Named a top influencer by The Wall Street Journal and listed among Forbes’ top 10 online marketers, Neil brings unparalleled expertise in SEO, content strategy, and digital innovation. In this exclusive interview, he shares his insights on the future of marketing, the traits that define successful entrepreneurs, and how brands can stand out in an increasingly crowded digital world.
Q: Neil, as someone who has tracked marketing evolution for years, how do you see the rapid integration of AI reshaping not just content creation, but the broader digital marketing landscape?
Neil Patel: “Quicker advancements in AI are making digital marketing more efficient. If you look at more of the mundane tasks, they’re getting automated. But when we ask marketers how they’re using AI, most of them say they use it for creating content. And when you look at the value from that, it’s not that high.
“We did a study with 68 websites. We created 744 articles on those 68 sites — half AI-written, half human-written. After a five-month period, the human-written content got 5.44 times more organic traffic from Google.
“When you look at time spent versus how many visitors were generated, even though AI-created content is much faster to produce, the human-written content, though it took more time, was still generating more visitors per minute spent. In other words, the human-written content was producing better results, even from an efficiency standpoint.
“The problem with humans, though, is you can’t necessarily do things as fast as AI. And although marketers focus on content generation with AI, the real opportunity is in areas like data and analytics.
“For example, if you ask anyone within an organisation how often they look at analytics, a lot of people will say, “Yeah, we look at it on a weekly or daily basis.” But then, if you look at how many changes they’re actually making based on that data — most people don’t make any.
“Depending on the source, the estimated amount of wasted ad spend is between 60 and 100 billion dollars a year. That’s just ad spend. Now imagine how many inefficient hours are being spent on marketing within an organisation.
“AI can help you analyse your data much faster and give you insights on what’s working and what’s not. Then you can start making adjustments much quicker to, A, save money, and B, cut costs by stopping your team from wasting time on inefficient marketing activities.
“That’s where AI should be used more. Think of it this way: don’t use AI for the sexy stuff — use it for the ugly stuff. The ugly stuff tends to deliver a much better ROI.”
Q: You’ve observed and invested in dozens of startups. From your vantage point, what key characteristics consistently separate the successful entrepreneurs from the rest — beyond just grit or hard work?
Neil Patel: “Marketing. It’s really hard to pinpoint one quality that defines a successful entrepreneur. I met up with Guy Kawasaki years ago. He published a book called The Art of the Start and was a venture capitalist. He talked about how, if you’re going to bet on something, bet on luck all the time.
“I’ve been an angel investor in — I don’t know how many companies, but a lot — call it 40 or 50-plus. I’m an LP in quite a few venture funds, so indirectly I’m an investor in hundreds of companies. When you look at it, yes, luck is a great thing. But you can’t really bank on that. If I had to pick the qualities that have made successful entrepreneurs, it’s a few things.
“One: going after big TAMs. TAM stands for Total Addressable Market. You can have amazing entrepreneurs, but if you go after a market that only has $10 million in potential revenue, it’s hard to gobble up 100% of the market, right?
“On the flip side, if you go after a large market like CRMs — like what Salesforce is doing — even if you capture just 1% of the market, you can generate more than a billion dollars a year in revenue. It’s a massive market. So, entrepreneurs understand which markets are big and worth pursuing — and which ones aren’t.
“The second thing is, they need to be able to execute extremely fast. If you can’t execute and adapt fast, you’re going to lose to the bigger organisations, because speed is what you have on your side.
“The third thing — and I learned this when raising venture capital for one of my startups years ago, called KISSmetrics (which ultimately failed) — came from one of my investors, Phil Black.
“At KISSmetrics, I believe we raised over $16 million. Back then, that was quite a bit more money. And when I was raising, people rarely raised more than $100 million in total — if they did, they went public.
“Phil taught me an interesting lesson: as an entrepreneur, you don’t need to do everything. You don’t need to get everything right. You just need to hire people who know how to do it.
“That didn’t hit me at the time — it hit me years later. With my current company, NP Digital, we became the fastest-growing ad agency, according to Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies.
“And here’s something really interesting I learned — but only many years after I got that advice.
“If you go on LinkedIn, you can see who worked for your competitors and who continually got promoted. Everyone says in an interview that they’re amazing, right? But we don’t really know if those people were responsible for the growth of that business or not.
“However, if they got promoted multiple times, that means the organisation typically found them valuable. And if someone worked for two of your competitors and they continually got promoted at both places, that means two companies found them valuable. Chances are, when you hire those people, they’re going to do a great job for you.”
Q: When advising business leaders today, what are the most effective strategies you recommend for building an authentic, high-impact brand that cuts through today’s noisy, multi-platform digital world?
Neil Patel: “The best way to build a brand is by leveraging the rule of seven. When someone sees or interacts with your brand seven or more times, they’re much more likely to buy your product or service and evangelise it.
“And the way you do that is by consistently creating and publishing amazing content online. Attention is everywhere — from YouTube to Google to Facebook, the list goes on and on. You’ve got to be on all the platforms. You’ve got to create amazing, high-quality content.
“When I say quality content, I don’t mean posting the same stuff everyone else is. Even if they got a million likes, it doesn’t matter. Posting something similar isn’t going to perform as well, because people have already seen it. You’ve got to figure out what’s new — things you can post that people haven’t seen before.
“Now, you’re probably wondering, “How do I do this as an organisation? Because this is going to take a lot of time and cost a lot of money.” Not necessarily. Most social networks — when you publish content on them, and if it’s terrible content — won’t let it perform well in their algorithms.
“The algorithms learn that your audience doesn’t like your content. So, when you start posting better content in the future, they just don’t show it to most of your followers, because they’ve been trained to believe your followers won’t engage. So, the key is not to post rubbish content — it’s to post only quality content.
“Here’s how you do this: you leverage X (formerly Twitter) as a platform first. Go on X, test out your ideas. You can just post text blurbs, quotes, whatever ideas you have, and test them in quantity.
“Because X’s algorithm works very differently from most social platforms. If you post rubbish on X one day and great things the next, they don’t penalise you for your past content. They evaluate each post separately, and they don’t really use your history to determine how your future content should perform.
“So, you test a lot of your ideas on X, you see what’s working, you take the winners, develop them, and then post them on the rest of the networks. That way, you save time and money — and you get your brand out there in a much more effective way.”
This exclusive interview with Neil Patel was conducted by Mark Matthews.
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