The Future of Digital Marketing According to Neil Patel

I'm a bit exhausted. I didn't get enough sleep. Crying baby wakes up every 2 hours. So today I wanted to talk to you guys about the future of digital marketing. Where's my slides? All right, as you guys can see, and the future is not what you think, but don't worry. Not everything has to be grim. There is some good news as well. And I'm going to share with you guys a lot of stats and data. So we deal with companies of all different types of sizes, from large corporations like the Fortune 100, all the way to small mom-and-pops. And when you're dealing with companies of all sizes and you've been doing this for roughly 16, 17 years, you start noticing trends and patterns. And what Eric and I wanted to leave you with is changes that you can implement so that way you're going to be better prepared for the next algorithm updates, next platform updates, so that way you can keep thriving and surviving and doing extremely well. So my Twitter handle, ignore the hashtag. I'm the co-founder of an ad agency called Neil Patel Digital. As I mentioned, work with all different types of companies from the Facebooks of the world to the Microsofts, you know, yada, yada, yada. Tons of quotes, testimonials. Now the point of all that isn't to say I'm great or I'm amazing. I don't think I'm the best marketer out there. I still think I have a lot to learn and improve upon, but it's more so to show that, hey, when I'm giving data and facts, it's based on what I'm seeing and it's not just me making stuff up. And I truly see both sides of the table. Not only am I an entrepreneur and a marketer myself, I also work with companies like Google, or this one's actually Facebook, companies like Facebook who will hit me up and pay me money to speak at their own conferences to their own customers, as well as companies like Google who will hit me up to help market Google as well. In essence, I really do see every single side of marketing. I see it from the entrepreneur side, the business owner side, the marketer side, the platform side from the Googles, the Facebooks of the world. Now before we get started and go into the future of marketing, I wanted to play a little bit of a game with you guys. So number 1, how many blogs do you think are there on the web? Let's see how many of you guys listen to Marketing School. All right, take a guess. A billion. That's right. Saeed may have a different number. You may have a different number. You're like, no, no, there's 1,100,000,000 WordPress blogs. Do you know the real number? Okay, so from what we know and all the stats online, there's at least a billion blogs. How many people are in the world? Take a guess. 7 billion. Yeah, roughly 7 billion. Do you think we need that many blogs? That's roughly one blog for every 7 people. Just honestly. No, we don't need another marketing blog, so don't try to copy me. All right. But in general, there's just too much content at this point. How many enterprise companies do you think are leveraging digital marketing? You know, like these old school companies, some of them are like big corporations like Fordive. How many of you guys have heard of Fordive? Did you know they're worth like $30 billion and they sell like gas pumps and industrial equipment that you guys use on a daily basis? that you never know about? Okay, how many old-school companies like that do you think are leveraging digital marketing? Take a guess. All of them. Who said all of them? That's right. All of them are pretty much leveraging digital marketing. Those guys have a shit ton of money, literally piles and piles of it. They make more in interest on any given day than we make in a whole year working. Right? So they can outspend us and when they make mistakes, it doesn't really hurt them. Another question. Startups, they raise money. What do you think most of the money that they're raising is used for these days? Ads. Ads. What else? What else? What else? What do you do? You do sales. Don't try to lie to people. You're a salesman. I know you're on payroll. If that guy tries talking to you, he's a salesman. Okay. So startups these days— when I was starting my first company back in the day, we would raise venture capital. The money was raised for creating a product, engineering, servers, all that kind of stuff. Now most companies raise the majority of their money for sales and marketing. In other words, growth. They're trying to figure out how to get more revenue and that usually involves sales and marketing. You can talk about growth hacking and looping some product changes, but in essence, that's where they're spending their money. How many of you guys or what percentage of voice searches will be in 2020? What do you think? What percentage? Go for it. Yeah, you. 80%. You really do listen to marketing school a lot. 50% it is. Things are changing. How are you going to monetize when someone's doing a search over Alexa device or Google Home? How are you going to monetize that? Have you guys ever thought about that? 50%. I want that revenue from that 50%, don't you guys? So there's a lot of things that are changing and I'm going to even go over even more. You're going to see me turning my head a lot back a bit because there's a ton of stats and data. I hope you guys don't get overwhelmed. And then we'll go into some of the things you guys can do to ensure that you continually succeed. So here's Google's revenue. 2008 was a recession. We're worried about a potential recession coming in the future. What happened to Google's revenue during the recession? It went down. It went up. What do you think is going to happen to their revenue during this recession? Go up. It's probably going to go up. They'll figure out ways to make it go up if the cost per clicks go down. You may see more paid listings on page 1, right? Generally speaking, performance advertising continues to go up. If you spend $1 on paid ads, you expect to make more money than what you spent. Would you guys agree with that statement? So during a recession, if you still spend $1 on Google and you make $2, do you think you're going to slow down because it's a recession? No, it doesn't matter if it's a recession, a bull market, a bear market. If you can spend $1 and make $2, as long as it's profitable, including all your other costs, you're going to keep spending as much money as you can. And that's what you'll see. People will start moving their traditional ad dollars more over to performance-based marketing during recessions. So let's go over what I've been learning and the future of marketing and where it's going. Fact number 1, and we talk a little bit about this during our podcast, marketing is going omnichannel, but I have the data to show you why, right? So I'm going to actually go over here because it's easier to see the television screen than the projector. Here's marketing spend by channel. No shocker. Which place gets the majority of the revenue? Google. Who has the largest market cap? Google. Next one, Facebook ads. Makes sense. Facebook has a huge market cap. Then you get into SEO and content marketing and social media marketing and then other. SEO, yeah, may get a lot of the clicks, but paid advertising, spend $1, make $2. You don't have to wait a long time. People keep spending. Conversion rate by channel: Google AdWords, Facebook ads, SEO content marketing, social media, other. Why does Google AdWords convert better than SEO? If you had to take a guess, people are like, "Oh, this is paid ads. We wouldn't trust it as much." Why do you think paid ads converts better? The what? Bottom of funnel. Okay. Intent. Landing page. Landing page, that's right. If you— Saeed has WPBeginner, you get a ton of visitors, millions a month. On those pages that get millions of visitors a month, can you just put a squeeze page and make them sign up for hosting and my plugins? You could, but your rankings would go down. If you remove the content you just put that, it would go down. With pay-per-click, if you give them money, you can put whatever you want as long as you keep paying them. SEO, you got to have content. Sure, you can get a lot of traffic, but that content, you know, if you look at auto insurance, you click on the first paid listing, it's usually type in your zip code and that's it. It doesn't even have 100 words of text on the page, including the title tag. You look at the text-based version that ranks on page 1, there's like 1,000 words about auto insurance. Facebook ads, intent isn't there. You can still convert them. Cost per clicks are a lot less and you can still convince them to convert. You just got to get more clicks. SEO, as we already mentioned. Social media, you guys already know that one. Other, we'll go into other a bit later. Average number of social shares per post. It's been continually declining. What do you think is going to happen in the future? You think it's going to go back up? No. Nope. If you want to go back up, what are you going to have to give Facebook? Money. Money. That's the reality of it. And I'm not here to say Facebook sucks. It's a great platform and channel for marketers. You can also start getting creative and leverage like Messenger chat and all this stuff helps as well that Larry talked about earlier. But in general, social shares are declining. That's just the stats. Now here's where people are publishing content. It used to just be where it would be on their own blog, but now everyone's leveraging Medium, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter. Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content. You release content once, publish it everywhere. You release one video, take that same video, re-upload it to Facebook, re-upload it to LinkedIn, re-upload it to Pinterest. Actually, I don't think Pinterest takes videos, but everywhere else that takes videos, upload it. Get that traffic. What do you have to lose? What percent of organic search traffic goes to your blog? You see a trend here? Not only are people continuing to blog, but those pages give information. They don't necessarily sell products or service. And this isn't Google's fault for doing this. There's nothing wrong with what they're doing. This is the trend. Their trends, the way they adapt Google is based off of usage of you and I searching. So if we all search for something and we want to read the informational articles, what do you think they're going to show more of? Informational-based articles, and that's what they're doing, right? What portion of your customers first found you through your blog? It's increasing. Why? Because blogs are ranking better. That's what people want to see. So if you're not blogging, whether you like it or not, you're not going to end up generating all those extra conversions. In Google Analytics, there's this report called Assisted Conversions. Are you guys familiar with this report? Raise your hand if you are. Assisted conversions will tell you things like, are people reading your blog and then eventually converting? This is really important because this will help you put an ROI to some of these other channels. What has led to your biggest traffic gains? Shockingly, translations. Most people don't know this. Number 2, updating content. That works better than creating more content. Again, billion-plus blogs. We don't need more content. We need the stale content that's outdated to be re-updated. Remember Saeed talked about, hey, when I create 3 pieces of content a week on one of these sites, I'm not really releasing 3 pieces of content. One of them is an updated article. Why? Because if you don't keep updating, you're not going to keep maintaining your rankings. It's no longer you create a blog and you just get the traffic. It's now you create a blog, you promote it, you get the traffic. If you don't constantly update, remarket that content, you're going to lose that traction and someone else is going to take your spot. So if you look at this, translations has the biggest opportunity because the United States is competitive. Brazil, all these other countries like India, They're up and coming, there is money there. And if you translate your content into their local dialects, you can do extremely well because there's not that much competition. Google needs content within those regions. You'll dominate fast. You'll maintain at least a bit longer in the short run. And you can generate revenue as well. When people talk to me, they're like, Neil, in India, why would we go after that market? There's barely any money. Do you think Walmart would pay like $15 or $17 or whatever billion dollars for Flipkart if there wasn't money in India? Do you think Airbnb would be doing investments there? Do you think Microsoft and Amazon and Adobe and all these companies would be investing billions of dollars? No. So you got to get on these regions fast. That is a big future. If you translate your content, you can find a lot of these people from Upwork, you can do really well. So what channel provides the biggest ROI for companies? Can you guys take a guess on this? Out of all the survey data, there was one channel that provided the biggest ROI and it was lumped into other. If you guys had to guess what this channel was, what would you think it is? Instagram, email, what else? Podcasting. Conversion rate optimization. It's the least sexiest channel out there, From every company we interviewed and surveyed, and we surveyed hundreds of these companies, and some of these guys are doing like millions and millions and millions of dollars a month in profit, if not billions, some of them. Conversion optimization out of all the marketing channels provided the biggest ROI, but the smallest investment by far. If you can boost your conversion rates by double, What does that mean to your paid advertising or your SEO or your content marketing? You can spend more. These channels will become more expensive. Whether you like it or not, paid ads will keep going up. Whether you like it or not, you're going to keep doing it because it makes you more money. If you don't optimize for conversions, you're going to get slaughtered by all the competitors. And there's a huge trend in digital marketing right now where a ton of companies are finally starting to spend time in A/B testing, personalization, and all this other stuff that very few people talk about. And I know this because if I release a blog post on A/B testing or personalization, no one wants to read it. If I release another article on how to get more traffic, everyone's like, yeah, show me this. It just shows what you guys want to read and the trend is going 2 different opposite directions. So really start getting into conversion optimization. What's also cool about going omnichannel is that it's also not hard to see what the competition is doing, right? Because all these channels are getting saturated fast and that is a big trend. You have no choice but to leverage all of them. You used to be able to create a business off of one channel. Facebook grew just from the referral program. Dropbox grew from social media. Tweet this to get more space. You no longer can grow a business through one channel. It's becoming more and more competitive. The people who are early on, sure, Saeed has access to a huge WordPress community. He already is integrated and has access to all these users. Do you think someone can just come in right now and compete with him? Saeed, if you were coming into this right now, do you think you can do well compared to you being in this for 10 years? No. Why not? Relationships and equity is much harder to build. It's much harder. And you got in early enough, which gave you that head start. Hence, he was able to leverage one channel and explode. Now even Saeed, even though he's done really well, he's still expanding into other channels and platforms because that's how you continually grow. But you can use tools like the SEMrushes. See, I won't get complaints. I'm not just promoting my own tools. I'm not getting paid by them either. You can use SEMrush and tools like that to see what people are going after from an SEO perspective or paid advertising perspective. You can use WhatRunsWhere to see what kind of media ads people are doing. You can use BuiltWith to see what technologies people are using so that way you know someone's doing A/B testing and stuff. You can use like Ahrefs to see links to your competition, see if you can get them to link to you. You can use Wayback Machine to see if, hey, someone's doing A/B testing. Very few people do this, I don't know why. Use Wayback Machine, go back, see all the variations of their pages. You can see their transitions. Typically the one that they're with now is the one that boosts the conversion rates the most. That'll give you an idea of where to start. Link Explorer by Moz, another tool that gives you a lot of marketing insights. So what do you think happens to your CPAs when you go omnichannel? On everything, your cost per clicks, all of that. You guys familiar with Expedia? Yes? Yes. How old is Expedia? Exactly. They're really old. You guys have known about them for a long time. Expedia recently ran a test where they went omnichannel by doing television, radio, pay-per-click, etc. Do you know what happened to their CPAs on pay-per-click? Like their cost per clicks and CPAs went down by double-digit percentiles. Omnichannel helps improve your numbers on all channels. All right. Fact number 2, user metrics are the key to beating Google. You don't have to increase rankings to get more search traffic. Here's the old site that I have. I eventually got rid of it. Nutrition Secrets. It was a nutrition site. I got my traffic up and to the right. And yeah, there's writing content and building links and all that kind of stuff. But the real way we grew Nutrition Secrets, we did something really manual. At that time, there was no software that could do this. Now there is, and I'll tell you about the software in a bit. I don't have a screenshot, but you go into Google Search Console. I still like the old version. I don't know why. You click click CTR impressions, you see the pages that are getting the traffic, and then from there you look at which— you click into the page that has a low CTR, you look at the keywords, the ones that are driving a lot of impressions but low clicks, and then you're like, all right, I need to adjust my page with these keywords so I can get more clicks. Simple concept. You look for keywords that have less than a 5% click rate, look for pages that have less than a 4% CTR rate, and make sure the keywords that you want to rank for are in your title tag and within your content and meta descriptions. Once you make that change, you submit to Google and they recrawl it. And here are some keywords that help skyrocket CTR that we've tested: how-tos, list number results, free, you, tips, great, tricks, best, why. Blog posts, you guys get the gist. These have all worked really well from everything we've tested. And as you submit it back to Google and you fetch and you submit the URL, you click submit to their index and boom, you're in. You say you're not a robot and you give it 30 days and you see results. We used to do all this manually. That's how we grew our traffic. It's one of the best ways because Google is looking for user signals. Everyone focuses on links, but not enough of this. If you don't want to do it manually like how I used to do it, there's a tool called ClickFlow. You can harass someone on the Single Grain team, they can probably tell you about it. Sorry Single Grain team, but nonetheless, that's what we do now and we just automate it and it works much easier. But I kid you not, this is where we're seeing the biggest search gains right now for SEO. We're just optimizing and going after user signals. It's not sexy, not No one talks about it, works. Again, I know if I write a blog post on this, it doesn't get read as much, but this is where we're getting the traffic increases. Luckily, because I have you in front of me, you're forced to listen to whatever I want to talk about. Technically, you could walk out. ClickFlow, C-L-I-C-K-F-L-O-W. It's not called ClickFlow? It's not called ClickFlow. Do not sign up for that company. That's what it's called. I'm kidding. So eventually, here's the thing that most people don't talk about. User metrics are going to go on all platforms. Did you know on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, what is the number one metric that they look at on if a post should go viral? If you had to take a guess, what do you think it is? What is it? Take a guess. Time. Time. Okay. That's one. Shares, engagement. What's engagement mean? Comments. Comments. Comments. The more comments you get, legitimate comments, that impacts how viral a post goes more than anything else. I kid you not. If you had 50 of your friends go to your Facebook page and start leaving comments, interacting with each other, that post goes viral. Don't believe me? All people in this room, go comment on my latest Facebook post and you guys will see. Seriously, just if you don't believe me, go and try it. You can write whatever you want and I'll respond to you. And if you want to respond back and leave another comment too, you'll watch, I'll respond back again as well. That's how confident I am that it'll work. But I know you need to see it to believe it. So go and leave a comment on my Facebook page. Make sure it's the latest post so that one gets the most traffic. But that's how effective user metrics are. I used to put in all my YouTube videos and Facebook videos, Leave a comment and ask a question. My comment numbers started going up really high. My videos went viral. And then YouTube and a lot of these platforms have now built in if people are asking for comments in their videos. And I noticed the day it hit because my numbers started going down. I'm like, man. So now I'm trying to think if I can put a visual image saying leave a comment to see if that works. But it worked for a while. Fact number 3, you got to focus on branding. Brands are the future. You need to build a brand. Now, this is a quote from Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google. Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. The best part is Eric and I say this quote on our podcast so often, we never get the quote right and we always butcher it, but now we have the real one right in front of us. So you know what Google is doing to help try to solve fake news and figure out which sites to rank higher? What do you think they're looking at? Brand signals. Brand signals, that's right. What do you think Facebook's doing to try to combat fake news? What do you think they're trying to promote? What type of pages and content versus others? Brands, that's right. If you have a bigger brand, you're going to do well. You don't have to build a Coca-Cola, but if you build a brand within your niche and you're the leading player, your content within that space is going to go more viral than the others. And the Expedia example. We all know about Expedia. Expedia owns a lot of properties, Hotels.com. They used to own Trivago, TripAdvisor, all these other properties. They still own a lot. That gnome one, I don't even know what that one's called. I think Orbitz or something like that, or Travelocity, or I don't know. They just have too many properties. So with Expedia, even though people knew their properties, when they started running TV, more digital campaigns, more pay-per-click, All their cost to acquire from all the channels went down because people had their brand top of mind. It wasn't that they didn't know who Expedia was. It was, oh, Expedia, I forgot about that company. We forget about every single company. Remember how Uber was a talked about company back in the day? And now not so much other than Uber went public. Their stock didn't do as well as they would like. Dropbox, such an amazing company. This company is revolutionary, yada, yada, yada. Now? Oh yeah, it's another publicly traded company. I can just upload my information on my iCloud. I can upload it on my G Drive. I can still use Dropbox, but I got all these other things as well. We all have patterns of what's in and out. It doesn't matter if you've built a big company, you still need to be top of mind. So you want to keep pushing your brand. The key to building a brand, whether it's a personal or corporate one, is a rule of 7. How many times can people see you? Are you continually doing email marketing to get people back to your site? Are you doing push notifications? Are you doing things like Messenger Boss? All these things will help you get people back to your site so much more often, you can build a good brand. How many of you guys get 100,000 visitors a month to your site? How many get more than that? Raise your hand. How many get less than that? Raise your hand. I just want to see if you guys are lazy or not, or tired, or I suck as a speaker. Okay, so majority raised your hand. I focus on doing an omnichannel approach, putting content everywhere. I get over 100,000 visitors a month from people typing in Neil Patel. I'm not saying I'm good at building a brand. I think I'm not that great. There's way better people like Gary Vee, Tony Robbins, et cetera. And I'm more of an introvert, as Eric knows. I've known him for a long time. I'm the same way. I stay inside my house. I watch Netflix a lot. Bad Blood is amazing if any of you guys haven't watched that. And, you know, I'm waiting for season 3 though. So, and Sneaky Pete, by the way, on Amazon. That was amazing. In 2 weekends, I watched all 3 seasons. And I work while I am on or watching TV. Like, that's how I work. I don't go to office. I sit on my bed. And my team will tell you, they'll FaceTime me, like we'll be on a client call and I'll be in my bed talking to the client over Zoom while I work because that's how I get the most done. But the way I built a brand is the rule of 7, you keep getting people back. Now, over a year ago, Eric mentioned this, I acquired a company called Ubersuggest. And that guy was from Italy and I paid, I think around $120 grand for it. He built a better brand than me and he didn't do anything that I did. I think he's smarter than I am. And what I did is I just leveraged what he did and I put it on steroids by just going to the nth degree being like, let me just update your tool and give away more for free. I now get 3 times the brand queries, over 300,000 visitors a month from people looking for Ubersuggest than I do from people looking for Neil Patel. Those brand queries help skyrocket your rankings. You got to build a brand. Every time I grow my brand queries, I notice that my rankings for all my terms like online marketing pop up on the top of page 1. It's not that I try to build more links or any of that, it's I focus on brand queries. It's that powerful. So here's some tips. Emails are still effective. Push notification in combination with email marketing is really good. Combine that with Messenger bots, then you're really doing well, right, which was the next one. And then you want to use tools like Google Correlate to help you figure out what people are looking for that's similar to your keywords. So for example, if I'm in the hotels hospitality industry, I want to see what other things people are looking for. Google Correlate shows you all the other relevant keywords with similar patterns. Make sure you have content on all those keywords. That way you're helping people out because if you're helping people out, what do you think it does? It helps build a brand. Putting people first is the right thing to do. Just like when Eric and I threw this event, we were debating, we both decided we wanted to do it for free. Why? Because we're like, let's help people out. We didn't do it to try to close revenue. We didn't do it to try to generate business or anything. We're just like, this will be fun. Let's just help people out. People helped us. And yeah, the positive side is it may help us increase our brand, not by a ton. I don't mean to be in a rude way. With 200 max people, it's not going to skyrocket our brand. But it's about just giving and helping. And if you truly enjoy that in whatever you're doing, it'll help build your brand as well, but that's a side effect. It's like people saying, I want to make money. You don't make money by making money. You make money by helping people and help them solve their problems. Put other people first and eventually you will build a bigger brand. And Nutrition Secrets, as we started doing all this stuff, our branding started going up and we started doing better, getting higher rankings. More pages, and that's how we continually climbed. But traffic and all this kind of stuff is great, but it's not everything. SEMrush showed one of my past startups Kissmetrics. I think we raised like $17 million for it. It didn't turn out well. I bought out the domain name from the investors for $500,000 and then redirected the traffic, and then they recently did an asset sale. Now I had good traffic. My competitor Mixpanel, who copied my product at the beginning, They even had a TechCrunch article showing similar screenshots, had roughly 1/3 of the traffic. They raised money at an $865 million valuation. What do you think we were worth? I'm the traffic guy. I'm getting all this traffic. I'm beating them. What do you think we were worth? Anyone want to take a guess? You can be honest. It won't hurt my feelings. You can say something good or bad. Take a guess. $1 million. You're a management consultant. What do you think? $15 million. More than $15 million because we raised $17 million, but technically not when I bought the domain name. But we were worth roughly 1/10 that. Technically not even 1/10 that. So maybe 1/15, 1/20. That's brutal, right? Think about it. I'm a marketer. I'm on cloud nine getting all this traffic. It shows you traffic isn't everything. And I realized at that point, the real formula to success, especially in the future, is traffic plus conversions cubed equals success. The more you focus on conversions, the better off you guys are going to be. I'm hammering that so much because I know in a year you guys won't be able to do a lot of the marketing techniques that you're using right now unless you focus on conversions, which gets into fact number 4. Conventional CRO techniques won't work well. Interactive quizzes, I use a lot of this stuff on the Neil Patel site. It gives you some conversion lifts. I even leverage 2-step checkouts for e-commerce. I even do pop-ups that are like, do you want more traffic? Yes or no? If you click yes, you're going to get a guide that teaches you how to get more traffic. If you click no, what do you think you get? A guide that teaches you how to get more traffic. No, if you click no, I'd be like, congratulations on having massive traffic. Now let's help you double your conversion rate. Put in your name and email. Funny enough, that actually works really well. It's kind of creative. So what's wrong with all the tactics I mentioned? Pop-ups, all this stuff. They're not bad, but what's wrong with them? They're annoying. They're annoying. That is true. They still work, but they're annoying. I hate them, but they're annoying. What else is— what's the issue? You see them everywhere, and because you see them everywhere, do you think they work the same that they did 5, 6 years ago? No, the effect's worn out. Personalisation is the new conversion rate optimisation. It's all about personalising the experience. So here's an example. Now I operate my day in which I have a few companies and there's a CEO in place of a lot of these companies. They're starting to use tools like Intercom. And I'm not saying this because Intercom's a sponsor. This was— I actually did the opposite. Once Eric and I, someone told us, Yaniv, he's like, why are you guys putting your money out of your own pocket for the event? Why don't you get a sponsor? And Eric and I were like, that's a smart idea. We're really stupid for not thinking of this. That's really what happened. Am I right, Eric? True. We were just like, we're like, how much should we each spend? $20,000, $30,000 each? And then Yaniv's like, you guys are dumb. A company will give you the money. We're like, oh my God, you're brilliant. Where'd you come up with this? He's like, every conference does this. And we're like, oh yeah. So when we look at a lot, and you can use any tool you guys want out there, it doesn't make a difference to me, being honest. But when you start personalising that experience and start chatting, You'll notice that you can adapt what you do to each person. Whether you do that through Facebook Messenger bots, whether you do it through Drift, Intercom, the big point I'm trying to make is you need to start creating personalized experience for every single person. That's where we're seeing the conversion lifts because then you're getting data on everyone and you're seeing the lead type, the quality, what they even thought about your conversation. If they rated that it's an amazing conversation, do you think you have a higher chance of converting that person? Yeah. Of course, if they start asking you through chat about pricing and how they sign up, you can tailor your messaging and your content totally different than if they asked you, how do I use your product? That would be more support, or why should I buy you or use you over the competition? You need to personalize everything. Chat is now responsible for 28% of our sales. Yaniv from Nextiva, I believe his chat is responsible for roughly a 1/3 of his sales, 1/3. We're even seeing it help with e-commerce. You guys need to start using it. But don't just rely on things like Intercom for chat. You need to go above and beyond that. You need to start leveraging product tours. And I know this whole stigma out there like, oh, product tours are only for SaaS companies and when people log in. I'm going to show you something different. Here's Google. What do you think is on the right, right there? That's a functionality of a product tour. Them trying to get you into more features, more reports, more sections of Google's products and platforms. Here's something within their Gmail app. Did you know you can also schedule a send notification? That actually happened on my phone. My designer, I'm like, ooh, design this, make this look pretty. He gave me one with a ghetto iPhone because he's like, you're too cheap to get a real iPhone. I still have an old school iPhone. I'm looking in my pocket. I still have like a really old iPhone. So he's like, you get the design of an old iPhone until you upgrade. So I was like, okay. I don't want to spend the money. But even then they're doing product-related stuff. So check this out. This is animated on a checkout page. Check this. You see that moving part on the animation? That's examples of how you can use product tours on things like checkout pages and lead forms. Isn't that slick? No. No? The conversion rates go through the roof. When we started doing all this and started testing this, conversions lifted by 13%. So you start combining all these little things. You're not going to get one thing that grows your sales by 50%, but you start combining all these little things. What do you think this allows you to do? Spend more on paid ads as Google increases their prices, as Facebook increases their prices. And they're not increasing it for the sake of it. They're increasing it because more people are jumping on and you're competing with more people. It's supply and demand. Fact number 5, to win, you'll have to think like a winner. What do these people have in common? Michael Jordan, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Phelps, other than their names start with an M? Win. Yes. They all want to win. They actually all have won. 2 of them are billionaires. Michael Phelps is an amazing talented swimmer. He's an Aussie like Ryan. Is he an Aussie or is he American? No, he's American. My bad. He's not an Aussie. Right? They all have coaches and mentors who helped them get to where they are today. You need to invest in mentorship. It doesn't have to be paid. This is a free event. You can, you know, you can go to other free events. You can listen to podcasts. Eric has this podcast called Growth Everywhere where he's interviewing people and they're revealing their revenue numbers. If that's one of your competitors, you listen to it, you can figure out how they grew and you can copy some of it. Look, if you're going to climb Mount Everest, would you just fly over to Nepal, climb to the top and get there? No, you'd probably die. You would get a Sherpa to help you out and do your training. The same goes with anything you do in marketing and business. Go read articles, find people who can help you out. Again, you don't have to pay for it. There's a lot of free stuff online. The reality is marketing never stops. What works today may not work in the future. So the best approach is to continually test and keep learning. You're going to be overwhelmed by the information. And you know what? Just go after the low-hanging fruit. Try one thing. If you're going to take one thing away from this presentation, try some CRO stuff. If you don't, you're going to get beat by all your competitors in the few years, probably in 12 months, because that is where the market is going. It's so competitive. Everyone's raising money to pile on marketing scales or using Reid Hoffman's concept of blitzscaling, spend money at all costs to generate revenue even if you're not profitable. It's screwing up the margins for most of the companies. You need to focus on conversions. There's 3 types of people. Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who are wondering what just happened. Be the person who makes things happen. Thank you guys for attending. Later we'll get into Q&A during our Marketing School Live. Thank you.