- 250,000 followers on Instagram, but they're known for like, teaching like crazy boxing techniques and strategy, and they're like, "You got to check out these Winning gloves." Right? "Winning" is a brand of gloves. Even if it's a paid endorsement, people will listen, because that person is a specialist within that subject. (calm music) - Are you scared or excited about AI? - I'm excited about AI, I just don't think it's... It's hyped a lot and it's progressing at a really fast pace, which is great.
- [Speaker 3] Super, hyper fast. - Yeah, but the thing with AI, everyone's like, "Oh, it's going to replace humans! It's going to replace you know, content writers, it's going to replace everything!" I'm like, "Like we're so far away from that though." It will. - Like seven years away, that's in short-time, probably some companies three, but we're not far away from it, I mean, we were far away from it back in 2000.
- Back in 2000, even more far. - [Speaker 3] We were far, but we're close now. - And I don't have the exact answer or crystal ball on how close, but like if I had to guess, at least in the marketing world, in the next five years, I do not see AI replacing a human. - That's still a short time though bro, that's 60 months. - Even more than that, and here's why, here's the basic concept with AI, so check this out.
If you want to think about like, everyone talks about AI writing content, there's way more to AI with systems and processes, and automation with analytics, and getting more informed decisions, but let's just look at content as a basic example. When you do a search on Google, or any search engine, are the results always 100% accurate when you look up some of the- - No, they're actually bad. - Yeah, a lot of times they're off.
Now, Google knows this, Bing knows this, they've been working not five, not 10, maybe 20+ years to fix misinformation and it's not perfect. What AI is doing, is scraping the web, gathering all the information out there and spitting out an output based on the input, so if they're gathering false inputs, right? Not all of them are false, but even if a small percentage of them are, it can screw up the output and that's what you're seeing with AI, and yes, AI will get better, but you're still going to have a lot of bad information because the inputs are off and that's not easy to fix, and I don't see that being fixed over the next 5/6/7 years. - Interesting. - Well, even with the input, the input is based off of what humans actually input into the system, so AI is actually getting a lot more sophisticated daily because of the usage, I mean, you have over 100 million users using it, I mean daily, you know? But that breaks down to hourly and when it come to the minute, you know I can't give you those numbers, but I'm sure it's up there. So, I think the information will get better, but I you know... Potentially, I hope it will, but I think AI is...
I think people should be, not technically scared, because I feel like they should work with it, but they should be worried, the ones that aren't educating themselves. - I think you nailed it, people should be working with it. If you embrace AI, and you learn how to leverage it to do a better job at the company you work at, or for your own business, you're going to get even further in life, but if you stay afraid of it, and you're just like, "No, I don't want to touch it." I think you're going to start becoming replaced by other people who either understand AI, and know how to leverage it, or you're going to get replaced by AI, one or the other. - Right.
- Which AI are you using right now? - So, we use a lot of OpenAI, they have some APIs, and they're the ones that created ChatGPT, and Bing is using them, but we use a lot of their APIs to help make better informed decisions for our business. And it's still early phases, and none of it's like really perfect, but like you said, you know, five years it's going to be really dangerous, I think even in a few years, it's going to make our lives much easier. - And by December we'll start feeling the impact, I mean, people are feeling it now, but by December I feel like impact, it'll start making a little bit of a push for sure. - And I think every day that goes by, these AI tools and the learning that they have is just incredible because of so many daily users- - Me and Sean text almost... What, we text all the time- - About AI, I mean it's making some of my contracts now, it's pretty crazy. You prompt it and it makes a contract, so instead of paying a lawyer 500 an hour, you just send it to the lawyer, say, "Can you review this real quick?" - That's smart, I never thought about that one.
- NDAs, disclaimers, contracts- - Yeah, even it breaks down, it was showing me one tool, won't disclose it, but it was breaking down the episodes in the sense of like place value, so you can do course work too, you can like turn it into a course if you wanted. - So, you put a two hour podcast on it, and it breaks down the key points for you. - That's awesome, so it digest's the podcast for you. - And that uses OpenAI, it's pretty crazy. - Yeah, OpenAI is amazing, I think Google's Bard is going to be really good, you know, I know a lot of people are counting out Google, but Google has so much information, they have more than OpenAI or anyone else out there, I do believe their AI is going to be amazing, it's just going to take time. - It's going to take time, but they can be late to the game, because you still got...
China's going to get involved heavy and when they come, I mean, ChatGPT might just be a poodle from what they're... You can't count them out either, so Google has to, if they're going to drop it, they got to do it now and waiting, they won't benefit from waiting, because every system that's out, if you think about it, it's getting more and more sophisticated daily, so how can their system advance if they're waiting later to drop? By the time they drop, these systems will be far more advanced, Google will still be technically in beta. - Yeah, and I think they're pushing really hard, but the way I look at it is if you look at the most popular social network right now, let's call it Facebook, I know Facebook owns Instagram, and WhatsApp, Facebook wasn't the first, right? There was a lot of others that came, MySpace was a lot earlier, Google wasn't the first search engine either, "Yahoo!" was before there, AltaVista, Lycos, the list goes on and on.
- But in this, it's a race right now, because there's just... It's a sophistication race, so who's going to be far more sophisticated in this AI space, and at what speed? You got chat four already dropped, right Sean? - Yeah. - And then they're working on 4.5, so I mean- - It is, it's going to get, it's going to get crazy and when you look at from three to four, and all the variations, just the improvements are so crazy, and they're also trying to make it cheaper, and cheaper.
- What are the biggest opportunities you see for 2023 and 2024? - From a marketing standpoint, this is going to sound silly, I actually don't think it's AI, I think podcasting is one of them, podcasting isn't that competitive, there's like less than 10 million podcasts, over a billion vlogs if you think about the ratios, it's a open landscape still, so that's one of them. Two, is taking an omni-channel approach with marketing, like when we try to acquire customers from TikTok in our ad agency, we're seeing that for our clients, a lot of times, TikTok's like 40/50% cheaper than Facebook ads. - [Sean] Wow.
- [Speaker 3] Which is better. - Yeah, which is- - [Speaker 3] It has a better algorithm too. - So, it's just like, that's just so much cheaper, why wouldn't you want to save the money and acquire as many people as possible for as little as possible? The other big opportunity that we're seeing, and this one's the dead-simplest one, but people are lazy and no one wants to take the time, updating your content, no matter what you search for on Google, or anywhere on social media, there's already content on that topic, the issue is, is most of the content is old, outdated, so the algorithms, the social platforms and search engine's don't want to showcase it, but the moment you keep it fresh and up to date. - [Speaker 3] It'll boost you.
- It'll boost you. Just look at Wikipedia, they rank and get so much traffic because people keep modifying Wikipedia pages every single day. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - [Neil] I probably bet every single minute, someone's modifying a Wikipedia page, I don't have the stats or data on that, but if I had to take a guess, I'd bet you it's on the minute basis.
- [Sean] Probably. - What is reverse ETL? Can you explain that to us? - Reverse? - [Speaker 3] ETL. - I don't know what reverse ETO is. - [Speaker 3] ETL.
- ETL? - [Speaker 3] Yeah, yeah, yeah. - ETL? I don't know what reverse ETL is. (Sean laughing) - Well, I was looking through your NP Digital and one of your associates was touching bases on it, it was real interesting to me. So, it was the difference between gathering data and then inputting the data when it comes to like your ads and stuff like that, I find it interesting. - I have no idea what reverse ETL is, but that's why we have 750 people that specialize in different things.
- [Sean] That's baller, that's a good answer. - [Neil] I should learn it, don't get me wrong. - Actually, I mean I learned a lot just from you know, just kind of looking into it I'm like, "Oh okay, I never heard of that, so."
- [Neil] Yeah, me neither, I'll look into it. - It was talking about ads and stuff. - Yeah, we have so many people that specialize in different things, like we have... We literally have a handful of people that fully- - You have 700 employees? - Yeah, seven-something, just in that company.
- That's a lot. - Just in that one? Jeez. - And we're still hiring, but like when I look at it- - [Speaker 3] So, are you not going to replace with AI? - We're even using AI, but we still... Like we're expanding fast internationally. So, like we're opening up this year in France, Italy, Germany, we just added Singapore, we just added a head of LATAM to expand it to Mexico, Columbia, Chile and Argentina, we just... I think we mentioned Singapore, we're interviewing right now for a head of Malaysia, I just finished interviewing today for a head of Spain.
- Is it mandatory for your employees to learn how to use AI and work with it? You're making it mandatory, so you don't have to get rid of anybody in the workforce? - No, we want them to figure out how to use AI to make their job more efficient, so they can focus on the things that are important and not do the mundane, boring stuff. - That's how you do it? I like that. I like that motto. - You feel like celebrity endorsements are a waste of money, why do you feel that way? - So, I feel celebrity endorsements are a waste, because most of them are too generic. So like, let's talk about the Kardashians, you know, some people hate on the Kardashians, but you got to admit, they built a amazing business empire. - [Speaker 3] Powerful.
- Yeah, you got to respect that and it doesn't matter what people think about the Kardashians, or how they got popular, they were really smart on how they took that fame, or how they built up that fame and took that fame, and turned it into a big business empire, not just for one of them, but for pretty much the whole family. If you get Kylie Jenner to push... If I get Kylie Jenner to push my marketing agency, NP Digital, I may get some leads, but it's just irrelevant, like her audience is like into makeup and cosmetics, and clothing, and stuff, and that's why most celebrity endorsements don't work, because it doesn't match the product. And now, you have it where so many people are using celebrity endorsements for everything and they're being brand of Angeles, it's not working that well, but the moment you get like Rihanna to create her own company, or you get Kylie Jenner to create her own company, people are like, "Oh, you're not pushing someone else, and you're not just getting paid, you're creating your own products." - Which they're supposed to do.
- Yeah, which is what they should be doing, and that people love, and that converts really well, but the product's got to be aligned. Like for example, let's say The Rock, The Rock is known for like fitness, humor, the guy is like buff, he's smart, he's good with business, but if he created a course being like, "Here's how to pass your CPA exam, I'm going to teach you guys how to do really well in accounting." And accounting's a big business, right? There's a lot of massive accounting companies throughout the whole world, everyone does taxes, and people have to do accounting for every single business, even personal finances, it just wouldn't convert well, it doesn't line up, but if Rock sports a energy drink, which he does. - [Speaker 3] Blow? - Yeah, it makes sense. So, they got to do their own products, I do think there is value in influencers if the celebrity is directly aligned to the product and service, and is really involved in the business.
- [Speaker 3] And believes in it. - Yes, like Ryan Reynold's in Mint, it sold for 1.3, Ryan didn't create Mint, they gave him equity to be the advantage and be part of the company, and help out, he believed in it, he wanted to put in the time and the energy. - Flo Rida and Celsius.
- Yeah. - Which he had to sue to get his money, but he still, he still made a lot of money. - Yes, good for him. And then the other one is...
You know, if you get a micro-influencer, like someone who's known for like something really specific, even if they only have like a half a million followers or 100,000, but their audience is super engaged, because they're really well-known for it. Like you do boxing, if you have someone who has 250,000 followers on Instagram, but they're known for like teaching like crazy boxing techniques and strategy, and they're like, "You got to check out these Winning gloves." Right? "Winning" is a brand of gloves and if they say, "You got to check out Winning gloves, they're the best." And they break them down, even if it's a paid endorsement, people will listen, because that person is a specialist within that subject, that's what I think. And that's a huge opportunity right now in marketing, in 2023, 2024, I even see that going to five, six years from now, AI cannot replace that, people want to deal with companies that have a face, no one likes faceless companies, but it has to aligned, I can't have LeBron James pitching my marketing company, yes, he's a business mogul, he's crushing it, but people don't know LeBron James from marketing, I'm not saying he's a bad marketer, I'm just saying people know him from marketing... I mean, basketball.
Yeah, not marketing. - But if he had a new basketball that had some special grip on it, he would be perfect for it. - Exactly, or shoes, or even something for fitness like Tonal, right? I bought a Tonal because of LeBron James. - Oh, is that the ice thing? - No, Tonal is like resistance, it's like you can... It's electric resistance, so you can modify the resistance.
- He's an investor in that company? - I think he has equity in it for sure. - Or investor, or equity owner, maybe he got it for free, I don't know, but I saw Serena Williams on the commercial, I saw LeBron James- - How important is for E-com, people who are in E-com to use Survey Monkey? - I think it's great, because you can figure out what's wrong with your pages, your products, and what changes you need to make to make them better, because like when you look at analytics, like Google Analytics, yeah you can see, "Oh, people are leaving this page." But, why are they leaving that page? Survey Monkey is a (indistinct) quantitative data and there's qualitative, quantitative is like the numbers, qualitative is him getting feedback, Survey Monkey is like a version of just talking to people and getting feedback, "Hey, why aren't you buying? Why are you leaving the page? What else would you like to see?" - [Speaker 3] How effective is it? - Super effective, we like taking all that data, assuming you're getting enough quantity and responses, not like one or two, but if you're getting like 50/60/100 for a specific page, and you make changes, we usually see revenue and conversions go up. - Wow. - So, it's based on the consumer's perspective of how you can make your company from a visibility standpoint, better? Just by asking them simple questions in regards to you know, if they're happy or not with the service, or a product. - Yip, "What else would you like to see on the page? Why didn't you buy?" You know...
- How many business owners actually modify their business, based on the consumer's perspective. - [Neil] Very little. - That's terrible. - That is. - [Speaker 3] That's terrible, you get stubborn business owners. - I used to do it, it would record their checkout screen and I'd see what they were doing.
- It's important, because it's research, it's market research, you're able to scale your business up from that, just by understanding your consumer. - Is LinkedIn underrated? - I think LinkedIn's massively underrated, especially if you're in B2B, it's like one of the best social networks for generating revenue for a business, LinkedIn's probably... If I had to guess right now, I'm pretty sure YouTube is number one for social channels, for revenue for us, for our consulting company, and LinkedIn is number two. - That's Mark Zuckerberg's ex-business partner created LinkedIn. - Really? - Yeah.
- Oh, I didn't know that. He's got a lot of ex-partners that are successful. - [Speaker 3] That's what happens when you've got a group of people that are successful.
- Mark's made a shit load of money. - [Speaker 3] Everybody he associated with too, either by suing him or creating something else. - Yeah, facts. What platforms do you see taking over? Social media platforms? - Platforms? I see TikTok booming, I see WhatsApp as still a big opportunity, no one's really figured out how to- - Why? Why? Why? I see Tencent owns them, and they're like the biggest conglomerate, but why here? Like, what impact does WhatsApp have in the US? - So WhatsApp, everyone globally is... Everyone globally right now on WhatsApp is using it because in a lot of countries, it costs money to text, it's free to text... It's free to text on WhatsApp- - It's also controlled by the government over there too.
- [Neil] TikTok is, right? WhatsApp- - WhatsApp is. - WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. - No, it's owned by a company called Tencent. - That's TikTok. - TikTok is, yeah. - Yeah, TikTok.
- WhatsApp is too. - Facebook bought them. - Facebook bought them. - Oh, Facebook bought WhatsApp? Oh.
So, Tencent used to own them then? They created it? - WhatsApp was funded by Sequoia Capital, it was some founders based in San Francisco- - You're thinking of WeChat. - That's what I'm thinking of, my bad you guys, that's WeChat. Okay. Okay, because I... Okay, okay so Tencent- - WeChat's popular I think in Korea, right? - No, it's everywhere now, but it's- - Oh, that's KakaoTalk, KakaoTalk is Korea. - KakaoTalk? - WeChat is China, Tencent owns them? - [Sean] Yeah. - Okay, so WhatsApp...
Okay, okay, okay. - Yeah, but TikTok might get banned. - TikTok may get banned, you never know, I don't think it will, I think maybe for government's and stuff, they'll regulate it, but in the US, I still think it'll be popular, people love it.
- The college campuses are banning it, but- - Oh, colleges are? - Probably, oh I think they said 30/40% already, big-time colleges and varsities banned it already. - Why? - [Neil] Yeah, why would they ban it? - The data? - They banned TikTok, but not Adderall, so. (Neil and Sean laughing) (group speaking together) - I knew that when I was in college, I knew so many students that were just taking Adderall, it was so bad, I don't know why they were doing it- - [Sean] You weren't on it? - [Neil] No. - [Speaker 3] Wow, Sean.
- No, props because I feel like everyone was. - I've never... - And if people want to get on it, I don't think there's... It's up to them, I was just a big believer and was like you know...
- I try to be natural, as much as possible. - So, Facebook owns WeChat? - TikTok, no I mean... Sorry, Facebook owns WhatsApp. - WhatsApp? - All right, are we good now? - Yeah, yeah, yeah we good. - WeChat, China.
KakaoTalk, Korea. - [Speaker 3] KakaoTalk, I don't know what that is. - Ey, you got to check it out, it's big for the Korean Market. - [Speaker 3] Oh, wow.
- [Sean] Okay. We got to wrap it up soon, but I want to know the best hire you've ever made, was it the chef? Was it the driver? Who was it? - [Neil] Personal or corporate? - Let's do both. - Corporate, CEO. I'm a terrible operator, we have a CEO named named Mike Gullaksen, he's done wonders for us, I wouldn't say that he's the only amazing hire, but he's brought a lot of amazing people with him and there's a lot of amazing people we brought before him that helped us get him, but we continually try to bring amazing people who have done what we're looking to do and they've already done it before, like he ran one of our competitors was called iProspect, I don't know how many employees they had, maybe 5,000 I'm guessing, 6,000/7 or 4,000, or something like that, they were just a larger version of us. So, he's already done what we were trying to do and he helped us grow. When we got him, maybe we were 200/300 people? He's more than doubled us in size.
And personal? It depends who you ask, if you ask my wife, she's going to say a nanny, Edith, who's been amazing. If you ask me, I would say either Philmon, who drove me here today, I love him to death, or Franny, who helps us clean, but that's not... She does an amazing job there, but why I love Franny is, I travel almost every single week for work and like, she'll have my suitcase ready with all my clothes, depending on how many days I'm gone, I don't have to check anything, and it's just like so convenient. - That sounds amazing, I'm packing today for New York and it sucks, third world problems, right? - And then, another question.
What are some things that you can tell a lot of people out there struggling with E-com? Like what makes a E-com business do good? And what makes a E-com business... Like what makes it... What's the difference in the good one, and a bad E-com business? - So, good one's typically have funnels, like up-sales and down-sales, because if someone's buying one product, you already got them buying, you got to get them to buy more and you got to figure out how to up-sale them, ideally the products you up-sale are related to the core-product that they bought and it offers anything helping get results in a automated way, or getting results faster, so speed or automation. If people can get results faster, or in a automated way, they'll typically pay for the up-sales. - But what about when it comes to clothing? because everyone isn't selling like a actual product- - Sure, so like clothing, someone buying underwear, you know they're going to need underwear, I don't know how often people replace them, every year? Or socks, every year? Or every six months? Or, if they buy t-shirts, they're going to need more t-shirts like mine here, they have some holes on it, little ones, and I buy like 12 of the same white t-shirt, and then they'll last for a while, and that's what also makes it easy to pack, because I wear the same clothes, same things, same colors. And they could send a reminder saying like, "Hey, click here for a subscription."
Or, "Click here to get a new shirt." Or, "We have a new style that's coming in." I think email marketing's huge, a lot of people take that for granted, and a lot of E-commerce these days are doing email, but they're not doing text, you know, you can't stop with email, you got to add in the text messaging, we see better revenue from texting right now, assuming you collect enough phone numbers, than we do from emails for E-commerce. The other thing that we're seeing good E-commerce companies make is, they're using tools like Survey Monkey, or using the video recording tools, like the Crazy Egg's to figure out what's wrong with the pages and how to improve the checkout close. Good E-commerce companies also offer multiple payment options, we typically see a 18%-ish increase in revenue when people add PayPal as a payment option as well. - [Speaker 3] I hate PayPal.
- [Sean] It's a big jump though. - Yeah, but people love it, they love clicking that button and it makes it easier, and they have multiple funding sources typically in their PayPal account. - And what's the best app that they can attach to their stores for the texting marketing? The marketing text? - There's a lot of them, I wouldn't actually say there's one that's better than others, I would actually look at what E-commerce platform you're on and which one's fit natively, and integrate with your CRM. Ideally, you would want one that just plug and plays, you don't want to just go and add a random one, and be like, "Oh, it doesn't integrate." And then we got to do everything manual, just like email softwares, there's a lot of them, right? It's the question of, "Which one's integrate really nicely with your CRM?" And you can just get everything done pretty quickly. - Neil, it's been a pleasure, any closing thoughts, and where people can find you? - Neilpatel.com for my blog,
or all my social handles are also neilpatel, or npdigital for our ad agency. - [Sean] Nice.
2023-05-30