AirBnb and Olipop Ditching Paid Ads, Logan Paul's New Influencer Strategy, Parasite SEO, and the Decline of Digital Marketing (Trends Dec 2023 Week 3)

0:00All right. So for this episode, we are going to be talking about the latest marketing trends. And guess what? I'm going to start us off first. So, Neil, there's this trend right now where you see companies like Airbnb and you see companies like Olipop. You know Olipop, like the sparkling water drink? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Okay. So guess their revenue from 2021. What do you think it was? I don't know. Okay. $30 million. Now guess their 2023 revenue. $300 million? Close. I guess the way I said that made it – Yeah. $200 million. 200 million, right? Yep. And so here's the thing. This is a tweet from Alex Garcia over here.

0:40And we can actually react to this one. This is almost like a reaction as well. Do you see my screen?

0:50Okay, you can see my screen. Yeah. So, okay. So here's what happened. Their revenue 2021, 31 million. And in 2023, 200 million. And it says they did what no other DDC brand would do. They ditched paid ads in 2021. and instead they went all in on creator partnerships and organic content on tiktok so they hired a creator named sarah crane who took over the olipop account blah blah blah so you can see a tiktok account over here if you're watching on youtube has 324 follower 324k followers and you can see sarah crane who i believe is a full-time employee over here you can see she's the one making the content which i think is really smart because she's not off making her her own thing and then the other thing i want to call out here is we continue to look through the screen then i'm going to go over to airbnb is you can see for olipop They have a hashtag called Olipop Partner.

1:36And you can see all the partners that were doing all the shout outs, 1.6 billion views, right? And so do I think this is the only thing that led them to go to 200 million or so? Absolutely not. But I think it's interesting because there's like this, as I'm reading more and more things, it's like, hey, there's this growing trend of people shifting their spend away from search or whatever, right? Now, here's the other thing I'm going to pull up. So Airbnb says it's focused on brand marketing instead of search. And it's working, right? Since it's focused on brand instead of search. And so they were spending like a billion a year.

2:08We've talked about this on the pod before. And they also started off early on spending a ton of money on performance and his driven results. And they still spend a ton of money on Google ads, by the way. I don't care what they say. Point being, you have their CFO in here. He's like, yeah, we've been cutting our spend 28 % quarter on quarter. They're still spending$229 per quarter, right? But the question is on what? By the way, in marketing, that is not a small budget. Yep. I mean, look, we have to look at their reports at the end of the day. But look, the CEOs have said this, right? Brian Chesky has said, hey, look, we've got to cut away from search or whatever.

2:47And then you see like this, Olipop's not really spending on search. And so I think it's interesting. I think it's something to talk about. Is this going to be a growing trend? I don't think it's going to happen immediately. but I think we're starting to see people like, you know, the sentiment maybe shift a little bit right now. So to also give you perspective, Eric, according to Status, in 2023, Microsoft spent roughly$900 million on advertising. Now that doesn't include all marketing, but that's probably the largest chunk. So they're like the same on ad spend or marketing spend, I should say.

3:22in revenue in 2022 microsoft did 198.3 billion dollars yep look the last thing i'll i'll go ahead revenue when you look at their stock price i don't know why google's just messing with it um it's quartered 3.41 2.48 1.82 1.9 so let's call it somewhere around 10 million uh 10 11 million that they're doing a year in revenue. Big difference percentage wise, right? Percentage, I actually agree with them cutting back on marketing spend. They actually spend a lot on marketing when you look at a percentage of revenue. Here's, I'm just going to call it these quotes and then we're going to, we can, we can finally talk about this.

4:07So the quote here says, our brand marketing results are delivering excellent results overall with a strong rate of return. And it's been so successful that we're actually expanding to more countries. And so he says, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, says, we think of performance marketing as more of a way to laser into balance supply and demand rather than a way to just purchase a large amount of customers. So Airbnb isn't thinking of marketing as a way to buy customers because more than 90 % of traffic to its platform arise directly, unaided by search advertising, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky said on the call.

4:41I can see why they're adjusting marketing. They spend too much on marketing for a percentage of their revenue. Yep. Look, is this going to be a growing trend? I don't know. Like, I think just looking at Alipop and looking at Airbnb, I think it's going to be a small growing trend. I don't think it's going to be crazy because I think search is still a very, very, it's a profitable arbitrage for most people. Yep. Cool. All right. What else? You got something over here too. Pick one. I'll talk about… Look, the rate's falling. Yeah, so we looked at data. We looked at over 10 million search queries over the last three years.

5:15So comparing them now to what they were three years ago, same keywords. All right. Do you want to share your screen? It'll probably be easier. No, it's the same thing. You just click it. All right, let's try it. Share screen. Okay, so as you can see here, we analyzed 10 million results over three years, same queries. We saw quick through rates fall by 2.83 % last three years. And we found a few different interesting things. One, you know, and Eric used to talk about this a lot, and it worked really well for a while in which if you put the year in your title, like, you know, how to rank number one on Google 2023 version or 2024 version, you know, it did really well, it got more clicks.

6:02We're seeing now when you add the year, doesn't do much, but we think it's because markers have abused and overused it. We also found that the number one spot on Google used to get 25.91 % of the clicks. The number one listing now gets 27.13. Again, this is only for 10 million queries, but that's a positive sign. Position two increases 16.98 % from a previous of 15.32%. We also noticed that the click-through rates, if they're low on page one, like eight through 10, you know, was all really low. Doesn't really make a difference from previous to now. URLs with the same search term still have roughly a 39.29 % higher click-through rate.

6:42This isn't exact match domain. This is if your URL contains the keyword. So it could be like neilpatel.com slash how to rank on how dash to dash rank dash on dash Google, if the keyword was how to rank on Google. People prefer still positive titles over negative ones. It doesn't increase click-through rates by much, but it still helps. And people don't care if your title tag is a question or a statement. Click-through rates are roughly the same. But overall, we saw that it wasn't too bad, right? Everyone's like, ah, SEO's dying. We've got to be worried. Yes, SG is coming out and things will change, but overall, it wasn't too bad.

7:18You know what's funny? Let's move on to the next one over here. Let's talk about this. this here this is why parasite seo is crap right seos are start making up all these these phrases and then all of a sudden it's like oh it's this new trend and so neil and i were talking on the phone uh maybe a couple days ago or so and we're just talking about dude have you heard about this people are just they've been talking about parasite seo for like a year or so and then when you start to look into it parasite seo is basically like guest blog posting or commenting it's like dude what are you talking about and then there's so many people making these videos i'm just like dude Why don't you like just go go like instead of trying to create new new trends go focus on driving traffic and revenue for your business instead.

7:57Dude I totally agree like oh we need Google to talk about this and give a description. Who cares just go focus on your business like none of this stuff has making that much of an impact. And here's the thing too like we've always talked about this since the inception of this podcast that the way you want to do SEO is yes do white hat but look at how people do black hat. But then think about how you can do that in a white hat way right. Parasite SEO, like when you say the word parasite, you're by default, you're like talking about gray hat, black hat type of stuff, right? And we're not saying that stuff doesn't work, but what we found, because we've been in the SEO space for a long time and a lot of people come and go in the SEO space, it's the long-term stuff that generally works out.

8:35It's just like when you think about doing business, is it better to start like a drug cartel or is it better to start like a legit business? Like you're gonna, you run through a lot of problems with the law and like other people if you haven't started a drug cartel, right? It's better to start a legit business and build something for the long term and let it compound over decades. That's how we look at SEO as well. Yep. Another thing, speaking of Google, is when you look at marketing 10 years ago, we saw that only 31.4 % of companies were actively leveraging digital marketing. But if you fast forward today, the numbers increased to 96.1%.

9:06Now, this data is a little bit biased because I was surveying people on my blog to find out, surveyed thousands and thousands and thousands of people. But keep in mind, these people are reading articles on marketing on my website. So it may not be 96.1%. It's probably going to be higher. But back in the day, I also surveyed people through my blog. That's how I had 31.4 % number. So it just gives you a relatively perspective why there's roughly three times more competition. And what we've been seeing is a lot of people trend-wise just believe you can still spend money on marketing paid ads, do SEO the same way, email marketing, and you're going to get the same old results.

9:48That's not the case. You know, Andrew Chen talks about the shitty law of click-throughs. The law of shitty click-through rates. The law of shitty click-through rates. Go read that. And in other words, the first banner ad had massive click-through rates, but now everyone's used to banner ads. They have banner blindness. Click-through rates aren't as good. It doesn't mean SEO, pay-per-click, et cetera, doesn't work. It's more so that the results just aren't as good as they used to be. So what does that mean you need to do? You can still do the performance marketing channels and you should because it can be highly profitable, but you got to think outside the box.

10:21So, for example, I give away Answer the Public and Uber Suggest for free. That's a way of thinking outside the box to get a lot of users. And yes, I have some paid plans, but majority of the software you can use for free and it helps us generate over 100 ,000 leads a month. On the flip side, Eric did something similar, but not with the concept of releasing a free tool. He used AI to create, I think, comparison-based articles and articles on other topics, long-tail terms that people type in that could be highly relevant for a lead but may not get as much traffic. And the last screenshot I saw from his Google search console, I believe it was somewhere around 17 ,000 clicks or impressions that he's gone from these articles by leveraging AI.

11:08why he's doing something unique and different that a lot of people aren't. In other words, he's thinking outside the box. A lot of people are using air to create content, but they're using it to create blog posts. Eric's not doing that. He's going after non-competitive long tail, uh, bottom of the funnel, high buyer intent keywords, which can either a help them generate a lot of leads or B help them generate affiliate revenue. Um, and that's an example of getting super creative. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be. to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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13:55And so here's what it says, those of you that can't see the screen. So Logan Paul and KSI, who are the two co-founders of Prime, which is the energy drink, right? Are completely revolutionizing the concept of brand deal and its genius. So here's how this deal works. So like, yes, you can get these influencers involved, right? But what happens here is the celebrity gets paid, right? And what Logan Paul and KSI will do, because they both have big audiences, they will drive audience to them as well, right? And so no other brand can offer that to an influencer. So today, Prime announced a partnership it with Patrick Mahomes, who's the best quarterback in the NFL, arguably.

14:32And yeah, he's the most famous quarterback in the most popular sports league in America. Mahomes has six followers, 6 million followers on IG. Logan Paul has 27 million. Even the prime account has 1.9 million. And so by being sponsored by prime athletes and celebrities are getting a ton of value, all while driving new audiences, credibility and awareness to prime the fastest growing energy drink in the world. So it's kind of like, Hey, Patrick Mahomes, we're going to make you even more famous. And by you becoming more famous, it's also going to help prime as well. And I've never seen a deal done like that before.

15:01Have you seen this? No, but did you see their jerseys? They put prime numbers on there, 19 and seven. That's funny, dude. I didn't even look at that. That's funny. Yeah, they put prime numbers. That's funny. But I think that's super innovative, right? And we're going to start to see more trends like this. Yeah, I totally think so as well. So But make sure you rate, review this podcast. Give us five stars. We appreciate you guys listening. And we'll see you tomorrow. And also before you go too, let us know what you think about this new format. Because we're experimenting right now. Let us know what you'd like us to see us change.

15:33Hit us both on the X's of the world. And we'll see you tomorrow.