I am one of the best in the world at only one thing. That thing is marketing. And today I'm going to teach you how to do it all for free. Even though I've been told I should charge you 5,000 US dollars for this course, I'm going to give it to you all for free.
I have built 100 million views on my social media per month. I'm one of the largest business personal brands globally in just two years. I've also built a company worth 30 million US dollars in the last 12 months called helpbank.com. And I'm going to teach you everything I know about marketing that's taken me 30 years to learn.
Right now for free. If you can't watch this video right to the end and get all the knowledge for free, then I've got some news for you. You're probably not going to make it. There are nine key elements I'm going to teach you in marketing today. And first up, hustle marketing.
That is one of the cheapest ways to get your business known. You can become a millionaire learning hustle marketing alone. Forget the other eight. Community marketing.
1,000 true fans, you might have heard about it. We're going to dive into that and how you can build a community and how community can make your life better. Social marketing. Of course, going viral, social media.
I'll tell you how to go viral in social. Profitable marketing. One of my favorites. You can actually make a fortune marketing your own business. You'll get paid to market your own business.
Partner marketing. One of my personal loves is working with other people and making crazy shit happen. I'm going to teach you how to do it. Paid marketing. Actually, my least favorite in the marketing triangle, but something you need to understand and have it as an option in your arsenal.
Data marketing. Understanding the information you're receiving from the back end of your systems will help you boost and create incredible value. I'm going to teach you how to do it. PR marketing.
An obvious one you think is getting in the newspaper. It's so much more than getting in the newspaper. Fuck the newspapers anyway. I'm going to teach you how this all works.
And finally, and probably the most complicated, brand marketing. You have to understand brand marketing for all these pieces, the other eight pieces to come together. Let's get started.
Hustle marketing. Now, hustle marketing is one of the easiest things to understand. And probably one of the hardest things to actually execute on.
It requires a sense of confidence and strategy. Now, a silly example of hustle marketing is I made 400,000 stickers of Help Bank when I launched. In every city we went to and promoted the business, we stuck stickers everywhere. Now, it might sound silly, but it works.
People would message me saying they'd seen it, take pictures and put it on Instagram saying, what is it? We were quite clever. We didn't even put the website address on it at first. So people are like, what is this Help Bank everywhere?
It's sublimable. We put it on airplane seats in front of people. We did it everywhere we could and you'd be shocked what a simple marketing idea like that can do for your brand.
And it doesn't have to cost a lot of money and it can be a lot of fun. Now it doesn't have to be stickers. It could be anything.
Stencils on the ground. I saw recently someone jet washing the dirty street with a stencil of their brand. Brilliant.
Not all marketing has to cost money. That's one of the themes I'd love to run through this whole thing today. I'm going to tell you right at the end about brand marketing and I'm going to touch on the fact you want to be careful where you put your brand. So for example, this might sound silly, but we didn't put these stickers on portaloos.
We didn't put these stickers in places that might compromise the brand. The second thing I'd like to teach you is what I call hustle hacking. An example is when I was living in Hong Kong, I found out that the Batman movie was being filmed not far from my office.
So me and the team came up with, why don't we all dress up as stormtroopers and gate crash. the Batman filming. Now we knew because it was in the street being filmed they'd be pressed there as well.
So what happened? We gate crashed that party. We got a little confrontation going between Batman and stormtroopers and that was in the front of the paper.
Why was a stormtrooper fighting Batman? We got front page coverage on every single major newspaper in Asia. Why?
Because we took a risk because we did something fun. So hustle hack. Think what you can jump into that's already got all the coverage that if you're there, you'll get noticed.
Number three, you're not going to like this one, but it's a fact. Knocking on doors is hustle marketing. Knocking on doors and telling people about your service or doing research about your business or asking people if they would buy your product or service is literally the lowest cost way of getting a client. Now, you'll get a lot of rejections.
People will tell you to piss off. Who cares? Go and do the research.
Now I know knocking on doors is not glamorous. Most people teaching you marketing won't even mention this but they're missing an opportunity to do great marketing for free. Now finally in the hustle I'm labeling vehicle.
Everywhere you go, everything you do, brand it. Your clothes, this is marketing. I'm wearing All Blacks marketing.
We're about to launch a doorbell partnership with them in New Zealand. You can go pitch with the All Blacks in New Zealand your dream. Wear your brand on your car, on your scooter, on your skateboard. on your laptop, everywhere. Do everything you can.
Get all your friends to wear your t-shirts. Marketing is an obsession. Marketing is passion. Go out there and make every vehicle you travel in have your brand attached to it.
If you've got this far in the video, I want you to take a moment and just please look after yourself. As many of you probably know, I lost my father when I was 15 years old. He died suddenly of a heart attack. For the first 10 years of my career, as I learnt the things I'm teaching you in this video, I carried that trauma with me.
It wasn't until I got help and dealt with this trauma that my career really took off. That's why today, I'm pleased to introduce to you BetterHelp, a paid partner in this video today, but a service I really believe in. BetterHelp connects you to a credentialed therapist who is trained to listen and give you helpful, unbiased advice. First, you go to their site. You can use my link, betterhelp.com forward slash SimonSquibb.
You answer a few questions and BetterHelp will match you to a professional who has years of experience helping people with struggles just like yours. You can do it all from your phone or computer, via a phone call, video chat or messaging, however you feel most comfortable. It's the easiest possible way to start.
talking to a therapist and I wish it was around when I needed it. Let BetterHelp connect you to a therapist that can support you all from the comfort of your own home. Visit betterhelp.com forward slash Simon Squibb and enjoy a special discount on your first month. Now let's get back into it.
Next up, community marketing. One of my favourite subjects. Took me two decades to do this properly. This is a little bit complicated to explain so I'm going to start with the top line.
The most important thing is that you look after your customers, right? You'll hear that from all the successful brands. Now, some don't do that all the same. I won't name any companies right now.
But certainly the ones that don't do that will die eventually. The customer service part is important. But this is more than customer service. This is more than looking up your customer. This is about bringing value to your customers by bringing them together.
Now, this is a competitive advantage if you do this right. Because a lot of brands are very scared to do this. If you think about Sky, they wouldn't put all their customers in one place because we'd all be...
playing around how shit their service is, right? So they don't want to bring their community together because they haven't done a good job looking after all their customers. Your competitive advantage could be that you can do that. So start small. I remember when I started my first community model, I basically picked 10 people and I made them founders.
I made them feel like founding members of what I'm doing at Help Bank. 10 people can tell 100 people about what you're doing. And the idea is to get what we call 1,000 true fans.
But it starts with having 10 dedicated, caring members of your community that believe in what you're doing and will promote you and support you. If you can get this model right, your marketing costs can be zero. And all that money you're going to spend, I'm going to tell you about later, things like paid ads, I think you can put into this.
I think it's better to give the money to your community than Facebook, right? Now this means this video probably won't do very well on Facebook now because I've just slagged them off. I don't care.
You need to know this information. The best thing you can ever do today is build a community. It'll give you a competitive advantage. It will allow you to give your community extra value that otherwise you'd have to give to idiots like Facebook. And you can make a brand have a community, therefore more value than any other brand out there probably doing something similar.
Now there's another way to work community that isn't your customers in your silo. And that is. Probably best illustrated by geniuses like Steve Jobs and Apple.
What Apple used to do is every time they had a new product launch, they'd do something called demo days. They'd get 3,000 people in the room, not necessarily part of their community, journalists, tech people, people that are influential in the space of talking about products and YouTubers, and they would do a demo to them hours before anybody else. So they would give value to a certain community, not their community, before...
the rest of the world hear about it. That will give those journalists a chance to go and blog about it, do a YouTube video about it, go write about it, make money for themselves by helping Apple. We call this type of marketing beta community marketing. Now, you have to be careful with this type of community marketing because, of course, if you get the wrong people in the room, they might write something bad about you as they might write something good. So you need to do your due diligence and vet these people carefully.
That being said, all press is good press, right? So. Let these people be themselves.
Don't control them too much. Again, I've been a part of the Apple beta room. I've seen how they do it. It's very slick.
They even give you a product at the end. So you're getting value all the way through. This sort of model is about giving value to people. In this case, journalists can make money or a YouTuber can make money out of the preview of your product before anybody else.
You've given them that access. It's special. It makes a difference. It's community-based marketing.
It's powerful. The third part of community marketing is something I like to label up as subject matter. So when you're doing a community, the key is not that necessarily those people need to make money or they get any benefit, as I've just mentioned with the other two ideas. It's that they feel a very strong bond to your problem that you're solving for the world. So example of this is, I really care about fixing the education system.
And so I've been working with companies that want to fix the education system too. And one company in particular that I work with called Peas and Pot, what they did, which is really clever, is they said, we want to help fix the education system for five to eight year olds. We want to give them an alternative way of learning, a forest school way of learning.
But they didn't have any money to market the business. So what they did is they went to all the different homeschooling communities and they said, this is the product we built. It doesn't make us much profit, a few pounds a box, and we use that money to make the product better. Would you please promote it?
Thousands of people did. Now, I think this is a really interesting way. It's slightly different.
to the 1,000 true fans I mentioned earlier. This is more about mobilizing a sales team around a subject, not necessarily true fans of your product. They might not necessarily be bought in totally to be part of your community. They might be independent and not want to be part of your community, but they might believe in your mission and want to promote you. So it's different to the 1,000 true fans, but it's also very powerful if you can do it.
You tap into what people care about. A lot of people are helping me today because I'm trying to fix the education system. And write what's wrong in that system. So they will promote this video and share it. They will tell people about this video because they're trying to support what I'm doing.
And they don't get any benefit from it. But if in the subject format, you can build financial remuneration. So for example, affiliate, which I'm going to go into much more depth a bit later. But affiliate marketing. So every time someone gets you an order, they get 10%.
If you can do the holy grail, they like your subject matter, they want to support you. And you can financially reward them. Bingo. This can be the best marketing you ever get.
These people will be motivated and they will help your business fly. Now, there's actually a lot of stuff in community marketing that I'm going to kind of cover in the rest of the subjects, especially branding at the end. Very important. Branding part is very important to make community work and you need the branding piece to work to be able to build this community piece.
Next up is social media marketing. Now, you might think you know all about this. Trust me, you don't.
I've spent the last five years going deep on social media marketing with hundreds of millions of views. in the last month, not over a lifetime, on this subject. I know how to go viral and I'm going to teach you. Now, it's a funny old word, viral marketing.
And I want you to understand that it all starts actually within a social context. Social marketing is more literal than it sounds. You've got to care about the people you're talking to.
You've got to imagine you've walked into a pub and you're talking to these people. Don't do what most people do. Most people do walk into a pub and shout.
hi, I've got a flower shop, buy my flowers. What happens if you walk into a pub and do that? They'll tell you to fuck off, right?
They'll tell you to get out of their pub and no one will want to buy anything from you. Not how to do it. You walk into the pub and you do one of three things. This is how you make social media marketing work. It's a free prom attack.
You even make people laugh or you teach them something or you make them feel a connection. Now, laughing is obvious. If you can make someone laugh, Can I make you laugh now?
I could try and tell a joke, maybe not. Not my best thing, making people laugh. I can do it from time to time. But making people laugh is key to some types of viral content. If you look at videos that are really popular, often there's some element of making people laugh in there.
Teaching people something, now you don't want to bore them, so you want to try and, you know, have a whiteboard and a pen. Make it interesting. People think they're going to learn something, they will watch it.
But it has to be quick these days, right? It has to be short, snappy and quick. And then finally, connection.
Do people believe in your problem? Some of the most popular videos are ones where people are telling their personal stories about mental health struggles or issues in their business. Sometimes having connection, something people can relate to, will make people watch that video, share that video and comment on that video.
Can you get all three of these in here? Sometimes. I've had some videos that have definitely done this.
Perhaps if you go look at the pinned videos on my profile, you'll see some of them make people laugh and taught them something and they feel a sense of connection. It's definitely powerful you get all three, but you actually only need one to go viral. Number two on social media marketing, bring value. Bring value.
It's so underestimated. I just mentioned it a second ago, but I want to go deeper on this. Like, don't just sell people something.
Make them feel something. In marketing, we call this sell the sizzle, not the steak. I've said it before. I'll say it again. Don't think about the product.
Think about how it makes people feel. Make people feel the... that buying this product will make their lives better.
In social media, people will buy because they feel it, not because they're told to do it. Never jump into a social media feed and start telling people, here's your product, please buy it. There's only a few occasions when this can work and that goes back to the community piece when it's your community. Maybe if you've built a community, you've built a sense of trust, it's not the first time they've heard from you.
If it's the first time they've heard from you, time people have heard from you you cannot just sell them cold you need to make them feel something so when you do social media posts bring value make people feel something give them something for free the more you can give for free the easier sales gets later again this links back to community and it will also link to brand I'm going to talk about a bit later but make people feel some give people value feel value if you do this your social media channels will grow People will want to subscribe to you if you make them feel like you're helping them. Even better if you actually do it. Number three. Now, if you get lucky and a piece of content works, and trust me, you need luck.
We all do. No one succeeds without luck. Sometimes I posted a video that didn't do well. A month later, I posted it again.
Like, tweet, change the music, dip a tagline, and it's blown up. So if you've done a piece of content that hasn't worked, maybe rejig it and post it again. But once you've learned how to fine tune your content and get it right and you get a hit, then this is exciting. because now you can repurpose that content.
If you've got a video that's resonated, you can do things like boost, which is a very amateur way of doing it, a lazy way of doing it. I'm gonna go into paid marketing a bit later to do it in a more sophisticated way, but this is definitely a video you want to cherish and you want to learn how to leverage that video and put it up there as your advert, put it out there as your promotion. Boosting, I'm gonna call it, for the sake of social marketing.
You want to make sure the video that's done well is the one you give all the attention to. It's the one that you learn from. I had a YouTube video get 4.6 million views at the time of filming this. And I've used that video as it was so successful as the hook for this video. Learn from ones that work and push it again and again in different formats.
Learn to boost it. I'm going to get into paid advertising in a little bit later. I'm talking boost now in the sense of learn to leverage what you've learned by doing a video that works. Now the final point on social marketing, you're not going to like to hear this. but I have to tell you the truth, persistence.
At the end of the day, you just have to keep going. I've done two posts on social media every day for the last four and a half years. Now, I'm not saying every single one of those videos was good and I'm not saying every single one of those videos has worked, but compound over time is a real thing. We don't talk about compound in marketing enough.
It's how you grow. You have to be patient. I'm going to put it in here.
It might not be something you think I've just taught you, Write it down. Be patient. Be persistent. That's how you get luck.
Next up, profitable marketing. Something I absolutely love. And if you do it right, not only will companies pay you to market your business, you'll make money by doing it. And even if you get really good at it, a company will want to buy you for a lot of money. That's basically what happened to my agency Fluid.
I sold it to PricewaterhouseCooper for a lot of money. I made marketing profitable. Now the best way for me to explain profitable marketing is probably to give you examples. Why do I start with this YouTube video? This YouTube video will make money.
Now we have decided as a company to give the profit from this video a way to fund people's dreams and build infrastructure for things like helpbank.com. That's our decision but this video will promote me and helpbank and what I'm doing and I'll make money doing it. Now YouTube is not the only way so I'm going to give you many other ways but I want you to understand this concept. that if you do marketing correctly, you will make money. We made a video launching Help Bank in Hong Kong that got 21 million views.
The video was a promotion for the fact we were launching in Hong Kong. We made thousands of pounds from that video. Now, we decided to give that money away to the person in the video, but that's our decision. You don't need to do that.
That's not your mission. You can make content that makes you money. So number one on profitable marketing is content.
Now, it's a pretty obvious one. That's why I start with that. Five, go.
Some really exciting things to share with you. You might be asking how does content make money? Well there's so many ways now.
Obviously on YouTube the ads around YouTube and the ads playing during this YouTube video all make money for YouTube and they give creators a small slice of that revenue. On TikTok they've now monetized so when you do a video that gets over a million views that has over one minute on it you will make money in that video. But content itself now pretty much every platform, Facebook's moving this way too, wants to pay creators. for videos. Twitter have just done it as well.
Everyone's moving that way. So if you can learn to do content, you can make money marketing your own business. Now, there's an art to it. I think a value to it.
You have to listen to what I was saying earlier in the previous social piece, but also understand how brand plays a part. The thing I'm going to talk about at the end. So content marketing is a huge revenue stream for my platform.
That's how I am able to help people for free and give people money every day because we make content that people watch. And from that content, we make money. Now beyond content, and it might sound like the same thing, you can make products that do the same.
So for example, a book. So I've got a book coming out. It's called What's Your Dream?
You can go pre-order it now on Amazon. Please do. If you pre-order it, it helps us get on the Times bestseller list.
But this book ultimately is all my knowledge, which I've practically given on YouTube anyway, so you don't have to buy the book to get my knowledge. My knowledge is free. But the book itself does talk about the philosophy I am trying to pursue, which is help people do what they love and how people can follow their dreams.
But this book ultimately will sell millions of copies of it. It will explain what we're doing and we will make money from the book. Now, again, we have decided to give the proceeds of that book away to fund people's dreams, but that's alcohol. And doing a book, even if it's a PDF download for a pound, and... or a free upload in an Amazon bookshop can make you money.
A pound here, a pound there. If you bring value in that PDF or you bring value in that book, you can not only bring a relationship closer to your audience, but you can also make money from it. I used to make brochures in my company Fluid. They used to cost me £8 to make a brochure and I'd send it to a customer. They'd probably put it in the bin, but I had to spend £8 making it and sending it to them.
But today, if you're smart, you just make a book in your niche, people will buy it. and that will make you money and promote your business. I call this the book hook. But you don't have to be a book.
It could be anything. It can be any sort of value item. It could be a product, for example. This might seem like a silly idea, but what about an umbrella that has your branding on it? And when it rains, you stand outside the tube stations selling them to people.
You can make money from the umbrella sale in that moment and then people are walking around London with your brand on it. It doesn't have to be just a book hook, but I'm telling you now. If you start thinking like this, you'll realize there's a million opportunities to promote your brand for free, for profit. Number three, become a TV star.
Now, when I tell you this, your initial thought is, I'm not going to be on TV, Simon. You'll be shocked how easy it is to get on TV today. Now, of course, you need a lot of luck. That's part of it.
If you're not putting yourself out there, it won't happen. But I see today people like Clarkson's Farm. I don't know if you guys have watched it.
You should if you haven't. It's a great show. Jeremy Clarkson talks about him trying to make his farm work.
It's all very simple. It's made him 220 million US dollars. All he did was document him trying to make his farm work. So why don't you document you trying to make your business work? And then you can put it in content.
You can make a book about it and you can become a TV star. It's possible. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen overnight.
It could. But I'm telling you right now, if you can get on TV. is one great way. I look on things like Netflix. There's a show about property, Selling Sunset.
Basically, Oppenheim Group, the property agent in that show, have become famous. They make more money from the TV show than they do from selling property. So think like a TV show. Think how you can make money from being on TV.
It can feed the other two things I've just taught you as well. Have an ambitious goal. You've got to think. Why not think big?
Of course, it doesn't have to be TV. It can just be a good podcast. It could be good social media.
Mr. Beast isn't on TV and he's making a lot of money with his YouTube channel. But maybe just think this way. Think about how you can build assets, build platforms that make you money.
Now, the final thing I want to teach you on the profitable marketing side, just before I tell you this, I want to say this is not sponsored by Tabasco. All right? I don't like Tabasco, just for the record.
But this is what happened to me. I was helping a food delivery business in Hong Kong. I built their website for them and I was building their infrastructure on the marketing side.
And they told me... They were losing a lot of money doing the deliveries. And we did the numbers.
This is back before Uber Eats or any of these brands popped up. And I worked out that really each delivery driver not only was underpaid, but they were also a cost center for the business. Do you know what we did?
The main thing that was ordered in this business was pizzas. The main product in those pizzas was Tabasco. So the company was already buying a lot of Tabasco sauce. If anyone doesn't know this product, don't bother googling it.
It's shit. The point I'm trying to make is... We went to Tabasco and said, we are your number one seller of Tabasco in Hong Kong.
We'd like you to advertise on the side of the delivery vehicles. And they did. And they paid us so much money that the client was able to pay the delivery drivers more, which made me happy, and was able to also make profit from the deliveries. So how can you apply that to your business?
Think about it. Where can you get an outside company to come in and sponsor something you're doing? Your delivery van, get them to sponsor it. Your delivery scooter, get them to sponsor it.
Your... website, your laptop, your car? What can you do to bring a brand in that maybe you're accidentally promoting right now, that you're accidentally supporting to fund your dream and make your marketing profitable? I'm going to label this idea driver. Just think how you can drive your business forward by working with a partner because one plus one equals 11. Next up is partner marketing, which is slightly different to what I was just explaining around driver and partner marketing is brilliant.
I see nobody doing it. Nobody knows how to do it. And I'm going to teach you it right now for free.
I'm excited. Now, there's a chance that my son will be watching this one day. So I just want to tell him I love him and that he's the best thing in the world. And right now he's gone to the forest. He's running around the forest having fun while I'm here thinking of him while I talk about partner marketing.
Why? Because the number one partner in your partner marketing is your family. People don't spend enough time getting their family on board in their business.
Invest in getting them on board. Everybody I work with, everybody I'm living with, is part of my business and are my friends. I don't want to work with people I don't want to be friends with and I don't want to live with people that aren't understanding what my business life is like. I literally this morning went through with my son and said, this is the video I'm making.
What do you think? He's six years old. He gave me some advice. He said, Daddy, kids don't do what you say, they do what you do.
Okay, the advice is not relevant, but the point I'm trying to tell you here is that family is key to partner marketing. Now, I'm going to get into some more elaborate thinking on this, but I want you to write this down. Everybody in your life has to support your business. You cannot market this business on your own.
No one could do it on their own. We all need a little bit of help to make our business work. And if your partner can't go and sell your business for you when they're out, get a new partner or train them so they can stay.
Get your family on board. Next up is more traditional, influencer marketing. Now, I think people get this wrong, actually.
You don't need to pay influencers to do marketing. A big part of this video for me today is showing you ways to get your business marketed without a huge cost. And I think if you align with your competition, work with people that have the same values as you, or try and solve the same problem, you'll find quite often you can get a lot of free marketing. So for example, I have been on a podcast pretty much every major business influencer. So they have had me on their podcast and then they have promoted what I'm doing.
Now you could argue that we're all competing with each other and maybe, and I know this is the case for some people, they don't approach these people because they're like, well, Simon's my enemy. I'm not going to work with him. But the truth is I'm trying to fix the education system.
So if you're trying to fix the education system, please come on my platform. I'll promote you. Ultimately, you'll be shocked. If you can focus your influencer marketing around purpose, around the thing that matters to that person, as much as it matters to you, they'll partner up with you and it won't cost you any money. The other thing these days is people don't understand how advanced the tools have got on social media so you can do a collaboration function now with someone and all they need to do is press accept and it can go on to their feed and promote your business.
Now I'm not saying do this without their permission but it's not a lot of work for some people to do it so sometimes people have mentioned me in videos and they've just added me as a collaboration I can accept it and now I can help them get access to my six million followers right without much effort. influencer marketing of course can get much more elaborate where you need to go and pay an influencer to promote you and sure we all know how that works it's big money sure you can do it and i want to include it as part of influencer marketing but there's so many ways to get influencer partnerships done that don't have to cost a lot of money even i owe you a favor later model which means you can go to an influencer and say i'm going to be big on social support me now and i'll support you later i'll give back now i believe in give without take But in the influencer world, it can be quite transactional. So just think about how you can leverage what I've taught you earlier about hustle to work with an influencer.
But of course, it's part of the marketing strategy when it comes to partners. Now, number three, brand partnerships. Now, a lot of people ask me how to get a brand on board. It's so simple to get a brand on board. Follow a three-step sales process to get any brand on board.
First, do they need you? Do they need you? Do you bring something to them they need?
Second, Get to know the people who actually work at the company. Get to like them, get them to like you. If you need each other and you like each other, the third thing, which is the deal structure, always falls into place. An example, I did a big partnership about three years ago with TikTok. TikTok wanted to get more into the business space and I could help them do that because they're not business people, they're tech people and internal marketing people.
We did a partnership with them where I would bring my credibility as an entrepreneur to the table. I would help people start businesses, which is what I wanted to do in way, which I was doing in way three years ago. And they needed that credibility, but they had the reach. So they literally pressed a button on my live and suddenly I got 50,000 views on my live instead of 100. they have that power they're privately owned people don't realize this right but working with brands and figuring out what value you can bring them and what value they can bring you means that neither of us paid any money i didn't pay any money to get the 1.6 billion views that we ended up getting on that content i didn't pay for any of those views but i did pay for it by 30 years of business knowledge which i've given you in this video right but ultimately you guys can learn to leverage brands understand what they need so for example if you're a graphic designer Maybe you could offer up QuickBooks, a free lesson for their community members on graphic design and building a brand.
Maybe in return, they'll promote you to their millions of customers, right? Why not try? People don't try. That's why I love this category so much because people think brands are unobtainable.
They're big companies like Nike or Apple. You can't reach them. It's not true.
It's never been easier to reach these people than it is today. Through LinkedIn, through things like Help Bank, it's never been easier. You just need to believe it's possible and then do it.
The biggest barrier people have to getting brands on board is believing it's possible. Do me a favor. Drop a brand you want to work with in the comments. Maybe I've got a contact.
I'll try to help. I can't promise I'll reply to all of them, but I'll try. Don't think it's not possible.
That's key. Try. Build a package that brings value to them.
Go and talk to them. Try. The biggest barrier to this one is you believing it's possible.
There is a hack to get brands on board. You may have heard I bought a staircase in Twickenham in London, and on the bottom of that staircase, we stuck a doorbell. You can go there, press that doorbell, pitch your dream.
We pay for it to be edited and uploaded to my channels to help you get your dream out there and get some support. Now when we started it, we originally put up a Ring doorbell. We didn't ask them, we didn't get their permission.
It was the best product at the time for what we were trying to do. And of course those videos have gone viral, millions of views of many of them. So what happens? Well, Ring eventually sees it. We did approach them, we went to a festival where they had a stand, told them what we were doing, we got a contact, we followed through, we followed through.
Then they saw the video and now they're sponsoring us. It took a year, but it's done. That's how you do it.
Patience along with perseverance. There's a common theme in most of my videos. If you notice it, you want to get lucky, you have to be persistent, you have to persevere.
Number four. Now, I want to think a little bit differently when it comes to marketing and partner marketing in particular. So this might sound a bit wacky, but bear with me. Become a model for other people's brands.
Get involved in another person's TV show. Build your brand. Partner marketing can also be you just being a part of something else that can give you some prominence. If you think how many people have managed to make money after being on Love Island, right?
Love Island isn't a career. Love Island is a partnership opportunity. They pay you a small amount of money to go into that show.
You then get famous. Now, I'm not saying you might not be a Love Island contestant. I'm not saying that's the only way. But think about the things that you see going on that have prominence that you can be involved.
Look at social media influencers, for example, that are doing really well and maybe get involved in helping them. And maybe they'll mention you in their social media stories or in the footer note of their YouTube video. Go hold their mic. Get involved in things.
especially things that relate to what you want to try to do. I'm going to call this be a player. So for example, Doug did the works on the team here, standing behind the camera right now.
He's gone and done an internship in a production company because he learns from that. But beyond learning, maybe he'll get in the next Apple show. He wants to be in an Apple TV show. He loves Apple.
So basically, you can be a player. You can get involved in other things, right? You don't have to do just your job to get exposure for your business, to get marketing done. Partnership marketing is pretty powerful.
Maybe apply to Love Island. You never know, you might get it. Next up is data marketing.
I bloody hate data marketing, but I'm going to teach you it because you need to know it. I don't really like it. And in part, because I don't really like it, I'm not necessarily the best at it, which I hate to say, because this is meant to be a video about how brilliant I am on everything marketing.
But data marketing is the only area in these nine things you need to know that I don't think I'm brilliant at because I don't like it. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to teach you what I know, and it's good knowledge. But I'm also going to put a PDF down below in the comments with a deeper understanding of paid. Someone actually does it all day, every day, has made for us. So it's for you in the comments.
But data marketing, this is my view on it. Now, there's a lot of different ways to do data marketing. The headline I'll give you is it's all about understanding your client, where they live, where they hang out, and how they're acting. Now, one of the reasons I don't like data marketing is...
feels a bit snoopy. I'm not talking about the furry little dog that sleeps on a box. I'm talking about looking at your life and trying to manipulate you.
That's what I don't like about data marketing. So I'm going to talk initially about a little bit more aspirational things and then go read the PDF about how to manipulate people because that's not really my thing. Right.
Number one on the list, email marketing. It's the most simple data marketing you can do. People sign up to your main list. Then ideally you ask them, what their interests are, what they're looking for, why they signed up to your main list, and then you can target them with relevant data-driven information. Number two is SEO marketing.
Again, less manipulative, more what are people searching for, what are people looking for, and make sure you're optimized for that search. So yesterday, I helped an entrepreneur who sent a letter to the staircase telling me their dream, and their whole business is HR recruitment. And they originally had human resources support as a website, right?
Now that's the name of their business. But when you go on Google, you're typing in HR recruitment. So they didn't have HR in their URL. So we bought them a HR related URL and now they're ranked on SEO.
So it's understanding that side of data. What does Google rank you on? What are people searching in platforms like Google? How can you then turn up in those searches?
So that's another way of thinking about data. Number three, referral marketing. Now I'm going to talk about this in branding again later. because it has to all legs. But referral marketing is kind of what it says on the tin.
You have someone who's an existing happy customer and you target them to promote your product to their customers. And you help them understand what your customer is. You use data to understand whether they can actually do it, right?
But you give them a referral. You pay them to promote you. And that's all targeted around this customer loves you. For example, if someone's giving you a review on TripAdvisor, then you go and approach that person saying, thank you for promoting us.
How about we pay you a percentage of every order we get in the future to promote us? So you use the data that's out there, someone's giving you a good referral, to then take that customer who clearly loves you and ask them to help you promote your business to their community and you'll pay them. Simple, right? Number four. Now this is where I like to go a bit wacky to help you understand how brilliant this can be if you do it right.
So data marketing sounds so techie, doesn't it? Here's one of the best marketing things I ever did. I was looking to promote a new business that I created, something called Coaster Ads.
Very simply, ads on drinks coasters. We took out all the Heineken and Carlsberg coasters and we put in branded coasters with ads in them instead. Carlsberg were not happy. Oh well.
And what did we do? Well, we wanted brands to advertise on these coasters. So we did a billboard right outside the advertising agency's offices. They were all in one office in Hong Kong. We did one advert.
Every time someone from those agencies walked out of their office, they would see our coaster ad on a billboard. So what did they think? They thought we were a massive company advertising across the whole of Asia that we had this new platform called Coaster Ads.
Data marketing is about targeting people in the right way. It became a smash hit, Coaster Ads. I made a lot of money from that business and all because we use data. Where are the people we're trying to get on board to advertise on this product? Where do they live?
And then target them. The end. I'm going to label this one, billboards, just so you don't forget. It's not always billboards, of course. It can be anything.
It can be literally, you know where your customers live, drop them a letter so they see it. Now, there's a lot more to data marketing. And I said, a lot of it is a dark art I'm not a big fan of.
I understand it. I know you can take an ad, you can retarget it. I mentioned it earlier. that sort of marketing is pretty clever.
If you know a video is working, I mentioned this earlier, right? Video's working, then repurpose that video and target people so you know exactly an ad that works for your target audience. That's what I love about doing viral content because once it's working virally, it will probably work as an ad.
So I'm going to put it down here, targeting ads, but I personally have never paid for any of my videos to reach people. Personally haven't done it. It doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
I don't like to do it. because sometimes it can skew the following. It can sometimes hurt the people that follow you, are following you because they saw one particular advert, not necessarily because they understand what you're trying to do. So in five years, I've managed to resist ever boosting or paying a reach.
But it doesn't mean to say it's not something you shouldn't understand because for your business, it might work well. One of the best ways to think about it, I know someone, for example, who's selling stationery. It costs them 20p to do the ad and every time they get a sale, they make.
40p profit so it makes total sense for them to do the ads because they don't really want to be fussed building a community or spending years building up a following they can't be bothered with any of that which i think is a shame but i also get it it can be a great way if you spend 20p on the ad and you make 40p profit then absolutely you should do it but it is a dark art and the link is down below from a company that i believe is quite good next up is pr marketing a lot of people misunderstand this and this is i've spent years understanding how to get right and you don't need to be a PR expert to do all of these things. Now, not only am I hoping you're getting lots of value from this video, and if you are, please do comment or share or like to let me know you're enjoying the video, but the more important thing is that PR companies will charge you thousands of pounds to do what I'm going to tell you how to do now for free. So be careful with PR companies because a lot of them will sell you stuff you don't need, and PR strategy, when it comes to marketing, can be very powerful.
Now, the best way for me to make you explain... First step in PR marketing is tell you my own story. I bought a staircase in Twickenham. It was in the news, the staircase for sale in London.
The first time a staircase had ever gone for sale in London. In the crazy property market that is the world right now, because property is being abused by people doing buy to rent and all that stuff. The news headline is staircases for sale in London.
Now it resonated with me instantly when I heard it on the news. Two reasons. One, I do believe everything is a step-by-step process. So owning a staircase kind of fits. how I think about the world.
So why not own a staircase and make that physical illustration of how everything is step by step, including learning marketing. But also I knew if I bought that staircase, if presently all these newspapers and all these radio stations were covering the staircase, they would want to know who bought it, right? So I knew I could newsjack by buying that staircase. And that staircase in the end just cost me 40,000 pounds after all the legals and everything else.
So you don't need to spend 40,000 pounds to do what I did. You just listen to the news and think, how can you newsjack? Now newsjacking is done by a lot of influencers.
If you watch people that are popular with a video they then might critique it right and that's how they newsjack. They take something that's popular and they do something themselves around that popular thing. If I talk right now about politics it would probably do quite well because we're about to go into an election. Now when you're watching this YouTube video later the election might be over and we might be in the middle of a nuclear war who knows.
The point I'm trying to make is hopefully Nigel Farage is not in charge and you can newsjack. You can look at what's happening in the news related to your subject matter ideally. I wouldn't just... Some people just jump on these news things for the sake of getting exposure. They damage their brand when they do that because they get following around that subject.
So for example, I tend to not talk too much. about politics because I don't want a load of people that are political activists being a part of my community. That's actually not what I'm about. So I don't necessarily want to hijack news related stories, but anything to do with entrepreneurship.
So I just saw Tim Cook talk about the Apple mouse and how it was a success when everyone in the world thought it was a failure. I did consider jumping into that because that went a bit viral that he still thinks the Apple mouse was a popular thing, right? So I was tempted to jump in there as a business person and talk about it. It wasn't quite right for me, but it was in the news and I could have jacked. it right so that's what you need to think about how can you jack the news and you can get amazing PR marketing by jumping on the back of something else that's already popular now another way of doing that and a less less aggressive way perhaps is to be the person that the press come to around certain subjects so for example if you're in the distribution business perhaps next time there's a Brexit story you want to write to the journalist and say because of Brexit my business has suffered or benefited depending on your take on it And I have something to say on this subject.
So whenever anybody ever writes about Brexit, which I'm sick and tired of that word, but you know, you can insert yourself as the authority in that subject, one side or the other. So a news reporter is always looking for someone that can give them a viewpoint, one side or the other, on a story. So look out in newspapers, look out online for who's writing about what that might relate to your business and your life, and insert yourself.
Write to the journalist. Twitter, by the way, or X, whatever we're these days. It's where most journalists hang out.
So an interesting hack is to follow all the journalists on Twitter and then comment on their posts so they get to know you. And when the time is right, slip into their DMs and let them know you can help them with a particular subject or a particular story they may or may not be writing in the future. I call this, make friends with journalists. Making friends with the people that you want to work with on the PR should be done with sincerity and with the viewpoint that can you help that journalist write a better story if your side of the story is inserted into any story they do in the future number three this might sound so basic i'm shocked how many people don't do this every time there's a new story of any sort and someone else has posted about it comment on that post especially people that have a lot of influence around that particular subject and try to get in there early set the alerts early when i first started doing this if anyone was writing about business in general, I would always set the alert and make a comment in their Instagram, in their TikTok, in their LinkedIn. I'd be the person having an opinion on that subject.
So you can insert yourself in other people's feeds, other people's social media feeds and become the authority. I've got thousands of likes commenting on someone else's post. I built up my brand by connecting to something that matters to me within someone else's feed.
Again, this is a press-related activity. So think about it from a news story point of view. What news story is someone posting about that you want to insert your opinion about and become the authority in that subject?
That's how you leverage PR. And just call this one, comment. Have a comment. Have a voice. Be a part of the conversation.
Number four, try to get on the news. Now, again, a bit like I was saying earlier about getting on TV. It's not that hard. Now, don't do anything crazy to get on the news. But if you do a flash mob, you might get on the news.
If you do a charity drive or a long run across Africa. you may get in the news. And once you get in the news, you can take that news clip and post it on your social media feeds. I was recently on a pretty crappy show that's now since closed down called Steph's Pack Lunch. And I was happy to go on it.
It was a great experience. I took the clip. I think I got about 50 views on channel four from that being on that show.
But I took the clip from that show and I put it on my social media channels. It's now had a couple of million views at least. So it's not me being on the TV show itself actually proved to be beneficial.
It was the authority that me being on TV brought when I put it on social media. So learn to leverage that. Now, you only need to get on TV once somehow to leverage this sort of thing. Again, try to bring value to the broadcast. Try to insert yourself.
If you follow the things I've just mentioned, News Jack, comment on news stories, talk to the press, you'll probably get invited. Do something good in the world will often get you on the news. This isn't told enough.
I've been on the news quite a lot because I'm doing something good. Most people think they have to be on the news for, I don't know, robbing a bank, right? Sure, that won't be good for the press, will it? So ultimately, try to think about what good you can do in the world, and that will lead to getting on TV.
I have a brilliant name for this, Get On TV. Now, it doesn't have to be TV. It can also be on someone's podcast. It can be in someone's YouTube story. It doesn't have to be TV per se, but I'm just using that to illustrate the idea to you.
PR marketing is powerful if you leverage it right. Now that's PR marketing for you. Brand marketing now is big and it's the one I left at the end because it ties all of this together.
If you don't understand how to do brand marketing, a lot of what I've just described to you previously can actually hurt you. So for example, if you do You rob a bank and you get on TV to do it. That will not be good for your brand, right? Brand marketing.
The first thing I'll say about brand marketing is, can you name me a brand that you love today that you don't instantly know the person who that brand is attached to? So for example, do you love IBM? I think so, right? Who's running IBM? Who knows?
Who cares? These brands become irrelevant over time. Brand marketing today is about... a connection that's why what i mentioned earlier in this video is all connected you have to make brand today have a personal connection one mistake i see a lot of people on tick tock doing is they set up a tick tock account with their company name which feels okay i've got my company name secured but no one wants to follow a company no one cares about a company people care about people despite what the news tells us people care about people so the best thing you could do is update your company profile on TikTok with James at buildingsheds.com, right? You've got to make it personal.
And that's the first thing I'm going to tell you about brand marketing. Business is personal. It's bullshit when people say, don't take it personally. It's all fucking personal.
People want to buy from people. They don't really want to buy from brands. Now they will buy from Apple, but in part because they're bought into the Steve Jobs story and now Tim Cook, who's going to protect your data. It's all part of that image.
that Apple are creating, the personal brand of Tim Cook, is deliberately designed to make you trust Apple with their data. That's what he's all about. Steady hand, a trusted person, a techie, he's going to trust, he's trustworthy.
That's what that personal brand is about. Mark Zuckerberg, a lot of people are confused about Mark Zuckerberg as a personal brand. I don't like Mark Zuckerberg as a, when I see him, I'm sure we all feel the same, something weird, right?
But he does appeal to tech people. He's actually there to bring in tech talent. He's there to allow Facebook to help build.
tech. That's what his personal brand is there to do. He's not there to make the consumers happy.
He's there to bring in tech talent. So personal brand, if you start analysing businesses, you'll see the ones that are most successful, Oprah, Ryan Reynolds. These personal brands are powering up companies in the future. I mean, Kardashians, people used to laugh at these folks, but they're brilliant. Personal brand, people have a personal connection.
They'll buy from these people. You must learn to make it personal. The second thing I'll teach you about brand marketing. There's two types of sales because marketing is sales, right? There's reactive sales and there's proactive sales.
Proactive sales is you go out there and sell. It's hard to do proactive sales. It's good to do it. I've done a whole video on sales, which you can watch.
It's a brilliant video about how you do sales. But in marketing, the reason marketing is so powerful is because it creates reactive sales. Reactive sales are people coming to you, people calling you.
And probably the best example I've seen today of this. kind of reactive sales is liquid death. First of all, they name a product that instantly stands out. You're like, why would you name a drink something death, right?
Second is their marketing is brilliant. They just did a video clip, which I love, of them smoking in a classroom and giving kids sugar to drink. Like it's just brilliant, right? Kids smoking is weird, but it's brilliant marketing. And that makes me want to proactively go buy the product, right?
Now is the genius of marketing. Learn proactive. Sales and I've done a sales video all on this anyway you can go watch later but proactive approach to sales you want to create a marketing your brand marketing campaign that makes people go oh my god that brands different oh my god that Brad has these values that I aligned with oh my god that brand cares about the problem they're trying to solve when I care about the same problem Brad is about relationship it's not about an image of what a logo looks like all the the colors, none of that matters. What matters is the philosophy behind your company. What are you doing is often obvious.
How are you doing it is often obvious, but why are you doing it? What is your purpose? Build that into brand. So make it personal and have a purpose and you'll have a proactive sales mindset.
Number three, when it comes to brand, understand there's two different parts of branding. The first part is company branding. The second part is personal branding. Now, company branding without...
personal branding as I just mentioned I think long term is a problem in today's world people want to know who's behind the company what their philosophy is what they're going to do with data but in branding the best way for me to explain this would probably be let's say the camera we're filming this on right now it's a brand now the brand itself might not have a founder it might not have someone that wants to be the face of the company so what do these brands do they get someone who has the respect within their industry so Peter McKinnon for example He's a well-respected photographer with millions and millions of followers online. Camera company will sponsor him. So he then becomes the spokesperson and the ambassador, and I guess the moral guardian of that brand. So they, as brand, will leverage a person.
brand to give their brand relevance so I think most people starting a business today the cheap way to do it to make yourself the personal brand to make yourself the way to do it of course if you're a big company you can afford to pay an influencer to be your representation then great in the past people give me equity in companies to be their brand ambassador I think this is quite a clever way to do it GoDaddy hired me to be their brand ambassador for a year the point is that that's how you do it if you've got lots of money if you haven't got lots of money Ideally one of you, you or your co-founder or someone in your company can be your brand ambassador and illustrate to the people at large what your values are because that's what it's about. Brand is about your values, your mission statement. It says who you are.
It's not a pretty colour and a nice looking shape. It tells people at a glance what your values are. So have a brand strategy. Are you going to be the brand yourself?
Is your co-founder going to be the brand? Are you going to bring someone in who's going to be the brand or are you going to hire people? to make your brand alignments and values clear number four now brand marketing is a really complicated subject but once you've understood personal brand and its impact you understand the proactive sales approach and you understand brand strategy the final thing probably is like literally the marketing of a brand so of course you want to be aligned to the right people as I've just mentioned you might find that sales come from brand trust so for example I'm not genuinely downloading anything from a brand I don't know I'm not gonna open up an email from someone I don't know We have an inbuilt protection system.
If we don't trust the brand, we tend to not interact with it. So you need to build trust. Now, trust, in my opinion, comes from giving everything you've got to people without any catch. Every time you add a catch, I think you hurt a brand.
So when people sell a course, for example, they start off saying, oh, everything in the video is going to be free. And then at the end of the video, they start selling you something. They hurt their brand.
They reduce trust. Now in this video I'm never going to sell you anything because I've got nothing to sell. The point I'm trying to make here is that trust is key to making a brand work.
You want to build trust and you do it, I think, by giving, giving, giving. Now you might think, well if I keep giving I won't make any money. Not true. You'll create... Most companies in this world that are worth a lot of money spend years doing stuff for free.
Big brands like Instagram, for years the service is free. Today they add verification and they have this way of making money and that way of making money But for the first few years, it's just about here's a product that can bring value to you The point I'm trying to make is as soon as they start selling your data, you don't trust them anymore, right? So trust is key to building a brand and if you get trust you'll get sales If you can build a brand that is trusted and then you can promote that brand using the other things I taught you earlier You will make a lot of money Brands are the future.
Build a brand, not a business. A business on its own is not scalable. A brand You can add huge amounts of value, both pricing wise, you can charge more, but also people will trust you more. The open rate on your emails will be higher. People will look at that billboard when they walk out of their office and they'll care about your business.
They'll watch your content. You'll make money on social media. You see how it all ties together?
I hope you've enjoyed this video today. I'm going to go eat some chicken for lunch now. I'm starving. Appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for listening.
Got any questions, drop them in the comments. I will try to read them.