it was an honor to connect with him.

In terms of credentials, here are some of his:

US President Obama's top 100 entrepreneurs under 30 list

the United Nations top 100 entrepreneurs under 35 list

and Forbes Magazine top-10 marketing guru list

But that still doesn’t do him justice. Because he’s also a really nice guy. Humble, approachable and easy to talk to.

And I can't be alone, because his CEO Mike Kamo has a 100% approval rating on Glassdoor, and Neil hired him.

Neil Patel Digital's ratings on Glassdoor.

If you're in a rush and this post is TLDR, you can jump to the specific section you're interested in here.

Table of Contents

Why Neil Patel Shares Growth Marketing Hacks

How Neil Patel Picks Tech Startups to Invest In

Personality Traits Neil Patel Looks for in Founders

How Neil Patel Creates Top Ranking Blog Posts

Neil Patel's Headline Optimization Strategy

How Neil Patel Creates Top Ranking Podcasts

How Neil Patel Ranks for Competitive Keywords

How Neil Patel Decides When to Blog and Podcast

Sliders and Pop-Ups vs Content Injections

Neil Patel's Favorite Lead Gen Tools

Neil is the real deal. If you follow these easy growth marketing techniques, you're organic traffics will grow.

1. Sharing Growth Marketing Hacks

He’s probably the most generous digital marketer alive, sharing tons of useful, evergreen “how to” growth marketing hacks for free.

Neil publishes tactical growth marketing content on his popular Neil Patel blog.

He produces a daily podcast called Marketing School with Eric Sui.

And he maintains a popular YouTube channel that's always overflowing with fresh, informative, useful content.

In my opinion, his collection of work are probably the best growth marketing hacks of all time.

He’s entirely an self-made man who has bootstrapped a veritable empire from next to nothing.

He’d never call it an empire.

But it is.

And if you know me, you know that I always call a spade a space.

Neil also invests in and has grown a number of his own self-serve, lower-priced software-as-a-service offerings.

They're all digital marketing related and include Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, Hello Bar and Ubersuggest.

He’s also established a global digital marketing agency called Neil Patel Digital with 7 offices worldwide. 

His firm grows traffic for small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise clients through SEO, paid digital, conversion optimization and email marketing funnels.

Search engine optimization is just one part of B2B lead generation. Equally important are content marketing, social media, email marketing, a/b testing, and conversion optimization. 

In this episode, we go deep with demand gen maverick Gaetano DeNardi about assessing an existing site, increasing its organic traffic through SEO, growing your email list, and converting more leads to revenue.

Gaetano led demand generation at Saleshacker, growing traffic from 17,000 to 100,000 monthly unique visitors, which helped propel the company to a successful acquisition by Outreach.

He currently serves as Director of Demand Generation at Nextiva, which sells cloud phone systems.

Creativity and science go hand-in-hand for Gaetano, who talks about his favorite approaches for optimizing sites for search, leveraging top pages to build an email list through content injection strategies, and how to draw engagement through organic posts on LinkedIn.

Some of his favorite tools, which we discussed in the podcast, include:

SEMrush and ahrefs - He said he has no preference and is a customer of both.

Clearscope -  Provides semantically relevant terms, recommended article length, and other recommendations about writing quality.

VWO -  Combines heat maps, a/b testing, and exportable click tracking

Hotjar - Website user behavior mapping 

Opt-In Monster - Content injection tool that loads faster than Sumo

BriteVerify -  integrates with form handlers and blocks junk from Bots

Pardot -  The salesforce.com marketing automation solution.

HubSpot -  The company that defined Inbound Marketing

Amazon Polly - Text to voice generator from AWS

B2B content marketing is the demand generation pillar in the SEMrush digital marketing strategy.

SEMrush sells a SaaS platform popular with SEO consultants that helps with keyword research, content marketing, social media and competitive research.

Her goal is to position SEMrush as the best way to automate the optimization-based part of content marketing. Offload the quant work to SEMrush and focus on creative content marketing, collaborating with coworkers and developing new business.

I sat down with Anna Lebedeva, Head of Growth Marketing at SEMrush and she opened the playbook and answered all my questions.

Table of Contents

Is Content Marketing Indispensable for Global B2B Marketing?

What are the Best Ways to do B2B Content Marketing?

How Do I Find Topics for B2B Content Marketing?

How to Do Curated B2B Content Marketing

Is Content Marketing Overtaking Digital Marketing?

How To Generate B2B Leads with Content Marketing

Sales Funnel Optimization for B2B Marketers

What is B2B Content Marketing?

B2B Customer Journey Mapping

What B2Bs Blog About

One-to-One vs One-to-Many Marketing

Is Content Marketing Indispensable for Global B2B Marketing?

Anna is responsible for driving worldwide demand. B2B content marketing strategy is not one size fits all.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

She localizes her approach to each market. And she starts by reviewing local blog posts and other types of content marketing to see what resonate.

By starting with a media audit in the local language, she sees what topics are popular. She uses Google Translate to get the gist of what's people are saying that market.

The SEMrush blog publishes posts in 7 languages.

She's interested in seeing, at high level, what the topics are so she can tailor her content creation for each audience.

Then, she tries to get a sense of how knowledgeable the majority of B2B marketers are in that geographic area about search engine optimization. That way, she knows who to create relevant content for.

B2B Content Marketing in Brazil

In Brazil, digital marketers are great at the process of high quality content creation. They know how to develop rich buyer personas and generate engaging content for their ideal customer profile.

Photo by Agustín Diaz on Unsplash

But when it comes to the more technical aspects of SEO, they're a little less experienced. She entered the Brazial market with content marketing oriented material.

B2B Content Marketing in Northern Europe

In Northern Europe, like Scandinavian countries and Germany, digital marketers want technical information. And this makes repurposing content developed for English speaking audiences, who are more interested in qualitative information, ineffective.

You can't just translate content developed for the US and UK into Scandinavian languages or German because these audiences demand quantitative back up. She focuses on creating technical content for Northern Europe.

B2B Content Marketing in Australia

When SEMrush creates content that specifically addresses the Australian market,

What is digital marketing strategy and how should you pivot as a result of the pandemic?  In this post, I’ll tell you how to evaluate digital marketing strategy in this time of uncertainty.

Eric Siu is a digital marketing strategist who runs a modest, multi-million dollar empire that includes a SaaS company called ClickFlow (an SEO Experimentation Tool), a SaaS digital marketing agency and a portfolio of mega profitable, digital marketing oriented online media properties that collectively draw millions of unique monthly visitors.

That’s right. Millions of uniques every month.

If you want to know how to start a digital marketing agency or a SaaS company from scratch, Eric Siu is a living, walking case study.

And if you just want a few digital marketing tips to grow your startup, Eric is a geek famous, living legend. 

I caught up with him and shared how he creates successful digital marketing strategies to generate qualified B2B leads for clients, what considerations go into growth hacking, the basics of SEO consulting, and how to develop a digital marketing program to drive software trials for SaaS offerings.

ClickFlow and Single Grain Founder Eric Siu

Siu grew his digital advertising agency from nothing and today he represents some of the biggest SaaS brands in the world including Amazon, AirBNB and Uber. Nuff said. 

Single Grain specializes in ROI-focused marketing programs that generate sales accepted leads for complex B2B software as a service subscriptions.

Eric Siu is a big believer in product lead growth, which usually means offering a free version of a premium service, as a way of giving people a way to try your product without having to bleed excessive customer service resources trying to get functional.  Let them churn and support those customers who have the where-with-all to be successful.  

According to a conversation Siu had with HubSpot VP marketing Keiran Flanigan (@searchbrat), it really wasn’t until HubSpot introduced an entry-level, freemium product, that their business really took off.

Impact of Coronavirus of Digital Marketing

Orbit Media just published a study with Drew McLellan about the impact of COVID-19 on digital marketing spends, and it showed B2C getting hit much harder than B2B, although marketing across the board is way down. 

Siu spoke about the impact of the pandemic on ClickFlow and Single Grain. But his recommendations for what marketers should do at this point in time may be counterintuitive to many listeners, because it's far from what most people seem to be doing. 

If you want to hear what he’s doing to get through this rough patch, listen to the podcast.

Digital media strategy framework from Start Ups Guide to PR - 2020 Report.

What I will share is what he said about his discussions with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, who are essentially writing this year off.  But he does think that when business resumes, don’t expect to see the same aggressive approach to paid media as a primary source of traffic. 

Instead, expect to see start-ups and change-ups take a more innovative approach to digital media marketing, and closer look at owned and shared media, like this.

Digital Transformation’s Big Moment

For a lot of companies who still haven't gotten their arms around digital transformation -- meaning they don't have a digital business infrastructure or much sophistication around revenue operations --  the pandemic has accelerated the need for adoption bi...

If you want to market new technology products B2Bs you need to engage the CTO. Marketing to the CTO requires an understanding of who they are and what they do. 

“A CTO is a sort of ombudsman for all parts of an organization's technologies,” says Ty Roberts, who currently runs strategic partnerships at TIDAL, JAY Z’s global music and entertainment platform committed to creating a deeper connection between artists and fans. 

TIDAL is a pioneer in giving its subscribers exclusive access to high-profile music, videos, original content, livestreams, tickets, merchandise and live experiences fans cannot find anywhere else. The platform’s original content includes the “On Air” podcast network, original video series, artist documentaries and more.

Ty is the former CTO of Warner Brothers Music. I worked with him when he was CTO at Gracenote, a company I handled public relations for for nearly a decade.  When I was there, we created an internet music ranking chart with Billboard.

In this exclusive interview, you'll have a chance to get inside the head of a senior-level CTO and learn why they adopt new technologies and products and what it takes to motivate them to buy.

A CTO is quite different from a CIO. CIOs are typically more focused on data and technology in support of product development whereas the CIO tends to focus more on managing email servers and internal systems.

In order to sell new technology to the CTO, the CTO has to be able to sell it to the CEO. So the most successful CTOs are those who are able to win and maintain the trust of the CEO.  Ty goes into what it takes to earn the trust of the CEO and what types of resources from vendors are most helpful in securing that trust.

You can size up a CTOs ability to win the trust of the CEO by analyzing specific character traits which Ty outlines in this interview. If the CTO doesn't have those traits, it's going to be very difficult to sell the CEO through them. 

When you're demoing new technology products to CTOs there are specific things to feature and things to avoid. Ty shares about his experience in decades of demos and vendor pitches and reveals what works and what doesn't.

And once you've sold new technology through the CTO, you need to figure out how to drive and sustain utilization so that deployment stays successful for the long haul and they keep it up and running. Ty goes into the details of that process as well.

Three time author and two time unicorn king Max Altshuler has perfected the art and science of finding customers who are ready to buy.

The reason it's not all science is because account sourcing requires finding the middle ground between data and gut instinct.

Max has played a key role building demand and nurturing leads at Udemy (I teach there) and Outreach, where he works now as vp marketing. And he founded Sales Hacker (and I've written for them).

Udemy and Outreach are startups that grew to unicorn status. He sold Sales Hacker to Outreach before he joined them. Outreach is a sales engagement platform that makes it easier to build custom sales sequences that reps can use to prospect and qualify leads.

According to Max, it all starts by building ideal customer profiles that can be used to to help companies target the right buyers. Successful ICP strategies target the right customer, in the right place at the right time.

For his example, Max says it's going to be easier to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of a marijuana dispensary then a gluten-free restaurant.

After you build an ICP, it's time to develop persona buckets for the c-suite, managers and frontline employees because everyone has different pains and responds to different messages. You're selling to pain points.

Max has perfected outbound selling sequences that optimize the conversion of sales accepted leads. He's figured out how many times to call, email and tweet a prospect to convert them to a sale. And he's built a state-of-the-art sales tech stack which he walked us through in detail.

He also explains why marketing qualified leads don't matter and why sales accepted leads do. But he takes revenue attribution models with a grain of salt and warns marketers against relying too heavily on correlating metrics where causation is unproven.

If you want to come up to speed on where sales engagement is and where it's heading, and you're not necessarily knowledgable about this space, this 30-minute Master Class is for you.

All these skills are transferable to marketing and public relations. So give it a listen and tweet me and Max and let us know how you're implementing demand-generation and lead conversion at your organization.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

ES: Now, before we get into Outreach and your book, because I want to talk about both of those, let's talk for a moment about Sales Hacker. So, how did you wind up building a 100,000+ membership community for salespeople online?

MA: I was working at Udemy, which is an online education marketplace, small startup back in 2011, 2012. And they had entrusted me with building out the sales side of the marketplace, the supply side, which was getting instructors to teach courses. And I looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes: what if the normal sales process had never existed before? What would I do right now? I had a blank canvas and I started reading a lot of books and learning some of the best practices and layering on certain things that typically work, but then challenging the status quo on things that might have been a little more manual than they should be. So I ended up hiring a team of virtual assistants in the Philippines to do a lot of sales development work and go out and get a lot of our leads. I used Python, which is a programming language, to scrape information off sites to fill out our databases and build some of our intent, which led to the copy that we created for these instructors in our emails and phone calls. And then I used an early sales engagement platform called ToutApp. I was one of their first customers to send all these emails and make these phone calls ...

If you want get booked to keynote SXSW 2021, now's the time to start planning. And what better way to start then by listening to this exclusive deep dive interview with Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Office at SXSW, about how he goes about making that decision?

Welcome to my first episode of the new B2B Lead Gen podcast, hosted by yours truly, Eric Schwartzman. Many of you may know from On the Record...Online, an award-winning podcast I produced from 2005 to 2015.

Highlights include what it takes to be invited to keynote SXSW; how tech companies have leveraged the popularity of SXSW to launch huge brands such as Twitter and Airbnb; plus the challenges and surprises of his role, including how the festival became involved in the Gamergate controversy, and the ongoing importance of face-to-face meetings in the industry.

After this coronavirus pandemic winds down, I imagine there will be a ton of pent up demand for conferences and trade shows. Next year's SXSW could be the biggest gathering yet.

Show Notes:

Eric Schwartzman: Welcome, B2B start-ups, change-ups, scale-ups and grown-ups. This is the B2B Lead Gen podcast. I'm your host, Eric Schwartzman. Let's do this.

ES: You're the Chief Programming Officer at SXSW. It's definitely the most influential interactive conference in America. And technology's always changing, it's always moving. So when you're creating educational programming in an environment, I guess we have to do it I don't know how many months in advance, but probably a lot of months in advance. I guess you're part fortune teller, yeah?

Hugh Forrest: Part, but I hope not too large a part, because I'm not as good a fortune teller as I'd like to be. If I was I'd be in a different line of work. How about that?

ES: Do you have some sort of a process? I mean, how many years have you been doing this now?

HF: I started at SXSW in 1989, so I've been here roughly 30 years. In terms of a process, the process is just a process, meaning that we start meetings to plan for the next year, the next March, those meetings typically start in July, and we aim for the big name keynote speakers, the people we hope will fill the biggest rooms. We're talking and talking and talking. Someone nominates. The person coming to the committee that we have working on this stuff will nominate someone. Hopefully we have robust dialogue with someone saying, “I think this is a great person for the event,” and someone else will say, “I don't think this is a great person.” I certainly have learned, and learned the hard way, that the more you can discuss something, the more likely the result is going to be a positive one. I also am a huge, huge, huge believer in the power of community. So I get a lot of great ideas from the community. And that belief in the power of community is certainly one of the driving motivators behind the SXSW PanelPicker interface, which is how we choose a lot of our programming. And that idea being that the community has lots of great ideas that we might not have yet, and the more we can engage with that community, communicate with that community, interact with that community, learn from that community, the stronger the event becomes. 

ES: Hugh, I'm particularly interested in the pre-qualification process. And I'm particularly interested in those panels and speakers that don't come from PanelPicker, that you decide, and you and your committee or group decide, need to be there to have a well-rounded event. Are there any lessons learned about pre-qualifying? Obviously, once they've pre-qualified, they still may not pass muster once you start talking to them, but what is it that brings someone up to the level where you say, “Wow,