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- This is Caroline Forsey
and welcome to another episode of Marketing Minds,
where we interview thought leaders across the industry
to help you stay ahead of the competition
and create a winning marketing strategy.
Today we are joined by Neil Patel
and we're going to discover Neil's solutions
to marketer's five biggest challenges.
Welcome, Neil.
- Anytime. Thanks for having me.
- For some context, we surveyed a thousand marketers
and asked them about their five biggest challenges
that they struggled with in 2022.
So I'm going to read each challenge to you
and I would love your answer as to
why it's such a big challenge for marketers,
and one tip you have for overcoming that challenge.
- That works, let's do this.
- Challenge number one.
62% of marketers
say that growing a global audience
was their biggest challenge this year.
Why do you think it's such a problem for marketers
and how would you combat that challenge?
- You know what's funny is
I've created A, a global audience
and what I've also found is,
once you create a global audience
it's also even harder to monetize that global audience.
But the biggest reason that we see marketers
struggle to grow a global audience is,
they typically focus on one language, believe it or not.
People either start off in English or Spanish or Portuguese
or they pick a popular language like Hindi or Mandarin.
But keep in mind,
the majority of the world doesn't just speak English
or Spanish or Mandarin.
They're speaking tons of different languages.
And the real strategy and way
to not only create a global audience
but be able to monetize it is
you gotta translate and transcribe.
So here's what I mean by that.
You can go find people on places like Upwork
or whatever forums you can within that region
or even within your local community,
but you need to find people
who are experts within your industry or know it enough
but live in that country.
And you gotta pay 'em to translate and transcribe
because adjusting the words
from English to that other language doesn't always work.
Sometimes you gotta adjust it for cultural differences.
And then the reason you also want someone
within that local region is,
they need to help market that content,
the website, the product, the service,
whatever you're trying to build,
community-wise, within that region.
Ahead of other sites to get backlinks,
set up other social profiles and connect with them
and set up interviews for you.
You gotta actually have feet on the ground.
And again, you gotta translate and transcribe
and that solves it.
But without doing that,
sure you can still build a global audience
even if you stick to one language,
like, let's say English,
but they're not gonna be as engaged
because not everyone within those regions speaks English.
- Challenge number two.
56% of marketers
say that updates to privacy regulations
is their biggest challenge right now.
Why do you think it's a challenge for marketers
and what's one tip for overcoming that challenge?
- The reason marketers have issues with privacy changes
isn't because they don't like 'em or they like 'em.
It's more so every country has their own rules.
So you gotta adapt to 'em from a legal perspective.
And sure, lawyers can work on terms of service
and privacy policies,
but you gotta actually adapt your marketing.
So for example, in California,
at least during recording of this interview,
you have to have a do not track option
for specifically, California.
Some of the other states may require, or may not require it
but as marketers, you gotta adjust
what you show people
based on their regions that they're coming from.
The solution to this is personalization.
Think about personalizing experience.
If someone has dogs,
you don't really show 'em products for cats, right?
Because you know they have a dog.
The same goes when someone comes to your website
from a specific region using the GOIP.
You can, you know, if it's country-based or state-based,
if you're in the United States,
you can end up adjusting the marketing messages
a little bit here and there.
But you will need to connect with a legal team
or outsource a law firm
just to make sure that the marketing campaigns
you're running are compliant for those regions or countries.
- Challenge number three,
53% of marketers
say that pivoting their marketing strategy
due to major global events,
like the pandemic, recession or political turmoil,
is their biggest challenge.
What's one tip you have for overcoming that challenge
and why do you think that pivoting a marketing strategy
in the first place is so difficult for marketers?
- It is very hard to adapt
when it comes to major events like COVID or pandemic
or you know, one country
going to war with another country
and it affecting the global economy.
What I recommend companies do is
most of them try to say,
"All right, all hands on decks, what can we do?"
And that's great and you should end doing that.
But think of the Facebook rule.
If they're trying to build a product,
the amount of engineers that they have
should be able to be fed off of one large pizza.
So when you have too many cooks in the kitchen,
in other words, things actually move slower.
So what you wanna do is
figure out who on your team is agile,
can move fast and have a small circle.
Doesn't mean that you don't update everyone else
on what's happening
and the changes they need, may need to make,
but you need a few people
who can just focus on executing and adapting and changing.
Because if you have everyone
trying to focus at the same time,
yeah it's great and there's nothing wrong with that,
but it just tends to move slower
because you find a lot of people go into meetings
and discussions about it versus actually doing.
It's really hard to get a thousand people
to all adjust at once,
but you can get the leaders on board
and a few people underneath them
who are really quick at executing.
It doesn't have to be that they'd be managers.
It could be lower level people,
but just people that you know that can move fast.
Once you get a lot of the systems,
processes changed or some of the steps
or any improvements you need to make,
then you just need to distill that information
to the rest of the team and have 'em follow suit.
- And just as a quick follow up,
what can marketers do to stay up to date
with trends that are happening in the industry
and knowing when to pivot on those?
- People will have a lot of statements saying, like,
"Personalization is dead",
or "SEO is dead"
or "Paid advertising is too expensive."
The way I look at it is keep up with the news.
There's a lot of marketing sites that have the news.
You guys do at HubSpot,
we do at neilpatel.com,
and there's a lot of other sites that have news,
like Search Engine Land, keep up up with that.
But the bigger thing is just because you read something,
doesn't mean it won't work anymore.
So constantly experiment within your organization
and use it for the best it is.
And here's an example of that.
"Oh, people have been saying for years
Facebook reach is dying."
Just because Facebook reach is dying
doesn't mean that there's no revenue to be made
from Facebook organic.
Maybe not as much as before.
Maybe you don't put as many resources behind it.
Maybe you repurpose content so it's not as expensive
but that doesn't mean Facebook organic doesn't work.
Doesn't mean that you should stop.
It just means, hey, it's winding down
on how much ROI you can actually generate organic,
but use it for the most you can.
And whatever it is, as long as it's profitable
keep doing more of it, right?
Maybe it's not as good as it used to be,
but something's better than nothing.
Challenge number four.
51% of marketers
say that measuring their marketing efforts
and their marketing ROI is their biggest challenge.
Why do you think that is?
And what's one tip for better measuring your ROI in 2023?
- The reason 51% of marketers
say they struggle to measure marketing ROIs,
they focus on vanity metrics.
So everyone knows there's Google Analytics,
you can pay a consultant to set it up for you.
You know, at NP Digital,
we help companies with that,
but that's not really the issue.
There's actually a bigger issue on hat.
Look, at HubSpot, you can send out emails
and it converts, the money's in the list.
You know, people call it the digital ATM.
But what people do
is they focus on things like visitor counts,
and oh yeah, we're gonna set up conversions
and you know, Google Analytics,
we're gonna look at first touch, last touch attribution.
But what they're doing is
they're like, "Oh did our traffic increase?
Great, yeah, that's awesome."
But if your traffic increased and your revenue didn't,
who cares?
What we're seeing is companies are focusing on
what channels, what keywords, what audience type, et cetera
are driving the conversions
and they're not focusing on getting more of those.
So when you set up your marketing campaigns
and your analytics correctly,
you actually need to pinpoint what's driving the most ROI
and double down on that.
And it's okay if your revenue doubles,
and your traffic goes down by half.
It's not a big deal if your traffic goes down by half
or even 5X, if a lot of that traffic was irrelevant.
Your revenue went up.
So people start focusing on these vanity metrics
and want them to increase
when they don't matter as much.
Like we see so many companies, you're like,
"Oh my bounce rate is going in a worse direction."
But your revenue and EBITDA went up by 20%,
so who really cares?
- Finally, challenge number five.
47% of marketers reported
that generating traffic and leads
was their biggest problem this year.
Why is generating traffic and leads
such an issue for so many marketers?
And what's one tip you have
for generating better traffic and leads in the future?
- Yeah, so Andrew Chen once said,
"All marketing channels eventually go to shit."
At least all the good ones.
Why? Because they become competitive,
saturated and more expensive.
It's harder to squeeze a ROI out of them.
There's a great advantage from being a early adopter
but sometimes if you're early adopter on channels,
I wasn't an early adopter at clubhouse
and I didn't believe in it 'cause I was, like,
"Well, you only get value from it
if you're on there and if you're not on there
on the right time, it's useless."
I'm like, "This isn't time efficient."
I'm like, "This isn't gonna last."
This is not,
people don't have these kind of attention spans
to be on this for, like, hours a day.
The real solution for marketers,
it's always gonna be hard.
But the real solution,
and this is really the only solution,
is to take an omni-channel approach.
So what I mean by omni-channel approach is,
you gotta do paid advertising.
Not just Facebook and Google,
but Bing, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok,
you gotta try 'em all out.
Snapchat, you gotta do SEO,
not just SEO on Google
but there's also Bing.
If you're in the hospitality space,
getting your listing for your home hire on Airbnb
is considered SEO as well.
These are all examples of SEO.
When you're capturing someone on your website,
you gotta do phone number,
you gotta do push notifications,
you gotta do chat,
you gotta do email.
You actually offer a lot of these products
which is great and it works.
And people always say,
"Oh, no one opens up email.
Email is dead."
It's not dead.
Email sent and received per day
was 319 billion emails per day.
Like, just think about it.
If it's dead, why are that many people sending emails still?
So in essence, you gotta take a omni-channel approach
with all those channels,
including social media, repurposing content,
and you gotta do it long enough and be consistent at it.
Don't expect results in two, three months or six months.
You gotta do it for a long time.
There is no silver bullet, there is no one channel.
Facebook grew with the invite flow.
Dropbox blew through Twitter.
Tweet and get more space.
Just using one channel isn't effective anymore
'cause they're all crowded.
You gotta test, adapt, be consistent,
do it in the long run and use multiple channels.
- Awesome. Well, those are all my questions
but I do wanna leave it open
if there's anything you wanna add
when it comes to marketing challenges in 2022
and as we segue into the new year.
- Last thing I would say is just stick at it.
Be consistent, continually experiment,
and learn from your mistakes and adapt.
There is no silver bullet, takes a lot of time.
No good big company was built overnight.
If you look at organizations like HubSpot,
Dharmesh once had a post.
I believe I could be wrong on this,
I don't know if you guys were a unicorn
before you went public
but for all the years you were public,
your market cap increased
by at least a billion dollars.
In essence, the point he was trying to make is,
slow and steady, guys have done well.
It just takes a very, very long time.
Anything that's worthwhile, right?
Like if you wanna build something amazing,
it takes time to recruit amazing people,
build up amazing products and services.
Good things don't happen overnight.
You look at Elon Musk and how well he's done.
SpaceX and Tesla are roughly 20-year-old companies.
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