Top Skills Every Marketer Needs

Key Takeaways

a lot of it just comes down to consistency and doing something long enough and what we're doing isn't rocket science there's a lot of other people that can do the same thing but they're just not willing to put in the blood sweat into your system so what is it particularly about SEO the excite shoe it's a great way for the little guy to get tons of traffic without having big budgets yeah but what you mentioned the little guy there so uh do you do you specialize in working with just big corporate companies or is it you help the little guy as well uh we work with medium businesses all the way to large corporations we have some small businesses but uh um you know typically most of Revenue does come from large corporations what I mean that I love it because a little guy can get results you can go use tools and learn a lot on your own and do SEO without having a big money investment if you're willing to put in the time and energy yourself a lot of other marketing forms don't exist uh uh or they exist but they don't provide those kind of results without money right some of the other marketing channels out there you have to put in money to get results SEO organic social there's only a few channels where you can really do well that really exists for the small guy that doesn't have any money okay now obviously you have got a massive personal brand yourself right what what what's the thing that you did to the really accelerated your own personal brand but there wasn't anything I I I I did not try to build a personal brand there wasn't one thing that I did when you do something long enough and I don't think my personal Brand's that big there's so many bigger personal Brands than mine but when you do something for a call at 20 plus years and you try to do a decent job at it you know hopefully you build some sort of brand whether it's personal corporate maybe a bit of both um but nothing there you're not going to become an overnight success there's not one thing that builds a personal brand there's a lot of little things that add up over time from an outside perspective they don't really see it that way but that usually is the real case it's a lot of little things done for a very long time and done consistently that build up a personal brand so when when you say a long time if somebody's starting off to build up their corporate or their personal brand music when you do consistent things is it before you really start to get known three to five years that's a conservative estimate you know somewhere in that time range you'll start getting more well known sounds like a long time but most people uh are looking for that one year solution and it's very rare right so yeah I mean I mean a lot of people look for the quick wins in the industry do you think there's any do quick wins exist quick wins sometimes exists uh it was you know when when you say quick wins a lot of people just get lucky um but here's a great example so everyone in the SEO industry is familiar with chat gbt it's a project from open AI open AI was founded in 2015. Chad gbt did not just come out this month or last month or the last year they've been working on the whole Vision whole product since 2015. it's not an overnight success Sam Altman is an overnight success before this white combinator he did a lot of other things before that did a lot of Angel Investing he's been uh entrepreneur for ages the point I'm getting at is everything worthwhile just takes time yes sometimes people get lucky and things just blow up overnight but it's extremely rare that's like pulling a needle in a haystack consistency in the key to anything he marketing then Junior I think consistency and learning from what's Happening because there's so many algorithms and changes you gotta experiment learn what's happening and adapt yeah now I'm not sure how many videos you've done it must be quite an a lot because I mean social media is just flooded with all your videos you think that being consistent in all platforms with all your various videos really helps it does you know it drives good branding for corporate personal it drives leads um I would always recommend it to people you know what we do there's nothing magic at our agency NP digital we're one of the fastest running ad agencies uh according to ad week and a lot of it just comes down to consistency and doing something long enough and what we're doing isn't rocket science there's a lot of other people that can do the same thing but they're just not willing to put in the Blood Sweat and Tears I mean one of the the conversation I have with business owners and individuals is well okay I get the consistency but what do I talk about what do I do videos on I mean obviously yourself you've done thousands of videos where do you get your inspiration from I get my inspiration from just reading and also talking to people and figuring out what pain points and issues they have great example of this you can go on Google type in any keywords within your industry and you'll also see people also asked people also ask is what people are curious about you can then go and start creating content around all those topics it could be video could be text-based it's up to you right so it's realistically just being what people want to know yes brilliant that really is all about content creation it all comes down to what do people want to know if you create that you'll do well if you create content around what people don't care for then it wouldn't matter so do you have a big team behind you um for creating content not a big team uh one video person for all my short four one video person that I see once a month for all my long form even the short form I see them once a month as well short for my team for a few hours a month the long form I see him for maybe like three four hours a month uh um two other people on the tech space side so a small team four five if I had a guess all right so so it's not a massive team then do you say your personal time it takes what a two three days a month um so personal time to create content probably [Music] if I had a guess 24 hours a month Max including podcasting and everything okay so it's a lot less than I actually thought actually yeah that's a Max there's someone's worth much less than that yeah okay and talking The Wider mods in Industry if businesses don't have the budget to employ um an urgency or a freelancer what what could those people do do it themselves look you can bust out your phone and start recording and creating content and uploading it the issue is is people don't want to put in the time it has nothing to do with hiring that's why I said SEO is the one of the only channels that really work for the small media business not because they need to pay my agency but with SEO and organic social you can do those without having to pay anyone money you can put in the time yourself and learn it just people aren't willing to do it right yeah you can learn paid advertising too but you got to spend money on the paid ads so it's just like that's tougher for a small business but SEO and organic social is very doable for businesses of all sizes so if somebody had to choose between going out and writing content pieces or doing videos what would you say would create the biggest theme park between both people spend more time on videos than text-based content at least I was reading some stats uh a few days ago but that was the latest stats that I read I forgot what percentage or time but it was videos dominated more than text-based content um so I would tell people to focus on video first okay now just to get to know you as a person right what does your day-to-day look like my day-to-day is a lot of phone calls meetings some content creation uh answering emails uh strategy stuff working on client accounts you know typical normal day spending time with kids watching some TV like news I watch BBC quite a bit okay now you you rebranded your agency from Neil Patel to MP what was what was the reason behind that we originally why they call it NP digital we couldn't get the domain name and then eventually the person sold it ah tickle is up yeah we want it from day one we tried getting it the guy said no when the economy started going down a little bit they hit us back up saying hey do you still want to buy it same price and we said yes all right so with MP digital how big of an agency is it we're between seven and eight hundred employees we're US Canada UK Brazil Australia India Singapore Germany we're about to have Portugal and Spain what I'm saying these regions we actually have like a managing director or someone leading up a specific region but we have people in many different regions on top of that as well but my guess is we'll probably have be in over 20 countries with leaders in each of those countries by the end of 2023. so how the growth of your agency it gave us an amazing start because it provided us leads but um you know Believe It or Not majority of our revenues 70-ish percent comes from uh employee referrals client referrals uh uh and just Word of Mouth right okay so literally I think it's actually like 76 to be exact comes from those three channels right now this is why I love doing uh videos like this because perception was like the majority of people go to your agency because of your name no you have to remember when you are working with large companies let's say you want to work with the fortune 100. they don't care about Neil Patel they care about who are the people working on my account and what are their skill sets and what experience they have in my industry that's going to produce results so it's all about the team who work within the Asian Center not just the team who works with an agency but the team who is on their account that's who they care about more than anything else right okay so like when you're working with these big companies they've got to requirements you have to put in what sort of pre-sales prep work you have to put in in order just to be be at the table to pitch to these corporates there's not an easy answer for that because these big corporations all have unique requirements so you have to put in varies based on their needs a lot of times they send out an RFP request for a proposal they tell you the requirements and then you either decide if you wanna put it in the energy or not you could end up sometimes spend a hundred two hundred thousand dollars to try to get a deal and you may not win it wow I'm gonna say so you really need to have a solid base behind you and financial backing in order to really go after these bigger contracts to start with correct yes well I or you could just put in your own time right um for me the reason we have those expenses because we have so much staff so then we're paying for those hours and if we don't close it we wasted the money but I think it's always worth it Okay so um you say you're in all these various countries how involved are you personally within the agency very involved that's what I do full time right so is your own focus on building this one this agency up or do you have over all this entities you focus on no no just focus on agency right on my time oh your time and um moving forward is what you personally what's your personal Journey looking like in the future it's the same I don't really see it changing Focus all the time on growing the agency and try to become one of the biggest Global ad agencies out there what's your why why why I just love it I'm having fun I love it it's just passionate about marketing has nothing to do with money or anything that is just a goal and I want to try to achieve it right so it really is because of the work you're doing [Music] so how important is um obviously family how does family fit into everything for you family fits in great I'm at home I work from home um and I see my kids often throughout the whole day and I play with them and I read to them and all that kind of good stuff so um yeah I try to be there as a parent all the major events and everything like that and you know try to support my kids and whatever they decide to do in life and whatever makes them happy so when you saying that you work from home do you don't you see a need for you to be like in the office with the teams oh we're virtual oh everything's virtual is it aha post covered we move virtual all right okay that I wasn't aware of so yeah we still have offices barely anyone goes into them but we're virtual right and do you find um office space vs virtual is a good move uh we like virtual both are fine there's pros and cons to both there's nothing wrong with either it depends what a company wants that's why we have a bit of both then people can either go into office or they can work from home we don't force them with any uh specific requirement we let them decide okay now going moving on to SEO obviously this is uh the SEO interview um what what do you thinks missing in the industry do you mean people focus on tactics not enough people are focusing uh enough on user experience and truly trying to Delight them I'll talk about user experience just from like a low time perspective I've done a user experience from like how do you just create amazing products amazing Services amazing content and just try to Delight that some people do I wouldn't say it's totally missing but that's not the main focus people like oh let me build more links let me you know optimize this you know element in within my code to try to like game the system I was like well if you put the user first and do what's best for them in the long run you should win you should as you know I I put an asterisk around sure yeah I'm gonna say and if nothing if you could have the power to change something within the industry what would it be um I don't know if I would change anything you know I don't really see anything wrong with it been in it for a long time people are friendly it's nice people try to learn more you know it's it's a good industry good so first time I've heard somebody say that yeah everyone has their own take but I love the industry it's it's done wonders for me and wonders for a lot of people and when I first got into industry people are really uh welcoming with open arms and you know I think it's a great community yeah I was going to say how obviously you're giving your time up to be on uh this interview now is what other things are you involved in in order to just help people uh I create content we try to educate and help through that but I'm actually not that involved in much my wife is so I try to focus on uh building a business my wife focuses on philanthropy and tries to help do that so she spends her full time raising kids and uh helping out a lot of different organizations wonderful but it's real it's a really good feeling when you you know you can help others in life it can be I don't really look at it as like a feeling I like it as more like a you know it's just like there's a lot of things that are wrong and as humans if we have the ability to help others out you should right I I don't look it as a feeling what makes me feel better isn't the helping other people out it's actually seeing things improve you know it's just like there's so many kids out there that people are like oh they don't live in good areas they're not going to succeed well if you gave them the tools and the education why can't they they're hungry who says they're not smart who says they can't accomplish amazing things who says they can't build multi-billion dollar companies who says they can't cure cancer and for me it's more like it's sad to see a lot of people in this world not have opportunities and others help them out and helping them yes it's you could say it is a good feeling but what's a better feeling for me is seeing change and then seeing the people that you help out try to help other people as well and just it continue and hopefully you know it'll make the world a better place uh I say more so like what's a good feeling is like what Elon Musk is doing what he's doing is tremendous right trying to make it where people can live on multiple civilizations not have a single point of failure being earth like that's crazy in a good way you know I don't have the capability to do what he does it's not just even money sure I don't have the money he does but I don't also have the brain power and into life