Good marketing is 10% skill, 90% dumb luck 🍀
How to engineer luck in marketing
Welcome back to ✨ Tom’s Monday Update ✨ I spend my week obsessing over marketing so you don’t have to. Here are 5 things worth knowing right now:
#1
How to be in the right place at the right time
Last week gave us two perfect examples of luck in marketing.
FIRST: Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was captured wearing a Nike tracksuit. Nike went viral.
SECOND: NYC’s new mayor took the subway on his first day in office. Behind him in every photo: a Rippling ad.
Pure luck, right?
Not really ↓
Rippling took a bet on subway ads hoping for some eyeballs. They never planned to get a massive PR boost from someone famous sitting next to them. But here’s the thing - if they hadn’t put those ads there in the first place, their chance was 0%.
Brands that don’t experiment had a 0% chance of this happening to them.
Rippling had slightly more than 0%.
That’s how you engineer luck: You increase your luck surface area 🍀
The more bets you place in the right places, the higher your odds of catching lightning. Most marketers play it safe and wonder why good things never happen to them.
Want to get better at this? → I wrote the complete playbook on how to be more lucky.
#2
We ranked #1 by telling people how to replace us
Here’s something crazy we tried at Wiz:
We built a page called Wiz Alternatives listing all our competitors. It became #1 on Google for “wiz alternatives”.
And the cherry on top? One of the BIGGEST names in SEO praised us for this tactic:
I asked our SEO Lead Erik Episcopo to break down exactly why this worked so well ✅ (and why most marketers get it wrong ❌).
Here’s what Erik told me: