Neil Patel: $20M Super Bowl Spend, Little Growth (Minisode)

Neil Patel (00:00) I'm pretty unplugged. from what I would say most marketers are spending their time on. Because here's what I've learned when it comes to growing a business. A lot of this stuff does not impact your revenue. And so many people being like, Neil, you got to check out this stuff with AI, it's so cool. Why aren't you using OpenClaw for this and that and so forth. We've got like a thousand plus people, right? My team definitely should be using it and they do use it. whenever it's safe and secure and we won't have safety issues or privacy issues, because there's security issues with some of these AI tools. And I'm a big advocate for AI. But when I go to most corporations, okay, and I ask them, because I speak all around the world, how many of you guys use AI? Everyone raises their hand. I could be in Brazil, I can be in Columbia, I can be in Hong Kong, US, UK, it doesn't matter. I travel literally nonstop, everyone uses it. You want to guess how many marketers see an increase in revenue from AI when I ask them that question? Take a guess, percentage of the room on average. Tom Rudnai (01:09) I'd say that would be quite low, but I think you'd have some that would claim to, I'm gonna say 25. Neil Patel (01:15) usually two, 3 % max. That's it. Now, most don't even see cost efficiencies, right? Because in theory, you should be able to save more money with AI. And it doesn't mean AI is bad. People actually use it in many of the wrong ways. I look at it as people aren't spending their time and energy on stuff that drives ROI. And I think that's the biggest problem with marketing. They spend their time on everything that's cool and sexy. And I'll give a great example of this. One of my dear friends who I do a podcast with talks to me about how he's using OpenClaw and is creating tons of content for him and look at all these views he's getting on X from his articles. And I'm like, good for you. And him and I probably will have a disagreement with this. And I'm not saying he's right or wrong because I don't have his data. But if I had a bet a million dollars, I bet you it drove very little revenue, right? So I spend my marketing efforts and my time in business on the stuff that produces a tangible ROI. And I think that's the problem with marketing that we face in today's world. People want to do all the stuff that feeds their ego and get some likes or looks cool versus the stuff that just produces them revenue. Tom Rudnai (02:29) I think there's a challenge here. So, because what I completely agree with you and I think what you're describing is that for you, the vanity metrics followed the organic growth, right? So you were looking for organic revenue growth and you were trying to be smarter than other people and that's what led you down the route of posting and blogging and things like that. Cause it was a more cost effective way to reach people and the following grew from that and it spiraled like a flywheel. I think now what folks do is they view the reach as a route to the growth. So they're trying to go at it from the other direction. Neil Patel (03:00) But it's not, it's not. And I'm going to take you back to when I was blogging. Everyone thought I was blogging to just get tons of visitors. We did that approach. I ranked on Google for things like Instagram followers and I was at the top. And it drove little to, actually it didn't even drive little. It drove no revenue. It would just create a ton of calls. I think we're getting 600,000 visitors a month. No joke, 600,000 visitors a month for things related to Instagram followers. How to get more Instagram followers, how to be popular on Instagram, right? And variations of it. It drove no revenue. All it did was call people and be like, hey, my daughter wants to be Instagram famous. Can you help her? Right? Which was a waste of time. Now on the flip side, There was a point in time where we ranked number one on Google for digital marketing. You would say as an agency, that's a prime keyword. Drove little to no revenue, okay? And those terms were really terrible. On the flip side, we started creating blog content around specific edge cases that we knew large enterprise businesses would face, like massive publicly traded companies like Adobe and Cisco and Microsoft, et cetera. And we'd have blog articles on things like autostructure your blog when you have multiple products and multiple languages that you're targeting. Okay? So when you think about something like that, that's not really a problem that most people would have. It's not something that you're going to get really any traffic for, but the people who read that are like, yeah, we're in a hundred and something countries and we have all these languages that we're targeting because some countries, you know, target the same languages. And we have... 32 products and we're competing internally, how should we structure it all so it works out the best in each division and each language isn't hurting the other? And clients like that will pay us seven figures a year, drives very little traffic. So we switched our approach from me creating content on social media, like what did I learn from flying first class for a whole year, which would get tons of views to content like the example I gave you on like... dealing with the multilingual, multi-product domain and how to structure your content, your blog, your URLs, so that way it works and it doesn't hurt you. Like that kind of content drives revenue. The other stuff doesn't really drive revenue. And this is the problem with marketing. Everyone focuses on reach and it feeds their ego and they think reach is going to drive revenue. And I'm telling you, I've already done this, I've already tried it. I know so many other businesses that have. When I look at NPE Digital, my ad agency, the first year in business, I think we did around five or six million in revenue. Almost all of it was driven from my personal brand. I think the second year was somewhere around 18 million in revenue. 10 million was my personal brand. The rest came from word of mouth, good employees, know, awards, although actually back then we didn't have really awards, but more so good employees. track record, client referrals. The third year, I don't know the exact numbers, but I know it was in the 30 range. It was more than 30 million, it was less than 40 million, okay? I'm going to pick a random number, let's call it 36, because I think we were doubling roughly at that point every year. And it was still 10 million that came from my personal brand. And as we kept doubling and growing, only 10 million was coming from my personal brand. And we started getting accounts and customers from referrals and word of mouth and awards. and stuff that was very specific and targeted for ideal customers. Like me going to a event and talking about how to do marketing from multi-location franchise, right? When I say multi-location, multi-lo, technically all franchises usually have multi-locations unless they're getting started and they're just trying to create a franchise. But I would talk about how to do it in not just multiple locations, but multiple locations throughout the world. So you're dealing with different cultures, different languages. And you have to adapt things like the menu and how you do the marketing because what works in America does not work in Brazil, right? There's a lot of nuances. You can use a lot of the same strategies, but you got to adapt. And stuff like that does not get tons of views, does not get tons of likes, but it drives revenue way more than someone walking down the street and be like, hey dude, what's up? I see you all the time. Great content. That kind of stuff does not drive the revenue people think. Tom Rudnai (07:26) Do you see, because what you're describing here though, I completely agree with. And so we operate mostly in the B2B world. And I think in B2B, people do talk a lot about these kinds of marketing fundamentals, which is what you're talking about really, which is understand who you're. get to know them as well as possible. And then actually there's a lot more value often in finding the obscure problem that they're trying to solve than just marketing to them in a very broad sense. And that's, think, what you're describing by bit. Find specific things that you can help them do and that will get low reach, but it will have a high impact, which I completely buy into. Do you find there's a lot of difference in the extent to which that mindset is adopted between consumer and B2B, because I think most folks in B2B tend to think they do that well. Do you? Neil Patel (08:11) It's very similar. So we have customers that run Super Bowl commercials. We have a lot of customers that run Super Bowl commercials. When I go and look at the numbers and I'm not going to go pinpoint a specific customer, because I don't want to share anyone's data and get in trouble. You want to take a guess how many of them see an increase in revenue from a Super Bowl commercial or a World Cup commercial or Olympic commercials? You want to take a guess? Tom Rudnai (08:38) I'm hating these guessing games because I never know the answer, but I'm going to go low this time and say virtually none. Neil Patel (08:44) You got it right. This is why I like the guessing games, because eventually people get where I'm going with this. Tom Rudnai (08:45) There we go. Neil Patel (08:49) But like they're spending our leg you buy Super Bowl and then you buy Super Bowl they expect you to buy Olympic ads at the same time So you're spending way more than you're paying all this money for commercials and production So you're spending well over 20 million dollars because you got to buy more ads than just a Super Bowl typically and then you got to actually produce the commercials which adds up so like let's say if you spend six million on a Super Bowl ad or seven million they usually want you to buy six seven million dollars of other ad spots so non Super Bowl so now you're talking about you just spent 12 to 14 million dollars plus Plus you're spending money on the production of the commercials and then other promotional events on it and YouTube and all this stuff. So you're either spending 20 plus million. Very few companies see growth from it. It's like the money's in the boring and ugly in marketing. It's not in the sexy. yes, every once in a while you'll see companies do really well from the triple commercials like the GoDaddies of the world, which it really helped put them on the map. But that's a needle in a haystack. Tom Rudnai (09:49) It's a statement that you're making, right? But that is a, that is by definition kind of a vanity project. It's difficult because I kind of want to play devil's advocate a bit, but I completely agree with everything you're saying. I guess do you buy into the idea, what some people might say is it's not that they don't have that impact, it's that you don't see it. So actually what you might see is a bit of an uplift across every metrics. It's like there's an adage or kind of little line that someone told me a few months ago actually, which is basically all that matters in marketing is word of mouth. If word of mouth is good, everything works. If it's not, everything doesn't work. And I think what you could argue is that something like a Super Bowl ad is a way of turbo charging the word of mouth and the hype that just lifts everything up. Have you ever seen that in the data? Neil Patel (10:19) Yes. that we have not seen in the data. What we've seen help create the of mouth is grassroots. I want to internationalize, let's not use the word of grassroots. It's very targeted marketing to our ideal customers to get them to see it and they spread it to more ideal customers for both B2B and B2C. So that's number one. Number two, you need a good product or service. If you have a crap product or service, the word of mouth doesn't work out no matter what you do on the marketing. But if you have a great product or service, but you have a terrible marketing, it doesn't work out either. And what we found is the Super Bowl or Olympic style ad appeals to too many people or goes to you reach everyone. The majority of those people are not your ideal customers. It doesn't matter if you're B2C or B2B. It's very rare that someone's selling something that's applicable to everyone, unless you're selling toilet paper. But at that point, you don't really have to make a pitch for toilet paper is more so you go to the store, whatever's reasonably priced is what people buy. Soft and reasonably priced, right? Super Bowl commercial is not going to help too much. What we find in most cases, focusing your marketing on your ideal customer helps really spread your word of mouth to more ideal customers.