The Power Of Brand, Why I'm Shifting My Marketing Strategy To FREE Over Content Creation

0:04When Apple they said on air or they were quoted it was by someone named last name Q, Apple said AI will replace traditional search and Google stocks sunk 7 % I thought it went out 8 % 7 % that ended up at. Oh, what is it? At least that's what the CNBC article reported. When I saw a candle going negative, it was like a negative candle. It was like negative 9%. And people probably ended up buying it and started propping it back up. I still think it's like what I bet on it long-term. I think it's a great business right now, but this is not financial advice, guys. This is just me thinking about this.

0:40By the way, remember when we're in Miami, you're about to... I finished my talk already. This was in between your talk and my talk. and we recorded using a DJI Osmo. We also used Noah's second one. I actually, that one was really good. We got a lot of positive comments. One of the comments was like, this is the content you guys should create. And the other one was like, this is like a real conversation with two smart people because we just riffed for 80. Oh, there was no topics. No, we riffed for 80 minutes and you didn't have an iPad. I didn't have one. I still pulled out my phone a little bit just to look at the topics.

1:09But they really enjoyed it. And then when I watched it, before I knew it, 40 minutes was done. I was just kind of watching it to see how I'd feel about it. but it was like those types of natural conversations is what people really enjoy. So we should we stop just creating these ideas and just go. I think the ideas are still good, but I like the classic stuff where it's like, hey, why are you shifting your marketing strategy to free over content creation, which you should go out. And then we can talk about what I learned from these conference ratings that made me happy, but also enraged me. Yeah.

1:37So I'll bust out some stats because I love numbers and you know that We have an exit pop-up on our Ubersuggest landing page. All right. The exit pop-up, it takes you to a quiz. And the quiz specifically says, it's, I think, a seven-part quiz. It's actually one more SEO traffic. That's the headline. Answer five quick questions. I'll give you a seven-week action plan showing you exactly what you need to do to get more traffic. We generate leads from it. So if you go to neilpatel.com slash ubersuggest, which gets a lot of type in traffic and traffic directly from Google, that's branded. People go to the exit pop up a certain percentage of them.

2:16In 2023, we generated 9 ,973 leads for that. This is just United States. 2023. 2023. Okay. Okay. Just from that exit pop up quiz from that one URL. And we close 1.7 million, 1.742030. So let's just call it$1.7 million in contract value. This is services. Services. Yeah. All right. Now that's just the original contract value. A portion of those people could renew. Maybe some people went bankrupt in between. I don't know. I don't have the actual data on the LTV. I just have the original contract. Internationally, from that same page in 2023, we generated 38 ,736 leads and only$338 ,000 in revenue.

3:01All right. So the international team didn't do as good of a job closing. 2024, in the United States, 7 ,331 leads and$2 million in contract value. Okay. It was literally 2 ,007 ,751. So let's just call it 2 million. And international, 33 ,458 leads, 939 ,979. So almost a million bucks. So roughly$3 million from that quiz. And then in 2025, it's too early,$2 ,231, call it$400 ,000,$394 ,000 in the United States,$172 ,000 internationally. Keep in mind, it's early in the year. It's also the worst economy. It's a really bad economy recently. and we cohort. So the leads from 2024 that close in 2025 is counted towards the 2024 numbers.

4:02For 2025, our sales cycle is, it's actually gone longer. So we expect if we just close off leads tomorrow, the numbers in theory would be better a month, two months down the road because you still have a lot that'll close from the original leads. So I was telling my team, I was like, how many people, if I just like answer the public, forget uber suggest just answer the pub because would you agree the audience is very similar they're both keyword research tools i was like how many users go through there in the united states on a weekly basis and they're like users without registration or users with registration i was like with registration they're like we average 18 to 20 000 per month i mean no per week sorry 18 to 20 000 per week and out of the 18 to 20 000 roughly 16 of them are united States.

4:53So you're looking at roughly a thousand, no, 2 ,800 leads per week in the United States. I was like, huh, what was if there was no pricing on the app? And I just sold every single lead on services and open up the app to be more free and just ate the cost. How much more traffic would I get? Because I think I can double up the traffic because the traffic is down by almost half from 16 months ago not a year ago 16 months ago because they've been more aggressive on the uh paid side and i was like dude i just opened up double the traffic so instead of 2 800 in theory i would be at 5 600 you know how much more revenue i would just close if i just open it up if i just opened up and made the app free from a service-based business so in the next two weeks i say two weeks I'm hoping two weeks on the 14th people open up parts of the app, not fully of the app.

5:52Cause we don't want to crush the revenue. Um, but they, in the last like 40 ish days, they made a lot even more aggressive. And I was like, guys go back to what it was. Uh, so I'm going to open a little bit more up and then I'm going to just start collecting leads and run a test. And if the leads start panning out, it'll take me 35 to 40 days to get initial data on if we can close leads and they're interested and we're getting to pitch. Because the moment we get to pitch, we know our close rate ends up being really standard, right? So it's just like I lead to a pitch. I don't know what the ratio is going to be, but pitch to close, it tends to be standard because by the time we were pitching, they're super qualified.

6:32And I was like, dude, I spend so much time creating these YouTube videos, right? That you don't enjoy doing. That I don't enjoy doing. I had to create more scripts today, which I don't want to do. And we spend money on paid ads and we spend money. I spend tons of time going to conferences, which I love interacting with more people. But you can take a guess if I enjoy going to conferences, right? I want to just be home with my family. And if I'm home with my family for like three months straight, I miss conferences. But like this week, I was at two conferences, one in Toronto, came back. and then the next day I went to Fort Lauderdale.

7:11I don't know why my team didn't. Why did you just go down? That's what I'm saying. That's so dumb. I would be so pissed. I think one was booked at the last minute. Still. Someone needs to be looking ahead. But it was too cheap to change the flight. We knew a week in advance. Well, that's on you. I don't want to pay$1 ,000. You paid for the extra pain. But the$1 ,000, it adds up, dude. That's the Indian in me. I couldn't spend the money. Dude, okay. You have to fly back five hours to LA And then you have to fly another five hours to Fort Lauderdale and then, or four hours. Yeah, but I just work on the plane.

7:43And I didn't pay for either of the plane tickets. So if I changed it, it would have been my expense. Well, you know what? It's still good to retain the cheapness. The frugalness is good. And we should talk about this because I was thinking about it this morning. I'm like, what are the first principles? What are the building blocks to building a generational business? We can come back to that in a second. Let's finish this point, though. So, okay, you're pivoting. See, you have a little bit of innovators dilemma, too. You don't want to sacrifice all that revenue. So you got to. Well, sacrifice it on answer to the public before Ubersess because it's a much smaller business unit for me.

8:14Smart. So what does that funnel look like when they're coming in? Like, what are you offering them like in that seven step funnel or whatever that is? Well, the seven step funnel in Ubersess is not a Ubersess lead gen collection. My team just has an exit pop up on the neilpatel.com site. Ubersess is on the neilpatel.com site. It doesn't have its own domain name, even though we own ubersess.com. I just show the exit pop-up on that page. It's not related to Ubersess. It's just like, take this quiz. We'll give you an action plan to grow your traffic. What's the difference from that? Because when they fill out an action plan, it's not like they're saying, hey, give me consulting.

8:48They're just saying, give me an action plan to grow my traffic. People on Ubersess try to grow their traffic. I don't collect a full lead on Ubersess. I don't collect a full lead on answer the public. The theory will be to collect a full lead, I need URL, website or budget, marketing budget, revenue, phone number. Those are the four fields that are pretty much a must have for my sales team. But you're not going to try to collect that unless you enrich them and it looks good. What I'll do is I'll give more of the app for free. I'll be more generous on the features. There'll still be a lot of stuff that requires a paid upgrade, but I'll be more generous on the freemium side.

9:25And then on the second step, when you register, it says register through Google or just put in an email and password. The next step, I will force them for United States only because my U.S. sales team is the biggest. It's the quickest for me to run an experiment. I will ask your step two out of two to finish your registration so we can adjust to answer the public data and reports to you. we need your website URL, your marketing budget, right? To unlock premium features. Thank you. That's a great idea to unlock premium features. Dude, that's a great, dude. That's a great idea. Yeah, there you go.

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12:20So then I think I'll get dude with that. I know I'll get a lot more leads. Um, and then what will happen from there is we will go and call. And if the numbers work out, I'll just blow it all up. And the biggest ATP features that cost us money is things like tracking. So when you put in a keyword, we're looking at things like Google suggests, or people also ask, how does that change from today to tomorrow to next week to next month to next year? And aggregating all of that data, that is actually the biggest expense on answer to the public from what we can tell, right? Or at least what my devs are telling me.

12:57I don't know how accurate it is, but that's what one of the product managers told or product people told me. that kind of stuff i would still charge for the premium features and that's what a lot of people pay for but i love your idea uh uh fill out the rest of your registration to get more information and then what i'll do is if if that works i'll do more of that and less of traveling yeah less traveling less content creation i think you'll still keep the content creation for also keep the content creation even though it's painful for me to record eight videos a month yeah but if i cut down the traveling it's not as painful because it gives me stuff to do yeah but dude the traveling is just so painful yeah the back and forth it's you know when i get there and it's a new country or some somewhere i haven't been it's great like you get to enjoy the local local scenery and all that and maybe meet up with some people wait but is it really great if it's a new country i mean i mean okay we had fun in frankfurt frankfurt was cool yeah but do you really do anything that's touristy no well well no see so it's so here's what i enjoy doing i enjoy hanging out with friends i enjoy trying different restaurants and i enjoy like walking the parks it's like old people stuff right i enjoy the old people stuff like getting this sort of walking the park and being out in nature and then i just work like walking in parks like the actual parks yeah like okay when you go to you when you go to london they have all these like hide park they have all these parks right yes it's great i don't know parks are fucking awesome we're very similar you want to know the number one reason I'm looking to move into my new house.

14:25Why? Because you can walk around more? Yes. I walk around probably for outside hour plus a day. Yeah. And then you're probably on your phone all the time too. I take my kids sometimes to walk with me around the new house. And what I do is we have, even though we're doing construction there, I have bikes, their bikes in a garage. So then I take their bikes out of the garage with them and they go and ride their bikes on the sidewalks and stuff because it's a safe, quiet street. And I go run around chasing him. Yeah, see, that's great. And I love it. And I'll do it for like, I try to do it for an hour.

14:59They usually get tired after 30, 40 minutes, but it's fun. That is like one of my happiest moments. That's worth it. You know, it's funny. I was thinking about it this morning. I was like, the moment Neil had kids, he completely changed. Like, don't get me wrong. You're still very much optimized for money, but it's less of that now. Yeah, it's a lot less. Yeah, okay. So just on what we're doing right now, we're kind of doing something similar where I'm like, okay, we have this influence pipeline reporting feature, right? Which shows you how your ads are affecting like more. Are they driving more events?

15:31Are they driving more interactions through email? Or are they changing your deals in HubSpot or whatever, right? Because you want to determine if your ads are actually driving your pipeline forward or not. So we're just like, what if we just give that part away for free or at least freemium it, right? Which you actually have something here on freemium. or why don't we just give away for ClickFlow, give away 25 ,000 words for free while everyone else is still trying to charge like a lot of money for words, right? Why don't we just give that away for free? And so right now for us, we're much more aligned internally on go-to-market for a lot of these features that we're splintering off because those, as AI makes it easier to build different calculators or different eBooks and things like that, you probably want to continue to move upstream and to differentiate yourself.

16:17And you've done that for a long time with Answer to Public and Uber Suggest. Yeah. What are you going to end up doing to really grow your top of the funnel? If you had a, your product right now just does ABM and that's it. It does. Okay, so Carrot does personalized ABM ads. It also does personalized landing pages too. It also does influence pipeline reporting. So those are the three primary features. Wait, what's the last one? Influence pipeline reporting? Influence pipeline reporting. What does that mean? That just, all the B2B marketers, they want to know if like this stuff is actually working.

16:46And so we basically like - you know have you opened when's the last time you opened gong never okay so yeah so okay gong shows you like when a when a lead is very active there's like more and more like larger um like clusters bubbles and clusters right so that's what our influence pipeline shows it's like there's like these beautiful clusters like oh if you had an email over here it's a blue like bubble but if you had multiple emails it's a bigger blue bubble and you just have all these things per lead so you know which ones are more likely to close because they're engaged and then you can see it before and after hey this is when you started running linkedin ads over here and then boom okay you got way more activity that kind of you try to justify your your your job as a marketer right you you need stuff like this and so there's a lot of people that charge for it we're like why don't we just give that part away for free um so just more stuff like this that's cool and so you're gonna give that away for free yeah at least at least uh a free version of it and then for premium features please enter more more information yeah yeah yeah yeah dude the the one trick though because with the premium stuff is uh not just it's not for more premium features enter your information it's uh the wording is going to be off but for more premium features for free right you got to include the for free part so they know that you're not just making them register and there's a credit card following up.

18:07Yeah, that's smart. Yeah, that's important. The conversions drastically drop when you don't put the word for free. We've tested register to keep using and we put register to keep using comma it's free. It drastically changes sign up law. Dude, see, this is what Josh, who works with George Gavin, said. He loves it when we share stories like this and then we have data to share. So we'll try to bring the data back, Josh. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. We'll see you tomorrow. like