Adam Torres and Neil Patel discuss building a personal brand.
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Show Notes:
Do you need to build a personal brand? Well, according to Neil, it depends. In this episode, Adam Torres and Neil Patel, Co-Founder at Neil Patel Digital, explore Neil’s journey as an entrepreneur and how having a strong personal brand helped him in the early days.
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About Neil Patel
Neil Patel a New York Times bestselling author. The Wall Street Journal calls me a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. he was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
He helped Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Google, Thomson Reuters, Viacom, NBC, Intuit, Zappos, American Greetings, General Motors, and SalesForce grow through marketing.
His a marketing blog generates over 4 million visitors per month (51% of them spend money on paid ads), His Marketing School podcast generates over 1 million listens per month, my YouTube channel about marketing has over 31 million views and 765,000 subscribers, he has 1 million Facebook fans, and 372,000 Twitter followers.
He spoke at over 310 conferences and companies around the world. From speaking at Facebook and Thomson Reuters to every major growth marketing conference, his available and interested in speaking at events worldwide.
About Neil Patel Digital
Neil Patel has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the United Nations, to name a few, as one of the most influential and successful marketers and entrepreneurs in the world. NP Digital is the award winning digital marketing agency that brings his passion and insights to life for the world’s more important brands. We focus on creating innovative, adaptive, and data-driven digital marketing plans. Obsessed with helping companies grow and exceed their goals, we deliver on the mission of continually helping brands connect and engage with their audience. We combine proprietary platforms with best-in-class talent to deliver leading-edge experiences centered around: paid and organic search, social media, influencer marketing, content, retargeting, performance display, feed management, email marketing, and conversion rate optimization. We’re an Adweek Fastest Growing Company, Media Post Agency of the Year and 2-time Inc. Best Workplaces recipient.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today is a very special episode. And if you’re watching this and not listening to it in your car, you could tell I’m smiling from ear to ear.
I’ve been trying to get Neil Patel in the show for maybe a year, maybe years. I don’t know how long it’s been. Ben, but for those of you that don’t know who Neil Patel is, he’s the co founder of Neil Patel digital. And he’s a New York time bestselling author. Wall street journal calls him one of the top influencers on the web.
Forbes calls him one of the top 10 marketers. I call him somebody that I look at from afar at his work on, Hey, what do I do? How do I scale my business? And now having them on the show week, I get to pick his brain directly for our audience. So first off, Neil, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
All right, Neil. So every episode we start the same as our long term listeners know, and we’d like to call that our mission matters minute. So Neil, we at mission matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Neil, what mission matters to you? Helping businesses grow.
We just love it. You know, seeing them get more leads and sales, seeing people succeed, seeing companies hire more. It’s a great feeling. Well, well, great to have you on. And I guess just to get us kicked off here, I mean, when did you know, like, when did you know digital marketing was for you or just marketing in general?
When did you know? So I’m 38 now. I knew by the time I was 16. Wow. Started my first business around 15 and a half. Started getting into marketing by the time I was somewhere, you know, mid 16s. I really fell in love with marketing. I just kept going. But it’s just crazy to think about, you know, it’s a 22 year journey roughly.
What, what, what kept you in the game? Like in those early things, like, cause I, maybe, maybe you’re different, but when I was 16, you know, I had other interests, you know, I had other things that I was trying to sell other businesses, other things that made that I obviously didn’t stick with. I don’t even know if podcasting was around back then, but how did, how’d you know it was the one?
I didn’t, but I was just in love with it. So it was my first love, my first child and just kept going. And. You know, similar to most young people, I had ADD. I tried doing too many things, too many businesses. A lot didn’t work out, but they all revolved around the marketing space. And, you know, I’m quite happy and content now and just keep pushing forward.
What was one of those and I, I asked you this question specifically because I know there’s a lot of people, especially young entrepreneurs, just getting started when something, you know, they fell in love with an idea or something else and they had to kill it. Like, what was one of those early ideas where you were like, you know, thought that was going to be a little bit better than it was.
It had had to end that one. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had a lot of those you know, some of my earlier ideas that I thought would have been amazing were like try to create a cloud computing company back in the day before it was really popular. Great idea for execution. Try to create an analytics company that just did general site analytics.
And then Google analytics came out literally a few months before I released mine for free. So early on these things, man, bad timing there, but like you, you live and learn on some of these things. And I had quite a bit of fun doing all this stuff throughout the years. Just, you can’t predict what’s going to work or not.
Some things go wrong. Some things don’t like, look at YouTube. YouTube did well, but there was a few other players that were doing the same thing as YouTube who came out earlier, who got bloody and had to deal with all the lawsuits and legal issues. And then it paved the way for YouTube, right? A lot of it is just luck and timing.
Well, what are some of the other platforms right now? So speaking of like a YouTube, like what are some other platforms that, that you follow right now that, that you find that are interesting? Like that might be in some of the earlier stages, if you will. So I actually look at it the other way. I don’t look at the earlier stages.
I look at the ones that already have adoption. So I’m mainly on X Instagram, Tik TOK, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And I go where the attention is. Now there’s a lot of platforms that keep popping up. I let them go and do their thing when they become popular. That’s when I go and I start leveraging because there’s a new platform every other day, right?
Not literally, but you know, you guys get the point. There’s new popping up all the time. And it’s just too much, too many platforms to be on. According to DemandSage, the average user is on 6. 6 social platforms. So I stick with the round six and I pick the bigger ones. Tell us, tell us a little bit more about Neo Patel Digital.
So keeping speaking of keeping it you know, to the core, I know, I know you’re known for SEO. That’s one of the things that I’ve followed you for in the past SEO and otherwise. Tell us a little bit more about Neo Patel Digital. Sure, so NP Digital is a global ad agency. I think we’re in 19 ish countries.
We’ll probably hit a thousand or so employees this year is my rough guess. Who knows? And we help people with all their digital marketing or performance marketing from SEO to social media, organic to paid ads, both on social. As well as, you know, cost per click ads or media buying or Google ads.
We help with things like email and conversion optimization. The list goes on and on. We just gave a webinar that we’re talking about personalizing people’s, you know, webpages and content and marketing, so that way they can boost their conversions. Like we help with pretty much anything that’s digital.
So according to what I saw on LinkedIn, I, NP, digital, you know, been around for let’s say seven years, maybe more. But, and I feel like I’ve, I’ve been, I’ve been watching your work for longer than that, so maybe this particular company, I don’t know, maybe I followed you on some of your earlier marketing stuff as well.
And what’s been very interesting. For me to look from afar is to watch this company build and to watch your products and just watch your, your delivery. And I’m just curious from your standpoint, what are some of the, the keys to success or some of those things that have led you to a lot, a lot of people started at agencies, let’s say six, seven years ago, not all of them have grown them into what you’re talking about, nor the numbers.
Like, what are some of those keys to success? Personal brand helped us get off the ground quite quickly. But the biggest one was actually hiring leaders. From other bigger ad agencies, like the hold calls, like the WPP, the denses, Omnicom, et cetera, and bringing them into the fold and having them help grow.
You know, there’s people who have already done it before. If you hire them, you’re much more likely to do better. Yeah. Let’s circle back to that, that concept of personal brand. You said personal brand helped you in the beginning. Like, tell me a little bit more about that. Had a following, had a blog, had a social media following, you know, and telling people, Hey, I’m open for business.
I’ll do your marketing for you and my team, and I will help you. Yeah. It helps generate revenue. And that was a big thing for us early on. I would say personal branding, you know, the first year, I think we did around 5 million in revenue and it drove all the 5 million, I think the second year we did around 16, 17 or 18 million.
It was somewhere around there. And it drove 10 of that. So it wasn’t too bad. And as time went on and as we grew, it’s still only responsible for around 10 million of our annual revenue. So it’s not like The biggest amount but it helped us get, you know, a nice kickstart. Can you talk to me about, obviously you’ve benefited from it and you’re, you’re talking about it now, but for, for those that maybe haven’t gone down that personal branding route, or maybe still don’t even kind of know what that concept is like, talk to me a little bit more about personal branding and its importance.
Yeah. You know, people resonate with people and if you can build a brand and people like you, you’re going to end up generating sales. That’s why Kylie cosmetics did well. That’s why Fenty, you know, from Rihanna has done well. That’s why Jordans have done well and you know, the list goes on and on.
That’s why people like Tony Robbins do well and no matter what he’s touching or Gary Vaynerchuk. Yeah. Personal brands, powerful. Why not build one? I don’t think it’s as good as a corporate brand, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have both. And speaking to the corporate leaders out there who maybe, you know, they already have a successful business, but they’re, let’s say lacking on the personal branding side of it.
Is that important still? If your business is big enough, you don’t need a personal brand. Personal brand is great to get you kickstarted. I don’t think it helps grow organization in its later stages as much. It helps more in the earlier stages. I still think it’s great, but if you already have a big corporation, you know, it doesn’t help as much as one would think.
Yeah, for the small business owner, what do you think there? It’s definitely worth it for a small business owner. It can help a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I see you know, when, when we’re having these conversations about social media or otherwise, or podcasts, just a lot of different niches. And you’re thinking about like getting your name out there or even starting your, I mean, taking you way back when to those teenage years, you know, maybe that’s when you started your first blog or your first Bit of getting your content out there.
And so when we’re talking about, you know, those small business owners that many of them that listen to this, I’m always like, you gotta kind of just get started at some point with some type of content. That’s my, that’s my advice. I want to hear your advice. If you have, if they haven’t gone down the like content creation route at all.
And I’m talking specifically for the small business owner, like, like, what are your thoughts on that? Yes, it can do wonders for you. You need to get started. And if I had to break it down, start on X first, cause you can test a lot of your ideas on X. If you don’t have tons of followers, it’s okay. Spend a little money on ads and then take your winners from that and post them on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, tech talk, et cetera.
But X is a good testing ground because they don’t penalize you for creating a lot of crap content. While a lot of the other social networks. Penalize you if your content continually doesn’t perform well. Mm-Hmm. What, what about LinkedIn? Like, what, what’s your thoughts on like, on like creating there?
It’s great. I still believe you should post on X first. Yeah. Figure out your winners and then post that on LinkedIn, YouTube, and the rest. That’s what we do. It works out well, let’s get into a little bit about the content strategy and maybe even some of the SEO and what, how business owners should be looking at that at that side of things like many, many people have maybe had websites for a long for a long time.
Maybe they’ve tried to generate content. They haven’t had any real plans on how to do this or how to deliver this. When I think about, and I don’t, I don’t know the numbers off off the top of my head, but you’re getting millions of visitors per month on your sites. Yeah. Yeah. What should people be thinking about when they think about those online assets like that?
Cause I feel like social media has been getting a lot of talk, a lot of like for the last, you know, I don’t know, five years plus, but I think, I feel like many people are forgetting the core asset of the website. Look, I think it’s no longer about a website or social media or email list. It’s omni channel.
You have to pretty much leverage all the channels. You have no choice. You know, they say marketing, they have something called a rule of seven. When someone sees or interacts with your brand seven plus times, they’re much more likely to evangelize it. Tell the people about it to really play off that rule of seven.
And you’ve got to be on multiple channels. You have to have your own website. You have to be on most of the social platforms. You have to do emails. You have to be doing SEO, maybe podcasting. The list goes on and on. If you don’t, it’s hard to succeed in today’s world. Yeah. So, so Neil, I know you probably don’t even get interviewed and don’t get this question asked.
So I’m sure you know, it’s coming up. Where, where does AI play in all this stuff? I know you already knew that was coming. Yeah. So AI right now in marketing isn’t as effective as most people think. AI, people are just overestimating AI in the short run. They think it’s a magic wand, you wave it and it solves all problems.
That’s not the case. Yeah. Now, in the long run, I believe people are underestimating AI and it’s going to do way more for you than people can even imagine or think. And my philosophy of AI is AI combined with humans in marketing can help level up your ads, your content. And we’ve done tests on this and studies and it’s worked.
But just relying on AI and clicking a button, having them do everything, we’ve seen it be a complete failure for most things in marketing. You need AI combined with a human. It just doesn’t work that well without a human. Yeah. And then the concept that I like to talk to people about is like, okay, you bought that 20 a month software and now you pump out hundreds of, you know, what, what keeps the next person from doing that?
Right. Like, And then they’re using what, Oh, AI can just create your marketing strategy. Well, it’s going to create similar marketing strategies for everyone. What makes you different now? You know, AI, if you look at the quality that it’s producing, it may be like the average person out there, sometimes even subpar, but it’s going to get better.
Yeah. When you hire marketers or agencies 1%. They’re the ones who can really move the needle. Hmm. AI is going to have a hard time replicating that top 1%. Yeah. If you’re one of those, you’re great. If you’re not, you’re kind of screwed. I know that sounds bad, so you better level up your game. True. What excites you right now?
Like, what are the conversations that are going on over at NP Digital where you’re just like, man, this is exciting. This is what keeps me in the game after all these years of marketing, digital marketing, otherwise, like, this gets me fired up. Like, what’s that conversation being had? It’s not actually one thing.
It’s different experiments. So every week we try to run new experiments at our organization, whether it’s with AI or social or SEO or whatnot. And we continually have failures when we run these experience and we continually have wins the wins get exciting because it allows us to figure out new ideas and strategies to grow because typically you learn from your failures and you do less of that and you do more of the stuff that’s working, right?
So, for example, we work with a company called UTI University of Technical Institute. Their college all throughout the United States. And we were leveraging AI for research for a lot of their local pages. And then, you know, it’s AI combined with humans, writing a lot of content and we were able to get them a massive boost in organic traffic.
That was cool. Right. On the flip side, you know, we’re working with a brand and personalizing a lot of their emails based on the flows and the demographics and stuff. And we’re able to get, you know, their open rates boosted by around 14, 15%. That was cool as well. Yeah. So this is running a lot of different experiments and testing and doing more of the winners.
And for us, we get excited about that. It’s fine. Is it, is it fair to say that testing and that like almost, I won’t say programmed failure, but by the definition of doing so many tests, like the failing on certain things and reiterating getting better. Is that, is that, would it be safe to say like, that’s just part of the culture that you’ve built up overall?
Yeah. We, we really encourage testing and tweaking and experimenting not necessarily on client websites, but more so on our end. And then we leverage what’s working for customers. Wonderful. Well, Neil just want to say it’s been great having you on the show today and being able to pick your brain and get a little bit of, of what’s going on over at MP digital that being said if somebody’s listening to this or watching this and they want to follow up and learn more and continue to follow your journey, if they’re not already following you, how do they do it?
My social channels are Neil Patel. My website’s neilpatel. com. My ad agency’s NP digital. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put all the links to that in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if you haven’t done it yet, don’t forget, hit that subscribe button.
And we got many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. Neil, thanks again so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.
