$100M Marketer Explains: How To Dominate Against A.I Competition

AI is everywhere and it's evolving super super fast Chad GPT has made it where my mom and dad can now tell me how to do my job better and we were generating a lot of leads 60 plusk leads a month we bought another tool called answer the public for $8. 6 million and started rinse and repeating the Playbook that's how you stand out when everyone else is using Ai and is doing the same Waldo stuff as everyone else so there's probably been a a lot of talks about AI some of you guys may be sick about hearing about Ai and today I'm going to give you something a little bit different instead of focusing on AI I'm going to teach you guys how to win when everyone is using Ai and it's a simple strategy and a concept it's not that complex anyone can do it you know we're here in Boston with some of the smartest colleges in the world har MIT I wasn't smart enough to get into any of them so if I can use this strategy all you guys can so my name is Neil Patel uh I'm the co-founder of Ad Agency called NP digital work with a lot of different clients won tons of different Awards um you know and I've seen a lot of things we've proven that we we've taken a look at a lot of the data that these Enterprise companies are using and we figured out patterns from it right so today when I break down how to win when everyone's using AI keep in mind is coming from a place where I'm seeing a lot of data what big corporations are using cuz most of our clients at NP digital are Fortune 100 or Global 5,000 companies the first thing to know is and you guys know this AI is everywhere and it's evolving super super fast and if you look at the study from McKenzie pretty much around 50 to 60% of companies have adopted AI over the past few years and that's a lot but the big change here and this is nothing new is actually the shift to the mainstream what's happened is chat GPT has made it where my mom and dad can now tell me how to do my job better they literally log in and they were like Neil did you know this and I'm like Mom did you know that or did chat GPT know that and she's like well I know it CU I read it from Chad GPT and it's come to a place where it's so so mainstream that people are using it for research or learning anything new if you look at how long it took Netflix to gain over a million users it was literally you know if you look at the time frame it was literally 40 plus months while chat GPT was 5 days just think about that five days they beat Instagram they beat Facebook they beat Twitter the only one that I think that beat chat GPT was um what is that new social app called from Facebook threads and I already kind of forgot the name so it shows you how many people are still using it probably not trying to throw shade on threads but I think we all went back to X or Twitter and Chad GPT or open AI is one of the most popular websites on the internet at least according to similar web I believe it ranks number 26 from a global rank perspective could change dayto day but last time I checked before I had to turn in my deck on to HubSpot it was number 26 and with AI it's evolving at a really rapid Pace it's just like there's weeks that go by and it's like have we really progressed this fast in such a short period of time look at Mid journey and how they evolved in just 1. 4 years the image to the left versus the right is a massive difference you're not going to use the image to the left in a marketing campaign image to the right right it looks like oh you paid money for it nope use mid Journey but here's the thing AI will not just transform marketing it will cause a lot of problems for marketers as well anyone want to guess what the number one problem is it's what I call the Waldo problem have you guys seen where's Waldo before right the person red and white hat funny story is I once lived in Seattle and for a gift someone gave me a where's Waldo photo and it was a good friend of mine and they convinced my concierge to let him in and they hung it up in my bathroom and instead of Waldo the face was of me but in a red and white striped shirt with a hat so then every time someone went to go pee in my bathroom pee ended up everywhere and they laughed and I had to clean it up but the problem with marketing is if we're all using the same technology how do you really win content will look alike you know if you tell chat GPT or barred hey how can I improve conversions on this page and we've asked them that many times they start giving a lot of similar suggestions so if everyone starts making the same changes how do you make yourself stand up from the crowd and with AI there's a lot of risk people believe that their content won't be optimized for SEO or that AA could beide inaccurate information you guys hear about the lawyer who got into trouble by by using chat GPT for his case well you did now don't do it a lawyer got in trouble because there was things in there that was inacurate probably wasn't a good La in the first place content will also sound too similar you know back in the day when I was a marketer we had something called a Content spinner you upload a few articles and it outputs something new AI is a modern version of that in which it scrapes the web looks at all the old data and creates something new but it's basing it off the old data so so how are you going to really stand out and separate yourself in when when everyone's using these kind of tools and they're using it when it comes to at least marketing for creating content analyzing their data and analytics and check this out all right be honest and I want you guys to look out look around the room how many of you log into your analytics at least once a week literally raise your hand you'll be shocked okay look around the room it's lesson 10% and check this out how many of you log into your analytics raise your hand and make changes based on the data at least once a month my guess is 50 people raise their hand 60 70 maybe most people don't log into their analytics and if they log in they don't really make any changes with AI that's going to change people are going to start making changes based on what the AI tells them they're also learning how to do things and conducting research so if everyone's using AI what's left well whether you love her or hate her you could build a personal brand like the Kardashians they' done exceptionally well I know a lot of people talk trash on them but you know what they've done exceptionally well in business can't knock them for it whether Kylie Jenner is a billionaire or not she's done well with her Kylie Cosmetics brand but to build that personal brand like Kylie Jenner or Kim Kardashian or anyone who's pop on social media there's this factor and I don't care what anyone tells you it's a big hit or miss game it's not just about right timing it's about do people resonate with you you know I once went to a conference and I was talking to this guy named Perry and Perry used to run this event called digital marketer and I was like and uh they had a you know their own event called like war room and Perry's like you've done a really good job building your personal man but Perry's done a lot of the stuff I did and so has his uh partner Ryan Dice and Perry's like you know what I think's worked for you that didn't work for us I was like what they're like you're that token nerdy Brown dude that people could resonate with I can't replicate that or other people can't it was just my genetics just like I don't have hair right but there that X Factor in branding it's just like what makes that dude on the longboard drinking cranber juice going to work super popular you guys know who I'm talking about that was a while ago but still there's that X Factor there must be another strategy that works that doesn't have to do much with AI and there is we used it to build our Ad Agency NPD to over nine figures a year and we ended up getting to number 21 on the Inc 500 list the first year that we got on there and our team was really happy I wasn't so much I'm like 21's a useless number unless you're playing Blackjack I'm like it's not even in the top 10 but you know we digressed my team was really happy with it I had a fake celebrate to show enthusiasm um but it worked really well and it wasn't just me who used this strategy actually dares at HubSpot used it before I did I wasn't the first one to come up with it and hubf used it to build a 25 plus billion dollar company again they could be worth more a little bit less I don't know what their latest stock price is but this was a screenshot call it maybe a month or so ago but either way that's a massive company right HubSpot used it much more effectively than I did they've grown much faster than I have they've been around longer but still their numbers are extraordinary you know even if you look at their earnings are growing at 20 to 30% per year even in this economy so what's the secret and no it's not AI it's a simple concept and you can do it in both B2B and B Toc you give away P something for free that people are used to paying for and you sell them something bigger all right and I'm going to give you example of it hubs how many people here pay for hubs spa or use their product almost everyone should be raising their hand all right website grater is by HubSpot have you guys used website grader raise your hand if you have okay you guys should all check it out most of you guys did not raise your head check it out it's a free tool from hubot they don't sell you anything there is no premium that oh use this feature and you pay for more website grader they just give it away for free do you want to know why hubot gives it away for free it causes a lot of people to become into their ecosystem once they get you into their ecosystem what do they sell you HubSpot and it's not just them galat has run promos where they give away free razors well if you buy a razor you only need one handle but what do you need to keep replacing the blades you're giving away something for free and you're making money selling something that's much bigger in which razors right there's much more money to be made continually selling the razor blades than there is to sell the handle now at NP digital the strategy we use I started the company a little bit more than 5 years ago and we were really fast to grow to nine figures we did it without venture funding and I was like wait more people spend money on marketing Services than marketing software if you look at marketing services and I have a chart on this later on and marketing labor if you combine both those two it makes up roughly 49% of marketing spend the rest is on tools and marketing ads like ads like on Google or Facebook so I'm like wait if I give away a lot of tools for free even if they're not as good as a competition but if I give away stuff that they're used to paying for and and just make them 100% free I can upsell them on something that is a bigger pie the bigger pie for me was marketing Services now I could have run this Playbook on marketing software but someone already ran it before me HubSpot right they gave away marketing greater for free sell them on HubSpot and it did really well we started climbing up in visitor count and we started generating a lot of leads and we did this with two two products and I'll show you that in a bit and we are generating a lot of leads now in the chart it looks like our leads went down but we are collecting leads from a global basis like in places like Croatia and Romania all great places and countries but we weren't we didn't actually have staff to service companies in those regions from a service base so what we started doing is we stopped putting those leads into our CRM to save money less records you start paying it starts costing money you have a lot of sales reps I was like there's no point in passing in all these leads if we're not going to call them pass in the leads for the regions we actually service but I can bump it back up to 60 plusk leads a month so here's how the model works and I'm going to break this down again you can do this in both B2B and B to C first you find a big Tam Tam stands for total addressable Market all right HubSpot is in a big Market they're not just in marketing tools they're also in CRM they're taking a slice out of Salesforce as well that's a big Market if you find something that's really massive if you give away something for free you still have this massive thing to sell and then that leads me to step two you give away something for free that people are used to paying for now here's an example of this a lot of you guys work for a company or have a business use payroll software paychecks is a massive Payroll Company it's $40 billion but you know what else every single employee wants at least in America health insurance United Healthcare is worth more than 10 times from a market Captain paychecks they're not the only health insurance company in town literally $451 billion Market over $40 billion Market payroll software does not have to be expensive it could be free you create a free payroll software and you get businesses onboarded you start selling them on insurance health insurance life insurance for their employees 401K you see what I'm saying you give away something for free that people are used to paying for because everyone's used to paying for payroll software and you make money charging for something bigger it's amazing mouse trap right Gillette same thing let me give you away free razors cuz I know you're going to end up buying a lot of blades for me in the long run another another example we did this at NP digital if you look here 23% of marketing spend is to agencies 23.

7 another 24. 9% is labor see people pay my Ad Agency for agency services and labor so that's making up close let's call it 48 49% somewhere around there a little bit less than 50% that's a big market so I'm giving away a lot of marketing technology for free which is around 25 5% of the market to try to gobble up another bigger portion and my competition is wpp Omnicom publicist right the big holding companies they're not doing it it's a very unique strategy that allows me to take away clients from these guys step three create your free product or buy it we bought a tool uh called Uber suggest back in the day for around $120,000 I put in around3 million to5 million in it for shits and giggles to try to make it better um and I didn't end up leveraging this strategy on purpose it was more of an accident I was going through a midlife crisis I'm 38 now I was much younger back then but I was like what is there to do in life you know didn't really care for a big home didn't really care for Ferraris I drive a Honda Odyssey love that thing you push buttons the doors open your kids hop right in such a cool car they should give me a free one because I could be a spokesperson but you know so I was going through this midlife Cris what should I do so I was like you know it' be fun give away a lot of the features that my competition charges for or software priers for free it was just literally a random experiment and I was spending millions of dollars cuz I didn't know what else to do in life and it just became more and more popular I started collecting a lot of leads and my salese at my Ad Agency were like hey Neil let's call them up do you mind if we start calling like sure do whatever you want and I was like huh it really quickly turned into 40% of our new customers nine figure agency generating 40 plus% of it from one tool not tool Revenue but literally sales reps calling up people who are using the tool be like hey you're using the tool do you want to just to pay us and we'll just do everything for you people like yeah sounds good and we're getting leads from companies like Venetian and wi which are hotels all the way to Windam which is another hotel to Honda and Mitsubishi to Nike to Target it was a very effective strategy so effective that we bought another tool called answer the public for $8. 6 million and started rinse and repeating the Playbook because it had roughly 70% of the traffic that Uber cedus had they just never ran that Playbook and they wanted ax ebaa so in other words we we spent eight times profit buying it but we didn't care we overpaid for it on the buy but we knew the moment we picked up the phone we would make way more than our money back with in roughly 12 months and the numbers end up panning out it didn't take us 12 months we're a little slow to integrate um just due to headcount and bureaucracy once you grow a company to 4 or 500 employees a thousand plus employees Etc you start having layers things just move slower and if you're going to buy it like I did make sure you look for tools or anything that's free out there with brand queries brand queries is when someone's doing a search on Google a lot of times they'll type in the domain name in the URL bar or just type in the brand name in the URL uh in the search bar if they type in the brand name that means that site has good brand Affinity those are good buys typically if you're going to build it you can Kickstart it with things like product hunt Tech crunch just getting press out there and if you don't want to build it and you don't have the money to buy it you can use sites like code Canyon or you can use AI tools to help you start building the tools um Chad GPT coded the gting of pong in 60 seconds you can do this with literally anything that's related to your ideal customer now step four once you've built it you got to keep adding features I love this quote from Peter theal first mover isn't what's important it's the last mover like Microsoft was the last operating system and Google was the last search engine in other words if you're the last mover you can see all the mistakes others did and then adapt base on that so when I bought Uber suggest the first version that I adjusted it to was hey let me just give you a lot of keyword data I did deal with sem Rush took their data popped it in there showed it to everyone people weren't too happy with it got feedback then I started adding in more features like a keyword overview giving you more ideas for keywords telling you who's ranking on Google for a lot of terms and then I just kept adding more and more features from my competition the book was simple last mover's Advantage you take what other people are charging for and you literally give it away for free as long as your cost is very small or what you're selling is so massive it makes up for your cost and then I just kept going because I was crazy this was during my midlife crisis phase my wife also make always makes a joke with me she's like if your midlife crisis was when you're around 32 what's going to happen when you're 50 and I said honey you'll find out you married me through thick and thin so you know she'll have to deal with it so then I started adding more features 4.

0 hey let me give you content ideas I took this and jacked it from buz sumo and people could hate and say hey you're copying others but I'm not the only one who does this the reality is what did Facebook do to Twitter they copied it with threads what do you think Instagram did with Snapchat what do you think they did with Tik Tok What do you think YouTube did with Tik Tok and Instagram they're like oh YouTube shorts oh Instagram reals all I'm getting at this is the way business Works whether you like it or not it's reality and if you just keep adding more features that people are used to paying for like I did here and here and here and here as you can see I just kept going and going it went so crazy that I stopped blogging and saying hey uberis 8. 0 and I didn't do 9.