The 47th episode of the DesignRush Podcast brings you a conversation with Neil Patel, a marketing expert, and a New York Times bestselling author.
Neil reveals tactics that can boost your brand, including why there might be better ideas than relying solely on personal branding in 2024.
Tune in to the show to learn:
- How unconventional marketing strategies can lead to surprising success
- How to strike the perfect balance of having a corporate and personal branded business
- What the future of search looks like in the age of generative AI
Who Is Neil Patel?
If we need to name the biggest marketing influencer on the planet, Neil would be one of our top picks. A New York Times bestselling author, Neil was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30. He's helped dozens of tech giants scale their businesses through marketing, including Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Google, NBC, and SalesForce.
Starting their conversation, Vianca asked Neil to provide us with some less-known marketing facts:
- One of the hottest startup trends in 2024 is giving away freebies to the community to increase website traffic
- The biggest marketing myth Neil debunked recently is that TV, Superbowl, and Olympics ads or sponsoring the NBA aren't great on ROI – "boring" marketing tactics produce the best results
- Streamlining digital interactions for users can often produce more results: Neil mentions an example where he narrowed down signup options to Google increasing the number of signups by 96%
Corporate giants like L'Oreal have an upper hand over other personal brands like Kylie Jenner Cosmetics. Ideally, people would want their business or their company to be somewhere in the middle of that.
As Neil explains:
"If you look at the L'Oreal and Kylie Jenner, L'Oreal is much bigger by far. A personal brand only gets you so far. If you ask 100 people who L'Oreal CEO is, I bet 99 won't be able to answer that question. If you ask 100 people who Kylie Jenner is, I bet 99 will tell you exactly who she is. It's nice being anonymous while making money.
For most of them that I know, the balance is leveraging influencers and celebrities for the personal side. They're spending an arm and a leg like you see in the makeup commercials and paying all these celebrities.
If you need a partner to expand your influencer marketing, try teaming up with some of the best influencer marketing agencies listed on DesignRush.
"If I had to say the best example that most people can relate to, check out a company called Legion Athletics. The founder, Mike Matthews, has a personal brand," Neil continues.
"His brand generates $30,000-40,000 a month in trackable sales.
They use influencers to help build their corporate brand. So they go on social media, pay influencers, and they have more than 700. The influencers drive trackable revenue of $400,000-500,000 a month.
It's a great way to build a corporate brand and then over time, more people know the corporate brand than they know Mike. He used his network to launch the corporate brand and then he used influencers to make the corporate brand bigger.
Now, the corporate brand is bigger than his brand by far.
The company doesn't just do $500-$1,000 a month in revenue from the influencers and the $30, $40 from him. It does millions and millions and millions a month in revenue, but it's from building a corporate brand."
Where Is Disruption in Marketing in 2024?
Vianca's discussion with Neil moved to the question bothering us all in 2024 – where is the disruption in marketing and how businesses can break away from boring advertising strategies to stand out?
Neil told DesignRush:
"The disruption in marketing means doing something very different. We talked about giving stuff away for free earlier. If you're a company that sells payroll software, there's a good chance that the people who pay you for payroll software also give their employees health insurance.
Imagine giving away payroll software for free and upselling all the customers' health insurance to bid on Google for clicks related to payroll software, a lot of times you're spending $80 a click. In many cases, just cheaper to give away something for free. That's what I mean by disruptive and thinking outside the box is the future."
The hardest part for all businesses is using commonplace platforms and standardized formats to push ideas never seen before.
Neil argues companies should align the content format to the marketing platform:
"You can't standardize the messaging for all these problems. You have to adjust them because the people, the usage, and the patterns on each platform are different.
It's not effective. When you advertise on TikTok, it should be very different than when you advertise on Instagram. People look at it as the same, the content type is the same, but the user is very different.
On TikTok, they prefer more beginner stuff than Instagram. So you should adjust your ads in the way you do it per platform. Even if the format's the same and even if it works, customizing it to each platform typically gives a better ROI."
We know Neil emphasizes bounce rates as a metric to gauge user engagement.
Concluding their conversation, Vianca asked Neil how he interprets bounce rate data in conjunction with page views to assess content quality.
"You have to look at industry benchmark rates," Neil notes.
"If you Google it, there are a lot of articles on the web of people telling you bounce rates per industry. You have to just make sure it's better than the average and the same with page view data.
You want your bounce rate to be lower.
You want your pages for visitors to be higher as well considering that you're not just manufacturing pages. If you have an article and chop it up into 10 pieces and then clip next, next, next to learn more, that's not a good user experience and that's not 10 pages.
It's about talking to your customers.
So there's qualitative and quantitative data. You gotta look at the analytics and see what pages are the issues. You gotta also survey them and talk to them on the phone, which gets into the qualitative data, which allows you to improve."
If you liked this interview, listen to the conversation until the end on Spotify:
