Marketing Dojo #4: Lessons in Content Marketing from Mr Beast.
Confluence of entertainment & shopping, marketing-led growth is alive and kicking, celebrating the brave B2B buyers and more.
Hello,
Over 20% of the world’s population is celebrating Lunar New Year this week. If you are celebrating, I wish you a happy new year—xīn nián kuài lè.
This week’s issue includes
5 Content marketing lessons from Mr Beast.
Amazon and TikTok are in a weird race to copy each other.
Marketing-led growth is a necessary ingredient for discovery platforms.
Sometimes landing on the moon is easier than getting a form-fill.
And more.
So let’s dive right in.
5 (Actionable) Lessons from Mr Beast on Mastering Content Marketing.
Lex Friedman's recent podcast with Mr Beast (Jimmy Donaldson) had me going down the proverbial rabbit hole to understand what makes his content tick.
For those who may not be familiar with the famous Youtuber, allow me to provide a rapid-fire introduction.
Mr Beast is the most subscribed and the highest-paid Youtuber. His videos are larger than life.
He's also known for his massive giveaways and stunts, such as giving away over $10 million live stream and donating $30 million to charity.
The 24-year-old creator has built a $1.5 Billion empire that includes chocolate bars (Feastables) and a delivery-only burger chain (Mr Beast Burger).
He is also an Elon fan and put up his hand to be the next CEO of Twitter!
We cannot spend over 8 Million USD a month to create larger-than-life videos as he does!
But 5+ hours of podcasts and a dozen articles about Mr Beast later, here are a few actionable tips I learnt:
Lesson 1: Create thumbnail & headline first, content later.
Mr Beast has a six-member team dedicated to just creating video thumbnails. The thumbnails are made before the content is shot.
Most of us spend days creating a video, and the Thumbnail and headlines are an afterthought - done in 5% of the total time to create content.
Similarly, for this newsletter, I took hours creating the content, but the subject line - that is written just in time.
Mr Beast does the opposite. Spend a tonne of time creating a thumbnail and headline - if that doesn’t stick - the idea goes into the trash.
No point in creating content that is not exciting enough to generate clicks.
Lesson 2: Having many ideas is key to having good ideas.
Mr Beast started creating videos at the age of 14. For a decade, he brainstormed new ideas for an hour daily.
Today, he sits on thousands of ideas - only a select few see the light of day.
Lesson 3: Invest in non-English content.
Mr Beast has separate channels for Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and French content. He hired native speakers to provide voice-overs for his videos.
These channels draw different audiences for Mr Beast.
Regional language content broadens your audience pool, just like it does for Mr Beast.
Lesson 4: Don’t give up on content that underperforms.
What do you do when content doesn’t do as well as you expected it to?
You experiment and edit the hell out of it. This post on LinkedIn is pure gold - how thumbnails were changed 5 times over till the views increased by 25%
Pro tip: Re-visit that underperforming bank of content. I am going to get my editing cap. These are the lowest-hanging fruits.
Lesson 5: Always be learning
One of the common things that stood out across all Mr Beast interviews was what an alpha learner he is. The ability to avoid getting into autonomous mode and keep learning is a non-negotiable for us marketers.
There are so many other lessons, but I will stop here for the sake of this newsletter’s length.
Do you have any opinion on Mr Beast’s content? Please feel free to leave a comment.
Amazon is trying to be TikTok; TikTok is trying to be Amazon: Who will win the race?
It’s a strange world.
Business Insider reported on Amazon paying influencers to start creating content for Inspire - Its TikTok-like feature. Meanwhile, TikTok has been building its warehouse capabilities across the US to become an Amazon alternative.
Who will win the copycat race?
My bets are on TikTok unless they get banned.
Leave a comment and place your bets.
Temu’s marketing-fueled growth has some lessons for kick-starting network products.
Take a little bit of Shein’s never-ending SKUs and combine them with the discoverability elements of TikTok. Fuel this with a big marketing budget. Voila! You have Temu, a fast-rising Chinese shopping app in the US.
This article from Andreessen Horowitz explains some fundamentals with great clarity. A few key concepts
Chinese apps do not shy away from marketing-led customer acquisition.
The rapid growth of customers & sellers is essential for a networked platform to deliver value.
Amazon’s shopping experience is search-based, and Temu’s is discovery-based. Discovery-based shopping platforms most closely mimic the offline shopping experience (remember walking into a store to buy toothpaste and leaving with a cart full of stuff?)
Temu is attracting many initial customers due to dirt-cheap prices, infinite variety and attention-grabbing first-timer discounts. Will it leave a dent in Amazon’s sales on Amazon’s home ground? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, Temu’s growth is a lesson in how to grow a networked platform in a hypercompetitive market.
It’s Meme-time: When landing on the moon is easier than filling out a form.
Last September, I was going thru a form-cleanup exercise. We were modernising all the old forms on our website. I came across this monster form with 21 fields to contact an expert.
In the past two years, the form had ONE submission. This week’s meme is dedicated to the determined soul who braved 21 fields and pressed the “submit” button.
Short Stuff:
Instagram is rolling out a quiet mode for its customers (Out of office for Social media).
78% of Comscore’s top 50 news publishers created a new TikTok account in the past two years (Can TikTok be the new news source?).
YouTube might go back on its no-swearing policy after creator backlash (Won’t stop swearing.)
Getty Images is suing Stability Diffusion for using its trademark images to train the algorithm. (Whose art is it anyways?) - This is the first of several complications arising with the rise of generative AI.
If you made it this far, thank you for your time and attention. I greatly appreciate it.
If you enjoyed the newsletter, please share it with fellow marketers. The more, the merrier.
I will catch you in your inbox next week.
I am signing off.
Best,
This is great! Have you considered how web3 can fit into future content marketing strategies? I recently wrote about this here and would love your thoughts: https://nativemarketer.substack.com/p/web-30-what-does-it-mean-for-brands