The Money in Marketing AI is in the Ugly, Not the Sexy

So let's talk about the money in AI. Where does the money really come from? Is it the sexy or the ugly?

The money's in the ugly, specifically when it comes to marketing.

Go on.

People always talk about AI, oh, I'm going to go use it to create content. I'm going to go use it to, you know, create this video or image. But look at the traffic that you're getting from that kind of stuff. Look at the conversions. It's not that much. But yet, very few people want to do things like, oh, we spent all this money on paid ads. How often is my team really looking at the analytics and data? Everyone says they are looking on a daily basis, but they're really not. And when you use AI to analyze your data from all these different sources and telling you where there's wastage in money spent, or where you should scale up faster because you're getting a better ROI, that's Real savings or real profitability, but yet very few people want to actually do that kind of stuff. And another great example, and you can talk about this, is talk about your AI framework that you're using.

Yep. So it's, um, guys, just if you're, if you're watching on YouTube, Neil and I both were at HubSpot Inbound right now. So we just spoke earlier today. And one of the things I brought up in our talk, we had a marketing school session, was the, the one thing we showed was the agentic workflow, right? So we talked about AI agents being able to automate a lot of the jobs to be done at our company. And it looks really boring. It's like, okay, log into Google Search Console and then, you know, consolidate, right? And then, you know, find, you know, similar vectors, right? It's like all written like programmer speak, but that's a very unsexy thing. But that thing will make us a lot of money because it's just a workflow that continues to repeat over time. And that's one of those things where it's like, we're not talking about, hey, we're not talking about the latest, you know, social media trend or whatever it is, right? We're not talking about the new hotness. It's often the boring things that work out well. And the biggest companies, they end up just doing the same things over and over and over. It's not like they're trying to be perfect at everything. And that's one of the problems with marketing. I've had that problem in the past where there's a lot of shiny object syndrome. Um, but you dial that back a little bit, just focus on what actually works well and just keep doubling, tripling down on it.

Totally. And that's the big issue that we see with AI. All the companies want to do it for this latest sexy thing that someone's talking about at a conference and showing a video of like this cool feature. I'm like, Yes, but will it really generate you that much traffic? Oh, not really. Okay, will it generate you tons more revenue? Oh, not really. But using AI for systems and processes, oh, that's boring. Well, that saves you time. You're paying staff a lot of money. Like these are the, in my eyes, and I know in your eyes as well, that's the sexy stuff, but most people don't view it as sexy.

Yeah. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our Our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. Well, let's give you an example. Like we'll talk about another example here with sexy. So new and sexy, we talked about this. I asked you if you knew what Google Notebook LLM is, right? That came out like last week and Google Notebook LLM, it just takes a giant book and it makes it into a podcast, right? But that's a shiny object thing, right? Like it's cool. I don't know what we're gonna do with it. But it's like, is that actually going to drive revenue or should we just focus our resources on what's already working? Right. I think there's all these new releases coming out all the time and we're going to continue to see that. There's always going to be a new breakthrough. Right. And, um, but oftentimes it's just, you do the same thing for 10, 20, 30 years, uh, in the, on the business side and marketing, maybe it's a little less than that.

Yeah.

Um, because things change, but still the concepts are, it's the same.

And similar to AI and going after the ugly, The same goes with marketing platforms. When you're trying to scale up your marketing and just grow, it's a lot of the boring, ugly channels is what produces results. Spending more time on that for most industries will produce better results than focusing on TikTok.

And you talked about your top 3 when we're, we're on stage. I was like, hey, what are your top 3? Go ahead.

Top 3 channels. Channels?

For new customers.

For my top 3 channels for new customers, it starts with Google. Then it goes to YouTube and then it goes to LinkedIn.

Yeah. But where are you getting the majority of your customers for NP Digital right now?

Oh, where we get the majority of customers. Uh, number 1 is, uh, RFPs, just word of mouth of people knowing where that we're in the industry. Uh, number 2 is client referrals. Number 3 is employee referrals. Once you have enough headcount, like we're above 1,000, just people are like, oh, I worked with this individual. They were great in the past. Oh, they moved companies. Hey, can you still work with us? And, you know, companies follow good people.

Yep. I mean, everything comes down to good people at the end of the day. But like, to your point, the top 3 are really word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth, right? Yeah. And then for us, it is word of mouth first. And then it's, you know, we talk about doing events, like webinars work really well. SEO works really well. It's like the boring stuff. And we just did a little interview with Entrepreneur Magazine outside, and they're just like, well, what's the old stuff that works well? It's, you know what it is? It's emails and it's webinars, right? But more than anything, it's Are you doing good work or not, right? Are you doing good work or not? If you are, that means you probably have good people. And that way you deserve to compound because you're doing good work. But that all comes down to people at the end of the day.

It does. And, you know, having good people is one thing. You want to make sure they have the right systems and processes, and that way they can be efficient and they don't have tons of roadblocks. But yeah, marketing is not about sexy. And I was talking to the same entrepreneur, guys, and he was asking me about email. He's like, what do you think about it? I'm like, it's one of the highest ROI channels. So then he goes and he starts talking to me about like, what are people doing wrong with email? I was like, the biggest thing that they're doing wrong with email, they're using it in the same way. I'm not talking about segmentation. I'm talking about the emails they're sending. And a lot of people don't realize with AMP technology, you can end up making it where your emails are powerful, where someone can select the product. Like if you were selling white t-shirts, They can select a white t-shirt or a gray t-shirt, the size. They can even click buy and purchase. And they can do all this within Gmail without even going to your website. When you do things like that, conversions go up.

What's that tool called again?

Zamo.

Zamo. So it's like Waymo, but with a Z.

Yes.

Yeah.

And just businesses aren't adapting to the newer technologies for some of these boring, ugly Channels, but they still convert and perform really well.

You know, he asked me a general question around what I would do with email. I think if I had a really good email list that was highly engaged, I would try to buy a lot of emails using, you know, Meta, Instagram, whatever it is exactly. And I would drive it to my highly engaged list. And then from there, I might have native ads or I might have different types of promotions in there promoting my own stuff ideally. I think that's a nice way to grow. That's one of the ways to grow. If I really had to focus, you know, exclusively on email, I think it's a very viable thing. I just think a lot of people won't go the extra mile. To just create a really good email list, right? Because a lot of people, they just try to promote from it. Like, remember, there's a really highly paid affiliate back in the day, a famous one. I'm not gonna name any names. But all he did was promote, promote, promote, promote, and it burned out the list.

Yeah.

Yeah. But the old stuff still works well. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there, and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. By the way, we talked about, so I, I kind of screwed up on this number on stage earlier today. Um, I said that Reddit added a billion in monthly organic visitors. Um, and here's how you can make money from it. Reddit actually added 700 million in monthly organic visitors. So this post is from Greg Eisenberg, who will be speaking at the YPO Global Marketing Summit. Um, if you guys want to go to it, but, um, so he says, Greg says niche, Internet communities are in high demand. It's not stopping. Best part is isn't the traffic from Reddit; it's the ideas and trends. So he's just basically here. He's talking about how you can create startup ideas from Reddit, looking at alternatives and things like that. And you know you can use AI to scrape pain points and all that. I'm just more excited about this graph over here. Forget about the startup ideas. Just look at this graph.

That's crazy.

You want to describe the graph?

The graph is just going up and to the right once Google made the changes and it just hooked up Reddit. They also have a deal with them too, where they're Buying the data from—

Yeah, I mean, look, it went as low as 1.6 billion monthly desktop and mobile visits, and then now it's, it's past 2.3 billion, so 700 million. And we earlier, we talked about the future of marketing, and we just think community is gonna be a big piece of it. But even being at this conference, 12,000 to 14,000 people or so, nothing beats in person. Like, you know, Neil met up— like, I have a couple meetings today. You had a couple meetings here just for this Boston trip. Not only that, we've met some amazing people and, you know, made a little connection for you. Maybe there's a little, you know, maybe a little M&A deal down the road. But that's what you get from these things, right? Community.

It was amazing. What's funny is Eric introduced me to that person last year. He's like, you should look at their agency. Do you remember that?

I knew, but I knew I introduced you to him already. But I also knew that it made sense to reconnect it because it's more relevant for you, for potentially—

It is today. Yeah. Going back a little bit, you mentioned people can go to the YPO Marketing Summit. How do— a lot of people listening are not in YPO. How do they go there?

They find a YPO member and they ask to go as a key associate. So if you're friends with a— potentially if you're friends with a YPO member, or maybe you can just find people. It's hard to find people that are going, but if you know someone that's a YPO member, just ask if you can, you know, have them sign up for you or something like that as a key associate. And hopefully they can go too. That's, that's kind of the loophole, right? Because usually these YPO events, um, They are only for YPO members, but the way I've structured it is like people can bring key associates and that's how you want to do it. So yeah.

Got it.

And Neil will be there. I will be there. A bunch of other people will be there. Anyway, that is it for today, everyone. This is live from us at Inbound 2024. This is how seriously we take it, guys. Neil had to speak at a couple of things. I have 4 things to speak at today. This is the 3rd one. I have one more. But please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. You can have a call with our guy Austin, and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.