- Personal brands can help you build amazing companies,
but they'll only get you so far.
The ideal, in ideal world
you would have what Kylie Cosmetics is doing
combined with what L'Oreal is doing.
That's how I believe you build one of the biggest companies.
But you're not going to get a massive company
without the business operations
and systems and processes down.
I believe that's actually more important
than the personal brand.
(inspiring music)
- A lot of brands and personal brands
are up against the algorithm.
(inspiring jingle)
It's tougher to get views, it's tougher to get engagement.
What are your thoughts, or what would you say to people
that are fighting with the algorithm
and what are things that they could do,
or if they can't do something, what would you say to them
to keep fighting the good fight.
- Algorithms are always going to be tough.
They make money when you spend money on ads.
It doesn't mean that they're going to crush organic.
It's just harder to get organic than it used to be
because they make more money on ads.
And you can't blame them because they're publicly traded.
And if I owned them, I would do the same exact thing.
I actually probably would be a little bit more aggressive
than them and make more money on the paid ads,
so I can't really hate.
But instead of complaining or worrying about a algorithm
use it for what you can get out of it.
A lot of people will look at algorithms like Facebook
or Instagram and they're like "I used to make
a $100,000 a year from it.
I only make $20,000 a year from it now."
$20,000 is still better than zero.
Use these platforms for what they are
and get the most out of them,
and keep trying new things to make up the difference.
One thing though, and Dan's an expert in this,
he knows so many people.
You'll be shocked at how many people I still meet
they're like, "Oh yeah,
do you know a guy named Dan Blenchman?"
I'm like, "Yeah, I know him," I'm like, "Great guy."
And I was even telling him the other day,
I was like, dude, I was on a plane flying back from New York
and Steve Aoki was sitting next to me.
He's like, "Oh, you should have said hi."
I'm like, "No, I don't want to bother him,
he was sleeping." and he's like,
"He's one of my best friends."
He was, I think, the best man at your wedding, right?
And I was like, "No, I'm good."
Though, like Dan really knows a lot of people
and the point I'm getting across
is Dan does so much with influencer marketing.
I don't know if you still do,
but used to do a ton back in the day
and he still does a ton right now.
One of the best ways to generate a lot of revenue
and stand out, and this helps with the algorithms,
is to have a influencer.
And the key with the influencer,
this is what most people get wrong,
they'll like go to Kylie Jenner.
It doesn't have to be that big.
It could be a micro influencer,
someone who's known within your niche
and they pay them to do a post.
That honestly doesn't work too well.
They all get paid to do posts.
What works really well is paying an influencer
who's well known in your space.
They promote your product, they're part of your business.
They're also on your landing pages, your ad creatives
and they're endorsing the product as if it's their own.
That converts extremely well
and that helps with the algorithms from what we see.
A great example of this is Ryan Reynolds and Mint Mobile.
Ryan Reynolds was not the founder of Mint Mobile.
He got equity to help blow up Mint Mobile.
- Raise your hand if you know the CEO of Delta Airlines,
American Airlines, Southwest Airlines?
No, but if I say, do you know the CEO of Virgin Airlines,
everybody knows Richard Branson.
That's the power of a personal brand.
The huge differences is outside of airlines,
Delta, American, Southwest, et cetera,
they don't have record labels,
they don't have clothing lines, they don't have vodkas,
they don't have all these other things.
Virgin does because of Richard Branson,
because of personal brand.
And so that's why we talk about branding so much
and why it's so useful
is they can help expand your business
to become much bigger than what it is,
simply by people knowing you
and knowing about the brand and the business.
You have built these very large companies over the years
but you still spend a ton of time creating content.
Every day I see, every morning on LinkedIn,
then I go to Facebook there you are,
then I'm on Instagram and then you pop up.
I can't escape you everywhere I go.
Literally I can't escape.
I see you more every single day than, anyways.
Like why do you spend so much time
creating the personal brand and why is this so useful
when you already have such large companies?
- Sure, so I used to spend much more time
creating a personal brand than I do now.
Our income at my ad agency, we're small still
compared to the other ad agencies out there.
We have maybe like 750 employees somewhere around there,
but we're small compared to the competitors
who have like 100,000 employees, right?
It's all you know in perspective, but for me,
we're still a really tiny company and we're five years old.
And most of our business at this point, it's roughly 71%,
the last, we looked at year to date
and when I say year to date,
we don't have data for June and we don't have data for May.
So, but we have most of the months so far this year.
When I look at year to date, 71% of our business
comes from RFPs, employee referrals and client referrals.
I used to focus most of my time
on building a personal brand,
which has help my business get off the ground.
First probably 10 plus million dollars
came from my personal brand, if not a little bit more,
but it was hard to scale more and more
than that through a personal brand.
Keep in mind, I'm dealing with enterprises.
So if you're pitching Microsoft
they don't honestly care who Neil Patel is.
They care in saying
"I'm spending a hundred million dollars a year.
This is my current ROI,
show me data and stats that you can beat this."
It really comes down to that
when you're dealing with large publicly traded companies
and large dollar amounts.
When you're dealing with startups and smaller brands,
that's not the case.
I think a personal brand is great
to really separate you from the crowd,
and I think it's also great
to help you generate quite a bit of revenue.
A great example of this is Kylie Cosmetics,
but what a lot of people forget
is marketing isn't everything.
And even though Kylie Jenner created an amazing company
and no one can knock her for it,
I remember Forbes releasing articles
saying she's a billionaire,
and then people knocking her
saying she's not a billionaire anymore.
And I'm like, who gives a shit
if she's a billionaire or not?
Look what she did at her age.
You got to give her props for that, right?
Like I don't understand why people were hating.
But to give you idea of a personal brand
versus a non-personal brand, look at L'Oreal.
L'Oreal I believe is a cosmetics company.
I say I believe this,
because I don't know too much about cosmetics
other than I went to Sephora today.
My four year old said,
"What do you want?" walking down Rodeo Drive,
She's like, "Makeup."
And it took me forever to find a makeup store
and I ran into Sephora.
I'm like, "Here you go,"
and one of the ladies was helping us out.
And then I got in trouble from the mommy
for buying her makeup.
She's like, "Four year olds don't need makeup."
I'm like, "My bad."
(audience laughs)
But when you look at L'Oreal versus Kylie Cosmetics,
Kylie Cosmetics built an amazing business.
No one should knock her for that,
everyone should be giving props.
But you know how massive L'Oreal is?
That's an example of amazing operations and distributions.
Personal brands can help you build amazing companies
but they'll only get you so far.
The ideal, in an ideal world,
you would have what Kylie Cosmetics is doing
combined with what L'Oreal is doing.
That's how I believe you build one of the biggest companies.
But you're not going to get a massive company
without the business operations
and systems and processes down.
I believe that's actually more important
than the personal brand.
- So right now when people make social media posts
on most platforms they can do either video, photo, or text.
Should they be focusing on any one of those categories
or should they be mixing it up
between the three different options?
- You should mainly focus on videos
because that's what all the platforms want.
Second, you can do photos,
but the main reason I say videos is
is you can take the videos
and get stills from there for a photo
or when you're doing the video
just have someone snap some photos
so you can get the photos as well.
And then you can translate and transcribe,
or in essence repurpose, the video into different formats.
So you can have an audio version for it.
Just strip out the video and you got a podcast
you can take sound clips from it
and you got reels and shorts, right?
So you can take the text from,
or you can take the audio from the video
and transcribe it into text and modify it a little bit.
That's why I say transcribe and you got a blog post now.
That's why I love doing videos first
over any other content format.
It's just the most efficient when it comes to repurposing.
- So all of us have a question.
Is AI and ChatGPT and all the robots,
are they going to kill us?
- Are are they what?
Are they going to kill us?
- Is AI going to take over?
- I don't know if they're going to kill us.
I'm not that smart like Elon Musk
or anyone who would know better than me.
But I'll tell you this in marketing,
I think a lot of people got it wrong.
In the short run I, most people
are overestimating AI and what it can do.
In the long run, believe it or not
most of us are underestimating what AI can do for us.
There's been decades where very little has progressed
when it comes to technology and AI, and now weeks go by
and it feels like decades of progress has happened
in just those small weeks.
But here's the thing
have you guys ever heard of Where's Waldo?
Yeah, you know that guy
with the red and white striped shirts?
Funny enough, someone made a Where's Waldo of my face on it,
and when I was gone, I was traveling,
I used to live in Seattle back then,
someone put it over my toilet.
Worst location ever.
When people would come over,
they would piss all over the bathroom
trying to find where I was.
I removed that one really quickly.
But just imagine Where's Waldo for a minute.
Back then when you find Where's Waldo,
there's only one Where's Waldo?
And eventually you find him, he stands out.
But now with AI, everyone looks like Waldo.
Literally you'll have a thousand people in the audience.
They all look like Waldo.
And here's why.
The way AI works is it's taking inputs.
The inputs is the web, it's scraping the web, indexing it
and then coming with the output
based on what it, what the inputs are.
The inputs already existed, right?
So people are using the same inputs
to create very similar outputs.
It's causing everyone to look alike.
So now marketing is turning into me too type of stuff.
And I don't mean me too,
you know like the women's movement.
I mean me too, in which everyone looks alike.
And what we're seeing is
the people who are really excelling at marketing
are the people who add in their own Google calls it EATE,
expertise, authority, trust.
And they added in another E to it, so experience as well.
The people who add in that unique touch
that no one else can replicate.
Those are the ones who are doing well.
For example, there's a lot of articles on the internet
that talk about influencer marketing.
Dan's worked with the Kardashians how many times?
You probably can't count on both your hands.
He's worked with him so many times
and other crazy influencers.
I've been at his events
and I've seen people like Mark Wahlberg
and you know, a Kardashian and the list goes on and on,
and Magic Johnson and et cetera.
He can actually write an article
talking about what it's like to work with these influencers,
because he's experienced something that others haven't.
That makes content unique.
And what people forget about is these algorithms
are amazingly good at drowning out the noise.
How many here follow more than a hundred people
on their social profiles, raise your hand.
Almost everyone should be raising your hand.
The rest of you guys are lazy, but I understand
it's 7:00 PM so I appreciate you guys anyways.
How many of you guys see all the content
from the people you follow, raise your hand.
Look around the room, not one person has raised their hand.
Seriously, look around the room, not one person.
Algorithms are great at drowning out the noise.
When you do a Google search for anything, guarantee you
in almost every search there's millions of results.
If you do a search for auto insurance in the United States
did you know there's over 1 billion results?
Did you know there's roughly 300,000 people
who searched that term
every single month in the United States?
Did you know majority of the people click on the first page?
Some people click on the second page
very few people click on the third page.
My team used to make a joke,
"You know where the best place to hide a dead body is?"
I was like, "Where?"
They're like, "Page two of Google, ha ha ha."
I was like, "This isn't that funny."
They loved it.
(audience laughs)
And just think about that.
Most the sites that rank for any term on Google
have similar content.
Google's good at drowning out the noise
and they only show you the stuff
on page one, page two, and page three.
That means they're showing you roughly 30 articles max,
which is what everyone's seeing,
out of over a billion results, think about that.
So what AI is doing is just creating
more of majority of those billion plus articles
and content pieces that most people are going to ignore.
You got to figure out how to stand out
and you're going to do that through unique content
that people haven't seen before.
While AI is going to create you, in most cases, not all cases,
most cases, regurgitated content
or something that isn't that unique.
- Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm round applause,
to my friend Mister Neil Patel.
(audience cheers)