Neil Patel | Revealing The Future of Marketing in 2017

Freedom FastTrack Podcast

Freedom Fasttrackers, listen up. Entrepreneurs, listen up. This episode with Neil Patel is absolute fire. He went behind the scenes and showed how he’s spending over $12,000 every single day on his Facebook campaigns. He shared his screen with me and actually went into detail on what he’s doing.

If you don’t know Neil – Neil is the man when it comes to online marketing. He’s the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP, and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web. Forbes says he’s one of the top 10 online marketers, entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur Magazine said he created one of the hundred Most Brilliant Companies in the world. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama, and one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 35 by the United Nations. He’s been awarded the Congressional Recognition from United States House of Representatives – and he is a bad-ass! But this interview is next-level.

I have interviewed some amazing people, and they’ve all been great. This one really stood out for me. He shared with us what he thinks, in 2017, is going to happen with internet marketing. And it blew me away. I’ve listened to it and implemented everything he said, and you should too. Make sure you go and listen to this episode in full. Take lots of notes and remember, subscribe to the show and send me in any questions. I’m going to be doing a follow-up episode with Neil and it is going to be bad-ass. Honestly? Just plug yourself into this and enjoy our conversation.

[00:01:51]

Chris: Welcome to the show, man. It’s such a pleasure to have you here and, for me – I’ve read your blog for a long time. I got your book, “Hustle” – it’s actually not in the bookshelf right now, but I’m excited to have you here! So, thank you so much for being here. I know that you’ve got lots going on. Today, I was hoping that we could really dive deep into what you think the future for 2017 marketing is. I mean, who better to ask and what better time to be releasing this show than in January 2017, and to get it from you, what you think’s going to happen. So thanks for being here, man, I really appreciate it.

Neil: Sounds good! Thanks for having me.

Chris: Yeah!

Chris: Before we dive into that, I don’t know if everybody that watches the show knows exactly who you are, so I would love you to maybe give us a quick rundown of how you started and what it is that you’ve been doing – because you, you know – you’ve done a lot of things, but how did you get started?

[00:02:48]

Neil: I was sixteen years old, looking for a high-paying job, couldn’t find one, and what ended up happening was when I was searching the job boards, I found that they were making millions of dollars – technically, hundreds of millions of dollars. So I was like, ‘you know what? I can’t find a job, might as well just create my own job board, make 1% of what they do. I’m going to be rich.’ And that’s where I started; I created my first website job board. [It] failed miserably because I didn’t know how to generate traffic. Paid a few marketing firms, got burned.

Neil: From broke and frustrated, I ended up trying to learn it all on my own, got good at it, and then my job boards started getting tons of traffic, and guess what? Still wasn’t making any money. [laughs] Because I didn’t know how to accept payments online, didn’t know about conversion or optimization, UX – there were so many issues!

Neil: But I got good at traffic generation. I started cold-calling and pitching other people on that service, right? Like, ‘I’ll help you get more traffic to your website!’ And then … honestly, it just went from there.

[00:03:50]

Chris: And so, you just had a problem that you kind of faced, and turned that into basically your business, and now? I mean, I’ve heard so many people have used your services. I think if you type ‘internet marketing’ or ‘SEO optimization’ into Google, you’re always in the top 2 or 3 that turn up, so you’re definitely doing some good things.

Chris: Where did that take you, and what’s kind of the journey towards, now?

Neil: Where it ended up taking me was – got good at traffic generation. From there, I learned how to help other companies get more traffic. Through consulting, I ended up learning about different types of industries, issues they may be having. I learned to think on the spot. And I eventually realized that the money isn’t in growing other people’s traffic, but it’s in growing your own traffic. So then I started to grow my own traffic, started doing a lot of SEO for problems that my guys would build, and then walk from there.

Chris: And so now you do what for people? I know that you do content marketing, SEO, but what’s the thing that you’re most excited about now? You have multiple different businesses and tech businesses –

Neil: -- yeah.

[00:05:05]

Neil: I mainly create software and then we market the software to marketers. They pay a reoccurring subscription for it. We don’t really do much consulting, actually. It’s –

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Neil: -- I’m trying to think of how many clients we have. Maybe three? We get a lot of consulting inquiries, we just … don’t care to do consulting.

Chris: Right. And so, what’s the tech that you’re mainly focusing on at the moment?

Neil: Crazy Egg, Hello Bar. Those are the main two.

Chris: Do you want to fill us in on those?

Neil: Sure!

[00:05:34]

Neil: So, think of it this way; someone comes to your website. They browse around and they don’t purchase! You get a hundred visitors, you’re lucky if one purchased – three, if you’re really lucky. What’s causing it? You look at Google Analytics and it shows you all these numbers, but what does that mean? Some people are visual people, right?

Neil: So what Crazy Egg does is it tells you, visually, why people may not be converting. From there, you can look at heat maps, user recordings – like, videos of people with their mouse, and how they’re engaging with your website. You can look at how far people scrolled down your page, right? Like, call-to-action is too low, but people actually stop scrolling halfway down, then of course you’re not going to end up generating sales, right? It helps you spot all these problems, and then through Crazy Egg you can run AB tests … and then you can try to optimize or you can moreso. You can optimize and then use your conversions. There’s a really simple tool … shows you where people aren’t converting and why, and then from there you can run AB tests in Crazy Egg to optimize for conversions.

[00:06:40]

Neil: And then the second company, Hello Bar – think of it this way: people come to your website. Again, a lot don’t convert. It’s hard to get a lot of these people to convert. You have to do so many changes. Not everyone knows what to AB test, not everyone knows how they can optimize their designs, not everyone can change it, so we just put elements on your website to maximize conversions, such as when someone’s leaving, why not incentivize them with an offer? If you’re trying to collect more emails, why not offer or create quizzes to collect more emails – stuff like that.

Chris: I love it. It seems to me that you really help people with one big problem, and that is, you know, how do they get more conversion out of their websites. So, tell me; what’s the big problem for most people with their sites? Why are they not converting?

[00:07:35]

Neil: Most people aren’t converting because they don’t understand the pain points of their users. It’s all about serving. There’s data – quantitative – and then there’s qualitative data. Qualitative is people talking to you, giving you feedback. If people tell you, “hey, I’m not going to convert because you don’t offer free shipping,” or, “I’m thinking your competitors may be cheaper,” and “I’m not sure.” There’s all these reasons.

Neil: And then when you survey hundreds of people, you’ll see some commonalities. Businesses aren’t trying to understand their customers, because if they did, then they could adjust the messaging, the copy, on their website to maximize conversions.

Neil: That’s the number one way. It’s really through surveying and understanding them, and then boosting conversions.

Chris: You know what? It’s so great to hear you say that, Neil, because – look, I know people who always tell me, “it’s leads. I need more leads, Chris, I need more leads.” And I always say to them, like, “leads is the easy part, because you can just pay for leads—“

Neil: Yes!

Chris: “—it’s the insights that convert.” [laughs] For every one person that hits your page, if you’re making a dollar, that’s pretty easy to get someone to hit a page for under a dollar, and you’ve got great money.

Neil: Yeah.

Chris: Right? But everyone’s focused on the other one; ‘how do I get more leads?’ It’s such a – aw, I don’t want to say it, but it is! – it’s such a naïve, ignorant thing to say. ‘I need more leads,’ – no, you don’t! You need a page that’s going to freaking convert.

Neil: [laughs] – you can convert, and then you can just spend a ton of money, right?

Chris: Right!

[00:09:04]

Neil: And it’s the easiest thing. Paid advertising isn’t that difficult if your conversion rates are high. Because even if you’re going to pay campaigns like crap, you still are profitable.

Chris: Yeah!

Chris: You only need to make, like, a little bit more per click, and you can scale like crazy! And I wish that more people really got that. The focus needs to be on that conversion, because the leads and the traffic are so simple. Someone said to me, the other day, they [went]; “you know, Chris, you’re not very big on this platform. How are you qualified to help people have freedom?”

Chris: I said, “look, I don’t care about that platform. I just pay for my traffic, because I know my numbers.” For me, numbers is the most important thing online. It sounds like that’s similar to you, so.

[00:09:55]

Chris: I’m excited to hear one big thing, and I just want to spin the conversation that way, because – I think going into 2017, Neil, things are going to be different. I think a lot of people had a tough 2016. This episode’s going to be released in January 2017, so the listeners are sitting there right now – we’re in December, we’re in the past – and, so, I want to hear from you, and I want to dive deep into what do you think marketing’s going to look like, 2017?

Neil: Sure! The big thing marketing’s going to look like in 2017, is you’re going to start seeing more personalization. Not personalization in the aspect of, like, ‘Oh, this person came from Google, so let’s show him a different landing page.’ I’m talking about to really get the maximum conversion – we’ve been testing some of these things – you’ve got to really personalize it to the user. For example – here’s a crazy example. This isn’t even online-related but it kind of ties into it: you go into your fridge. You’re running out of milk. You buy, let’s say – I’m making up names, because I haven’t bought milk in years – let’s call it, uh, Blue Milk.

Neil: The fridge tells you; ‘hey, Neil. You’re running out of milk. Would you like us to order you another Blue Milk, or would you like to try Alterdina Milk? It’s very similar to Blue Milk, but we’re running a promo right now that’s 30% off.’ Right? And Alterdina could end up doing that promotion to try to get you.

Neil: Now, that’s a crazy example of personalization in the real world. For example, online: Hubspot used to do this one, you won’t see it as much – when I was coming back to Hubspot, they knew it was me, and they would say, ‘Welcome back, Neil!’ Why can’t it go one step further and say, ‘Welcome back, Neil! Based on all the posts that you’ve read in the past, here are five more blog posts that we recommend reading for you.’

Chris: Right!

Neil: Even if it doesn’t say ‘Welcome back, Neil,’ based on cookies, you know what people are reading. If they’re reading all e-commerce posts, why would you show them posts on B2B, right?

Chris: Right.

Neil: So it’s truly about personalization. What does that look like in future? Who knows. I think the possibilities are endless. For example, I was talking to my co-founder, Ethan, and … he was like, ‘wait – with support, it’s run by people, why can’t we use the Watson API – from IBM – and learn, based on what people are saying and not saying, and what responses they like, buying patterns, etc., -- and then program the Watson to start giving responses that are very relevant to what the person’s looking for.

[00:12:49]

Chris: So, how does the small business owner – the person that’s not as tech-savvy as you – how do they capitalize on personalization and personalizing what they’re doing?

Neil: They don’t in 2017 – and here’s why: because this technology is not mainstream yet, and because it’s hard to actually do, you’re going to end up seeing that the big companies are going to try it out, or the small or medium – like, companies that are still making millions and millions of dollars – once they fine-tune it, you start seeing people productizing it. In 2017, I still think there’s going to be a lot of issues, but in 2018, small, medium businesses can buy these productized solutions like a Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, optimize etc.