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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:04.062)
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm gonna get straight into it today and I'm very, very excited to introduce our guest who you might have
Neil, hello, welcome.
Neil Patel (00:16.787)
Thanks for having me.
Tom Rudnai (00:18.798)
Good to have you here. I have a load of questions that I'm pretty excited to get into with you I guess before we do that and rather than me butcher the the introduction of you in your background Do you want to maybe just give folks a little quick overview of who you are? And what's kind of brought you up to this point?
Neil Patel (00:36.75)
Sure, so my name's Neil Patel, I'm the co-founder of NP Digital. We're a global ad agency, I think we're in 28 or so countries. I've been doing marketing for 24 years now, about to hit 25 within the next month actually. yeah, just love growing traffic, generating leads, sales, online. For me it's addiction.
Tom Rudnai (01:01.338)
So that sounds good. And how did you fall into so I guess maybe I know you a little bit more as being very, very prominent voice within the SEO industry. It sounds like there's certainly a lot more kind of breadth that you've had. Like, how did you fall into being the SEO guy? is that something that you would characterize yourself as? Or is that that just my perception that I've built up for my own little echo chamber?
Neil Patel (01:24.558)
That's not your perception. That's probably the majority of people's perceptions. It is my background. If I actually had to say what I spend my time on today, by no means do I think I'm the best SEO person out there. By no means do think I'm the best marketer or anything like that. I spend majority of my time on...
entrepreneurship and doing deals more than anything else, just being very transparent. I still know marketing extremely well compared to most people. I do get my hands dirty when it comes to marketing, whether it's SEO or running paid ads or creating the actual campaigns or optimizing for conversions or modifying flows. you know, I was talking with my team yesterday, we click leads through a few funnels on our website and I tore apart
the funnels and I put in a Word document of every single change I want, line by line, what APIs I want called, what text I want, the text change for the lead form. So I still get my hands really dirty. I just tend to spend most of my time if I look on a weekly basis. I just pinpoint problems within the organization and I'll just start solving them one by one. And that's how I run my life.
Tom Rudnai (02:41.416)
Nice, I think with the rate of change lately, I think it's something that I always worry about with people who are maybe at a higher level but don't get their hands dirty anymore because it's so easy to get disconnected from what life is actually like executing things. I think that's a frustration a lot of people more junior in organisations feel is the people that are in charge of them just don't get it anymore. So I think that's good.
Neil Patel (03:02.348)
That's correct. I agree with that. But I'm the opposite. If you ask me to manage employees and run a big organization, I will fail miserably. Like I will be one of the first people to fail. I'm terrible as a manager. I'm much better as an executor and a strategist and a deal maker. So I focus on what I'm good at and I don't spend any time managing because I just suck at it.
Tom Rudnai (03:30.35)
Well, that sounds like an entrepreneur to me. So it sounds like you've made the right choices then to end up where you are. One thing I'm always interested in and I always like to ask you, you're quite a unique case actually. I was looking on LinkedIn for the prep before the call and you have one role that you've ever done. I presume there's been various different steps along that 25 year career in marketing. And I'm always curious, like is there a step in that time for you that stands out as being like particularly formative?
Like is there one that you could pinpoint where that's really where stuff started to click and you started to feel your confidence grow?
Neil Patel (04:03.054)
So I'm actually looking at my LinkedIn, because I have no idea what's on my LinkedIn, just to be very... Is that all it says? I think you're right. Experience, Neo Patel Digital, that's it. Education, yeah, it doesn't have anything else. I didn't know that by the way. Yeah, I've done quite a few software companies. My background's actually in SaaS.
Tom Rudnai (04:06.61)
Just says Neil Patel Digital. It's cool.
Tom Rudnai (04:14.43)
Yeah.
Neil Patel (04:29.966)
and I spent my time being a marketer for my own SaaS companies. I spent more of my time in my career doing that than anything else. Now, when you look at my LinkedIn, NP Digital is the last, it eight years, but I've been doing this stuff for 24 years. So it's roughly a third of my time. And there hasn't been any one role that's been transformational, to be honest.
There hasn't been one aha moment or like I did something and it changed my career. It's just been, my journey has been messing up a lot and learning from my mess ups. And eventually I avoid messing up on the same thing over and over again. And I say eventually because early in my career, I didn't learn from my mistakes soon enough. So if I was doing a marketing mistake or a business mistake, I probably would make it two, three more times.
and then eventually I'll learn from it. But now I'm pretty good at learning from the first time.
Tom Rudnai (05:33.02)
Is this something that you've done that's enabled that shift? Like are you more intentional in how you evaluate mistakes that you've made or just experience?
Neil Patel (05:42.51)
No, you just kind of figure out where you suck and patterns and where you kind of keep screwing up and you're like, okay, I should probably stop doing this for real. So it's not gonna work out well.
Tom Rudnai (05:53.15)
think that's the thing for me, is realising there's certain things that I should just be nowhere near and kind of starting to accept that rather than think that you can do everything. But cool. then obviously at some point, mean, you've now got something like 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. So at some point, all of that started to more building up a personal brand. You've kind of answered my question, because it was gonna be like, to what extent was that deliberate and something that you decided to do? But I think we've kind of just answered that with a question.
Neil Patel (06:08.083)
Do it.
Yes.
Neil Patel (06:16.737)
You
Neil Patel (06:21.39)
I don't even know I 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn right now because when you said NP Digital is my only work experience, I had to look it up. But you're right, it says 801,000 followers. Being very transparent, I assumed I only had like two, 300,000 followers. I assumed actually closer to 300,000 or somewhere in the 300,000 range. Never knew I had 800,000 followers. But I don't look at following and clout that the same way most people.
look at following in cloud and it wasn't deliberate. Like I just got back from Las Vegas on a family vacation. My wife had a dinner with a friend and my wife is amazing. She never really leaves me alone with the kids. Not because she doesn't trust me, but more so because, you know, she doesn't want to give me the burden of having to deal with everything and she knows I don't have as much patience as she does and stuff like that. And she's much better at raising kids than I
by far and her job is much harder than mine because raising kids is not easy and we do have wonderful kids. So she's just like, hey, what do you want to do Monday night? And this is just a few days ago, right? Because it's Wednesday right now. And I was like, it would be great. I want to do something just with the kids. She's like, you know what would be really cool? She's like, you should get a limo.
and put the kids in the limo because they've never been to the limo and then go to the Rainforest Cafe, which is like a cafe with all like these animals and they do like this lightning and thunder show. And I was like, okay. So then as we're eating at this Rainforest Cafe in Las Vegas, kids of course want dessert. Mommy's not there. They know they can get their way with me way more than they can with my wife. They'll try stuff with me that they would never dare to try with her. Because keep in mind, I travel probably more than half the year. So I'm...
gone quite a bit of the year. So they want to go somewhere else. We went to this Link Promenade in Las Vegas on the strip. And we couldn't go to too many places because I don't want to take my kids where they're smoking. So it was an outdoor place and we went to Giordelli's ice cream shop and someone comes up to me like, are you Neil Patel? I've been following your stuff for a long time. And I get that quite often no matter where I'm going. Not every single day, but often enough where I'm used to.
Neil Patel (08:39.658)
And people always come to me and be like, did you do all this marketing and personal brand so you can get well known? Being quite frank, I appreciate people coming up to me. I feel honored and privileged. Never did any of that for any of that. Or I never tried to build a personal brand for recognition. I tried building a personal brand because when I started off, I didn't have the money to spend on ads.
So I naturally started speaking at conferences and blogging when blogging wasn't popular. Hopefully it would help generate business. The intention was never to build a personal brand. The personal brand happened on accident. And if I die tomorrow, I hope I live much longer than that, my goal was never for people to recognize me or what will people think about me when I pass away? I really live for...
What more my kids think of me as a father and my wife think of me as a husband. And if they feel that I've done a good job and I tried my best to provide for them and be there for them, to me, that's a win. It's not how many social followers I have. Look, I have an Instagram account, LinkedIn account. Do you want to guess how many times I log into Instagram and TikTok on a weekly basis?
Tom Rudnai (09:58.878)
I'm gonna hope for your sake less than I do. It's something I'm trying to cut down on now.
Neil Patel (10:03.783)
But if you have to guess how often do think I log into TikTok on a weekly basis?
Tom Rudnai (10:08.316)
I say once or twice to
Neil Patel (10:10.798)
I don't even know when the last time I logged in, so probably close to zero. Okay, Instagram, we get leads through there. I should probably check if we get leads through TikTok, but we get leads through Instagram. So I log in probably two to three times a week. I just go to the inbox and I just send the leads to my sales team and I don't do anything else with Instagram. I'm not scrolling, checking people's content or any of that, right? Like I'm pretty unplugged.
from what I would say most marketers are spending their time on. Because here's what I've learned when it comes to growing a business. A lot of this stuff does not impact your revenue. And so many people being like, Neil, you got to check out this stuff with AI, it's so cool. Why aren't you using OpenClaw for this and that and so forth. We've got like a thousand plus people, right? My team definitely should be using it and they do use it.
whenever it's safe and secure and we won't have safety issues or privacy issues, because there's security issues with some of these AI tools. And I'm a big advocate for AI. But when I go to most corporations, okay, and I ask them, because I speak all around the world, how many of you guys use AI? Everyone raises their hand. I could be in Brazil, I can be in Columbia, I can be in Hong Kong, US, UK, it doesn't matter. I travel literally nonstop, everyone uses it.
You want to guess how many marketers see an increase in revenue from AI when I ask them that question? Take a guess, percentage of the room on average.
Tom Rudnai (11:46.654)
I'd say that would be quite low, but I think you'd have some that would claim to, I'm gonna say 25.
Neil Patel (11:52.766)
usually two, 3 % max. That's it. Now, most don't even see cost efficiencies, right? Because in theory, you should be able to save more money with AI. And it doesn't mean AI is bad. People actually use it in many of the wrong ways. I look at it as people aren't spending their time and energy on stuff that drives ROI. And I think that's the biggest problem with marketing.
They spend their time on everything that's cool and sexy. And I'll give a great example of this. One of my dear friends who I do a podcast with talks to me about how he's using OpenClaw and is creating tons of content for him and look at all these views he's getting on X from his articles. And I'm like, good for you. And him and I probably will have a disagreement with this. And I'm not saying he's right or wrong because I don't have his data. But if I had a bet a million dollars, I bet you it drove very little revenue, right?
So I spend my marketing efforts and my time in business on the stuff that produces a tangible ROI. And I think that's the problem with marketing that we face in today's world. People want to do all the stuff that feeds their ego and get some likes or looks cool versus the stuff that just produces them revenue.
Tom Rudnai (13:07.12)
I think there's a challenge here. So, because what I completely agree with you and I think what you're describing is that for you, the vanity metrics followed the organic growth, right? So you were looking for organic revenue growth and you were trying to be smarter than other people and that's what led you down the route of posting and blogging and things like that. Cause it was a more cost effective way to reach people and the following grew from that and it spiraled like a flywheel. I think now what folks do is they view the reach as a route to the growth.
So they're trying to go at it from the other direction.
Neil Patel (13:36.942)
But it's not, it's not. And I'm going to take you back to when I was blogging. Everyone thought I was blogging to just get tons of visitors. We did that approach. I ranked on Google for things like Instagram followers and I was at the top.
And it drove little to, actually it didn't even drive little. It drove no revenue. It would just create a ton of calls. I think we're getting 600,000 visitors a month. No joke, 600,000 visitors a month for things related to Instagram followers. How to get more Instagram followers, how to be popular on Instagram, right? And variations of it. It drove no revenue. All it did was call people and be like, hey, my daughter wants to be Instagram famous. Can you help her? Right? Which was a waste of time. Now on the flip side,
There was a point in time where we ranked number one on Google for digital marketing. You would say as an agency, that's a prime keyword. Drove little to no revenue, okay? And those terms were really terrible. On the flip side, we started creating blog content around specific edge cases that we knew large enterprise businesses would face, like massive publicly traded companies like Adobe and Cisco and Microsoft, et cetera. And we'd have blog articles on things like
autostructure your blog when you have multiple products and multiple languages that you're targeting. Okay? So when you think about something like that, that's not really a problem that most people would have. It's not something that you're going to get really any traffic for, but the people who read that are like, yeah, we're in a hundred and something countries and we have all these languages that we're targeting because some countries, you know, target the same languages. And we have...
32 products and we're competing internally, how should we structure it all so it works out the best in each division and each language isn't hurting the other? And clients like that will pay us seven figures a year, drives very little traffic. So we switched our approach from me creating content on social media, like what did I learn from flying first class for a whole year, which would get tons of views to content like the example I gave you on like...
Neil Patel (15:46.254)
dealing with the multilingual, multi-product domain and how to structure your content, your blog, your URLs, so that way it works and it doesn't hurt you. Like that kind of content drives revenue. The other stuff doesn't really drive revenue. And this is the problem with marketing. Everyone focuses on reach and it feeds their ego and they think reach is going to drive revenue.
And I'm telling you, I've already done this, I've already tried it. I know so many other businesses that have. When I look at NPE Digital, my ad agency, the first year in business, I think we did around five or six million in revenue. Almost all of it was driven from my personal brand. I think the second year was somewhere around 18 million in revenue. 10 million was my personal brand. The rest came from word of mouth, good employees, know, awards, although actually back then we didn't have really awards, but more so good employees.
track record, client referrals. The third year, I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it was in the 30 range. It was more than 30 million, it was less than 40 million, okay? I'm going to pick a random number, let's call it 36, because I think we were doubling roughly at that point every year. And it was still 10 million that came from my personal brand. And as we kept doubling and growing, only 10 million was coming from my personal brand. And we started getting accounts and customers from referrals and word of mouth and awards.
and stuff that was very specific and targeted for ideal customers. Like me going to a event and talking about how to do marketing from multi-location franchise, right? When I say multi-location, multi-lo, technically all franchises usually have multi-locations unless they're getting started and they're just trying to create a franchise. But I would talk about how to do it in not just multiple locations, but multiple locations throughout the world. So you're dealing with different cultures, different languages.
And you have to adapt things like the menu and how you do the marketing because what works in America does not work in Brazil, right? There's a lot of nuances. You can use a lot of the same strategies, but you got to adapt. And stuff like that does not get tons of views, does not get tons of likes, but it drives revenue way more than someone walking down the street and be like, hey dude, what's up? I see you all the time. Great content. That kind of stuff does not drive the revenue people think.
Tom Rudnai (18:03.56)
Do you see, because what you're describing here though, I completely agree with. And so we operate mostly in the B2B world. And I think in B2B, people do talk a lot about these kinds of marketing fundamentals, which is what you're talking about really, which is understand who you're.
get to know them as well as possible. And then actually there's a lot more value often in finding the obscure problem that they're trying to solve than just marketing to them in a very broad sense. And that's, think, what you're describing by bit. Find specific things that you can help them do and that will get low reach, but it will have a high impact, which I completely buy into. Do you find there's a lot of difference in the extent to which that mindset is adopted between consumer
and B2B, because I think most folks in B2B tend to think they do that well. Do you?
Neil Patel (18:49.312)
It's very similar. So we have customers that run Super Bowl commercials. We have a lot of customers that run Super Bowl commercials. When I go and look at the numbers and I'm not going to go pinpoint a specific customer, because I don't want to share anyone's data and get in trouble. You want to take a guess how many of them see an increase in revenue from a Super Bowl commercial or a World Cup commercial or Olympic commercials? You want to take a guess?
Tom Rudnai (19:15.902)
I'm hating these guessing games because I never know the answer, but I'm going to go low this time and say virtually none.
Neil Patel (19:21.454)
You got it right. This is why I like the guessing games, because eventually people get where I'm going with this.
Tom Rudnai (19:22.6)
There we go.
Neil Patel (19:26.862)
But like they're spending our leg you buy Super Bowl and then you buy Super Bowl they expect you to buy Olympic ads at the same time So you're spending way more than you're paying all this money for commercials and production So you're spending well over 20 million dollars because you got to buy more ads than just a Super Bowl typically and then you got to actually produce the commercials which adds up so like let's say if you spend six million on a Super Bowl ad or seven million they usually want you to buy six seven million dollars of other ad spots so non Super Bowl so now you're talking about you just spent 12 to 14 million dollars plus
Plus you're spending money on the production of the commercials and then other promotional events on it and YouTube and all this stuff. So you're either spending 20 plus million. Very few companies see growth from it. It's like the money's in the boring and ugly in marketing. It's not in the sexy. yes, every once in a while you'll see companies do really well from the triple commercials like the GoDaddies of the world, which it really helped put them on the map. But that's a needle in a haystack.
Tom Rudnai (20:26.59)
It's a statement that you're making, right? But that is a, that is by definition kind of a vanity project. It's difficult because I kind of want to play devil's advocate a bit, but I completely agree with everything you're saying. I guess do you buy into the idea, what some people might say is it's not that they don't have that impact, it's that you don't see it. So actually what you might see is a bit of an uplift across every metrics. It's like there's an adage or kind of little line that someone told me a few months ago actually, which is basically all that matters in marketing is word of mouth.
If word of mouth is good, everything works. If it's not, everything doesn't work. And I think what you could argue is that something like a Super Bowl ad is a way of turbo charging the word of mouth and the hype that just lifts everything up. Have you ever seen that in the data?
Neil Patel (20:57.005)
Yes.
Neil Patel (21:08.782)
that we have not seen in the data.
What we've seen help create the of mouth is grassroots. I want to internationalize, let's not use the word of grassroots. It's very targeted marketing to our ideal customers to get them to see it and they spread it to more ideal customers for both B2B and B2C. So that's number one. Number two, you need a good product or service. If you have a crap product or service, the word of mouth doesn't work out no matter what you do on the marketing. But if you have a great product or service, but you have a terrible marketing, it doesn't work out either.
And what we found is the Super Bowl or Olympic style ad appeals to too many people or goes to you reach everyone. The majority of those people are not your ideal customers. It doesn't matter if you're B2C or B2B. It's very rare that someone's selling something that's applicable to everyone, unless you're selling toilet paper. But at that point, you don't really have to make a pitch for toilet paper is more so you go to the store, whatever's reasonably priced is what people buy. Soft and reasonably priced, right? Super Bowl commercial is not going to help too much.
What we find in most cases, focusing your marketing on your ideal customer helps really spread your word of mouth to more ideal customers.
Tom Rudnai (22:23.454)
So, because again, I completely agree. And I don't think, I think if I popped you in the room of a hundred marketers and we did a poll then of how many people agree with that and don't agree with that, I suspect the vast majority would put their hands up and say, yes, a hundred percent. Yet loads of people do Super Bowl ads, why?
Neil Patel (22:41.324)
Yes, it's because they can afford to and it's brandy.
Tom Rudnai (22:45.438)
Okay, it's just budget to burn.
Neil Patel (22:48.098)
Yes, so, but there's nothing that we can end up. It's just like a lot of the companies, not all, but a lot of the companies, like when your company is producing like two, three, four, or $5 billion a year in profit, you don't really care. It's just something you're doing, getting it out there. It's like the same thing. Why do people sponsor Formula One? We have a lot of clients who sponsor Formula One.
There's no direct ROI. They just do it for branding and they don't care and they think it's fun and they take some of their top customers or whatnot. It's like some of these companies are just so large, they don't know what to do with their money. We work with one company, they don't do 10 figures a year in profit, they do 11 figures a year, right? So double digit billions in profit. They have jets in their own company for their executives.
And we were talking to, I was talking to one of the executives about their jets and their airfare. And they're talking about maintenance and like, yeah, we don't really have maintenance on a plane. Like, what do you mean? Like we just buy new planes every few years and we don't have to deal with the maintenance. And they're like, yeah, it's too much of a headache downtime. We're optimizing for speed and efficiencies, not even fuel savings. We tell them to fly as fast as possible and don't do what's most economical. But you have to keep in mind you're making double digit.
billions a year, which means 10 plus. If you're making 10 plus billion a year in profit, not revenue, right? Your viewpoint on money is very different, including things like a Super Bowl ad. You're talking about these jets that they buy when they have multiples are like $75 million a pop.
So when you're buying a handful of them, and typically they're not buying them themselves, they're going through a company like a NetJets or whoever, and they're just paying them so they can get them to the planes and it's just dedicated or some other third party because they don't want to maintain them. It's just like you look at money in a very different way, including things like Super Bowl ads or sponsorship. Sometimes they just do stuff to test it out and they just want to try different things because they don't know what else to do with their cash. As ridiculous as that sounds.
Tom Rudnai (24:53.338)
It's funny that plane analogy, because I think we've all, we've seen that trend happen in society in general, right? The bar of what is such a commodity that we don't bother fixing it has gone up and up and up, right? It used to be clothes that you would stitch together and fix. And then we slowly realized actually I can just buy new clothes. But now we've reached the point where some people in society treat planes like that, which is mental.
Neil Patel (25:12.578)
Yes, so check this out. If you bought a $75 million plane and you do 10 billion in profit, okay, it is 0.75 % of your profit for the year. Now here's the kicker. When someone buys a plane for $75 million, it's not like they lost $75 million. One, there's payments, plans. Two, there's tax deductions, right? A lot of corporations can save
There's bonus depreciation, so depending on companies' rates, if it's a C Corp or S Corp or LLC, it can be upwards of 37 % on the bottom end, call it, think 21 % is what C Corp's, the tax deduction. And then you also have to remember, when they sell it a few years later, they probably got back 60 million, 65 million, right? Because they're just rotating through it. So you're talking about over a few year period, maybe they lost $10 million.
And when you put it for a perspective of $10 million, it's such a small number. It's like a fraction of a fraction of a percent where it just doesn't even matter.
Tom Rudnai (26:25.064)
Yeah, I get it. So, okay, let's say that I'm one of the vast majority of marketers that doesn't operate in these organizations. And so we're saying, okay, that's what we're competing with is that level of frivolousness or that level of freedom in terms of how we market. And so we have to be a lot smarter. I guess a few questions come to mind then. Do you think that AI will be an equalizer in that? Would you think it will help people be scrappy and smart to compete?
without the resources, you think it will make the market less pay to play or do you think it will exaggerate that issue?
Very broad.
Neil Patel (27:04.654)
I think AI levels up the smaller businesses and gives them a better chance to compete. For now, I do believe in a few years, the big organizations will eventually adapt and it won't help them as much because AI creates efficiencies, okay? And it allows you to move faster. Imagine you're a big company.
the big company has a bigger savings because they have so much expenditure, right, from AI and the efficiencies. They can move faster and it allows them to have even more money to spend on marketing and advertising. What people forget is it's not, in my opinion, it's not technology that causes small startups to overgrow and outtake the bigger companies because the big corporations
have access to the same technology and everything else that the small companies do. The real reason that small startups can be big corporations a certain portion of the time is actually due to bureaucracy. The startups can just move because there's no bureaucracy. The large corporations have bureaucracy. So I'll give you an example of this. I was talking with my CEO.
We're talking about releasing an offering for our customers where we help set up AI agents in their workforce and we help them out and we help modernize their marketing stack and we do it customized. A startup would just go and just do this, okay? Our organization size, we're not the biggest company in world, but in the US, I think we're classified as a medium-sized company, right? Or somebody classifies as a large company.
We have to look at things like legalities, privacy, data, WOMS, if there's a data breach, what is this going to do? We're big enough, we're getting sued and going to zero has a really big negative impact, more than not adapting.
Neil Patel (29:10.252)
because if we don't adapt, I can still sell the business and I would never in theory have to work again, right from a lifestyle perspective. Now it doesn't mean we're not going to adapt because I'm a crazy entrepreneur and I love doing new things and I don't care about bureaucracy. And as a founder or co-founder, I can do whatever I want, but I still have to deal with internal politics. Well, on the flip side, a startup doesn't, so they can run and move way faster because they don't have to deal with bull crap bureaucracy that large organizations have.
Startup never thinks, man, if I implement open-clog organization, I'm going to get sued because there could be this breach. Big companies think about that. Startups are more like, I'll deal with it as it comes.
Tom Rudnai (29:53.406)
Yeah, well, and that was my first thought when you, with what you said about how many people get a revenue impact out of AI. I was like, I'd be interested to know the composition of that room because we're a fairly small startup and I feel like it's got a massive impact. Our ability to compete with much larger organizations and to do a, like if you just take content as an example, to produce a quality of content that we could not have dreamt that before with consistency is amazing. The research that we've used AI to help us do and things like that.
But we have zero bureaucracy, there's only a few of us and I can think of an idea and I can do it.
Neil Patel (30:23.648)
Well, you make a good point and I have two points on this.
So majority of the events that I go to are all enterprise, like just massive corporations like, hey, we're Pfizer. Hey, how does, when anyone asks chat GPT medical advice, how does Pfizer come up? Like that is the majority of the events that I'm talking to and I'm talking to the CMOs in different countries for these organizations. Please keep in mind they have multiple CMOs. It's not like Pfizer will have one CMO. You'll have a CMO for every damn drug in every country and the list goes on and on, all right?
So majority are large corporations, but even the last time I was at HubSpot's inbound conference, and would you agree that HubSpot has a lot more medium and smaller size businesses than let's say the five years of the world, right? Because I would say the average HubSpot paying customer, and I should know this, is somewhere around 11, 12 or $13,000 a year. So much smaller organizations than the Fortune or Global 1000 that we tend to try to pitch for our ad agency.
And when I asked that same question, how much of you guys are getting more of a ROI? Almost no one raised their hand. And I think there was maybe like four five or 6,000 people in the audience when I was speaking, less than 1 % was raising their hand. No joke. I was trying to find the hands. And I asked other questions to see if people just don't want to raise their hand and people were raising their hands for other stuff. So, but I'm with you. I do think there is a ROI in AI. We've seen it firsthand, but I think it's...
the ROI is more created from cost efficiencies than actually revenue growth in which you just do more with less people. So you're really saving on the labor end versus you're seeing your revenue grow faster. That's typically from what we see from the data for both SMBs and large enterprises. Others could disagree with me on that statement. And we also don't believe there's a big ROI from things like content creation.
Neil Patel (32:22.05)
So, and I'm going to use that one because you mentioned content. You know, there's markers where AI knows that AI created the content, invisible markers. There's a lot of posts online about this. People should check them out. AI doesn't want to continually train and rank their own stuff. You want to guess why? What happens if AI creates tons of articles for people and then trains off of their own content? What do you think happens?
Tom Rudnai (32:45.212)
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, you're kind of compounding hallucinations.
Neil Patel (32:48.238)
Yes. So they of course are engineers. They're really smart. Of course they're creating systems to make sure they avoid training off of their own stuff. And what we found is a lot of the human created stuff in marketing does better. Now on the flip side, there is amazing use cases for AI like transcription and language adjustments.
when you're translating from English to Portuguese or whatever it may be. Also for ad creative, we actually see the best use of AI in marketing. It may not be the best, but I say at least top three is data and analytics, which no one really wants to talk about. Because when you think about data, it's like a puzzle piece, a thousand puzzle piece. And what you find in most marketing organizations is there's a thousand pieces, but the thousand pieces are in different boxes when they should be in one.
and these boxes are in different rooms. So to really get a good grasp of your data, you need to bring all the pieces together and put them on one table so that way you can get a clear view. And AI can really help you with that so you can have better understanding of what's actually working and what's not.
Tom Rudnai (34:02.686)
Yeah, I mean, that's what we found with content. To give you some context and give you an example of one thing that we did with it that I was really proud of and to give folks who are listening as well, we did a big benchmark report, right? So relatively small startup, we ran hundreds, thousands of prompts across loads of different categories and every stage of the bio journey, we wanna understand how AI responses vary at each stage. So that was a huge amount of data collection that we relied on AI to do because we were trying to think what...
what that we couldn't do before, can we use AI to kind of turbocharge? We then had to analyze all of that data. We created a custom GPT that allowed me to extract all of the storylines, all of the interesting stories from the data. And then I wrote it. So the content that goes out is still high quality, but the quality of that content is 10 times better than we would have ever been able to produce before without AI. And I think that's where people have gone wrong with it a little bit is they've seen this shiny thing and they thought, cool, we can...
chuck way more volume out there rather than think what were the limiting factors on me doing better and how can AI help me overcome that? And I know it's something that's something we've got flagged in our research for this as well a little bit was that that's something you've been talking a bit about how like there's a moat to be built there, complexity is a moat. I'd be interested to hear you talk about that a little bit because I think it kind of reflects what I was just saying.
Neil Patel (35:19.148)
Yeah, spot on. what we found with AI, we get the most efficiencies.
in product and engineering than any other division that we've seen in our organization and also support. Those divisions see the most impact from AI directly. For example, we get tons of support tickets and emails, air parses it and just goes and fixes it, a agent, does a QA, and then a human just verifies and then releases it. Like stuff like that has changed our product, our development and technology on our end. But...
In business, the problem that we end up finding, at least in marketing specifically with AI, is if everyone's using the same technology to create content and marketing campaigns and leverage the same, you have AI create the strategy. What we find is you end up creating two things. Everyone starts doing similar things. And the second thing is, what we found is AI doesn't optimize and give you exceptionally amazing results.
What we found it does is it scrapes the internet. The internet has tons of mediocre average content. Yes, there's some exceptional stuff. There's a ton of crap, but on average, it's just mediocre and average. And what we found is it trains off of that. So the outputs that it ends up giving you is average. If you do average marketing and everyone else's average marketing, it doesn't work. You got to be exceptional.
And that's what makes marketing tough. See, writing goes from black and white versus marketing.
Tom Rudnai (36:52.817)
Okay, so I'm
Tom Rudnai (36:58.174)
think one of the challenges that a lot of marketers that I speak to feel in this area is that actually the impetus or the pressure to adopt AI aggressively and use it to churn out volume doesn't come from them, it comes from above them. I think it's one of the issues in this space is basically marketing is talking, talking to investors, talking to CEOs, and that's coming down the chain in terms of the expectations. Like if you would have put yourselves in the shoes of that VP of marketing who knows everything that you just said to be true, but they're trying to
balance that with the pressure that they're seeing for efficiency, how would you approach that if you were them?
Neil Patel (37:34.86)
Yeah, so we get this a lot. I was in the UK recently. When I say recently, I think it was last week I was in the UK and Paris then. Yeah, it actually last week. So was in the UK last week and I was in London and I was in a room and someone asked me, my CFO is putting pressure for us to cut a lot of our head count and be way more efficient and do more in marketing and use AI. And I said, cool.
And then I said, well, one, you got to explain to them on how it produces a lot of mediocre work. So you're not going to get results. But I'm like, two, you should go back to your CFO and say, hey, now because of AI, why do you need all these bookkeepers and accountants and finance people in your departments? Can you just use AI to automate most of it and get rid of most of head count? And they laughed and they're like, no, our accounting team's actually grown. And I'm like, exactly. We've seen AI create the opposite problem.
There's more channels now, people are doing things faster. We're not seeing people reduce head count. We're seeing people trying to get more done with the same amount of people they have to compete. And we see that as a new norm.
because of monopolistic laws in, would particularly say the EU and the US, because remember, acquisitions don't happen in most cases from these big organizations if it's not approved by the US regulatory community and the EU. And those are, would say, the two big ones. Asia is lot easier from what I've seen in the past. And I'm not a lawyer or anything like that. I don't know the laws, but just from what I've read and kept up to date with. Anthropic,
couldn't get acquired earlier on by Google. know, chat GPT couldn't get acquired earlier on by Microsoft. There's too many regulatory rules. So now you have perplexity, have Claude, you have open Claude, and the list goes on and on and on. So what do marketers have to do? Well.
Neil Patel (39:29.71)
People use Instagram. Oh, TikTok didn't replace Instagram, so we have to market on TikTok as well. And Facebook is still around, it's not actually dead, it generates a lot of revenue from ads, so we got to still leverage Facebook. And we need to do YouTube, because people love it for a long form. And LinkedIn, and then Google. Oh, there's still some volume on Bing, not as much, but we got to be on Bing. Oh, Reddit, a lot of platforms use Reddit data, like these elements, so we got to be on there. Oh, we also have to optimize for chat GPT and AI visibility on perplexity and clod.
And all we got to do email, SMS and push notifications. Apple oven, their stock, it's booming. What is this company? they actually have inventory. We got to start advertising there. You can't get the volume, but it's very profitable and we should scale up that as well. And as you can see, I'm continually throwing in more and more channels.
And that's the new reality of marketing. It's getting more messy. The funnel isn't straight and linear. It's more messy. People are scattered around everywhere like a spaghetti dish where pasta's all intertwined. And there's just more work for marketers and people expect better marketing.
better quality of stuff that they're consuming before they decide to purchase with the company. And then you have other stuff like, now we got to optimize for reviews, because everyone's looking for reviews, whether you're B2B or B2C. we don't know if they're going to pull from Trustpilot or Captera or G2 or whatever new source or better business bureau. So we've got to look at all these sources, because one is pulled from, you know, one LLM prefers this source, the other LLM prefers this other source. Like, it's just become more of a headache.
Tom Rudnai (41:05.598)
So again, VPN marketing, series B company, we have resources but we don't have unlimited resources. Would your advice be, look, that is just the reality. You have to spread yourself across all of these or would you say, no, be smart, pick the right ones, do them well, branch out over time as you can or somewhere in between.
Neil Patel (41:22.254)
You have no choice to be on all of them, but you should start off picking the main channels you know your ideal customers are on.
get them going, scale them out. Once they're not on autopilot, but close enough to autopilot where you're just on maintenance mode, start adding in more channels. And you would keep doing that with those new channels, scale them up. And then once you get them where they're pretty efficient, then you add in more. And then eventually you'll be on the majority. You may not be on all of them, but that's the methodical approach to eventually get on all the main ones that you need to be on.
Tom Rudnai (41:53.64)
I think that's a great place to transition into a couple of quick fires Neil
So I think we did give you some of these in advance, but we have a few that we'd to just do at the end. So the first one I'm gonna give you is an AI use case that you absolutely love. Something that kind of, what has most blown your mind over the last three years?
Neil Patel (42:14.594)
Yeah, the AI use case that has blown my mind and my engineers ended up showing me this. And this was earlier on with Claude code was, we see all the inquiries in our marketing tools like Ubersuggest, our support inquiries. We then end up having Claude fix those issues.
then we end up testing them, QAing them, another agent's QAing them, and then a human just approves it then it gets rolled out and then the bugs get fixed much faster. And some of them may not look at that as marketing, but if you're delighting your customers faster, the word of mouth marketing kicks in and you grow much faster and we've seen it have a direct impact on revenue.
Tom Rudnai (42:57.81)
Nice, I like that. And then, this is always a bit of a fun one. If I were to give you, or one of your clients were to give you carte blanche to do any marketing campaign that you wanted, budget is no question, what would you do? I guess it's like, what is the wackiest, weirdest marketing idea that you couldn't justify but kind of feel like you'd love to do?
Neil Patel (43:22.638)
I don't have a customer who'll let me do this, but I've always dreamed about this. This is going to sound a little silly. I would love to do a marketing campaign where I'm blitzing Super Bowl, any current major events, all the television channels globally, soccer stadiums, NBA arenas, know, sponsoring journeys, jerseys, and doing it all.
within like a 30 day period and see what happens to a brand if everyone continually sees it. And I think it would just make the business just blow up in a really massive way, in a mainstream way. I'm not saying in a revenue perspective. And I know we talked about Super Bowl having crappy ROI, but I've never seen anyone, I've actually only seen one company get close to it, but very few people have the budgets to be like, let's go burden billion dollars this month.
on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, television, and just buy everything that we can buy and just see what happens in 30 days if we just do that.
Tom Rudnai (44:26.174)
Yeah, it's like if we compress our annual budget into a month, can we actually, can we make an outsized impact on the kind of cultural zeitgeist? And then the question would be, it actually make a, have a return?
Neil Patel (44:38.572)
So not compact it in a month, because typically from all the results we've seen, when you stretch it out, you actually get a better ROI than when you compact it. But it's more so for a month, I just want to blitz the whole world. And I just want to see what happens.
Tom Rudnai (44:47.102)
Mm.
Tom Rudnai (44:52.422)
Okay. I can see why no one's let you do that. Okay, cool. And then what is there like a skill or trait and this is for you, for you personally in your career that you would say has really moved the needle for you.
Neil Patel (44:56.459)
Yeah.
Neil Patel (45:12.247)
I'm pretty good at making deals and I don't know how to describe that other than persuasion.
Tom Rudnai (45:19.774)
Okay. Well, when you say making deals in most people's world, are we talking kind of at a sales level? We're talking buying and selling businesses. And when did you, how did you, and how did you.
Neil Patel (45:29.1)
That's goes over like me convincing someone to give us like a $10 million contract.
Tom Rudnai (45:36.422)
Okay, and that's something, yeah, that's- Would you say that was an innate skill or is that something that you honed?
Neil Patel (45:43.148)
I'm naturally decent at making deals, always have been. Nothing I really learn. Sadly, I hope people can learn it, but I've always just been decent at making deals.
Tom Rudnai (45:46.226)
Nice. OK. Cool.
Tom Rudnai (45:53.502)
And then what was the biggest screw up in your career? Is there a moment that stands out as like, man.
Neil Patel (46:00.48)
Yeah, we had a company called Kissmetrics. We were in talks to sell to Meta and Microsoft back in the day. We got a class action lawsuit over data privacy. They were saying like, if you're one company, we would sell the data to your competitor. We didn't.
And what I learned in the US is it's actually cheaper to settle even if you don't than it is to fight because the legal fees are so high. Our system's quite a bit different than Europe. And we had an FTC investigation and no publicly-dragged company wants to buy these kind of organizations that are dealing with these issues. And the FTC investigation passed with flying colors. They looked at code and all this stuff and they go, you guys aren't sharing data. The Wired Magazine article was inaccurate. I'm like, yes, it was. No one also sees a retraction, by the way. But the big mess up on that
we didn't adapt to mobile fast enough. And we were too focused on the lawsuit instead of adapting our product from desktop to mobile because everyone was starting to get smart devices and the web was moving into, hey, we're all going to start moving mobile phones. We saw that trend, but we didn't adapt our product to mobile devices early enough. And it was a data and analytics company. And we should have, if we did, you know, it would have been a multi-billion dollar company.
Tom Rudnai (47:17.65)
painful one. Cool. And then before I let you go, very last
Neil Patel (47:22.094)
And we lost acquisition because of the lawsuit. So that sucked too.
Tom Rudnai (47:25.99)
Okay, so that's a double pain here. Okay.
Neil Patel (47:27.872)
Yeah, I don't think we would have sold for hundreds of millions, but let's call it like 60, 70 million. When you only raise like four million bucks and you still own the majority of your company between me and my co-founder, like that would have been a great exit for us. And it was much earlier in our careers.
Tom Rudnai (47:41.224)
Yeah, I think we'll call that the highest stakes screw up that we've had yet on the pod, so nice. And then last one before I let you go is just for everyone listening at home, a book recommendation, podcast, thought leader, anything that you find really, really valuable that people should check out.
Neil Patel (47:58.028)
Yeah, so one of my favorite books is Principles by Ray Dalio. I know it's a little bit old, but I recommend everyone check it out and read it.
Tom Rudnai (48:06.558)
Cool, I have not read that, so that will be my weekend now. Look, Neil, I'm conscious we're out of time, so I'll let you go, but thank you very much. It's been lovely to chat to you. Is there anything that you're doing that you'd like to just promote quickly before we let you go?
Neil Patel (48:21.656)
Check us out at NP Digital if you ever want marketing help.
Tom Rudnai (48:25.382)
Awesome. Yeah, thank you very much for joining us and if you're still listening at home, then thank you for listening.