AI Won't Save Your Marketing. This Will.

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So Neil and I, we do this podcast called Marketing School, and we've been doing it for what, 10 years now?

0:31Neil Patel:Yeah, it's been a long time.

0:33Eric Siu:10 years, yeah. We first started doing it in his Vegas hotel and he had to turn off the air conditioner because it was too loud and it was like 115 degrees. So anyway, it's been 10 years. And I think today we're going to do some classics and some trends for this next 30 minutes before Glenn goes on. So yeah, I think maybe I'll lead off and we can talk about some cool stuff we're doing too. We'll just treat it as a conversation. We'll try to milk as many clips as possible. maybe that's a trend we should talk about as well. And maybe just I'll lead off with this piece. There's, how many of you have heard of that podcast, TBPN, the tech podcast that was acquired by OpenAI for$200 million?

1:12Eric Siu:Okay, so two people, three people. Okay, so they have a really interesting strategy. They, I think this year they were on track to do about$30 million as a podcast with like 10 people. The year before it was 5 million and they're driving a lot of distribution. And Neil and I were talking about this concept known as the clipping economy, where they might get four or five thousand live views, which is cool. It's pretty good. But a lot of the clips that they publish to X, for example, get hundreds of thousands of views. Right. And I think you can apply this to e-commerce as well. But there's the strategy that they have is they will interview like Mark Cuban or Travis Kalanick from Uber.

1:50Eric Siu:They'll interview all these tech giants. Right. For like five, 10 minute segments. and they'll milk it for a ton of clips. And earlier I was talking to two guys that they should start like an e-commerce podcast where they just bring on cool guests in the e-commerce space and just take out these clips, right? Because what's happening now is when you're not really just doing a podcast, you're actually trying to get as many clips as possible. And we were talking about this last week where we started taking these two, three-minute segments from this podcast, publishing into X and don't get a good amount of views, right?

2:21Eric Siu:and these actually drive pipeline, at least for us and we publish it to LinkedIn as well. So I think even though this is in the B2B concept or like a tech concept, I think you can apply it to what you're doing. So oftentimes you can just adjacent a little bit and you can pull this over and I think a lot more people are gonna try to do this and so might as well.

2:41Neil Patel:Yeah, your guys' space is all competitive. What I found is the boring and ugly still work well and I'm a big believer that AI is the future and there's so many different things that you can end up doing. But what we're noticing in e-commerce specifically is everyone's focusing on this new thing, AI. And I'm not saying you shouldn't, but they're forgetting about the fundamentals that are driving business results. So for example, with e-com businesses, we see influencer marketing work well in which not if you go through a platform, I'm talking about you have someone internally, not an agency, reaching out to thousands and thousands of people and recruiting influencers.

3:31Neil Patel:And then running ad campaigns with the creative that those influencers created. Works extremely well. You can negotiate great rates. Keep rotating them up. This kind of stuff is boring and ugly. It's worked for many years. and right now whenever I go to e-com events and I was just at one of the biggest e-com companies in Europe they're actually global they're in almost every major country that people fly in when I was in Spain and they were talking about all the cool stuff that they were doing with Claude which is great but then when we started talking about the fundamentals people weren't focusing them on as much.

4:15Neil Patel:And the reason I was there, I'm not going to mention the brand name is that you're starting to see revenue slip. When you're a publicly traded company, you don't want to see your revenue slip or it starts hurting your stock price. You can't forget about the fundamentals. And I would actually say that is the biggest mistake I'm seeing right now in today's world. I don't think we have an issue of people leveraging AI. I think we have an issue of people leveraging AI in ways that don't actually produce revenue or real results and they're forgetting about the stuff that produce results. Instead, if you know things like influencer marketing work out, why aren't you using AI to do that 10 times more, right?

4:58Neil Patel:And automate even the negotiations and biddings and all that kind of stuff. But instead, people want to talk about using AI in really cool and sexy ways instead of using it to make the fundamentals of your business that are already proven and working scaled up. That's how I would start thinking about your guys' businesses and marketing.

5:20Eric Siu:So there's two things there. One, let's talk about what AI won't replace. But before that, I think it's worthy talking about, for example, we did this last week, where our mandate when it comes to AI for both of our companies is if someone's using AI to build things, it has to tie into helping our customers or helping us get more customers. and to Neil's point, looking at workflows that are already working, human-led workflows, and then figuring out how to automate there, right? Because the challenge is, if you start showing all this cool stuff, you get people, I can definitely pump people off, right?

5:53Eric Siu:Problem is you start building a bunch of weird Frankenstein stuff that adds no value, and then it becomes that AI theater thing, and then everyone ends up pissed off, right? It's like, why are you pissed off at me? You told me to do AI. Well, no, I told you to build something useful, right? You might as well just start very clear with your communication.

6:09Neil Patel:Yes. And what we found is if you're going to leverage AI internally, we found two things that help really well. Because as your organization scales, you'll run into different problems. We have a mid-sized company, so we have more than a thousand people. And what we found was a lot of people build whatever they want with AI and you have a lot of overlap, a lot of inefficiencies because people are redoing things that they don't need to do. So the first change we made is you put someone in place to oversee everything that's AI related. And we found is when they start organizing everything and people know who to head up in their company, we start seeing less people working on the same thing.

6:53Neil Patel:Because you don't want five people trying to do the same exact thing and solve it five different ways. You're wasting time and money. The second thing that we found is if you don't create a beautiful interface, you may have the person who built it use it, but other people in the organization don't adapt it as well. So it's worth taking the extra time to beautify whatever you've built. And when we've done those two things, we've seen adoption increase drastically internally and it's short producing better results for us and our customers. Cool.

7:28Eric Siu:So let's talk about what AI won't replace, right? So I think a very easy place to start is distribution because now you can build anything in the world, but what you can't take away is brand. You can't take that away. You can't really take distribution away. And so if you learn to master that and compound that right now, I'm sure you're going to have a lot of amazing people talking about live shopping or clipping and things like that. You want to make sure you can drive as much distribution as possible. And ideally, you just spoke about email, I think, earlier, right? You need to keep building your email list.

7:57Eric Siu:Because earlier this week, as an example, I spoke to the email marketer I was talking about. He does about$60 million a year, and he's pretty public with this. And he just has an email list, right? And he's cleaning it all the time. But one really cool thing he has, on his email list, he has a concept known as the make money button. And it's worked out really well. It drives leads. Did I tell you about the make money button? No. Okay. So the make money, this guy's name is Matt Paulson. He runs a newsletter called MarketBeat, the stock newsletter. So the way it works is if I'm on your email list, Neil, and I click on three emails within seven days, I'm automatically thrown onto the make money button list.

8:32Eric Siu:And that is just all of your offers. One offer first, three days later, another offer, but in taste, right? You're maybe telling a story around it, but it's literally like four or five of your offers. Then, you know, we have a lot of conversions off of that, but then you get kicked off of that, okay? Then maybe five weeks later, I do it again, okay? I click on three emails in seven days. Guess what? I'm back on the make money mutton again. And he said that has made him millions and millions of dollars over the years. And so think about how you can apply that tastefully, obviously, to what you do.

9:04Eric Siu:And yeah, it's pretty cool.

9:06Neil Patel:Yeah, another thing, AI won't replace is strategy. I know people say it's really smart and it's gonna be smarter than humans. And I'm not doubting that. But if everyone goes to AI and ask them, how do I grow my e-commerce company? you're going to start seeing strategies that just get very crowded and don't work well. What makes marketing super effective is people will randomly try unique things that others have not, and it separates them and they do well. Example of this is when, you know, Nano Banana came out. I believe there was a company, it was a teeth whitening company that created AI to create a gorilla ad about teeth whitening.

9:48Neil Patel:Was it teeth whitening? You know what I'm talking about. The dentist. Yeah, the dentist. And it worked really well, went viral, people loved it. But if everyone did the same type of ad, it's not gonna be as effective. It's just like why all good marketing channels, whether it's SEO or paid or social media, eventually gets crowded. And to really separate yourself, you gotta have a different strategy. It doesn't mean you don't use those channels, you just gotta figure out a way to stand out. And if everyone's using AI to figure this out, I'm telling you, it's not gonna be that effective. and it is off in so many ways.

10:22Neil Patel:How many of you guys have used chat GPT or Gemini and found that it's given you the wrong information? Raise your hand, be honest. Look at that. A lot of the room's raising their hand. The reason being is the way AI works is it scrapes the whole web and it uses that to figure out what to output. And a lot of the stuff that's on the web is junk and it's hard to get rid of the junk. Google's been trying to solve this for ages. They can't. I'll give you a polarizing example of this. on junk. If someone asks about the COVID vaccine, and I'm not trying to get political, I'm not saying it's right or wrong to take it.

10:57Neil Patel:When COVID first came out, you would have a lot of information of people saying you need the vaccine, right? Now, I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand. I bet you majority of the room does not take the vaccine anymore. Okay. And I get, I bet you most people don't even have tests in their house or ever take COVID tests when they're sick anymore. What I'm getting at is there's articles on the web that say the vaccine's bad for you. There's articles on the web that say it's good for you. Both those articles have a lot of social shares. Both of them have a lot of links. Both of them have a lot of comments.

11:29Neil Patel:How does a platform decide which one is right or which one is wrong? And because of that, it's hard for AI to always give you the right answer because not everything in this world is black or white.

11:45Eric Siu:So let me, I'll give my next answer by telling a story first. So we just hired this kid. He's a kid, 18 years old. He hasn't even graduated high school yet. Genius, okay? Two of his parents are both software engineers, all right? So my CTO, who didn't go to college, right? He was challenging this kid. He's like, because he's going to college. He's like, why are you going to college? Give us a good reason as to why you're going to college. And he's like, well, I think AI is inevitable, but I'm going to college. He's going to a really good engineering school, right? He's like, I know that I have no relationships right now.

12:20Eric Siu:I have no connections. And the only way I'm going to do it is actually going to college. And so I'm taking BS classes right now so I can just chill. But I want to hang out. I want to have fun. But I want to build my network because that is going to be worth so much more. And AI can never replace that. So community will never, this, right? Community right here will never be replaced. This builds trust. This is a form of distribution as well. and as much of a pain in the butt as events are to do, Stuart, and I'm aware of, events are really hard, okay? It's worth it. It's so worth it, right? Like you do events, I do events, Stuart does events, you're all here, right?

12:56Eric Siu:This is community.

12:57Neil Patel:Yeah. Yeah, this network, the community, you know, I highly recommend that when you meet people, you ask them one simple question. What's working for you to grow your e-commerce brand? If you ask and you share the same, so when people ask you, share, like really share. Don't give them a fuzzy answer. Really share. You'll leave this event with ideas that'll work that'll help you grow faster. It's hard to get that stuff from the internet. It actually is much easier in person because people are more willing to open up

13:31Eric Siu:and tell you the truth. And it's actually from these events, by the way, where I've met some of my closest friends. And so you don't feel shy to just insert yourself into a conversation because everyone's just looking to build relationships. And then you ask that question. You do that a couple times, a few turns, this is paid for itself many times over, even though it's free. So now it's infinite ROI, right? So the next thing we can talk about here is, and did you see how the, you don't read that as much. Let me explain for you. So right now there's this concept of the forward deployed engineer that's exploding right now.

14:04Eric Siu:So the whole idea behind this is that this company Palantir, right? They have this software called Foundry. And they insert these four deployed engineers. These are basically engineers that help implement their technology. Okay. But that's become a very widely known thing now. Now everyone's talking about how you need four deployed employees, not even just engineers. And a piece that I don't think is going away is that the human touch customer success. the way they're approaching for deployed employees now, it's just customer success, right? But it's just like they've remarketed the word instead of calling it digital marketing, internet marketing, what do they call it now?

14:42Eric Siu:What do they call it now? Gross marketing, right? So it's rebranded, but I don't think that's going away anytime soon. And what's happening now is like, I threw up a random post. I think it was opening eyes like, oh, they're getting into consulting, right? Because the human touch again, right? Anthropics getting into consulting, right? And so I don't think that's going to go away. And I think what's going to happen is those of you in e-commerce, you're going to have to have that. When you think about software, services are converging with software. I think the same thing is going to happen with e-com as well, where people are going to want that human touch more.

15:11Eric Siu:And I'll just give you an example. Like that, that open AI tweet, I just said something on top of it, 100 ,000 views, 200 ,000. So I think there's a big demand for it right now. One, some more customer success. Two, it's just going to trend upwards. You're going to need more of it.

15:26Neil Patel:yeah and we're seeing right now with customer success a lot of people are trying to replace customer success or humans with ai and that's definitely doable do you see the job post the

15:37Eric Siu:the it's going parabolic now for customer success people do you see that they're looking for more customer success people like the the job post now it's like shooting straight up like what people

15:46Neil Patel:are looking for a lot of customer success people and what we're seeing is when you think about customer success, we still see humans wanting to interact with humans. And when they don't interact with humans, sometimes they get frustrated. I was just at a home service conference in San Antonio, I think a few days ago. And at this home service event, it was for a specific company in which they do fire damage repair, water damage repair, mold repair. So imagine your home getting flooded because of a crack pipe, etc. Not everyone wants to deal with AI like when your pipes are bursting and water's flooding everywhere.

16:27Neil Patel:So they did something that was interesting. They use a product called High Level that has AI and they simulated sales calls with High Level's AI to actually train humans on how to sell. Right? So then that way the humans do better when someone actually calls and picks up because we all get leads if you don't do well. Well, you know, you tend to lose out on a lot of revenue and humans get irritated. And this is happening more and more because I was on the phone the other day with Bank of America for a credit card. My credit card, I was at the gas pump. Someone stole my Amex, like numbers, so they disabled it, which sucks.

17:11Neil Patel:So I had to use my Visa card and only have one Visa card and one Amex card. I'm going to the pump and it doesn't go through. And I'm like, why the heck does my credit card not work? What's wrong? I pay my bills on time and stuff. My credit card, what I figured out was two months expired. I barely used my Visa card. I never got a credit card mailed to me, or at least I didn't see it. Called Bank of America. They kept giving me AI to answer my support. I was pissed off. And I'm like, I just need a card replacement. I'm like, representative, representative, support, human, operator, and I'm pushing buttons.

17:49Neil Patel:and after I think it was like 13 minutes I eventually got a hold of a human and I'm like hey I just need a new card I don't want to talk to AI my card's expired I never got the new card in the mail she's like I need to do a security check I got you don't worry within a minute and a half I was done with the call she said the card would arrive within two days it was great I had a terrible experience with AI I had an amazing experience with a human And I'm not saying you shouldn't have AI answer some of the simple questions, but there's a time and place for AI for your customer support, especially when you have a lot of products and you're doing a lot of volume.

18:31Neil Patel:But if you have a high-end product and you're selling something for expensive, people do expect a human for interaction.

18:38Eric Siu:Yeah, I got a good hook for you on this one. Social commerce is not a campaign. It now changes the org chart. So when you think about it now, you look at creators, right? A lot of people are, because creators are actually making the ad creatives, right? You need entire departments for that. And so we can talk about this a little more, but I think this, by the way, this is AI generated too. I do think this is a trend that we're seeing a lot more of, right? What I see on X, like we actually want, what's the trend? Social commerce is what? It's more so social commerce is not just a campaign. It's more so that it is changing the org chart.

19:13Eric Siu:So for example, a lot of e-com people that I see on Twitter, and we see this with our e-com friends as well, they're hiring armies of creators. And you need a creator manager. You need an influencer manager as well. You need an army of these people. And it's not just, you know, we're not talking like 100 or 200, 300. We're talking about like 500, 1 ,000 plus of these people, right? And then you look at that, the influencer.