How Neil and Eric Are Adapting Their Marketing So They Don't Get Crushed by AI

0:00All right. So Neil and I, we're going to talk about how we are adopting and adapting more so our marketing so we don't get crushed by AI. Yeah, so I'm curious on what you're doing on your end. We're still leveraging an old concept that we've been leveraging for years. And when Eric and I are saying crushed by AI, a lot of people assume that if you do SEO, your traffic's going to get crushed. We did an episode about this in the previous episode. We don't believe that's the case, but time will tell. one thing that we've been doing over the years is continually building free software and releasing it so we have uber sedes which we bought and then we added to we spent millions more to make the product better we bought ants to the public and we've been improving that product as well we released the ads greater i don't know when maybe a few months ago which analyzes your google ads campaigns but when you look at all these tools what it does is it helps us get more people into the ecosystem, it creates more word of mouth, more branding, and it does it all without us having to worry about what keywords we're ranking for.

1:02And we're not doing this because we believe SEO is dead or the changes with AI. It's more so if you want to succeed in the long run, you got to build a brand. You can't rely on paid ads. You can't rely on organic social. You can't rely on AI or anything. What you got to do is build amazing product or service and create a brand that people just want to keep going to, just like how Nike has done or American Express or Tesla, and the list goes on and on, because that's how you build a big company. But that's the main strategy we've been using for our playbook to continually get traffic and not be relying on any one channel.

1:35Okay, so let me first build on what you're saying. One is really what matters at the end of the day to two things that matter at the end of the day. One, do you have the attention? So do you have the distribution? Two, do you have any data that's unique? So if you have First party data that's unique, really all these engines, all these models are building off of data, right? Data is really, when they say data is the new oil, I don't know what you'd call attention. Attention is kind of the new oil too, but get the data, right? And so when Neil talks about buying products or software, you're kind of buying a distribution engine, but you're buying a lot of data that they have, right?

2:09And so that's something I want to take a look at in the future. I mean, we've played around with ClickFlow for a while, right? And we have data there and we're like, okay, maybe there's a way for us to bring back certain features there just so we can collect data, right? So that's one piece of it. The more free stuff that also helps you too, because when you give away free software, your offer is just way better than what everyone else has. And in the world of SaaS or software as a service, that's become a more commonplace thing. But if you can do it and layer it on with whatever, if you have a high dollar service in the backend, even better for you.

2:38So that's the first piece of it. Now, the other piece is both Neil and I are doing this, but we're talking to a lot of people, right? And so Neil Knight, we talk all the time, but also he's calling other people. What I do from my end is I will gather a group of entrepreneurs who I think are really smart that are doing a lot of interesting things in AI. And so we went on this Turkey Mastermind a couple weeks ago. We're talking about, oh, we're building this for AI right now. Happy to share the repo with you guys, the GitHub repository with you guys. You guys can use it as well. Oh, we're doing this over here.

3:09Happy to share it with you guys too. So we're just trying to get ideas from other people, seeing how they're doing it and figuring out, okay, that idea might actually make sense for us and pull it in. And so the other thing I'll say is I brought this up during a talk that I did recently at a conference and I brought up the concept of having to have an AI operator. And so what that means is you have one person that's just dedicated to figuring out what's happening in a news cycle, how they can design tests, iterate on tests, and then implement things. And then they are the ones that are kind of rallying people around them.

3:41Because sure, you might have one person that's driving it, but it certainly can't. Neil has his business. I have my business too. Even though we're trying to stay ahead of it, the news cycle is moving too quickly where if it's us trying to drive it forward, it's tough. But I'm still very much an evangelist in my company around it where I'll try to push things. And then we have this AI working group where we have a private Slack channel. And where I'm talking about it, I'm like, hey, we're doing this in the AI working group right now. This experiment really worked out well for us. This worked really well for us.

4:09And it's getting people really excited about it. And then they're starting to share information too. They're starting to come up with ideas where it's becoming a machine that's working on its own. And that's been helpful for us. The other thing that people forget about is there's a lot of old school marketing tactics that still work and will work in the future and have nothing to do with AI. A great example of this, we have a whole biz dev team at my ad agency, NP Digital. We generate a lot of revenue doing partnerships with other companies that generate millions and millions of dollars a month in revenue.

4:40Some of these companies generate billions of dollars a year in revenue. If they have your ideal customer base, but they're not competitive, you know, you can help their customers with your products and services and they can help your customers with their products and services. That's an example of a great potential marriage or partnership. And when you do things like that, it's a great way to drive revenue without relying on a lot of the basic channels that most of us talk about, like SEO and social media. When we look at a lot of the large corporations out there, like the Global 1000, they generate a lot of revenue from things like partnerships that very few of us like talking about.

5:18It's ugly. It's not sexy. No one really cares for it, but it can generate a lot of revenue and move the needle. We generate millions and millions of dollars each and every single quarter due to things like partnerships. Yep. Final thing I'll say from my side is aside from keeping it exciting, because it has to come from the top. And so if the top people in the company are constantly talking about, it's like, oh, okay, this is really important. But also we're looking at internal efficiency gains too. And so what I'm talking about here is that we are looking to analyze and score the calls, the client calls that we're in just to make things more efficient internally.

5:53When a lead comes in, we're looking to score and basically lead score, but also give the lead a couple of insights. So when our BDRs or our sales team reaches out to them, they can lead with a couple of insights. And so we're also potentially bringing this back where if you're losing traffic on your pages, we're going to give it away for free. And we're going to show you which pages are losing traffic. But there's also going to be a one click upgrade button where you can upgrade your content on that page. And so we're just trying to figure out novel ways of doing things. And what that means is we're talking internally to our team and figuring out, hey, what are the challenges right now?

6:25How can we make your life easier? That's building our muscle around AI because they're getting involved with the things that we're actually building. Anything else, Neil? Nope. That's it. Make sure you rate review this podcast. We would really appreciate it. It helps us get more listeners. If you want to see Eric and I in person, go to marketing school. Levelingup.com slash founders. There you go. All right. Goodbye.