Ep 646: Neil Patel: Why Your Leads Are Down 40% and Your Revenue Is Up

14:50Neil Patel:Your third one will be marketing.

14:52Eric Dick:But for brands that are listening, as opposed to agencies, because that's mostly who our audience is, they want to be featured more in these conversations. Obviously, Reddit, I know, is a big, besides what's on your page and making sure that you're building your content out to actually answer questions, the G2 crowd. What about Listicles? No, I guess not. That's all sass.

15:15Neil Patel:Reddit does. Wikipedia can help. YouTube helps. Shockingly, YouTube's used quite a bit. Quora is being pulled. I don't know how much that really helps with e-commerce though. The biggest one that we're seeing is not one specific site. it's listicles on other people's website listing out the 10 best phones for under$300. And then your phone being number one on the list, assuming you're a cell phone carrier and you sell phones.

15:41Eric Dick:Are those high trust sites or are those sort of like spun up fly by night listicle style pages? Does that matter?

15:50Neil Patel:The fly by night listicle pages are doing well as long as they're human written, their quality and they're from good sources and they're not a ton of crap. I don't think they're going to work in the long run with people just spamming. I think they're going to work in the long run if you do it right. And you get digital PR, you build trust, you're not buying them, you're convincing people. I think it'll work wonders.

16:10Eric Dick:In your video that you posted yesterday, you put together a bit of an action plan for people to kind of maybe audit how they're showing up now and a few steps to improve how you show up in the future. Could you maybe walk me through some of your thinking around that?

16:25Neil Patel:Yeah, so there's a few things. The first is you got to audit where you are. So you can use tools like Ubersuggest, which break down where you are and does a visibility report, shows you where you are versus your competition and the sentiment on different LLMs like ChatGBT and Gemini, and the list goes on and on. The second thing you need to do is evaluate your technical SEO. So like your structured data, your content, how old it is, most LLMs like fresh content. Look at what questions people type to find your pages. You can get some of this data from Google Search Console or Answer the Public or Ubersuggest.

16:58Neil Patel:And then you then need to make sure that your content's answering questions as quick as possible. Not only has it had to be fresh, but it has to answer questions head on and as quick as possible instead of rambling. Then you got to make sure you have really good reviews on the internet. Even if you have good reviews, are you consistently getting new good ones every single month? Because if you have reviews that are five years old, LLM's careful what's happening right now, not five years ago. So you'll notice that up-and-comers can overtake you even if you're a much bigger company. Then you got to start looking at digital PR, how many people are mentioning you, your products, your services, overall on a monthly basis, how positive it is.

17:33Neil Patel:All these things really impact, you know, if you're going to show up, how you're going to show up and what if people are going to decide to work with you.

17:40Eric Dick:You referenced HighLevel earlier. I'm interested in their sort of suite that are offering. I know that you've kind of announced a bit of a partnership with HighLevel, which is super exciting. Traditionally, you've worked with like big enterprise brands closely with Google and Amazon and all these things. I'm curious, why are you throwing your lot in with a website that really focuses on SMBs?

18:02Neil Patel:If you look at the majority of advertising on platforms like Facebook, it's actually SMBs and it's not enterprises. If you look at how much money SMBs spend globally on marketing and how many people they employ, it's the backbone of a ton of countries. SMBs really move the economy in almost all major countries. I think a lot of organizations take them for granted. And when we look at SMBs, if you look at today's world with the technology that they have access to, like tools like HighLevel, SMBs are actually much more able to compete with enterprise companies with a fraction of the budget than they ever were before.

18:39Neil Patel:If you think about commerce, it used to be hard to launch a D2C website and do well. now not so much you can launch a d2c website and crank and compete with the competitors really well even if you don't have a big budget assuming you have a really good product that the market needs if you have another me too product it's not that easy but if you build something special your probability of success without having to hire a ton of people assuming you're using the right tools is extremely high that wasn't the case years ago ai has really changed the game from that front. But the issue with most D2C websites is they release MeToo products and there's nothing differentiated.

19:22Neil Patel:And in some cases, they charge more than the competitors and they're like, why am I not doing well?

19:27Eric Dick:Shopify came to the market many years ago with the idea of like arming the rebels, right? So you could take on these enterprise clients, you could build your own e-commerce store out. And I feel like AI is, again, in the right situation where you have a really good product, really good product market fit, AI is accelerating that further. Barriers to all sorts of different things, to data analysis, to maybe robotic media buying or anything like that is just like a few clawed prompts away. So I can see how it could be leveling the field for the right kind of people.

19:58Neil Patel:Correct. I totally agree with you. I think it's leveling it for a lot of people, but most of them are not the right people. Most people, what we're seeing are using these AI tools and just creating crap, mediocre products. And they don't understand why it's not helping them create a real business.

20:43Eric Dick:today. Even if you're not the winner, every eligible brand that enters gets$500 in matched ad credits. So entering is a win either way. Don't wait, the clock's ticking. Enter at universalads.com forward slash Q4 dash contest. No purchase necessary. See official rules for details. Where you live in the attention economy, but we're also very much in the trust economy. I have a note here that you ran a trust study across 100 businesses doing eight figures. What's the biggest gap between those businesses, what they thought built trust, and what actually customers cared about?

21:18Neil Patel:The big thing is most businesses felt they had a lot more trust than they really did. People are looking at things not just like your price because everyone's like, oh, good price. That's what's going to cause people to get a sale. It's actually what is being said about them by influencers, what is being said about them on social media, the reviews, their refund policies, how many years they've been in business, All these other factors really play a big component to if someone buys. And in many cases, more than just, I have a cheap price.

21:49Eric Dick:And you also have a post recently about discounts. And you're saying that in a world where you're getting these like hand-fed, bespoke to your exact needs and your exact context recommendations from LLMs, price becomes less of a variable. What do you have to say about brands that are over-reliant on discounts?

22:08Neil Patel:It actually reduces your LTV from the data we've seen. The people who focus more on bundles to get the very first purchase of a customer versus a discount tend to do better. And a bundle is a sort of a discount, right? But you're increasing what an average customer spends or average revenue per user for a similar amount of CAC. And what we find is when you try to offer more value, even if you charge more, so that could be giving more products for a discount. but it's a bundle versus just discounting all your items and someone can just buy one, we tend to see a higher LTV for commerce.

22:43Eric Dick:Another one of your pieces recently, you talk about the increasing gap in sort of how people put value on impressions versus clicks. In a world where you're maybe seeing fewer leads or fewer clicks, maybe more impressions, how do you think founders should focus on the difference in value between impressions and clicks and how that's changed in the last little while?

23:06Neil Patel:You don't need a click to generate a sale. A lot of people will go and see your brand, buy on Amazon, and never click over to the website. What I would recommend is start looking at impressions as like branding. Kind of like how Nike kept running those TV commercials, just do it. And a lot of them are motivational. How many people keep buying Nike? People could say Nike's done or their brand's not as cool or hip anymore. Nike's doing well. They've been trying to turn around the company. I think their last quarterly earnings was pretty decent. Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure it was positive overall.

23:39Neil Patel:And I'll actually look it up. Nike stock. Let's see. Oh, yeah. They beat quarterly earnings estimate, uh, earnings per share by 53 % and revenue beat by 1.13%. So like I said, their earnings weren't bad and they topped sales, even though China, China sales dropped. So when you think about it, why does Nike do so well? It's that brand that's been out there for ages and they just keep pushing it.

24:05Eric Dick:Yeah. What do you think are some ways that DTC brands are wasting money in 2026?

24:10Neil Patel:The biggest way is they pay too little influencers, too much money. They should go for a long tail. Legion athletics is a prime example of this. They have thousand plus influencers. They pay them a reasonable amount. It's a good deal for the influencers. They go for the long tail. It works way better than trying to pay a Kardashian to promote your product.

24:29Eric Dick:Yeah. Yeah. My friend runs Frostbuddy. And I think he at its peak, he said he had 13 ,000 content creators slash affiliates. And they were all on a sliding scale of just content creator all the way up to affiliate or potential business partner. And it's just revolutionized his business, especially on platforms like TikTok shop, where you kind of need that those other voices to amplify your own.

24:52Neil Patel:Yeah. Another one who's done really well is Fashion Nova, the clothing company

24:57Eric Dick:done extremely well by leveraging influencers and mass scale of them. Interesting.

25:03Neil Patel:And then the other thing I would say D2C brands or e-com companies do really wrong is they focus on the sexy. Channels like email, SMS, super effective, not sexy. Channels like WhatsApp, channels like GEO and getting LLMs to mention your products, super effective. It's not as cool as posting some hip social piece of content, but you know what? Those other things drive sales and real revenue.

25:27Eric Dick:You mentioned in sort of the world of AEO and GEO that at this point, your Google ranking and your AI visibility are two separate scores. That probably goes against what I think a lot of people think that there's a very strong Venn diagram overlap between what you're doing for SEO and what you're doing for GEO.

25:45Neil Patel:But there's a difference by, let's say, like 20%, somewhere around there. And that 20 % causes their algorithms to be drastically different. So like strong technical SEO helps you with GEO. Domain authority helps you with SEO. GEO doesn't care about your domain authority. GEO cares about most of what you've done in the last 30, 60 days versus SEO cares about what you've done over the years and the reputation you built, right? So the factors that they're looking about are really different. SEO, the easiest way to think about it is more about what you're doing with your own website. GEO is more about what are other websites saying about you.

26:23Eric Dick:Makes sense. One of the things that came across in my research here was a bit of a reversal you've had over the past couple of years on the idea of investing heavily into a personal brand. You're one of the people I know who's probably invested most time and money into the creation of a personal brand. What has evolved in that strategy for you over the past year or so? the biggest thing that I found from a personal brand is when you invest in it, you can end up

26:51Neil Patel:making money, but big companies aren't built on an individual. They're built on a team. And if you want to go enterprise, similar to what you guys are doing at your agency, they don't want to hire Neil Patel. They don't want to hire John or Eric or whoever it may be. They want to hire a team who's working on their account, who's very knowledgeable and is going to do really well for them.

27:12Eric Dick:And those are the companies that also sell. And it's also a trap because if you did find one that did want to work with Neil Patel, then you try to give them one of your employees or someone else on your team, it feels like a lesser experience as well. So it's kind of a bit of a trap. Yes.

27:27Neil Patel:I don't recommend building a personal brand. You can. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it doesn't help as much as one may think. I'd rather have a big corporate brand than a personal brand. High level. One of the fastest growing marketing companies. Do you know any of the founders names?

27:41Eric Dick:No.

27:41Neil Patel:And I don't mean that in an offensive way. The product speaks for itself. That is the ideal way to run a company. I wish if I started all over again, NP Digital was built for the results of NP Digital. We won Performance Marketing Agency of the Year by Ad Age, one of the hardest awards to get for client results. I'd rather have continually press about NP Digital and no press about Neil Patel. I speak all around the world at so many conferences. I'd rather have it so my team can speak at all those conferences and not me. Now, I built a personal brand, which has helped me generate business. And I appreciate everyone following me or a small chunk of people in the world following me, very small chunk, but I appreciate the people who do follow me.

28:16Neil Patel:And I even appreciate the people who don't follow me. But when you look at it from that perspective, it's more scalable to not be relying on one person.

28:22Eric Dick:Was your agency always NP Digital or was it Neil Patel originally and you just switched it to NP to be less about you?

28:28Neil Patel:It was Neil Patel Digital, like you said, and we switched it to NP Digital to be less about me.

28:34Eric Dick:Yeah. What is one overrated metric that you still hear founders bragging about?

28:40Neil Patel:I'm going to give you an e-com one because I know most of the audience is e-com and I still see them bragging about views on social. So like, look how many people are checking out our stuff on social media, following us, liking our stuff, but that doesn't necessarily cause sales. I know people in e-com who don't do much social stuff, organic, and they just run Facebook ads and are really good at conversion optimization and they generate way more revenue.

29:06Eric Dick:Can you think of an underrated metric?

29:09Neil Patel:Underrated metric is your conversion rate. Another underrated metric is your repeat purchase rate. Another underrated metric is your lifetime value of a customer. The number of times I've asked e-com companies these questions, and they don't know the real numbers is almost all the time.

29:23Eric Dick:This is something we're grappling with internally right now. How do you, maybe in the e-com world, if you can, or I guess in the agency world as well, how do you feel about AI copy? is ai copy something that because we're marketers we're overly sensitive to and so we can sniff it

29:40Neil Patel:out right away and so we where's sora sorry to cut you off but where's sora down why no one cares for ai content you want to talk about an ai videos you want to talk about content who's creating a ton of content that's air related that people love most people don't text-based content it can do well on google in the short run and the longer it gets crushed lily ray did a study on this i think it was like 60 websites or 100 websites or something like that, that all published a ton of AI content, they saw increasing traffic in the short run, long run, not only did they lose the traffic, some of them went lower than the baseline.

30:15Eric Dick:So stay away. Stay away.

30:17Neil Patel:It doesn't mean you can't use AI for ideation or to help you in the process or help you with ad copy. We just find for most things, it doesn't perform as well as people think. Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't use AI for copy. I think you should use humans combined with AI. But a lot of people, most people in marketing just take the route of AI is just going to do it. And then this output is just crap.

30:41Eric Dick:Here's a random one. What's the most expensive mistake you'll admit to on air?

30:45Neil Patel:I'll admit to almost all of them. Or actually, I would admit to all of them. I just don't remember. I can name a few. Acquiring companies that I would have to clean up the management and the structure, but they had the reach, the clientele, the logos. It would have just been cheaper to build it from scratch. And I learned just acquire growing companies that don't need much meddling with. This is why private equity goes that route. It's easier. Biggest marketing mistake, running a ton of TV ads on CNBC and Bloomberg, thinking it was going to help us get the right type of clients. Got a ton of branding with finance people.

31:22Neil Patel:Kept getting calls from potential wealth managers. Didn't really generate a lick of business. spent an arm and a leg on that. I don't know how much, but it wasn't like 100, 200 grand. Like it was way more than that. We were spending more than that just on TV ads sometimes in a given week. I think our commercial to produce it, I don't know how much it was.

31:39Eric Dick:Call it 100 grand. But not when you'd repeat.

31:43Neil Patel:Yeah, branding's great, but branding to everyone in the masses is never a good thing. Building a social following for the masses is never a good thing unless you're going B to C. But even B to C, you need the right audience. I'm a big believer, focus on building a big brand with your ideal customers. Like really focus on your ICP, even if you're in B2C.

32:03Eric Dick:We should have started this with at the beginning, but just describe what is the Neil Patel universe right now? Like what does your focus spent on on a day-to-day basis most?

32:12Neil Patel:Just NP digital. Client calls, speaking at conferences, sales pitches, marketing content, meetings, biz dev, employees, the works.

32:23Eric Dick:What is NP's digital? I guess you're an omni-channel digital marketing agency at this point, but what does the breakdown of the services you provide most kind of look like?

32:33Neil Patel:Most is paid ad management, SEO, GEOs, like ranking on chat, GPT, or getting them to mention you. Conversion optimization. I would say those are content marketing, social media marketing. Those are probably the biggest ones. Do you invest in brands? Like e-com brands?

32:49Eric Dick:Yeah. Not a cup of tea. I was going to say, what do you think of the e-commerce opportunity over the next couple years? I guess we mentioned merchants are really empowered, but what's your, yeah, what's your take on that?

33:01Neil Patel:Yeah, I think that e-com opportunity is massive. You just have to create a really good product. I'm a B2B guy. If you look at all the businesses I've created, they're pretty much B2B companies. I stay in my lane. Yeah. I don't think there's anything wrong with e-com. It's just not my lane. Yeah, fair.

33:15Eric Dick:What's the best money you've ever spent on yourself?

33:19Neil Patel:uh if i had to say best money just like myself not family or anything like that i would say probably things related to health and fitness longevity if you sleep better like you buy a nice mattress or you work out more you know you'll function better i don't know how much my mattress costs it's not the most expensive but it's not the cheapest it is expensive but there's mattresses that go for 100 grand 200 grand i don't know how much my mattress costs maybe 20 000 bucks or something like that, which I would say is expensive for a mattress. I could be wrong, but you spend, call it a third of the day sleeping.

33:54Neil Patel:So why not make sure that you're energized that you work better?

33:57Eric Dick:I want to know what that's, do you said$20 ,000 mattress? How big is that bed?

34:01Neil Patel:Just a king bed, normal king.

34:02Eric Dick:Nice. Where do you see this whole, like, do you have any predictions? Obviously you're on the cutting edge of, you know, LLMs and, and LLM shopping. We're actually about to release in July, a big report where we're surveying a bunch of consumers and a bunch of merchants about the state of AI discovery. And one of the things that I think is interesting is people are giving away more and more of not they're using these tools more and more that it's helping compress the middle of the funnel a little bit where you're, they're just getting really good answers, but it might get to the point where you actually have sort of an AI and always on AI assistant who will even potentially make purchases for you, you know, with just an okay from you or something like that.

34:43Eric Dick:Do you have any predictions about where you see AI commerce kind of developing over the next couple of years?

34:49Neil Patel:Yeah. So what you said, but think of even more. Imagine you opening up your fridge and AI can read what you're eating on a regular basis, what's healthy, your vitals by, you know, doing a prick when you open the door, reading some diagnostics or weighing you or just looking at you or your posture or whatever it may be. and recommending new foods, recommending cheaper alternatives, recommending healthier alternatives, and then it just gets delivered to your house and stocked in your fridge by a robot. That is what I think the future of commerce is, but for almost everything. I think things are offline will be really integrated with your online.

35:24Neil Patel:And that is how a lot more transactions will happen.

35:27Eric Dick:Do you think it will get to the point where if you don't take the advice of your AI, your taxes will go up? No. No, you don't think we'll ever get to the point. Who's going to invent, this is kind of gross, but who's going to invent the first like AI toilet that is doing analysis on you every time you use it? I don't know, but I would buy it. I think so. All right. Let's get into business on that.

35:49Neil Patel:Toto has good toilets.

35:50Eric Dick:What's one thing that brand owners who are listening to this podcast right now should do to improve their AI discoverability?

35:58Neil Patel:If I was a brand owner trying to improve my AI discoverability right now, I would try to figure out how to build relationships with other websites in my space, not e-com sites, but journalistic sites, publisher type websites, blogs, build relationships and try to get them to cover me and talk about good things about my product. That'll help with your LLM citations and getting out there and generating more sales.

36:23Eric Dick:And then just on the Reddit side, Reddit to me is just such a, it's such a hard platform because if you come across two salesly on it at all, you're going to get eaten alive. What do you how people should approach Reddit. I imagine it's the same thing you'd say there. Make genuine relationships, add genuine value in the comments.

36:40Neil Patel:Help out before you be self-promotional when someone complains, try to help them out. But if I was an e-com site, I wouldn't focus too much on Reddit. I would focus on more so getting listicles on other people's websites. Genuinely, like building relationships, having them want to write it and not offering them any money, that will produce more results than focusing on Reddit.

37:00Eric Dick:All right. Well, Neil, thanks for coming on today. This was rapid fire value about all things LLM and the future. Any closing words for the DTC listeners about where their attention should be with the rest of this year?

37:13Neil Patel:On the ugly. The money's in the ugly, not the sexy.

37:16Eric Dick:Stick with the ugly. Like actually building great content, great products, great relationships. I'm looking for the hacks. I'm looking for the hacks. Yeah, there's no more silver bullet. Marketers want hacks.

37:27Neil Patel:Yeah. Got to put in the work.

37:29Eric Dick:Well, thank you for taking the time today, Neil. Everyone go follow Neil on all his various platforms. You're always putting out value. Thanks for coming in today. No problem. Thanks for having me.

37:44Eric Dick:Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at direct-to-consumer, alloneword.co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the D2C Podcast. We'll see you next time.

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