Behind The Scenes AI Secrets for Marketing with Neil Patel & Eric Siu

0:00Hello, everyone. Today, we have a very special episode for the summit in which Eric and I are doing a marketing school podcast focused on AI. You guys already know about me. I'm Neil Patel. I'm the co-founder of NP Digital. Eric, before we kick it off, do you want to give a quick background on yourself? Yeah. So I have an ad agency called Single Grain and Neil and I, we do a podcast together called Marketing School. And I do an entrepreneurial podcast called Leveling Up. And I have a lot of really interesting live guests that come through and also do an event called Leveling Up Founders once a year where we bring in the best founders just to really build relationships with each other and level up together.

0:37Cool. Well, let's kick this off. Let's talk about AI. I know, you know, let's first start off with tools. I know you use a lot of AI tools. Dude, what do you think about some of the AI tools out there? I know at the inbound event, we met Peach, Peach AI, I think it's called Peach. What are some of the other tools out there that you're using right now for AI? Yeah. So Opus.pro would be a competitor to Peach, O-P-U-S.P-R-O. And the reason I cite that one is because it's a product I've actually used. And so what it does is it will take like our clip from this 30 minutes or so, and it will find the most interesting moments that have an interesting hook.

1:11And it'll actually rate it on a scale of one to 100 on how viral it thinks it will go. And it'll also cite why it thinks it'll go viral. Plus it'll also add the captions in as well. So it really takes away a lot of the editing, heavy lifting, and this saves a lot of time. You know, I've been using BART a lot. I know a lot of people use ChatGPT, but I don't know what you think. just bard i get such a much more better output from bard than i do from chat gpt and i don't know if you saw this i know we talked about a little bit but with gemini.ai right they saying by the end of or it's currently what four or five x more powerful than chat gpt by the end of next year in 2024 is predicted to be 20 times more powerful it's kind of ridiculous so actually funny enough i pay for chat gpt i paid a 20 a month but i use bard more as well because i'm just like, okay, they probably have a larger data set to work with.

2:00Dude, you know they do because it's like, look at Google, right? Google has literally, I don't have any data to prove this. It's probably online somewhere, but I bet you it has the largest data set out of any search engine or probably internet company out there. Yeah. I mean, you think about all the people typing in their queries and all the content they're crawling, I mean, are the largest search engine in the world, right? So the other one I want to call out too is castmagic.io. and CastMagic is interesting because it allows you to create, it will take like this podcast and it will make show notes for it, like timestamp show notes.

2:34It will also make a tweet storm for you. It will also make a description for you. It will also create titles for you as well. And there's just a lot that you can do with it to create text-based content for your video-based content, right? So it will save you a lot of time. That is kind of the theme with a lot of this AI stuff. The problem I have with a lot of the AI stuff right now and the tools out there, you end up using them and the results are mediocre. I'm not talking about the results from like, oh, it's getting you more traffic. I haven't seen really any just being like, oh, you pop this AI tool and it gets you more traffic.

3:03But if you look at AI, most marketers use it for content creation. And whether it's ChetGPT or Bard or a writer from Ubersuggest or SEMrush or whoever has the latest AI writer, their content quality, no matter if you're using the open AI API or whether you're using your own in-house built solution, none of them are really as good as just manually creating content, at least from what I've seen. And even like mid journey, there's a big upgrade from what mid journey has done over the years. But the problem with mid journey is it's like, all right, what are you going to really use it for within your marketing material?

3:38Yeah, well, I mean, here's a counterpoint. I think it's at least for me, the marketing school content that we create, we've been running this experiment for a little bit. And what we do is we have maybe we use the open AI API and it will use chat GPT for and it will take like this episode over here and it'll make it into a blog post. And because it's what we're talking about is trending, you're hearing two voices, like it's probably going to be pretty unique. And then we have the human handle the last 30, 40 % fact check it. We'll add in the right links. We'll add in the right pictures and all that.

4:06And so that's an example of where you can leverage AI to save a ton of time and basically decrease a lot of the costs and increase the efficiency in terms of putting out that piece of content. I think in that case, that's AI enhanced content and you're not just letting AI do all the work because at the end of the day, I don't think we're quite there yet where you can just let it automate everything. In fact, when you think about the best computers out there back in the day, all the bugs that we create as both, neither of us are programmers, but you think about all the bugs, like all the bugs are actually human induced, meaning that there's like an error because it's human error because whatever you tell the computer to do, typically it will do.

4:43Right. And you know, usually it's like a human error with the coding. And yes, I do think there's a lot of benefits from AI and AI is here to stay and there's more value than not having it. But the big thing I believe in AI is people overestimate what it can do for them in the short run, but they drastically underestimate what it will do for them in the long run. In the short run, I talked to so many people and they're just like, yeah, I'm going to integrate in my marketing. Like when we were at the inbound event, I met up with so many people and a lot of the questions were like, how do we replace all my marketing staff with AI?

5:12I'm like, well, this is just a recipe for disaster. It's not going to happen. And people are looking to use AI to cut costs and get more results. And I'm like, it's not going to happen. The quality of the output that you're getting from AI is just not there. And I'm not saying that because I have an agency or you have an agency, but it's the reality. Like, go try creating ad campaigns, tons of content with AI, and only AI, and have very little human intervention, and go see what happens with your results. And we've tested it. And just, you know, every time we've tested it, it causes the results to tank.

5:41But it doesn't mean AI is bad. It's just use it for what it is, have a human go in and modify it and make things better. Just in the long run, you know, it'll get much better. We just have to be patient. You know what's interesting, Neil? So related to that note, I actually think agency type businesses will boom in the next five to 10 years or so because AI will help bring gross margins up. And that's not saying, oh, a bunch of people are going to get fired or whatever. But the people that learn how to use AI will be five to 10x more efficient. A lot of these enterprise companies, not even just enterprise companies, but small mom and pop shops as well, they're going to need help implementing AI and they're going to need a lot of these, they're going to need agencies to partner up with them to do it.

6:18And so I think agencies are set up to win for the longterm. And when you have higher gross margins, by the way, if you're an agency owner listening to this, that means if you want to sell later, your multiple could potentially be higher as well. You were actually at the All In Summit, right? With the All In podcast with Shemad, David Sachs. They had like some really big hitters there. Elon spoke, Shopify CEO spoke, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase spoke. There was a lot more big hitters. Ray Dalio was there. But what was their overall thoughts on AI? Did they really talk about it much? Not as much because I feel like AI is getting overdone now.

6:51People are just talking about it all the time and they've given their thoughts on it at the end of the day. And so everyone's hopeful about it. Like, you know, is it going to be able to help cure a lot of diseases? Is it going to make doctors a lot more efficient? Absolutely. They did have some science corner sessions. I wasn't able to make it on Tuesday, but I will say most of their talks will be posted online and you can listen to the podcast as well. But in general, everyone is optimistic about it. And they believe that it's going to be a net positive to humanity. You know, Elon, he did talk about a little bit in his talk.

7:17So the one where he started LinkedIn, and he just kind of mentioned that, you know, he kind of helped co-found OpenAI initially because, you know, he believed that, you know, it was a force for good, but when they became more private and closed off and, you know, Microsoft was backing it, he believed that incentives weren't as aligned anymore. So that's why he felt like he had to step back in again and make things right. Right. And so that is like another example of him believing that AI can be used for nefarious reasons. So he just wants to be a force for good there. Yeah. And what's funny is I think he also contributed some money to open AI in the early days.

7:46I could be wrong. He totally, but like that, that's when he thought like things were like going to be okay. So yeah, but no, dude, we're seeing the same thing right now. And like the big thing that I'm seeing in marketing is everyone's focusing on content creation with AI instead of analytics and data, dude, it's just like you work with a lot of clients too. Imagine if you can take someone's Facebook ad data, their Google ad data, their Bing ad data, their Reddit ad data, Snapchat, et cetera, pretty much take all of it, right? And if you just look at Google as a whole, I think the ad revenue is around$160 billion around the last 12 months.

8:20It's somewhere around there. Either way, it's a massive number. And when you look at that number, imagine how much wastage is in ad spend. If you can tie in all the analytics into one place. And in real time, it alerts a human on where there's wastage and what campaigns may not be working. And it flags it and it can say, hey, what do you want me to do here? Spend more, spend less, stop, click here to look at the campaigns and evaluate. And then you can end up making decisions. But I believe that'll save companies so much money because every time I go to a conference and talk to people, and I've asked this on stage multiple times, how many people log into their analytics on a daily basis?

8:58Majority of the room never logs into the analytics. And then when I ask them, how many of you guys are actually taking action based on the analytics on a daily or weekly basis, or even monthly, and I typically ask all three, very few people take action. So it's just like, with all the money being spent on ad spend, I look at that as AI can really help companies save a lot of money. Look, I mean, there's a tool that HubSpot is coming out with called ChatSpot. And the whole thing is like, you can ask it, Hey, what's the average lifetime value of a customer in the last six months or so, or the last nine months, last 12 months.

9:31And so typically you might need to ask your marketer, but sometimes you might need to ask a data scientist, or you might need to ask a controller or a finance person on your team. And sometimes those people might take three to four days or like an entire week to get you that report. And sometimes you need the data kind of tweaked a little bit. So, Oh, by the way, can you tweak it this way? Then it'll take another three days, another five days, by the time that happens, like everything is forgotten, and you just don't have time to work on it anymore. But when you have a bot telling you answering new questions, answering questions real time, and also making recommendations for you, that is real problem solving.

9:58And that's how you really get to the next level with your business, because that's going to help with how you define your strategy. Yeah, totally. And the other cool thing too, is it's like, you're going to end up learning really quickly, if something is working well for you or not just by testing, and you can test a little bit here and there with different things. and it can quickly tell you if you're going to get results. Like for example, we've tried creating a lot of content pages on AI or using AI. And what we found is the traffic has on those pages versus websites versus manually creating content.

10:30We saw a big increase in the websites that were using manual content creation versus AI. And even with the same domains, we tried AI-based content and manual. And we typically almost always saw the manual versions winning. I know you've done some AI stuff too on the single brand website. I believe you use AI to create like basic template of landing pages. I don't mean basic in a bad way, but there's a lot of basic long tail keywords and phrases that companies could be targeting that could be considered quote unquote boring content or simple content that anyone can write. And I know you use a ton of AI for that, which has helped you get more rankings and traffic too.

11:05Here, I'll share my screen real quick here. Those of you that can see this. So this is an experiment that we're running with like the content from the marketing school podcast. So we'll probably do it with this piece as well. but you can see it's taking some time here, but this is an example of using the open AI API and having the content, maybe like a blog or say, Hey, like, can you create a blog post with this transcript over here, which is we use riverside.fm. It gives us an AI generated transcript. And then from there, it will basically, you know, pump out the blog post and we'll have a human in the loop come in and, you know, make sure that we have the right stuff, right.

11:37Make sure to fact check information, you know, at least the graph is moving up into the right. So now we're like, okay, how do we do more of this, right? So that's a good example of how this might work. And to Neil's point, we haven't completely said, hey, let's stop all the manual human created content. We're still doing that. But we want to experiment and try things over time. So we can share this information with you on shows like this, or whatever you want to call it on summits like this. Yeah, what we've done with AI that we've found success in is having it create basic tools. So we found that tools get the most backlinks like we bought uber sit-ups answer the public we never bought them for its backlinks but when you look at how many backlinks these free tools have it's just ridiculous some of them have over 10 000 backlinks and ai you know can create the game of pong it did it in less than 60 seconds but when you look at like advanced tools being like create me a sem rush alternative it's not going to end up doing that in a successful way but on the flip side hey create me an ab testing calculator and then we give it to our internal developer, internal developer then goes and modifies and adjust it.

12:39And then you pop it on the website. We're seeing a good traffic gains over time, like six plus months. B we're seeing natural backlinks and we're seeing huge wins from that. The same thing we're seeing big wins from, so not just on the tool end, but on the infographic end. So you can end up using AI to help you come up with a story with tons of data because it can scour the web and help you find stats based on the points you're trying to make. And then you pop that in an infographic. We haven't tried using the AI to actually make the infographic, but the data collection and the story, we use it because a lot of times when you're creating an infographic, you know what you want to say?

13:15Like if I'm creating an infographic on how colors affect purchases, you know, I'll talk about like, what are the meanings of each color? Well, you can just put that in chat GPT or bar that'll spit it out, which ones affect conversions and all these kinds of questions. And you can then go take that and create an infograph to like infogram or canva or send it to a designer. But yeah, that's been pretty effective from what we've tested and seen as well. You know, I think it's really important to bring this framework to everyone. So a couple of months ago, I was on an event, it was a YPO event and individual named Sol Rashidi.

13:48She used to be the chief data officer, I believe at L 'Oreal. And she broke down the three types of AI. And she says 99 % of things that are happening that we're talking about right now or the use cases, it's not true artificial intelligence. And so you really have three. One's automated intelligence. The second one is augmented intelligence. And the third one is artificial intelligence. And most of what we're doing right now is we're automating a lot of things and we're augmenting a lot of things. And that's helping us save a lot of time at the end of the day. But true artificial intelligence is when you're able to talk to something and it's able to think and it's able to talk back to you.

14:20Yeah. Like the movie, iRobot, where you actually have like this robot that's next to you and And you can ask it any question. It'll not just answer it, but it'll also do tasks for you in real time. And it can adjust based on what it sees. I just pulled this up literally right now. So this is exclusive for everyone here on the summit. Okay. So I just got access to this thing called with Delphi or with delphi.com. And it's, this is like a, uh, an alpha version. What they're doing is they're combining everything I've ever said in my YouTube videos, my podcast, they're combining leveling up, they're combining marketing school.

14:51And it's like a little, like a Eric sued GPT over here. And we'll probably do one for marketing school as well, where you can basically ask it questions. Maybe we'll give it away for free. Maybe we'll charge$5 a month or whatever. But these are the things. How can you improve your product experience on negative reviews or whatever? Or on marketing, how do you evoke emotion and tell a story in your marketing videos? Okay, so let's see what happens here. So now, as this one thinks, you can see I previously asked the question, where can I find your newsletter? What kind of content can I expect? That's fantastic.

15:20I'm glad you're interested in my newsletter. I share it on my personal website and through the Marketing School podcast website at marketingschool.io. And it cites the words pulling this data from. That's cool. And yeah, you just asked, how can you evoke emotion and tell stories in your marketing videos? And it's answered it as well. And check this out. It's pulling from these sources over here. Cleverest marketing campaigns we have seen. Dude, I remember you telling me how you asked, I think it was chat GPT or it was a bard. How do I improve the conversions on this webpage? and it spit you out a laundry list of all the stuff that you could be doing too based on what it found from the web.

15:53And it did an okay job, but the fact that it's doing an okay job right now, like how's it gonna be in the next five years? Yeah, no, it should be really good in the next five years. But yeah, no, a lot of those things that people are testing are kind of crazy. Like my team is testing AI voice that you can kind of like what you just showed on your screen, you can ask it anything, but the voice is my voice and it's speaking too fast, so they gotta slow it down, but it's really close to being accurate where you can't even tell if it's my voice or AI voice for most queries for some things is choppy or it doesn't make sense.

16:26But for most things, we're seeing it be super, super effective. You know, we should talk about to Neil, this is a total like total conjecture from our end. But how do you actually rank highly on like a bard or a chat GP? Because I just asked bard right here, what are the best marketing podcasts? And so we have perpetual traffic where this is incorrect, by the way, this is Amy Porterfield and Jenna Kuchar. That's wrong. But at least number two says Marking School by Neil Patel and Eric Su. That's correct. And so to say, isn't Amy Porterfield's podcast, online marketing made easy? Yeah, this one over here.

16:58Yeah. The Jenna Kuchar one's different. So it's like sometimes like the bard will hallucinate, right? That's nothing new. But what do you think, Neil? Like, how do you rank highly on these GPTs that people use? When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio.

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19:11That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Dude, so a lot of it is similar to search. Okay, think about it this way. You do a search on Google and you get results 1 through 10 on page 1. I know for most queries, sometimes it's a little bit different than that. But let's just imagine you're getting a list through 1 through 10. They're looking at things like backlinks, other factors like domain authority. I know Google doesn't use domain authority, but their own version of it, the content quality. There's a ton of factors like that, right? Backlink O 'Brien Dean has an article on like the 200 factors in Google's algorithm.

19:45AI, from our understanding, we've talked to a lot of employees at these search engines, Google being, we've even talked to people at OpenAI. They're leveraging a lot of the same factors because when you're doing a search on Google, it's like they're saying, hey, here's a top result. we think this is the answer to your query and we think this is what you want but they're just not forcing it down your throat with ai they're pretty much just pulling from the first result then the second result and third result because it's already organized in a way that hey here are the best results and this is what's going to be the most relevant for people i just think it comes down to citations at the end of the day so like it's no different to neil's point the past right like reviews are important links are important like those are forms of citations as well right Right.

20:25Yeah. Brand mentions or recommendations, whatever it is exactly. Right. And that's how I think we're here. And plus we have over 2 ,500 episodes now. So we've been like, there's a lot of pages as well. I think that might be a factor too. That's like the number of times it's been seen in search. So when you think about Google, they have the double EAT, right? And so you have expertise. What's the other E again? Experience, expertise, authority, and trust. So you look at Neil, he's been doing marketing for a long time. I've been doing marketing for a long time. So when you add both of us up, I think that also helps with the authority piece.

20:56Yeah. And it's like, why would you pull for someone who's brand new, who hasn't had a ton of experience versus someone who's been doing it for 10, 20, 30 years. And the other thing that I would end up saying is, when you're looking at E, the biggest problem that people get is, they're just like, Oh, I can fake it. What do I need to do to create a shortcut and show I have E versus actually having it. But that's wrong. Just like with SEO, you don't want to play shortcuts and be like, let me just rank on top of Google. And Eric and I have done a lot of black hat stuff when we first started in our career.

21:29And that short term stuff never works. If we did white hat stuff from day one in our career, and to be clear, Eric and I only focus on white hat stuff and have been for a long time now, we would have been much further in our career and our businesses would have been much larger as well. And by the way, like, I think that's important for everyone to know too, especially with SEO, it's important to experience and understand how both sides, black, gray, or white hat, how they all work. And then what you want to end up doing for the long-term is do the black hat things in a white hat way, right? Do mostly white hat because here's the easiest thing.

22:00It's like, it's much easier to operate within the law and do things in a clean way than it is to try to take shortcuts because eventually you get caught, right? And we tested these on small sites that we didn't care about and we torched them, but that's a whole nother side thing. I think with the AI stuff in the long-term, I would say, especially if you're going back to the agency comment I made earlier, you are going to be able to, if you weren't a designer before, you are now a designer, right? You are now a designer. If you weren't a programmer before, you are now a programmer. You can make widgets.