7 Marketing Stats That Changed the Way I Think About Marketing

I’ve been a marketer for over 20 years. And over time, you kind of get stuck in your ways…

Especially when you have done something a specific way for years and it works, it’s hard to change your ways.

But I’ve tried to remain open-minded over the years… and these stats have helped me change my ways.

Stat #1: Omni-channel marketing boosts revenue on all channels

Years ago (pre-covid) I was in Toronto sitting in Expedia’s Canada office. I was with my buddy Tony, and we were going over campaign stats.

And he broke down an interesting test that they ran at Expedia. See, Expedia owns a lot of properties such as Expedia, Hotels.com, Trip Advisor (they spun it out), Travelocity, etc…

One thing in common with all the Expedia brands is they are already well-known and good size companies. Plus, they all have been around for many years, so if you ask anyone who travels or books flights or hotels, chances are they are familiar with the Expedia brand.

But Tony mentioned something interesting… even though Expedia is a well-known brand, they found that when they leverage omnichannel marketing and don’t just rely on a few channels, they’ve noticed that all their marketing channels performed better by roughly 10%.

Once I learned this, I started to put this into action. And not just on one site, but on many sites, with revenues of all different sizes.

I’ve been doing this for years now on dozens of sites that I consult with and here are the results.

The big thing I learned is omnichannel marketing helped all channels perform better. But what’s interesting is the results were better for smaller brands and companies versus larger ones.

Stat #2: Your number one keyword should be your brand

Check this table out, it shows the top 10 most searched queries on Google.

Notice a pattern?

70% of the top 10 most searched keywords are brands.

Once I saw this, I decided to do something that was fun. I looked at all the companies we worked with that generate over 1 billion dollars annual revenue and I wanted to see what percentage of their search traffic comes from their brand.

And then I did the same for companies that generate $100 million to $999 million in revenue. And I did the same for companies will $10 million to $99 million in revenue and $1 million to $9 million.

In general, the bigger the company the more of their search traffic comes from their brand.

Sure, SEO is important, and so is paid ads, social media, and other marketing channels too… but you need to focus on branding if you want to win in the long run.

The main 2 ways you do that are:

1. You stay in business for a long time.
2. You build a good product or service that people love.

Now the 3rd way you do that is through the rule of 7. In which one someone sees your brand and interacts with it 7 times they are much more likely to evangelize it and become a loyal follower.

This reinforces that you need to:

1. Take an omnichannel approach to increase the odds that someone continually sees your brand.
2. Focus a portion of your marketing on branding. Not all marketing needs to have a direct or immediate ROI.

Stat #3: Launches work

You know those marketers that tell you that they can make you rich, and all you have to do is buy their course or ebook and your life will change?

I was in Austin years ago and I was eating dinner with a friend, who taught me an interesting marketing lesson.

Take the marketing tactics from aggressive marketers that are promoting things that aren’t so ethical, and apply them to legitimate businesses.

One of those things that a lot of these aggressive marketers use is launches.

Many of them supposedly “generated” over $1 million in 24 hours by launching a product through email marketing.

In essence, they promote a product hard right before they are ready to sell it, as well as the day their product opens up for people to buy, and throughout the first week that their product is on the market.

So, I tried it out with my NeilPatel.com list.

Do you want to guess the sales I generated in the first week?

A whopping $756,954 (before refunds).

I didn’t hit a million bucks, but still not bad. It was through a series of emails such as this one.

Back then my email list size was much smaller too. That email went out to 255,237 people while my current list size is 1.4 million people.

And I’m not the only one who does launches. So does Apple and many other large companies.

Just check out this video from one of Apple’s launches.

Stat #4: The best country to market in is all countries

Every time I speak at conferences overseas people always talk about entering the U.S. market. Or how they want to focus on it because that’s where the money is.

It’s the furthest thing from the truth.

I used to think the same way when I was younger, but I quickly learned working with large corporations that the money is not in the U.S., it’s in the whole world.

Yes, the U.S. is a massive market and usually the biggest market for many companies when you look at it from a revenue standpoint, but the U.S. makes up a fraction of the revenue for most large companies that generate over a billion dollars in revenue.

Check this chart out that shows Apple’s revenue by region:

This means you need to focus on globalization with your marketing.

Sure one country may not be as big as you want, but when you add them all up, it really makes a big difference.

Just look at my traffic breakdown per region:

Even with my ad agency we are now in 16 countries (they are not all announced) and we will be in 20 countries by the end of the year and my goal by the end of next year is to be in 35 countries.

Even though the economy is bad, when I compare our year-to-date revenue growth in international markets, we are up 61%.

That’s crazy growth. Especially in this economy.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, BMW, Toyota, P&G, Coca-Cola, etc… they are all global companies. So, focus your marketing efforts globally and not just domestically.

This article should help you with your globalization. Or you can just hit up my ad agency and we can help.

Stat #5: Just because a company has money, doesn’t mean it can spend it

If you ever tried to market in the B2B realm, you may notice longer sales cycles and fewer companies to market to than consumer-based businesses.

Even with that, B2B is a lucrative market. Businesses have more money to spend than consumers.

But just because they can spend money, doesn’t mean it’s easy for employees within a company to do so.

And to see how much that applies to my industry, marketing, I did a survey asking 2824 marketers that work for companies back in 2021 if they need approval from their boss before they can spend money on anything related to marketing (no matter what the dollar amount was).

Once I realized that budget approvals are a roadblock, or at least they can slow things down, I started to test out a lot of “free” or “freemium” marketing methods.

Just look at what we did with Ubersuggest. You can do tons with the software for free.

Why do we do that? It’s because if you work for a company like Nike as an employee and need help with your paid ads or SEO, it’s tough to get budget approval. So it’s easier to use a free tool.

Now my agency, NP Digital, offers services. But can you guess how many of our customers come from Ubersuggest?

A whopping 41% the last time we checked.

Even though a lot of our customers are enterprise companies, and Ubersuggest has over 2 million users (mainly small businesses)… a small percentage of those users are enterprise companies which really adds up.

If you want to appeal to the B2B market, just remember people have to get approval to spend money. So, the trojan horse is to offer something for free, build the relationship, and the moment their budgets open up you will be top of mind.

Stat #6: There is no perfect marketing channel

I used to be a big advocate of SEO… and just SEO.

I used to believe it was the best channel because in the long run, it’s cheaper than paid ads.

Plus, if you stop your paid ads, you don’t get any more traffic.

And with social media, it’s much tougher to get clicks over to your website than SEO.

But that doesn’t mean SEO is the best channel. Now I still love SEO, but I actually love all marketing channels and I push all of them instead of “only” pushing SEO.

Here’s why.

Even though a lot of businesses fail, as you can see from the chart above, overall more people are creating businesses. The more businesses that are out there, the more competition you’ll have when it comes to marketing.

We are all fighting for the same attention.

So no matter what marketing channel you are leveraging it will eventually become competitive. In marketing, we call it the law of shitty click-throughs.

In 1994 the HotWired banner ad CTR was 78%.

In 2011 Facebook’s CTR was .05%.

Email open rates have also declined over time.

And the same goes with remarketing ads and pretty much most marketing channels.

Now this doesn’t mean marketing is dead, it just means it is competitive. And the best way to succeed is to leverage all the channels and use them for what they are worth.

It doesn’t matter if you can scale a channel up to millions a month or only thousands a month, as long as a channel is profitable why not leverage it?

Stat #7: It’s better to focus your marketing than go broad

Have you ever been at a dinner table and no one has ever heard of the company you work for? Or know what industry you are in?

It’s funny because to this date I still meet companies who have a goal of having more people know about their brand.

And these aren’t small companies either. Have you ever heard of: Corning, Centene, AmerisourceBergen, or Archer Daniels Midland?

These are all large companies. Just look at AmerisourceBergen. It’s a Fortune 100 company… but most people have no clue what it is or what they do.

But check this stat out. According to the founder of Under Armour, Kevin Plank, it takes a minimum of 10 years to build a widely-recognizable brand. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, that’s a long time.

So, focusing broadly on random buyers is just going to slow you down.

Just the other day, my podcasting co-host asked me to share this video about boats on Instagram.

I didn’t… On TikTok it got over a million views. It would do even better if I shared it.

But can you guess why I didn’t share it?

Talking about boats and yachts may be cool, but it isn’t going to bring in any customers. It’s just a waste of time.

Now to defend my co-host, he did tie marketing into the podcast episode so there was a purpose of him talking about yachts… I just know that if you want to do well in marketing it doesn’t matter if you have tons of views or followers, it’s the right audience that matters.

And I’m speaking from experience… I have over 1 million Facebook followers and over 1 million YouTube followers. But that’s just a number, it doesn’t matter so much.

Trying to be popular or having everyone know your brand doesn’t matter. Focus on your ideal buyers. Focusing on everyone convolutes your message and just causes you to waste marketing dollars.

Just look at toothpaste. We all use it… but just because we all use it doesn’t mean toothpaste companies just blanketly target all of us with the same messaging or even products.

Instead, they focus on their ideal customer based on the product they created within that category.

They do that because improves their ROI.

Conclusion

Marketing is constantly changing, so you must have an open mind.

Just because people do something a certain way doesn’t mean you should.

When I was younger, I was much more stuck in my ways and it hurt my growth (both personally and from a business standpoint).

But now I continually look to test and experiment and try things that are against the grain.

What other marketing stats have changed the way you think?