Ep. 174 – WOW! ==> GUEST: NEIL PATEL 👈 NYT Best Selling Author! Over 100 Million Podcast Downloads! 😮 10 RAPID Marketing Tips in 15 MINUTES! ⏰

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I'm Jay Schwedelson.

Let's do this, not that.

Welcome back to do this, not that.

And I, I, I feel like I have the ultimate guest.

Not even like a great guest.

I have the ultimate guest.

So we got Neil Patel.

Now, if you don't know Neil, I'm going to give you the quick rundown before we start talking to him.

But Neil Patel, among other things, is the founder of NP Digital, which is among the best digital agencies in the country.

They have about a thousand people around the globe, and the guy is a giant.

His blog gets over 9 million visits per month.

His podcast marketing school that I listen to every week, it's 12 million downloads a month.

And he's just everywhere.

He's.

He's him.

So, Neil, welcome to do this, not that.

Thanks for having me.

Amazing.

Okay, so when you have Neil Patel on your show, you don't waste time.

You don't talk about boring stuff.

You get right into it.

So I have a series of super random questions that I just want to put a USB in Neil's ear and get all the information out, but that's super awkward.

So instead I'm just going to ask you the questions.

All right, so first, threads.

Waste of time or the future?

I don't think it's the future, but I also don't think it's a waste of time.

Meta is pushing it really hard.

If you already create content for X or some of the other platforms in text, just put it on threads, repurpose.

You don't have to do anything unique for Threads.

And like, I saw that they now have 200 million monthly active users.

Yes.

Because Facebook's pushing it.

You see the thread stuff taking place on.

Or Meta's pushing it, you see the thread stuff happening on Facebook as well.

I can't tell you how many times I'm on Instagram.

Somehow I didn't even realize it's a threads post.

I click on it, opens up threads, and I'm like, now I'm a monthly active user.

They got me again.

But that's the benefit of all of it.

All right, so let me ask you another one.

Influencer marketing.

Is it only for big brands or should small and medium brands be testing this as well.

Influencer marketing works extremely well for businesses of all size.

But the key is you have to go after micro influencers.

The big major influencer.

I'm not talking about a Kardashian, you know, those are extremely large.

But the average big influencer has a million, 2, 3 million followers.

It's really expensive working with them.

On the flip side, these micro influencers sub 100,000 followers, you can do campaigns with them.

Extremely profitable.

And a lot of them will do it on a commission basis.

Oh really?

I didn't know the commission part.

So.

But how do you even find them?

Like, how do you find somebody that doesn't have like a fake million followers?

Like, would you look at their engagement?

Well, you ideally want to look for ones that are sub 100.

Right.

We're sticking with the micro one to make it more profitable.

And if you can do commission based, it doesn't matter what, how active or not, you're just paying them per sale.

I saw some survey data that NP Digital put out the other day and it made me lose my faith in humanity, which was you shared survey data that you asked a boatload of people, like 15,000 people of all ages, would you rather have a million dollars or a million followers?

And I literally wanted to just get under my covers and go away.

What was that?

Yeah.

So everyone, I've got this question so many times on people like, would you rather have a million followers?

And for me, they usually say like a billion followers, even though I don't even have that many followers.

Would you rather have a billion followers or a billion dollars?

And every time I pick a billion dollars.

So I wanted to reduce the amount to a million dollars versus a million followers.

I've been asked that as well in the past.

And what was interesting is the younger people feel followers are really more valuable because they can influence people, it can create tons of opportunities, while the older generation just says, give me my million bucks and get out of here.

It's so depressing.

But the thing that I thought that you shared that was so valuable is that.

So it was people under the age of 40, I think it was something like 70% of them would rather have a million followers.

Right.

Than a million dollars.

But I was very happy to see.

I actually talked to my kids about this.

I said, but Neil said that the average person who has a million followers only makes like, I don't know, 6,500 bucks.

6,000, right?

Yeah.

Six something a month.

So.

And that's revenue, not profit.

Revenue.

There you go.

Even better.

Yeah.

So I was just like, you're better off kind of taking the million dollars and just popping it into the S.

And P.

You see, you didn't realize you're influencing like dinner table conversation around the country.

Very important.

You're helping society.

All right, next question.

What is the most underutilized, an easy way to leverage AI for marketing without some sort of big fancy tool?

The biggest way to use AI for marketing.

This one's fun.

And the reason I say that is most people use AI just to create content.

My favorite way.

But you guys are all going to think this is boring and ugly is actually through data and analytics.

Imagine this.

How many people spend money on ads?

A lot.

These ad platforms Google over 200 billion a year.

Meta over 100 billion a year.

If your AI can help you analyze in real time what campaigns are performing in marketing, what ones aren't, where you're wasting money and you can make decisions in real time, you'll save an arm and a leg.

So you could do that leveraging almost any of the basic platforms that are out there.

It requires some work from humans on your end, but yes, all right, a.

Little bit of humans, but leveraging that for the win.

All right, next one I'm curious about for you.

Email re engagement campaign.

So you have a database.

Let's say 50% of the people in your database haven't opened or clicked on one of your emails in over a year.

Do you keep going after them with aggressive win backs, like we miss you nonsense or do you let them go?

Where does Neil Patel land with all this?

I let my subscribers go after 30 days.

If they didn't open anything, I don't even wait a year.

I wait 30 days.

What?

All right, 30 days.

I'm on Neil Patel's list.

I haven't opened or click.

I'm not going to get any more email from you.

You shouldn't.

Sometimes you may because the software is not perfect.

Right.

But that's what it's supposed to do.

We use Convertkit and it does for us.

Rolling 30, I think we're able to set it up automatically.

We're just rolling 30.

We just delete.

So you just found that after 30 days, if they're not engaging, they're hurting deliverability or something and you're like, screw it.

Correct.

But again, I don't know how accurate the software is at deleting.

Right.

All right, but fair enough.

Wow.

You hear that, everybody?

I believe it too.

I think reengagement is ridiculous.

People don't focus on their new Customers, they focus on these people that don't care about them anymore.

It's like, what do you do?

And move on.

Totally agree.

All right, here's a question I got for you.

Neil Patel gets hired.

He's not Neil Patel.

He has all the experience of Neil Patel, but nobody knows who he is.

He gets hired as a marketing manager at like a hundred person b2b company selling like some sort of software.

And they say, you got $50,000 to improve our marketing.

Our marketing sucks.

How does Neil Patel, the newly hired marketing manager, spend that $50,000 to make the biggest impact and get that promotion?

I would say let me give away the software and create a free version and give away $50,000 worth of software for free and get people to upsell.

That's what I would do.

Counterintuitive.

But usually when you give away software for free, it's cheaper than paying for the clicks in B2B.

Wow, I like that.

I was expecting about paid ads here.

Do this SEO stuff.

I figured you go to the SEO game.

I know that gets me out of a job because I'm in marketing, but that's really what should have been done.

I love that.

All right, what would you say is the biggest waste of paid media in marketing?

The biggest waste isn't a single campaign or strategy or anything like that.

Or it's really people not optimizing their landing pages in creative.

Like that's the biggest leverage point.

You have all these tools, you know, people have the same features that you do.

But it's the landing pages and the creatives that people don't focus on enough that really move the needle.

Right.

You got them there and it's like you are just doing a few stupid things and you're losing them.

Yes.

Well, people drive so many clicks.

What they tend not to do is they don't focus on the conversion.

They all want to drive more clicks and figure out how to get it cheaper instead of just converting more.

How do you.

I mean, is there like some, when you look at landing pages are out there, is there like some basics, you're like, I cannot believe they have 15 must fill fields or blah blah, blah.

Like what is it that like you think crushes that conversion?

There's a lot of basic stuff, but it doesn't actually move the needle as most people think.

Like two step checkouts in a lot of cases for unknown brands are better than one step.

Adding PayPal to a checkout.

We usually see like a 16 to 18% lift in conversions just from having PayPal as a payment option.

There's a lot of little stuff like that.

But the biggest conversion lifts come from serving the audience and figuring out why they're not converting what objections they have and then adjusting the page to answer the most common objections.

I think it's so valuable for people to hear.

If they just spent a little bit more time after the click, they could change all of their metrics and save you a lot of money.

All right, another question.

Totally agree.

Nice.

Are marketers sleeping on Reddit?

Marketers are sleeping on Reddit, but they're sleeping on a lot of platforms like Snap and Pinterest.

And there's so many out there.

I get why there's too many for them to really choose and go after.

But do you think now that Reddit's like making a concerted effort to kind of maybe clean up their act a little bit and be more friendly for advertising that their platform.

We should be prioritizing more than we have in the past, because in the past, to me, I just wasn't on my radar.

No, doesn't drive the volume that one may think.

And yes, marketers should end up looking at it, but it doesn't mean it should be prioritized.

You should prioritize the ones that drive the highest roi.

Gotcha.

Okay, so I saw you tweet about something on Tweet X, whatever the hell it's called about ad costs.

They rise around elections and around big holidays.

But there's a way to navigate allowing your ad costs to rise as people are buying up more media around these big events and things.

How do you do that as a marker?

How do you navigate that?

So if you're a small business, for large businesses it doesn't matter as much because you got budgets to spend and you need to spend it.

You can still fine tune where you spend the money.

For small ad budgets, you can pause and then re engage.

But what you want to do is spend less going up to the election because it's more competitive.

And ad costs just go through the roof.

After the election, it slows down drastically.

So then you can start spending more and ramping it up because you'll find that the costs are way lower before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Slow down after those periods, ramp back up.

That's a great way to reduce your cost.

It's like you go to buy wrapping paper after the holidays end.

Uh huh.

The best time to buy Christmas decorations is after Christmas is over because they're off for like, you can buy them for like 20% of the cost.

There you go.

I don't want to storm again for a year.

Look at this bonus information from Neil.

When to buy your Christmas decoration.

You're going to get that here.

All right, last question.

I'm super curious about this.

So Apple's got iOS 18.

It's in beta.

It's going to be rolling out really soon with their AI Apple intelligence stuff.

But specifically, specifically within the mail app, which 46% of people read their mail first on the Mail app on their phone.

Do you think that the AI bucketing of email into a promotions tab, into updates tab, into all these tabs, is this going to have a huge impact on the effectiveness of email marketing?

Or is it like Gmail tabs and no one's going to care?

I was about to say it's just like Gmail tabs and no one's really going to care.

And you can't control a lot of this stuff.

It's like saying, man, Google's changing their algorithm.

They're going to release AI overviews.

This is going to kill SEO.

Well, it didn't, first of all.

But B, even if it did, you can't control the stuff that's out of your hand.

Just adapt and take an omnichannel approach and leverage your channels for the best that they can, and that's it.

It's not up to you.

So, all right, this has been amazing.

A few things.

First off, Neil is going to be speaking at Delivered Conference.

That is a free virtual giant conference that's all about direct mail.

If you want to hear Neil talk about direct mail, delivered conference.com that's coming up September 12th and 13th.

Neil, very excited that you're doing that.

I love the fact you're talking.

You like direct mail?

Of course.

I love direct mail.

We should.

We'll talk about some cool stuff during it.

I'm excited to see you there.

So that's delivered conference.com and look, Neil's got a lot of followers, but you got to follow him on.

On X, on LinkedIn, on YouTube.

And I'm telling you, his marketing school with Eric Su is my.

I mean, that podcast, I listen to it every weekend whenever I'm running, walking, doing whatever.

You got to check it out.

Neil, did I forget anything?

Did I miss anything?

That's it.

I hope to see you guys at the event.

It's going to be fun.

All right, thanks a lot, Neil.

See you soon.

You did it.

You made it to the end.

Nice.

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