Something Is Happening To Marketing Teams That's Never Happened Before

0:00Eric Siu:I've learned one thing about the toughest part about AI transformation. And I'd actually be curious to hear from your side too. So when I say AI transformation, I mean, within your organization, the people that you're working with, you know, what are you doing to help people adopt, right? I think we should share some lessons on what we've learned. What I've learned is we just did our second hackathon last Friday, okay? And there are some teams that are shooting past the other teams, like the things we, the SEO team built something called Tiger Claw. So it's basically Open Claw, but it's for SEO.

0:24Eric Siu:And they're like, that's how they're going to work now, right? And then we have like the creative team, like they're pumping out creatives, like really, quickly. And so what I've learned is that this will be very painful and it's necessary pain, right? And we kind of use the joke internally now where, you know, going to work now is like drinking this cocktail of excitement and fear at the same time. And you have to be this very exciting, motivating person at the same time, but you also have to be this person that kind of shows people what's happening in the market. So my point of saying all this is that some people are going to self-select themselves out, which is to be expected.

0:57Eric Siu:And you're also going to attract some really impressive people in, right? But I think my key point here is for us, at least, molting is a very delicate process. So, you know, when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it's a very painful process and it's very delicate, but when it becomes a butterfly, it's very beautiful, right? It just, it takes time. So what have you guys been doing with it? Have you been paying attention to it or not so much on your side?

1:16Neil Patel:We have, we actually haven't found the transformation to be painful at all. We figured out the solution that works for us. It doesn't mean that it'll work for other organizations. And the solution has been very pleasant for almost most of the people in our organization. Go on. So instead of, we used to have the approach of trying to originally of just trying to train people when it comes to AI and get them fluent. And we found that solution did not work too well. Then we started setting up teams whose job was to help get others in the organization ready and prepared. And we also found that it worked better, but that also struggled.

1:52Neil Patel:And then we ended up moving the solutions team to doing something a little bit different. They would work with different people within the organization, different departments. So I'm not talking just SEO. I'm talking about someone who just focuses on on-page, someone who focuses on digital PR, someone who focuses on content creation. And imagine this for all aspects of SEO. Imagine the same thing for conversion rate optimization. Imagine the same thing for paid management. Imagine the same thing for email. You get the point here. And what they started doing was listening to the people who are day-to-day doing the job and then creating solutions, leveraging AI that helps them do their job better and in a more automated way.

2:34Neil Patel:Not so we can charge a client more money or make more profits. We actually haven't seen our margins increase because there's all these costs for using AI. What we found was it allows our team to spend more time on the high-level strategy stuff that is harder for AI to do. So then we're able to do more for customers, which in theory, it's too early to tell, should help reduce our churn and create better satisfaction because we haven't found most organizations in marketing yet when they're paying an agency to say, I want you to do more for less. We really haven't seen that conversation much at all.

3:09Neil Patel:Yes, for many years, companies want agencies to do a lot for very little money, but AI hasn't changed that. What we found is the companies who are making profit and are growing are like, how do we do more and do it more efficiently with AI. They don't care about the spending less money. For example, if you have a company that's doing nine, 10, 11 billion a year in profit, cost cutting isn't really a issue. What they care more about is growing their top line. What we found is, and this is not the majority of the companies that hit us up, the ones who wanna save money are the ones who their growth has declined and they're going backwards.

3:43Neil Patel:So they can't figure out how to grow. So they're just like, help us cut costs because that's their way of surviving. Why would you go to an agency to cut costs? Correct. We don't get that that much, right? But we do deal with them because I see them at conferences all the time. So when the companies are like, yeah, we're going to use all these solutions to replace SEMrush and Ahrefs and all these things that we spend money on and Salesforce and all this, usually the companies that tell us this are growing like 1 % a year or negative. So they do need to save costs because they can't figure out how to grow their business.

4:14Neil Patel:But for agency perspective, going back to your question, the reason at this point our team has adapted really well with ai imagine you i know you once worked for many companies or a few companies you were in charge of seo or marketing or paid imagine someone being like here's a suite of tools that makes your life easier and let me show you how to use them and they follow up with you every week to make sure you've implemented them you've onboarded and you're using them and then they check in with you every week to get feedback and how they can continually make it better to improve your experience as someone working for us.

4:49Neil Patel:And we found that to be the best way to integrate AI in our organization because here's the kicker. The moment you tell someone, hey, you need to use AI, go and use it. Well, if we just take content as an example, someone who's never written content using AI to write content is gonna do different than someone who's been writing content manually for three years versus someone who's also been writing content for 10 years and is an industry expert on that subject. All three of those people will use AI to write content differently. Who's gonna produce the best output? It really ranges because of their experience, not only with AI, but because of their experience within that field.

5:31Neil Patel:So what we're doing is creating the AI that adapts to the person and just say, here's how you use it, here's the technology, and here's how you deal with the agents that'll help do your tasks and then that way it's standardized and the quality of the output that we get is at a level where we're happy for our customers because the moment we didn't just give it to them, like the tech, and we just let them go on their own, the output quality ranged drastically and we realized that a lot of people were doing the work but it was shit work and we couldn't ever show it to our customer and what just happened internally, we just wasted a lot of time and money for them to create slop that we can't use.

6:14Neil Patel:So then you're spending double the amount of time and money.

6:16Eric Siu:All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see on the other side. So let me tell people specifically what we do here. So what we do at Single Grain is we make sure that we have these stand-ups with the leaders. So we have the stand-ups with the leaders. So we have people that are really good with AI and we also have the leaders that are supposed to also pass things around.

6:54Eric Siu:So we basically have a mix of people, right? And we're asking them every day. It's like a daily stand-up. It's like, okay, what are your blockers? What have you done yesterday? And also like, what are you working on today from an AI standpoint? so that's where the leaders will disseminate that information and then every Friday what we do now is there's a there's like I think it's like three four hours or so where people get together and we have this thing called gather town um no do you remember gather town where we like it's like these little video games where you're walking around in a conference yes yeah we do that you do that it's like the cartoon version you can go up to a person there's a text bubble and you start talking right yeah yeah so we have that oh we did that for the event remember the six years ago okay Right.

7:31Eric Siu:So GatherTown is the software that we use. And so everyone goes into GatherTown and everyone's like sitting at a desk where you can go to like an auditorium. But the whole point is you can interact more and we don't, we want people to talk more. Right. So same thing as Neil, we've realized that you can't just say, okay, here's a tool, go use it. That doesn't work. Right. So what we do now is when we do the hackathons, it used to be per team, but we realized like if I'm part of a team and you're, you're running the SEO team, Neil, I can just hide. Right. So now what we're doing with the hackathons is we're doing, every person has to present something, they might go to the team first, work on the planning, and then they'll do the hackathon, right?

8:03Eric Siu:So the hackathon is still there. We're just constantly adjusting it. But we also have an AI fluency prep standup that's happening. So it's constantly top of mind. And then I have an agent every Friday that will go to you, Neil, and say, Neil, what did you get done with AI this week? What have you automated this week? It's basically like, it's the Elon question. Okay. So, but it's public. It's in our AI public channel and everyone's responding to it. And then I was looking at it. It's like, by the way, if you don't respond by like 12 PM noon, it'll be like, Neil, how come you didn't respond? Right.

8:32Eric Siu:So, and then all of it is recorded into a document. And this is not necessarily the police. It's more so to say, Hey, we can see over time where we're getting better and who needs help. And the agent itself can uncover who needs more help. And then we can go and help that person. Right. That being said, not everyone's going to come along for the ride still. Okay. You can set all, you can build the bridge. We can build a bridge. Not everyone's going to cross the bridge. Right. And that's where it's like, I, I think you and I both want everyone to grow, but that's unrealistic because I asked my dad this question Sunday.

8:59Eric Siu:So he used to work as an engineer, a COBOL programmer. Okay. I said, Hey dad, when the internet first came out, how quickly did it take for people to adopt to getting like an email address, for example? Cause you and I, I started using internet when I was eight years old. I'm assuming you were pretty early too, but we were on it. Right. He's like, Oh, it's very slow, very slow. I was like, dad, what's very slow. He's like, Whoa, very, very slow, very slow. And I'm like, what does that mean? He's like probably like four or five years at least to adopt to getting email addresses, right? So inertia is a very real thing.

9:29Eric Siu:And that like when I talk to people on the team now, the people that have kids, I'm like, man, you should be so excited right now because all your kids need to do is just to be above average a little bit, right? Because human inertia is very real. So anyway, that's the struggle because my struggle is like, I really want to see everyone do it, but it's unrealistic to expect that everyone can get there. So yeah.

9:48Neil Patel:And this is why I believe the pyramid in marketing is going to be flipped instead of a CMO at the top. And then you have, you know, a team underneath him. And then you have some C players and then a big group of DNF players. That's the old way, right? That's the old way. I think the new way is going to be, you're going to have rock stars at the top, not just a CMO, but you're going to have a bigger A base, bigger B base, and the rest will almost be non-existent. And, you know, a company we could end up looking and be like, oh, we're going to end up saving money. We cut all these headcounts. you're gonna have to spend money on tokens which is gonna be a cost and then you're gonna have to pay more for the A and B players in my opinion I don't have data for this but I'm pretty sure you're gonna have to pay more I agree because

10:27Eric Siu:if they can do more like I if I automate my job away and imagine I've worked for you you would pay me more because I can automate myself many times

10:35Neil Patel:over yes yeah and then I would have you go do it for other stuff yes and you go

10:39Eric Siu:teach other people or like just run around the organization so I'm not just like a 5 or 10x I'm probably like if I'm really good like a hundred X correct

10:45Neil Patel:better so I believe organizations aren't gonna save that much on cost in marketing at least I think you're gonna have to pay more money yeah for the good people and the crappy people you're not gonna pay as much yeah and I've seen a similar trend that you've seen when we give rockstar markers technology to be better they work harder and they go do even more and they'll spend even some of their weekend hours doing whatever they need to learn and adapt and like this is cool and exciting when we give c players and below technology not always but the majority of the time like oh wow cool i can i can be lazy i can get a lot of this done and i can spend more time going

11:25Eric Siu:to the galapagos or wherever dude you know someone today on a interview for an executive interview literally used ai completely i was like it's cool that you use ai here now show me your workflows and he like pooties plants right like it didn't work so that what that's a good example of someone being a slop cannon. You used it purely. I'm like, okay, I'm going to ask you to explain your thinking. Did you just accept everything without thinking? And that's clearly what happened.

11:47Neil Patel:So I ended the interview early. Dude, I'm having the same problem with interviews, a little bit different. I'll ask people if they use AI and most people lie to me and say, nope, didn't use any AI for this, did it all manually. And I can tell it is 110 % written by AI because like, they'll give me examples like, oh, you know, we should do a webinar and this is a topic. And I'm like, And they're like, with this influencer. And I'll ask them, like, who's this influencer? And I can tell they're Googling right now. And I was like, so you know? And they're like, no. I'm like, where have you heard from them before?

12:18Neil Patel:You're like, oh, Forbes. And I'm like, so you're telling me they're not anywhere else on the web. It was just one article on Forbes that they wrote related to marketing. And you're telling me they're an influencer. I'm like, AI pulled this from you and recommended this person. And I'm like, they're in a different country like Japan and English isn't their first language. I'm like, how the heck did you come in? I'm like, this is pure AI.

12:39Eric Siu:We talked to someone and I want to get back to your story that you're sharing. But we talked to another executive. Okay. This is for like, let's say like a people role. Okay. And this person was like, yeah, you know, I do the vibe coding on the chat GPT. And I was like, dude, you can't vibe code on chat GPT. He's like, well, you know, I do the ADK on the MCP. And I'm like, dude, you're just like saying it to say it, man. Like, and I had to end that interview early too. And he got so pissed. So I'm just. What does that mean? He's spent ADK on the MCP. ADK is like agent development kit from Google.

13:09Eric Siu:And when my CTO was like, so what did you do with that? She was like, oh, well, I didn't do it. I had someone else build it. I'm like, okay, well, with the MCP thing, tell us more about it. Well, you know, exactly. I didn't do that. I was collaborating with other people. It's like, you just ask one level deeper and everything crumbles. I'm just, the point of saying this, guys, is like, if you're interviewing for a job, please just come a little more prepared. And I think you're going to do fine.

13:29Neil Patel:My favorite is a buddy of mine owns a franchise and they sell pizza.

13:34Eric Siu:Oh.

13:34Neil Patel:So another of it. the what do I know of it no it's not here in LA and they're they're mainly they're in the West Coast but they're they haven't really done much in California when I was talking to him about pizzas and they're like yeah we know another friend of yours we're gonna use them to do some marketing I was like how's it going like the person just gives us AI stuff and I'm like what do you mean he's like well we tell them to get us more customers coming to our pizza store they just give us reports on what we need to fix and it's purely written by AI. And I'm like, you sure? They're like, yes.

14:08Neil Patel:They're like, we've used AI and actually recommends almost the same exact thing that they're recommending and is written very similar. You know, different words, but they're like, they're using chat GPT and Claude for a lot of this stuff. I was like, okay. And they're like, the person doesn't get it. We've tried a lot of this stuff. It's not working getting more people into our pizza stores. We're looking to pay someone to solve the problem. We're not looking to pay someone to just ask AI what to fix and and give it to us and tell us and pay them to go and use AI when we could have just done it ourselves.

14:38Neil Patel:We're looking to pay a specialist who has experience in this space that can help us fix a problem and have to fix this problem for other restaurants that are franchises. And they're just like, we're giving them a test, but they're like, it ain't going well. And this is like, yeah.

14:52Eric Siu:It goes back to the high horsepower thing. If you have high horsepower and high agency, meaning that you're curious and then you're willing to push, you're going to be fine, right? Versus like the slop cannons. Sorry, did you want to finish something before I go to the next topic? Okay. So this is related here. So recently we've heard Travis Kalanick, former or founder of Uber, right? He said that there's going to be an influx of more jobs, right? And then recently Robinhood CEO said that there's going to be way more software engineers. Wait, can we go back to Travis Kalanick first?

15:21Neil Patel:You know his startup, right? Atoms?

15:23Eric Siu:Yeah, Atoms. He moved from Cloud Kitchens to Atoms. Go ahead.

15:26Neil Patel:Yeah, but similar concept. Cloud Kitchens is part of Atoms from my understanding. Is Atoms' robotics company? robotic company so helping with kitchens helping with mining like actually physical mining when you're mining for like yeah copper or gold or iron or whatever it may be right and he is creating a robotic company and he believes more jobs and we're seeing the same thing we're just seeing jobs transform it's just like people like oh yeah this is going to display so many jobs you're not going to need someone to cook french fries anymore at mcdonald's well back in the day everyone was doing things like farming and manufacturing.

16:03Neil Patel:And now a lot of it's automated.

16:05Eric Siu:92 % of people.