Everything You Knew About Paid Traffic Doesn't Work Anymore

0:00Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.

0:29Neil Patel:everyone already knows we talk about this a lot ai is changing marketing uh-huh what are you shifting your marketing spend to in 2026 or what are you doing with your marketing spend in 2026 and some of them could be the same old but i'm just curious what it is and we can go back and forth on this based on everything that's happening in ai yeah so i'll tell you what we're doing right

0:49Eric Siu:now i do think we're going to spend more on tokens i do think we're going to you and i are going to buy local infrastructure let's just start there and people might be thinking how's that tie into marketing. In my mind, it does because we're buying intelligence to do more marketing tasks, right? So we're getting a lot more inquiries for the agent stuff that we have, right? And so next week, we should be able to get up our MVP version of our site, Single Brain. Finally, we're getting that up now. So if people want our agents or AI transformation, we're going to go straight for that just because that's where I've kind of forced my organization into.

1:16Eric Siu:So we're going way harder on that cold email infrastructure. So because my agents build out all the cold email infrastructure, now we're sending way more cold emails and it's constantly tweaking the offers and all that too. So I think we're going to go harder on that, but that costs tokens too. That means we're going to be spending more on Apollo API credits or maybe just build our own eventually. So I think it's spending more on tokens. The offer that we have is moving more on the AI side and that's maybe a good starting point and we can go back and forth.

1:40Neil Patel:Yeah. So before I get into my, the number two, right, Eric just gave us number one, a quick thing. I'm in an email group with a lot of entrepreneurs who have been using AI for sending mass cold emails. And we would call these marketing emails. The reason I wouldn't call them sales emails is you then get the lead once they're warmed up, then it goes to the salesperson. Almost everyone in the group is seeing a similar pattern in which when it first started, it was kind of effective. Now people are getting bombarded way too much with cold emails from AI and it's just degrading response rates and it's almost not effective anymore.

2:22Eric Siu:Our positive reply rates so far, I want to say is about 1 % or so, which is decent. Like usually you want your positive reply rate anywhere from like one to 3 % or so for positive reply on cold email. So it's not bad right now, but I can see it going in a direction where it's like, it's not hard to build this infrastructure, you know?

2:40Neil Patel:Yeah. And when I'm talking about the numbers I'm not talking about the reply rate I'm talking about from sending the email to then getting the reply to setting up a call to then going through the pitch process and then closing a deal wait but all the people in your email group what kind of businesses do they have they're all b2b b2b like what are they b2b enterprise okay so some of them are software some of them are services it's actually only one of those other two it's either their software or their services we don't have like manufacturing or anything in the email group. There's only like 11 or 12 of us.

3:12Neil Patel:And if you look at the whole, if you look at it from a funnel perspective, we're still getting opens. We're still getting responses. The open rates are drastically decreasing. I think the average open rate decrease has been a little bit more than 40 % in the group from end of last year to roughly end of Q1 now. So people are just getting overwhelmed and the close rates are just getting in the, just going down the drain. So it's, it's getting to a point where some of the companies in the group at 11 or 12 are actually considering shutting it off altogether.

3:48Eric Siu:But they should shut it down. Good for them.

3:50Neil Patel:Yeah. Yeah. Cause I was like, and we're seeing the same thing at least for, let's say influencer marketing. And I know you and I talked about this in the past. We have a spreadsheet that tracks or Marina on my end, And I think, you know, Marina, tracks how many influencer outreach emails we get per week.

4:06Eric Siu:Okay.

4:08Neil Patel:We were getting on average two to three good ones per week. And we were getting, call it another three to four-ish junk ones. Yeah. What qualifies as a good one? Good one means is they have the budget. It's a reputable company. We like their product. We would consider repping them. And this is for you. This is just for me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We usually ignore almost all of them, even the three to four, but we still keep track of them because that metric, whether we choose to engage or not, it tells us if we're doing okay on social media and our brand is growing enough where people want to work with us or they don't want to work with us.

4:43Neil Patel:Outside of follower account, right? When someone's willing to give you money, it shows if they value what you've built or not. If that number keeps going down over time, that means you may not be doing something as valuable or it may be something else. Who knows? But that's why we actually track it. We don't track it from a remedy standpoint. Now, guess how many emails I'm getting a day? Good ones. Just overall? Overall.

5:06Eric Siu:Wait, what was it before? You said three good ones a week, but what?

5:08Neil Patel:Two to three good ones a week. Uh-huh.

5:10Eric Siu:And then around four crap ones. Four crap ones. So call it seven. Oh, you're probably, seven? Seven total, okay. Let's say, I think you've probably 10x the crap ones per week.

5:19Neil Patel:Similar, we're close enough. We're getting five to six emails a day right now. Yep. I don't know what portion's good or crap. That's funny. It's AI.

5:27Eric Siu:It's same thing for me. It's two to three good ones per week. And it's about 40 to 50 garbage per week right now.

5:33Neil Patel:Yeah, we don't even respond to really any of them. Some respond to like, I got head up by Facebook and I'll jump on a call with them on Monday. But it's not about money there. It's about relationship. And then what more can we do? And how can we turn that into business? But going back to your point one, Eric was saying he's spending more on tokens. So that way he can have agents do more of his marketing work

5:56Eric Siu:By the way, my agents look at my email and then they scan for those now. Yeah. So it does the Marina job.

6:01Neil Patel:Yeah. We see a lot of people doing that. Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn

6:09Eric Siu:ads right now, but you can do it with Carrot. It's www.carrot.ai.

6:14Neil Patel:Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. So I would say our number two, which would be the first one for me, but the big change that we made in 2026. I've talked a little about this in the past. I think it's harder and harder to differentiate your offering in today's world than it was three years ago. And three years ago, it was harder to differentiate your offering than five years ago. And what I'm getting at is as we go forward, I think offerings are blending in more and more with each other. Technology is not a moat anymore. It's accessible to a lot of people. A lot of stuff is open source.

6:52Neil Patel:You know, intelligence and brainpower and your offering. The question is not, can someone replicate it? The question is, when will they replicate it? So we're investing heavily in branding right now. What I mean by that is I'm doing more in-person speaking events with our ideal customers, holding our own internal conferences. We're doing less podcasts. I've actually seen that die down. One, the inquiries have slowed down. But two, we were denying -

7:18Eric Siu:Inquiries that get you onto podcasts. Yes.

7:19Neil Patel:and I've also in the past we used to I used to accept a lot you accepted because you didn't think about however your time was yes and then Eric Eric mentioned this on a podcast episode he's like dude how much time are you wasting what's the ROI and I was like you know what I should probably tell my team to be more restrictive you would come into this these meetings all pissed off sometimes because I would ask you stupid questions uh-huh so now I don't even do a podcast interview a week maybe one or twice a month I just turn them all down or ignore them yeah a lot of the inquiries never came to me anyways they were coming to my team now my team just doesn't bring them up to me at all yeah because they know what I'm gonna end up saying so but I am pretty sure they've died down to some extent so when I say we've been investing more in branding more word submissions like we want ad ages performance marketing agency of the year award so like we're spending more time and money on that it costs us a lot money on that.

8:15Neil Patel:I'm not talking about award submissions. There may be a fee for that. I'm guessing there is. I don't know for certain, but the amount of time internally we spend to try to present and win an award is expensive. Like if I had a guess on how much we spend a year on award related stuff, four or$500 ,000. That's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. Okay. But that's great branding for ideal customers. The in-person events that I'm talking about where we, like I was in london did our own event paris did our own event and own event doesn't have to cost a lot it's not

8:46Eric Siu:like we're selling tickets you explain this there was the between nine and twelve and then you occupied the time before uh breakfast and lunch right so it's not that expensive but it's a nice hotel yeah nice hotel we put out pastries and little bitings and things like that you bring pastries from the outside or you order from the hotel you have to meet a minimum right i honestly

9:04Neil Patel:don't know what the team does my guess is at neither of our two events this time we're in a hotel uh both of them were in co-working spaces oh you're even cheaper yes getting even cheaper so it was cost reduction yeah so i'm assuming in that case the pastries came from the outside yeah and i know i asked in the uk i'm like oh how do we get through he's like oh we pay for membership here we're able to just book the room it wasn't much including food and everything oh that's so good i was like how much was it he's like i don't know a thousand something bucks 2 ,000 bucks max. I was like, all right.

9:36Neil Patel:So I would say those are the two areas we've been spending more heavily on branding. And yeah, I went back to the speaking circuit. I would say that's more branding as well. Just speaking, being more pickier on the conferences. I'm doing a lot less paid speaking gigs. I'm doing a lot more free speaking gigs. Did you pay for any this year? Yes, I have paid to speak. So what Eric's getting at is before I would just accept any good paid speaking gig and when I say good paid speaking gig, I would base it on how much money they're paying for me to speak and then base it off of travel time and how convenient the flight was.

10:12Neil Patel:Now we don't look at if it's paid, we look at in the room, is our ideal customers going to be there? And is the talk that they also want me to speak on relevant to the services we pitch and our long-term vision? So if someone's willing to pay a lot of money, but their ideal customer is not there, we will turn down the speaking event. if someone's willing to pay a lot of money and it's in a city where we operate our business so let's say someone wants to pay me to come to paris and it's only an hour speaking slot i will take it because then i can meet up with all our customers in paris do our own event in paris and i got paid to do that so i didn't have to pay for a flight and i just had to take an hour of my time so there are circumstances where i will go and speak for money if it's convenient and it can drum a business in the same city for our current corporations by doing the stuff that we would normally do, like throwing our own events.

11:08Neil Patel:But now we're focusing on conferences that have our ideal customers. And a lot of them don't reach out for me to be a speaker. We have to reach out to them. And some of them, very few, but some of them do ask for money to speak. And we are paying for me to speak at some of these events because we believe it'll help us pick up business in the long run and how much are you paying to speak at these it ranges some of them are like 15 to 30 thousand dollars for me to speak i would say and you have to pay for travel and all that too so airfare is so expensive now it is uh dude i'm like spending like 12 grand for a business class ticket just so context for everyone it used to be around seven yeah and i was like five you know five, six thousand.

11:53Neil Patel:I'm like, what the heck is this? Like prices are obscene. Yeah.

11:57Eric Siu:But that's, you know, that's geopolitical. So to continue on this topic. So Neil just brought up a lot of in-person. So I think whether you're doing dinners or small conferences or even meetups, in my case, like if I do, if I'm doing a meetup on talking about this claw stuff, you'll get the right people in there depending on the type of meetup that you throw. But and then also what we're talking about too, the modes you really have are, we're talking brand, We're talking about relationships, brand and relationships, I think kind of go hand in hand a little bit and horsepower. And what I mean by horsepower is intellectual horsepower, because you need the intellectual horsepower to coordinate the tokens that you're paying for.

12:34Eric Siu:Yes. Because the tokens are that is that's intellect that you're paying for. But if I am a dumb, dumb, I will not know how to use the tokens. I'll use them in a dumb way. I'll still spend 500 grand. Right. But I might not use them in a smart way. So the final thing I'll say from my side for now, it's all the things that we're talking about. but it is used just to go a little deeper on tokens it is building these agents so for example we have these these i shared before we have these agents that will help ingest all my content put the social posts out there it writes in my voice now it's doing it across the board and so it's not only doing that to help with the marketing piece because organic reach is it's still very real but you need smart people who know how to manage these agents for you like the agent fleet for you so that's kind of how we're thinking about it but there's a lot of stuff that hasn't died yet webinars haven't died it's events really haven't died um and doing this by the way the only time i'm gonna accept the podcast is when someone invites me and it's in person there's a nice shot because then i can use it for social clips that's the only time i'm gonna do it right or they're

13:33Neil Patel:really good at asking questions and you can tell them you can just it makes you look smart too and

13:37Eric Siu:then you can just chop it up and reuse it yes yes um but that's another thing that we're spending a

13:42Neil Patel:lot of money on in 2026 is content production. So we're doubling down on content. We have been this year. We keep pushing on that narrative. It's actually worked out really well for us. And when I say we're doubling down, we're taking a little bit of opposite approach that you are with like OpenClaw and your ex-post. We're doing a lot more stuff manually with content creation. We found that it performs better. I don't know if it was on this podcast. Did we you end up breaking down the LinkedIn stat of how much content is being produced by AI now? I know it's exceeding humans by far. And have you seen the engagement numbers?

14:17Neil Patel:I don't know if it was on this podcast. I think you shared a graph or a chart, one of those charts. I think it was on one of my webinars or I forgot where I got it from or who presented it to me. But the numbers for people producing content through AI for X, LinkedIn, and a lot of these social networks is just skyrocketed. It's more than human-based content. And if you look at the engagement numbers, they're plummeting like really terrible. The only time we're seeing engagement numbers go up for a lot of this AI content, at least in B2B, B2C in most cases, we're just seeing the numbers plummet.

14:53Neil Patel:But in B2B, it works out well if you're using AI to write content and you're talking about AI like Claude or OpenClaw or anything like that, we're seeing the engagement numbers extremely high. But the moment you're not talking about AI solutions, in almost all cases, the engagement numbers are terrible. When you're not talking about AI solutions? Yeah. So if you're using AI to create content and you're not talking about AI, we're not seeing the content do as well. We're seeing anyone talk about the hot AI topics. Like if you, Eric, wrote an article on X or LinkedIn about OpenClaw, whether it was written by human or AI, the chances are it's going to do well.