Neil Patel - Give First philosophy, SEO tactics, how to leverage AI in marketing and brand building!

If I was starting out as a marketer right now and you're saying definitely, you're saying avoid a certain thing, the big thing that I would avoid is doing too many things at once. And that's the big mistake. Do one thing really well, conquer it, and then move on to the next channel and then continually add more. Yes, you need to take an omnichannel approach, but you need to start with one or two channels first and get them right before you expand to many more channels.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast. Where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now, today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckled down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different for every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the business becomes less valuable or worse. Worthless. If you find yourself here or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. Welcome everybody. Today I have Neil Patel, one of the amazing marketers I duly respect. Like now and then and every time I think about marketing, I refer his articles. I'm not an SEO expert, but everything he created regarding SEO and everything, it's like pure gold. Neil is the founder of NP Digital. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's a top influencer named by Wall Street Journal. I can go on and on and on and on. Probably I can take like half an hour just introducing Neil, which I don't want. Let's get into the conversation. Neil, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

I'm feeling great. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Fun story. Neil and I, we met at Inbound a few weeks ago and he was very grateful, very gracious to come on the show and bless our listeners with some of the wisdom he's going to drop now. So right off the bat, Talk to me about, uh, marketing 101. Like, when did you fall in love with marketing? Go, let's go back to your early days and like walk me through it.

So I was around 15 years old, created a website, and the website was a business. It was a job board and no one was coming to it. And I created the job board because I couldn't find a job.

Oh,

I was coming to it. I saved up some money from working some jobs and I paid a marketing firm. I got little to no results. I was frustrated, I was broke, so I had to learn it on my own. I started doing marketing on my own website, took a year, got good at it, and then I was like, huh, this is actually fun. And it was like addicting just looking at the analytics and the data and be like, oh, I'm getting more visitors, more people are registering on my site. Still wasn't making money, but it was at that point where I got addicted to the marketing aspect. Right.

And talk to me about the early mistakes you made as a 15-year-old learning about marketing that people still make today. Like, what are some things that you observe right now that, oh my God, there's still people are— I'm just getting super mad because they're just doing the same thing which I did when I was like 15 years old.

Sure. So one is they take shortcuts. They'll do things like buy links and try to cheat the system instead of playing the long game and investing that money in their product or service. The second thing that people still do, and they made this mistake when I first started 23 years ago, people focus on immediate ROI. And I'm not saying you shouldn't. Marketing, yes, you want an ROI when you can get one, but not everything in marketing is about ROI. What about brand building? And a lot of people took that for granted, you know, 23 years ago and they still take it for granted today. But if you look at electric cars, you buy Tesla because you just know it's Tesla. When it's running shoes, you go with Nike because of their brand. And a brand is very powerful. If you look at most of your purchases, you're purchasing brands that you know and you've seen before and you didn't necessarily do a Google search or click on a paid ad. And I'm not saying SEO or email marketing or paid advertising or social media can't help with brand building, but companies take that for granted. And you build a good brand by having a good product, good service, by being in business many years. You know, all these things really add up.

And when you say people take shortcuts, right, what are the things that I know, like, you know, some of the things you mentioned are kind of like they want, like, get rich— I mean, get quick results type of methodology. I would say, like, hey, if I do this, I get this type of a thing.

The same mentality as a get rich quick, which is what you're talking about, right? Right.

Yeah. And in those shortcuts, especially in today's short attention span world, what are some things that you drum the beat out saying that, hey, do avoid this because it's the social age? I think 15-year-old Neil lived in a different world than the Neil which is living right now. So what are the things that if you were like a 15-year-old starting to do marketing, That you say, hey, definitely do avoid this?

Yeah, so if I was starting out as a marketer right now and you're saying definitely, you're saying avoid a certain thing, the big thing that I would avoid is doing too many things at once. So in marketing, and it's contradicting advice, but it's not really. And here's what I mean by that. In marketing, people will tell you that good channels eventually could get competitive. And the only way to win is to take an omnichannel approach. You have to do social media, you have to do all the major platforms, you have to do SEO, you have to do email marketing, you have to do conversion, you have to do paid ads, pay-per-click, conversion rate optimization. But it's overwhelming. But that's how you win. Yeah. And what you see is people start off with trying to do everything, and that's the big mistake. Do one thing really well, conquer it, and then move on to the next channel, and then continually add more. Yes, you need to take an omnichannel approach, but you need to start with 1 or 2 channels first and get them right before you expand to many more channels.

And in your opinion, right now, right off the bat, given like you're observing the market very closely, especially in the marketing area, which channel do you recommend for listeners who are either starting their own business, being a creator, creating content? Which channel is really effective right now?

I wouldn't necessarily say one channel is more effective than another because it really depends on your industry. But I would tell you as a medium, video is probably one of the most effective formats. And I would start with creating video and you can repurpose that video on multiple channels or you can slice the video into Reels or Shorts or whatever you want to call them, TikToks, et cetera.

Right, right. You, your blog, had over 4 million visitors per month and you spend like a ton of time on it on a regular basis. Talk to me about how that reach— how did you maximize that reach? What are some tactics that from a writing standpoint, writing blog standpoint that you've used that people should learn about?

So the big thing is if you're going to pick one thing, if you want to get traffic to your website, because keep in mind I started early, so things a little bit different than they are now. But right now the key is you're writing really unique, amazing content. See, everyone's talking about ChatGPT and Bard and creating the same regurgitated information. To do well, you got to write unique, fresh content that people haven't read about before that is on top of their mind, that intrigues them. And that's where I think a lot of people make mistakes right now.

Let's talk about your Marketing School Podcast. If you've done written content, you've done building businesses, you've done like so many things, why podcasting? What caught your eye that I should do podcast?

Yeah, what caught my eye is I look at podcasting as an unsaturated market. There's less than 10 million podcasts, but there's over a billion blogs. Look how many people there are in this world. Podcasting is just much less competitive and it's growing at a very rapid pace.

And anything that you've learned building that podcast growth versus the blog growth? Like what are the some things that you did differently this time? I know it's, I think it's audio, video is predominantly like, you know, will help you get more visitors.

Podcasting, when you do your keyword research is similar to the blog. You got to have good keywords that people are searching for. You can use tools like Ubersuggest or Answer the Public for that. 2 is you got to talk about trending topics. 3 is you need to, we found that longer podcast episodes are doing better even though we do short ones. We've been doing tests on that. 4 is you need to keep a repository. So with podcasting, when people look at their feeds, a lot of times they only show the latest like 50 episodes or 100 episodes. We show as many as the aggregators will allow you to show. We find that gets us a lot more listens or views or whatever you want to end up calling them.

Hmm.

And then, The next strategy, and this is the last one, I'll actually give you 2 more. So one other strategy is consider interviewing people. When you interview them, have them promote the podcast episode. And then the last strategy is you got to do swaps with other podcasts. So let's say you have a podcast, I have a podcast. Right. We can do ad impressions on your podcast where you're promoting our podcast, and on our podcast we can promote yours. And it doesn't matter if your podcast is more popular than mine or mine is more than yours, we can do impression swaps. So I can do 1,000 impressions for 1,000 impressions or 10,000 impressions versus 10,000 impressions. And we found that to just really grow a podcast.

Wow. I didn't know that. I think I didn't know that that's a thing about impression swap. That's a good takeaway from this episode. So one of the things that really caught my attention when I was listening to you at Inbound was you were telling that You should always give free work in the beginning and you should give, give, give. And at some point, if you ask, you know, people are going to like come forward to support you in whether you're building a SaaS business or creating content. You should always free work first, then later you have to place an ask. Talk to me about that philosophy. How did that philosophy help you grow your business?

Well, it's simple. Let's start thinking of everything as a currency, okay?

Mm-hmm.

If you give away something for free, it costs you money. Opportunity costs, your time, your energy, maybe paying people, it costs money. Buying traffic costs money. What we found is if you can find something that people find valuable and you can give it away for free because it doesn't cost you much, we find that is more effective than spending the dollars on marketing. I own a marketing agency, NP Digital, right?

Right.

It goes against what, you know, what, how I make money in my business. But we tell clients what's best for them. Doesn't mean marketing is bad. We find that if you can find something that has high value that you give away for free, has bigger impact than charging or paying for marketing.

Isn't that so? Sometimes it feels like the debate out there is when you give a lot of free work, you are kind of losing credibility as well because it's— again, I, I'm opposed to it, but because you're doing—

There's a lot of people— Ray Dalio gives a ton of stuff away for free. No one cares. He doesn't lose any credibility. He's also one of the richest people in the world. But free has nothing to do with credibility. You'll lose credibility if your product or your service sucks, whether it's free or paid. Right? That's what loses credibility. If the information you put out is crap, doesn't matter if it's pay or free, you'll lose credibility. Free has nothing to do with credibility. Quality has everything to do with credibility.

I like that. That's a snippet that we'll use for sure. With personalized marketing being important these days, everybody's becoming more human, not sounding like a machine. How can founders leverage it to grow their business?

So personalization, I don't have a dog, but let's imagine I have a dog. I wouldn't want Amazon recommending me cat food if I have a dog and I don't have a cat. Personalization, that's an extreme example, but that makes your life easier when you're shopping. For example, if I'm looking up the weather and I'm in Los Angeles, but it shows me the weather in Las Vegas, That's a 4-hour drive. That's a big difference. I don't care what the weather in Las Vegas is. I'm in Los Angeles. I want to see where the weather is in the city I'm in or where I'm going to.

The

point I'm getting at is personalization just makes your life better.

Right.

But the hard part with personalization is when do you show people different things? And you can start using tools and services like ChatGPT to help with this, whether that's chatbots, you know, from the OpenAI API, or whether it is showing people different things based on their location. People want personalized experiences. But the hard part is actually personalizing and not getting too personal. And what I mean by that is, we found that when you personalize too much, it doesn't really impact conversions or revenue. Hmm. You need to personalize enough where you can get the extra conversions and sales, but personalizing much more than that, doesn't make that big of a difference.

I like that. You're one of the influencers in marketing, and I think it's after social becoming like the social wave, everybody's having that creating content on social, TikTok, whatever that is, like Facebook earlier. How important is an influencer's role in current marketing landscape? And as an influencer yourself, how do you Find advantages of influencer marketing?

I think influencers are very important. And think of it this way, with influencers, okay, if you wanted to buy— if you want to buy something, a lot of times you're— a lot of times if you want to buy something, you're looking at what other people are recommending. Whether it's a Cristiano Ronaldo if it's related to soccer or Kylie Jenner for Kylie Cosmetics. But people connect more with these individuals or Rihanna from Fenty than they do with a lot of these faceless corporate brands. Now it doesn't mean the faceless corporate brands aren't effective is look what Nike's done with influencers. Michael Jordan, you know.

LeBron James.

LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, et cetera. Influencers can be very powerful. You just have to have the right influencers and have to be relevant to your business. Me getting LeBron James to promote my marketing agency, NP Digital, isn't going to do much. His following isn't really to marketing. It's more towards sports and entertainment and it has to be the right influencers, but it's super effective. I think where, look what Ryan Reynolds did. He sold Mint Mobile. I forgot what the price tag was, but it was quite a

bit. Yeah, more than a billion.

Yeah, more than a billion, I think, including the earnout. And it was a super effective strategy. What was the differentiator between Mint Mobile and other mobile providers? The real difference was Ryan Reynolds. There wasn't much of a difference other than that.

I think, yeah, I feel like a lot many people make mistakes picking wrong influencers, wasting a lot of money, thinking that their name and fame are going to bring a lot of attention. But what you said is absolutely true. It doesn't matter. like a business influencer fit so that, you know, like just founder market fit, it should fit right in so that their audience feels like the product you're building is much more valuable. I like that a lot.

Yes.

In your opinion, what are some key trends that startups should focus on within the digital marketing in this landscape?

So digital marketing right now, think about AI and how you can use it to be more efficient in your marketing so you can get more done as a startup. Be as focused. Startups try to do too many things with their marketing. Try to pick 1 or 2 channels first and then expand. 3, start thinking about product-led growth. What can you give away for free, which we talked about as well, that doesn't cost you much and sell them something that's bigger? In the presentation, I give an example of you give away free payroll software and you sell them on health insurance, which is more than a 10 times bigger market when you compare Paychex versus UnitedHealthcare. Right. And the last one that I would really say is engage with your community. This hasn't changed much from when I started marketing 23 years ago. I actually think it's worse now. There's social media, but a lot of people don't want to engage with others. When people leave comments, people aren't responding back. They're not helping others. They're not really conversing with their audience. Mm-hmm. And if you don't hear them out, you don't help them, you're not there for them, you're not communicating with them, You're only going to do so well.

Talk to me. Yeah, I think 100% agree. Community is that additional weapon that people should use intentionally. Again, I think a lot many founders with their digital marketing strategy, they just build communities out of intention because someone else is building it, or they think that more people bring more business. That's absolutely, I feel, wrong. Should be very intentional, like interacting with the community. 100% on that. Talk to me about the data aspect of marketing. I don't want to ask a standard question about like, hey, what metrics people should measure. But at the same time, I want to really understand how you think data plays a role in startups doing the right marketing, meaning are they progressing in the right way, moving forward? What are the metrics that you generally consider?

So I don't really consider a specific metric like, you know, what they should— the reason I don't say I don't consider specific metric, it varies per business. So every business has their own key performance indicators. For some it's leads, for some it's sales cycles, for some it's conversion to customers, for some it's lifetime value of a customer, for some it's churn. I don't know what it is going to be for Your business or the listener's business because it's going to vary for each one. But you got to figure out what metrics really move the business in the direction you want to go and from both bottom of funnel, mid-funnel, and top of funnel. And those are the metrics you need to start tracking.

This is more of like a tricky question, I would say. There is like a scrappy of building marketing, right? Like there is this You know, you do not need to be like paid. It should be clever, smart, witty, like people wearing t-shirts in a conference, getting the attention of others. So in a way, guerrilla marketing, I would say.

Yeah, but it can be paid because there's paid— I still think is scrappy. If you can spend a dollar and make $2 in profit for every dollar you spent through paid advertising, you would spend as much as you can.

So the question I have is, Like if you were to design a scrappy strategy of marketing, what would that look like? I'm just curious.

It would actually rely on one key strategy. It wouldn't be a scrappy version of marketing. It would be what can I give away for free? It would be product-led growth, which in my version would be scrappy. It'd be what can I give away for free that would, and sell them something bigger so I can build up the audience without having to pay for it. I think that would build a much bigger business in the long run.

I like, I think you've talked in detail about product-led growth, you know, giving away free, extracting to expanding to other markets in inbound. When are you becoming Honda Odyssey's ambassador?

I love the Honda Odyssey. You click a button and the doors open on both sides for the kids to jump in and out, right? So yeah.

For context, I think Neil used one of the examples as Honda, and I loved it in one of the keynotes. So that was the context before that. But talk to me about like the brand making in marketing, like meaning take the famous Steve Jobs marketing lessons, right? Like it's always about Persona, people, not features or benefits or the product. It's always about beyond that, right? So in this 2023 age, what is— do still people think the same? Do you suggest the same? Or what are you suggesting beyond that? Like people versus product.

I think marketing, the concepts are still very similar as they were 10, 20, 15 years ago, in which it is people, personas, problems, solving them. Those are the things that really matter.

It's the same. There's no additions

to— I think the channels have changed. I don't necessarily think the way you talk, you know, people's problems and the personas or a lot of that kind of stuff has changed. But I think the channels have changed that you communicate with them. Just like think about television. People used to purchase television ads all the time and they still do. But now it can be done digitally, right? We have connected TV, you have YouTube TV, you have Netflix where you can purchase ads, you have Amazon where you can purchase ads in Prime. Like,

right,

the channels have changed, but you know, the real marketing concepts, a lot of them haven't changed, they're still applicable today.

The foundations are the same. I like that. You're, you're also one of the, uh, one of the amazing public speakers. You've given so many talks, so many interviews. You're actually nailing this one too. What advice would you give to those trying to improve public speaking?

Just do it. No one's perfect. No one's great at the beginning. You keep doing things and you get better. When you want to play a sport, you're not the best at day one. You get better over time. That's how the life works with most things.

Let's talk about like some of the, some of your, like the work versus the personal stuff. What excites you most as, as a dad Neil versus a marketing Neil?

Wait, repeat the question.

So let's talk about your work-life balance or like, you know, the work versus like, you know, the personal stuff. What excites you as a As a dad Neil, or like, you know, as a just general, like, you know, Odyssey driver Neil versus marketer Neil?

Yeah, so personal life, what excites me is just family, wife, kids, them progressing in life, taking milestones. Those kind of things really excite me.

Any pastimes that you want to talk about that really helps you really focus on your business that people should follow? Like any habits that you want to share?

Wake up early, start my work before a lot of distractions. I sleep early, that way I get a good night's rest. I do intermittent fasting. It helps me with energy, at least for me. I'm not saying medically it helps for energy. I just, I feel like I have more energy with intermittent fasting. I work out at least 4 or 5 times a week. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm not the buffest guy or the fittest guy, but it helps. I try to eat really healthy. And clean, no fried food or not tons of like cheese or oily food. You know, not tons of bread, but all that kind of stuff just helps me be more efficient. I don't really drink any coffee, not even really. I don't drink coffee, tea, don't need carbonated drinks, just water, no alcohol.

You seem like a like a. I think you should you should name this episode as Monk Marketer or something like that. You seem very calm, very. composed, you have a routine, you have like a lot of habits. You seem like, you know, the right person I think everybody should mock around. Talk to me about your, like, the balance— work balance, just work balance. Like, you do the podcasting, you have this business.

I don't have a work balance. So I spend almost all my time on NP Digital, or all my time on NP Digital, but there's no real work Life balance. I work a lot. I work seven days a week, and I enjoy it. I think when you love what you're doing on all ends of life, you don't strive for as much balance. You focus on what you love.

That's that's that's the classic classic you know inspirational drop right there. You've done a lot of consulting as well, right? Like you've you've helped companies like Airbnb, Salesforce. When you work with corporations or big brands like that, what are some challenges that you faced and how did you like overcome?

There's always a challenge. Typically when you work with clients like that, they come to you with a problem and you got to figure out how to solve it in the timeframe they want and within the budget that they want. And it's always tough to do both of those. And you got to start thinking outside the box. You got to get creative. That's usually the way you win.

Any particular examples that you're very proud of the work you did, you know, for— I

have a lot and you can find tons of examples on the NP Digital website. But the reason I don't bring them up is I don't know which ones we're contractually allowed to talk about and which ones we're not. And the NP Digital website, because the ones that are on our website, I know contractually we're able to talk about. Because some of the big companies that you work with, they don't even let you put the logo on their website. Like they're really picky.

And when in that scenario, how do you actually grow your consulting business? Like when you don't have that social proof, how do you kind of amplify it that you work for someone?

Offer work for free. And if you do well, then maybe you'll get a paid gig. Get creative. Look at all the people on Crunchbase who recently got funding, hit them up and offer them services because they're just flush with cash. Like strategies like that, like just getting creative really can drive good revenue. But that's where a lot of people mess up on is they're not really getting creative and thinking outside the box.

And in this age, I feel, let's talk about creativity, right? Like creative marketing and as such, in this age, a lot of people are relying just on AI.

Like,

yeah, hey, create some, you know, design strategies for my business startup and whatnot.

Which is really bad. You cannot just rely on AI. It's not perfect yet. I'm still jet lagged, sorry. But it's not perfect yet. It has a lot of issues. But creativity a lot of times comes with just brainstorming, thinking out of the box, reading, seeing what other people in different industries are doing. That can all help get the creative juices flowing.

And do you— I think again, going back to Steve Jobs about creativity, he says like, you know, great artists steal and a lot many others like copy, right? Talk to me about this, the stealing aspect. Like, how should one do it in terms of marketing and how to implement? Like what you just said, like, you know, observe other people's work. Right?

Yeah. Stealing is really normal. Instagram copied Snapchat, you know, YouTube copied Instagram and they copied TikTok, right? Like this is nothing new. It happens in all industries. If Apple creates amazing EarPods, Samsung and others may end up copying, right? Or earplugs or not. Yeah. Ear, ear headphones. Yeah. EarPods or AirPods. I don't know what they're called. Something like that. But all I'm getting at, this is normal. Now the key with stealing someone else's concept is you steal ideally if you can make it better. Doing the same exact thing, it could be effective, but what's really effective is if you can make it better. Google wasn't the first search engine. They copied a lot of other people, but they figured out how to make it better.

That's a great example. You've also like talked a lot about AI during inbound. And I'm sure that you have like the strongest opinion. Where do it really work well? Like, this is where AI, especially for marketers, content creators, you should heavily rely on AI. And like you said, you shouldn't heavily rely on the strategy bit, which we talked about. But where do you see that AI really helps accelerate the process in 2023?

I think AI can help accelerate the process with creative content ideation, research processes, analyzing data. I think those are some of the areas where it can really help you excel. It can't do the whole job, but it can help you get maybe 50% there or 60% there.

Do you use AI tools? Any, any, do you have any AI stack do you want to share?

I don't have any steps, but we use a lot of ChatGPT and we use Bard quite a bit. Those are the 2 that we use a lot.

And any specific use case that you use for?

Sure. Taking all our data from our marketing campaigns, putting it in one place, and then having the AI analyze it to figure out where we're wasting money, what's working, what's not, et cetera.

That's interesting. And where is AI going in the future? Like, what is your prediction from—

I think they're going to have robots that walk around and can help you.

That's a wild prediction. This has been like very short but very impactful interview, I would say. Any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

In marketing, we're in a time where it's just like everyone's using AI. When you actually take time to create something unique and you're not just being similar to everyone else, You'll really stand out even more now and it'll help you shine and succeed. So try to figure out what you can do manually that helps you stand out versus just using the same outputs as everyone else. I was at a conference the other day and this lady named Erica told me about her daughter. She's in Switzerland in a school. 3 of her daughter's classmates got a 0 on their essay. Why? Because they used ChatGPT and their essays all sounded the same, so the teacher knew. The point I'm getting at is being unique, being creative, standing out. It shines. It's even more important now than it was a few years ago.

Being authentic and like you said, being human is going to be the differentiating factor right now because of the machine overwhelming content that's been floating around. That's great advice, Neil. Appreciate you so much. I know you're busy, you're traveling, you've got a lot on your plate, and I appreciate you for taking and talking to us. You know, some of the things you said are really absolutely important. Pick one piece at a time, one channel, focus on one thing, double down and be authentic. Use AI, but don't overuse it. That's, I think, what I would like to put that as a summary of this conversation. But appreciate you. Thanks folks for listening. There have been like more guests coming on the show and I'm excited to like, you know, unpack a lot of these things. And cheers, Sunil, again, but stay tuned for more episodes. Cheers.

Thanks.