Neil Patel’s SEO Strategy for 2025 (Rank on Every Platform)

Chat GD is going to kill Google. Google saw because of their AI overviews a roughly 10% increase in usage. Google's already at 13.7 billion. That number is just increasing. Wow. Chat GPT just announced that they're on a $10 billion annual recurring revenue run rate. How are these platforms really killing each other? They're not. Is SEO really dead? In today's world, you can't just do SEO on Google. You got to do SEO on all the platforms because that's where the attention is. It's really divided and if you're not everywhere, you're going to miss out on a lot of revenue. You're watching the marketing misfits with Norm Ferrar and Kevin K. Hello, Mr. King. What's up, Mr. Ferrar? We got a we got a great podcast today. You want to get into it? Uh, we do have one. We have one of the most awesome marketers I think out there right now. This guy like is a prodigy. He's like one of those doogie houses. you know, when he was like 6 years old, Obama was like blessing him with like, "You're one of the greatest marketers in the world." I'm exaggerating a little bit, but he was young and he's leading the way right now and a lot of cool stuff. I follow his work. Uh Norm, have you have you messed around with like like have you noticed how the search is changing like with the chat GPT or 100%. We've talked about that and yeah, search is definitely changing. He's on the cutting edge of it. And so I'm excited to have uh Neil Patel on the show today because I think uh this is going to be eye opening for a lot of people that really aren't paying attention. You and I are kind of paying attention, but most people aren't. And I think uh Neil's going to be able to share some cool stuff. So I'm super stoked to have him on today. I I just hope he's going to stay on because you called him Doogie Hower. That that's just Hello. Thank you guys for having me. Thanks, Neil. Appreciate it, man. How you doing? I'm doing good. I just realize all three of us are bald. Uh, we are. We are. That's true. But I'm the differentiator because I have the beard. That's right. There we go. I I could not grow a beard that long. It would take me too long. Probably take me like 20 years. So, for those that don't know uh you Neil, can you just give us a really quick uh just I mean they must have been living under a rock if they don't know you, but just a quick background on on your history with in NP Digital and stuff. Yeah. So, name's Neil Patel. I run an ad agency called NP Digital. We're a global shop, thousandish plus people. Uh 20some countries. I stopped counting on both the employee count and the uh how many countries we're in after a while because then you just learn like, "Oh, we've expanded to Taiwan." And I was like, "Cool, sounds good." You know, and it just becomes it starts becoming hard to keep track of it all. Uh but yeah, no, um been in marketing for call it 24ish uh years. So, it's been a long long journey. One of the things I've noticed you're really doing a big push right now on how SEO is changing and love to to talk a little bit about what you're seeing in in that space and is SEO really dead or is it not dead? I mean like what you recently were were talking about uh it's just changing or does it just smell funny you know just smell funny is not dead at all um the old way of doing SEO 5 six years ago that's dead but there's been so many algorithm changes that even if you're using the tactics from 10 years ago it didn't work 5 years ago right like it's always evolved and changed so we look at SEO is no longer search engine optimization we look at a search everywhere optimization uh there's over 50 billion searches a day 13.7ish billion a day just on Google. Google controls roughly 27% of the search market share. Chad GPD has around a billion a day. Uh Amazon's at 3.5 billion a day. Instagram's at 6.5 billion a day. The Apple App Store is at 500 million a day. You guys get the point, right? Even Snap 4 billion searches a day. So search is everywhere. And the purpose of searching is different for a platform. On Instagram, a lot of the searches are for friends, but a lot of searches is also for content. Like if I'm looking for a handbag and I'm Louis Vuitton, I would want to make sure my handbag shows up when people on Instagram are looking for inspiration related to handbags or outfits or design, right? The same goes with Chad GPT. Are they researching information? Are they trying to find a product or a service to help them solve a problem? While on the flip side on Amazon, you know, if someone's searching on Amazon, chances are they're searching for a product to buy. So the intent for Amazon search is much higher than probably most the platforms out there. And in today's world, you can't just do SEO on Google. You got to do SEO on all the platforms because that's where the attention is. It's really divided and if you're not everywhere, you're going to miss out on a lot of revenue. What's one thing that marketers are misunderstanding? Like they're they're underestimating in 2025. The first is is your ideal customer uses multiple platforms. It is not a world where they just use Google or Facebook or Instagram. People understand this when I talk about social media because they've all lived through it. Uh, Instagram did not kill Snapchat. Tik Tok did not kill Snapchat did not kill YouTube did not kill Instagram. Instagram also did not kill Facebook. YouTube did not kill Facebook or any of the other social channels out there as well. They all have coexisted. According to Sprout Social, the average person uses more than six social networks per month where they're actually logging in. Think about that for a minute. When you look at search and attention and how people spend their time on the web, it's on multiple platforms from Chat GPT to Google. People are like, "Oh, ChatG is going to kill Google." Well, according to Sundar, the CEO of Google, Google saw because of their AI overviews a roughly 10% increase in usage. So, the AI stuff's helping them roughly by 10%. Google's already at 13.7 billion. That number is just increasing. That increase is roughly the amount of usage that chat GPT gets on a daily basis. When you think about it from just that number, Chat GBT is not killing Google and Google's not killing Chat GBT. Google's making more revenue than they ever did before. Chat GBT just announced that they're on a 10 billion dollar annual recurring revenue run rate. H how are these platforms really killing each other? They're not. They're all competing. They're all releasing similar features. And what's happening is is they all are coexisting with each other. Hey, Norm, you'll love this man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50k a month, but when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me. Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded. Exactly, man. I told them you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing cogs during using FIFO. Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs, too? Sure does. That way you can keep your quarter 4 chaos totally under control and know your numbers because not only does it do that, but it automates your PPC bids. It forecasts inventory. It sends review requests and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon. Now that's like having a CFO in your back pocket. You know what? It's just $15 a month, but you got to go to sellerboard.commisfits. sellerboard.commisfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial. So, you want me to say, "Go to sellerboard.com, misfits, and get your numbers straight before your accountant loses it." Exactly. All right. In that same regard, Google's up and that's what Google wants for their shareholders, but all the the newspapers complaining like our traffic is down 50%. You know, we used to count on, you know, organic search and all this stuff and now we're down and they're crying and this is not fair. This is not right. What's happening there? Some of these players are losing traffic, but they're getting data deals that are making up more revenue than they're generating from the traffic. I read something like Encyclopedia Bratannica's looking to go public because all the data deals that they had from all these AI platforms and LLMs, they're making more revenue than ever. Probably getting less organic traffic cuz someone's just giving them the answer. But does it really matter at the end of the day? We do marketing for so many businesses globally. Yes, some have been affected by traffic negatively. Some have seen more traffic. But when we really look at the numbers, is it really hurting you when someone typed in Los Angeles weather, and they didn't land on your website anymore? Like really, did it does it really hurt you that much more? You you you're following what I mean, right? You're going to go on weather.com, get the weather, and bounce off. Sure, they showed a banner ad, but you're probably not going to click on it. Or you're just going to use your app and just get the weather. Or when someone types in 2 plus two. Yeah, it equals four. We all know that. Do you really need to go to a website for it? they're going to get a banner imperson impression from you. Are you really going to click on any ads or buy anything from them? Probably not. Very slim chance. And a lot of the traffic that people are losing is traffic that would have never resulted in a sale in the first place. 20 years ago, uh Slate was big and they're like I remember seeing a talk with them at South by Southwest and they're like content is king. If you you got to own the content and then you're king. And in your example of Encyclopedia Bratenica, they've got content. But now with and one of my positions is that there's so much content out there that the internet is is scraped and some of it's they're scraping other AI content and misinformation or some guru that was on YouTube saying this is how something works and then he gets pared by other people and nobody it's not true. But the people that own the real content, whether that's course creators or that's people like yourself or Encyclopedia Bratannica or the New York Times, they're the ones that are sitting pretty right now, right? Because you can then date that off and almost create your own LLM that then feeds in and and becomes more official. Content isn't king unless your content is unique and special and differentiated in some way or fashion. Uh what I would say is king in today's world is data. Whoever has more data really controls a lot more and can win in many more ways. Uh the problem is it's hard to get access to the data and get people to give you authorization to gather data. And when it comes from a website perspective, putting out content is fine, but unless it's special or unique in a way that's different than other players. It's not that valuable like it used to be. You know, 10 years ago, there wasn't tons of content on the web. According to Search Engine Journal, the latest data it looked at, around 4.6 Six billion pieces of content are being created each and every single day. Content could be video, images, audio, text, right? The list goes on and on. But we don't have an issue of content quantity. We have an issue of content quality. And that's vague because it's in the eye of the beholder. But if you had to really sum it up from a quality standpoint, it really comes down to new. People want to engage with new stuff that they haven't seen before. That's what does the best. Keeping on content strategy, how has uh Google shifted towards AI generated results and how has that impacted the con content strategy? I was just talking about this right before uh this interview and someone was asking me like how do you get mentioned more in the AI overviews and I was giving them the CNBC example. So when you read an article on CNBC, a lot of their articles, not all, have the title and then it says key points and it in three bullet points, it typically talks about what's the main aspects of that content. We've noticed that if you're on page one of Google and there's a overview for a lot of the keywords that you're ranking for on page one, if you put in your key points and you just have your three bullets and then you go into article, you're much more likely to be included in the AI overviews, assuming your key points match up to what people are asking for in the AI overviews. Oh, so you're saying put your three key bullets or points at the top of your content. Uhhuh. Wow. Almost like the TLDDR or whatever people do now. Are you seeing a lot with schema? I mean, we've talked to some people that like saying, "Hey, the schema is like super important now for AI uh engines. Are you seeing anything around that?" Schema is important, but it's not like having schema versus not having schema is going to change the world. Um, there's other factors that we see affecting it more, like content being fresh. We notice the AI engines pull from content that is less than a year old more than that they're pulling from content that is like 3 years old. Unless you're asking about like how fast does a cheetah run. That really hasn't changed over the last 10 years. Uh, but generally speaking, they tend to go after content that's fresher and include that versus old outdated stuff. What about updating your content? So, we'll publish a blog article and then every quarter or so we might add a paragraph or two. Uh, does that still work? It it does, but it shouldn't be a blog article or two. We look at it as it should be a drastic update. Drastic update would be if it only needs a paragraph, great. If only needs a sentence, great, cuz it could be the article was fine. But we tend to see updates a little bit differently. Not that you should just take an article that's a year old and add a paragraph or two. Uh we look at as more processoriented approach. You look at your content from a year-over-year perspective and you look at the pages that are losing the most amount of traffic. You can also do quarter over quarter assuming there's no seasonality in the industry you're in. The pages that are losing the most organic traffic, they're losing organic traffic because someone else is doing something that you're not that is causing them to take traffic away from you. So then you look at those keywords, look who's ranking above you. look to see what they're doing that you're not doing. You then update those pages to make it relevant and better than the competition. But you're doing it off of approach not based on age, but based off of traffic decline because that tells you what to fix first. If something's going up and to the right, and you're just getting more traffic, why do you really need to mess with it? Do you think the funnel is changing? I mean, a lot used to be start here, work them through a process to actually get to the sale. Now it's almost like there's a you know those six steps or whatever it is. There's almost like awareness and then there's you're people are jumping because of this what you said the six different social media average. Do you see that changing from a sales point of view? The funnel methodology that a lot of people have been using uh you know to drive sales is is changing in today's world. So the funnel still exists. We still see the funnel as more relevant than ever. The funnel just got messy. So most people look at a funnel as this bigger opening and it just goes down and it's really simple, right? You buy traffic top of funnel awareness. They land on some landing pages. They learn more. Eventually a portion go to the checkout page. Portion buy. It's pretty simple. At least that's most people's definition or how they view a funnel. The funnel in today's world has changed a lot. And there's something in the what we call the messy middle. The middle is elongated. People spend more time there. or the average touch points someone needs with a brand, product, service or interactions uh has changed from 8.5 to the last study we looked at was around 11.1 that we ran uh touch points before someone buys a product and that messy middle is where they're engaging a lot with that could be on chat GPT social networks email text messages seeing your brand at a conference it's not all trackable because not all these platforms give you the data and where the funnels also change is at the very bottom Instead of going to a landing page on your website and learning a lot, on some platforms, they can just learn all that information right then and there, like in a real, and click buy on Instagram and then have the product shipped to you without filling in much information at all. And then boom, the conversion took place outside of your website. It doesn't mean the website's dead. It doesn't mean the traditional funnel is dead. It just means that people are interacting and engaging with the brand on multiple platforms and they have multiple touch points before they convert more than ever before from what we've seen. So it just takes longer to get a conversion more you need more patience and you need to be okay with not being able to fully track everything. What are you guys doing in MP Digital to actually track this? Because a lot of people if they're running Google ads, they're running uh I don't know uh Amazon ads and they're running uh some other ads and then the attribution gets to the last usually to the last place. It gets to let's say they buy it on Amazon and they're like shoot my Google stuff. I'm just blasting money here. Nobody I'm not getting very many conversions or or it's hard to track that to Amazon anyway, but I'm not what I'm just using as an example. I'm not getting much so let me cut off the Google. Uh and as soon as they cut off the Google a week later the Amazon's gone down. They're like what what just happened to my Amazon? My Amazon cost just went up. So, how are you I know there's tools like triple whale and some others out there, but how are you actually tracking that and attributing that whole process to where should you be doubling down and where should you be pulling back when the attribution may not clearly paint the right picture? Yeah. So, we have a data and analytics team and they look at everything from first touch to last touch to brand recalls. We do even uh MM, right? Uh media mix modeling. It's just a combination of a lot of things to figure out what's working and what's not. Um, but even when you do things like brand recall studies, like it's not 100% perfect. It's a little bit of art, a little bit of science, but your data is not going to be 100% perfect. People just have to be okay with that. No matter what they say, you really can't have 100% perfect. U, but directionally, you can have it correct and that'll guide you on where to spend money. Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8 fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right, it's called 8Fig. On average, sellers working with 8ig grow up to 400% in less than a year. 8FIG offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cash flow management. And here's how it works. 8ig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they could fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to 10 million. 8FIG gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory, and analyze cash flow. Visit 8fig.co. That's 8fig.co to learn more or check the link in the show notes below. Just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost. That's 8fig.co. 8fig.co. See you on the other side. So in today's environment, where should brands be adjusting their keyword research approach uh for AIdriven uh searches? Yeah, so there's a lot of prompts. You can use tools like the profounds, the scrunch and all those to figure out what people are uh leveraging from AI and what they're not. Um but even those tools, they're just using the suggested prompts to create more prompts and track if your brand's being mentioned or not. and they don't even tell you how to rank. They'll give you sentiment analysis. Uh but when we're looking at a lot of that data, when you're looking at AI, it's a lot of the same traditional SEO fundamentals that are causing you to rank in these AI platforms. And what you just have to do is just be there and continually create tons and tons of noise. What about the LMSTXT file? It's kind of like a robots file or sitemap file. Sitemap.xml. Some people are saying if you do a LLMS.txt txt it's they're actually open AI is paying attention to that and some others and can help you actually tell them like the last date you updated it the the last the the most important parts and you can put summaries and stuff and some people are saying that that's actually helping have you had any experience with that. Yeah, doing the summaries it's kind of like the notes like the key points. Um, we're seeing some of that kind of stuff help. Uh, but where we're really seeing help is getting tons of brand mentions, having fresh content, having positive reviews, uh, because they can, these LLMs we believe can easily analyze sentiment and if people are happy or not. A lot of traditional SEO, continually cranking out content, showing your authority out there, backlinks, you know, onpage SEO and schema, so they can easily crawl and identify what the pages are on. We think keywords are still important, but you got to look at not just keywords from an individual keyword, but more so a topic and holistically cover that topic. But yeah, all these things really do matter. I was looking at the reputation thing like last night. I just stumbled across I was looking up a company. I was like, what are the reviews for this company and it gave me Google is doing this in Google. It gave me an AI summary and it gave me like a summary of the company, what people are positively saying all over the internet and then what they're negatively saying and it was in the AI summary. So, I typed that in from one of my brands, billion-dollar sellers. Like, what's out there for me? And it came back. Well, people generally think this, this, and this. Here's some of the key points. And then here's the negative. Someone must have posted on social media something like, "Yeah, hey, there was this one had too many sponsors at this event or something." And they post this just double emphasizes the importance of what is out there and how you're interpreted. Norm has a press release company and you know, a lot of people shied away from press releases in the past. Ah, that's but now that's almost like it's almost coming back and like almost more important. back. Oh, yeah. More more important than ever now uh to get these positive mentions and get this stuff going out there. What can a marketer do to try to influence that um the best they can? We call it digital PR, you know, whether it's doing outreach or releasing press releases, but making sure people are covering the press releases. You know, we call it digital PR. It's how can you get other people to cover your brand? Uh some of that causes links, some of it doesn't, but it's really building relationships, doing something that's noteworthy where people want to cover it, but yeah, we see it helping. So in AI, is there, you know, like Google has the page rank system or that like okay, something coming from CNN is more credible than something coming from Kevin King's blog. Uh, is there something similar to that in AI at this point or is AI just making its own decisions and its own little algorithm and figuring that out what's what to wait more versus except for like the more recency stuff like you said earlier? No, they're definitely looking at authority and a great example of this is search engine land had an article and that article broke down how there's a direct correlation from ranking on page one of Google and getting mentioned by chat GBT. So, they're using a lot of the similar factors. There's not much of a difference from traditional SEO and what people call GEO or trying to rank on these LLMs. Now, can we talk a little bit? I know uh we had a few questions about this and that's AEO, answer engine optimization. Just like to know what that's all about. So, answer engine optimization is people are asking these LLMs a question and how can you end up showcasing your answer from your website and them ideally citing you and it driving traffic or brand awareness if it's not driving traffic. It's similar to AIO, GEO, or all the other acronyms that our people are using. People use AI, they type in a query or a prompt, whatever you want to call it, they get a response. How can you get your company being mentioned there? Uh, and when you think about it, when someone types in a prompt or they type in a query, it's usually because they have a question. They're looking for a solution to their problem or answer to their question, however you want to end up defining it. They're looking for something. The goal is is to get your product, your service, your content, your brand mentioned and it's a lot of the factors that we talked about. You have two tools, answer the public and Uber suggest, right? What's the best way for someone to maximize those two tools? a marketer to maximize in this what Norm just said in that in that vein to maximize those tools. Helps you recommend backlinks, helps you fix all your onpage SEO issues like schema that we talked about or page duplication issues or uh content issues. Uh it helps you with tracking what your competitors are doing and what you're not doing like with keyword gaps. It helps you get ideas for content that you can be creating um that you haven't created content on before. It showcases new opportunities for traffic. It pretty much helps you just build your traffic. We're also integrating uh uh AI data in there from the LLMs and showing uh sentiment analysis, what your brands are ranking for, what your competitors are ranking for. Uh that should be released in a few weeks to a month. I know I I've used both of them, but Uber Suggest has a free version. You can have a paid model, but the the free version is quite good. It allows for a lot of information. Both of them have free versions that do most of it. It does 90% of what you need for free and most people don't need to pay. Yeah. Answer the public we've been using in the Amazon space for years uh to actually like figure out longtail keyword questions and creating a blog post that's a 100 searches a month, but you basically own it and you string a bunch of those together and uh it can it can drive a lot of traffic uh when in aggregate uh which which is really cool. And you said earlier the moat or the the strength is not content, it's data. What can you do to create that moat of data so that everybody has to come to you versus, oh, it's just going to be we're going to price compare and we're going to bounce around from agency to agency like a lot of people do. What What can you do on the around the data side to make sure that okay, they can't leave you. So, we don't do this. Um, but there's an agency in I believe the Midwest in the United States. I'm not going to mention their name, but they have this really unique approach in which when they sign up a client, it's within their dashboard, their system, and all the data is stored there. All your records and everything. So, if you leave them and cancel your contract, you lose everything. Ouch. Uh, we don't do that. I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't do that, but they've been very successful. They got bought out by private equity. Um, and they made a lot of money. And I'm not saying it's a bad model or a good model. It's a model we chose not to do. It wasn't a right fit for us, but it could be a right fit for someone else. Um, and they control a lot of data. With all this AI stuff, a lot of people are saying, "Hey, there's probably a two or three year window here to make a lot of money. uh while the rest of the world catches up to the people that are on the cutting edge of it and as things change and then a lot of then gurus and top people are saying like hey in the future in real life and community is going to become more important than ever with in a robotic AI world. What's your take on on those thoughts? Yeah, uh I I agree. I think community is more important than ever. And if people don't have a good community, I think they're going to be at a disadvantage uh from the competition. In this world of AI, I think people are actually looking for a community more than ever and they want to belong and be part of something uh because we're moving into a world where it's like, oh yeah, we'll just do it for you and the Agents will deal with this and it's just like, wait, people still need that human one-to-one connection and feel like there's purpose and belonging in life. So, if you're a smaller company and you're trying to take on the big boys, uh, they have a ton more money, they have a ton of content out there. What can a small brand do to even try to be on the same level playing field as one of the bigger players? Is it just quality of content? No. Uh, one is focusing on your vertical and just being known for something, but two, we're a smaller player and going after bigger competitors who are much, much larger than us. Some of them do over 20 billion in revenue. We're nowhere near there. We're not even a billion in revenue. We're a fraction of what they are. And what a lot of people do is or what a lot of people should be doing, not a lot of people do it. Uh but what they should be doing is thinking outside the box. So for example, when we compete with WPP or publicist or some of those, we give away a lot of tools like answer the public and Uberess for free to build a community so more people recognize our brands and we give them a personalized experience instead of just being a client on the list like it may be with a potential holding company. So that way they feel more personal experience. We're giving a lot of value for free upfront versus those guys just have the brand and they just go after normal RFPs and this has helped us get a lot of business over the years. What do you think about the the CEO of Google U and a couple others that said this is the year of agents? What's your take on Agentic AI and where where that's at now and where that where you see that going? I don't know if it's the year of agents. Uh, I'm nowhere near as smart as a CEO of Google and I don't have as much information, but I know agents are the future. They're just not perfect and they're not here yet where they can just do everything for you and go off into the races with little without uh uh any human intervention. I do believe the future is agents. I just don't think the tech is perfect yet. I'm not saying it won't be there in 6 months or a year or two years. That's above my pay grade. I don't know that. But I do believe it is part of the future. We just need to see the technology improve. I I'll give you one more tidbit. I know this is not a question. I know we have limited amount of time, but this isn't a question that you asked. You know, at our agency, we got customers who sign up with us, especially large corporations, who don't allow us to use any AI. No agents, no AI work, none of that stuff. They just don't want the legal liabilities. And that's the world we live in. Just because the techn is here doesn't mean that everyone's going to allow you to use it either. You talked about legal liabilities. Can you explain that? Whats if the the stuff that you're using is plagiarized, right? Like that's an easy example. Um whats if the data was gathered for someone else and you built something off of someone else's data that you didn't have a right to. How liable is that corporation? When they're publicly traded and they're worth 50 or hundred billion dollars a lot of times, yes, they do want to grow, but they're mainly in wealth preservation mode. uh they want growth as well, but they don't want growth at all costs and just to cost in the business and have a massive billion dollar lawsuit because of something silly. Is there anything you can do like a copycape or something like that where it could go and check back to make sure that you haven't plagiarized anything? No, it's not perfect. Even when you use the tools that say, "Was this created by LLM?" A lot of times they'll be like, "No." And I'm like, "Yes, it was." Or they'll be like or they'll be like, "Yes, it was." There's tools that say this this AI is not detectable. Run it through our tool and we'll show you the chances of it being detected is 1% or less or whatever. Yeah. There's tools that do the reverse as well. Yeah. And I've had it where I wrote an article and they're like, "It's awitten." I'm like, "No, I actually wrote the whole thing by hand and I didn't even log in. It was just from my head. I'm like it ain't AI written." What are you seeing in the marketing world? Who who's in my opinion, you know, what's the number that uh OpenAI just said? Five 800 million uh monthly users or something. I think that I don't think that's actually individual people. I think that's actually accounts that have been logged in. Some companies might have five or 10 or whatever. Some people don't even log in and do a search. I I think the number that's running around is they get a billionish searches a day, which I don't know if it's true or not. And uh I do know they announced recently that they hit 10 billion in annual reoccurring revenue. What I think though, a lot of people right now, and including in the marketing world, they're using AI as a toy. They're using it to help them like just rewrite some emails or to maybe analyze a Excel document or something which is great. I mean, and you should use it, but I don't think a lot of people understand what this can do with proper prompting and proper engineering and proper putting together and where it's going. Do you do you feel that same way or do you and see like there's a few people like are on this cutting edge and everybody else is going to get left behind? And I don't know if everyone's going to get left behind, but they'll have to adapt. But people use it for a lot of basic stuff. And when you look at their efficiency output uh versus ROI, they'll be like, "Oh, look how much more efficient with my time." Okay, cool. How much more revenue did you drive or cost did you save or all this kind of stuff? They're like, "Oh, we haven't made any impact on any of those metrics." So, it's like, you're saying you're more efficient, but the company isn't actually getting more results. And we're seeing the issue of people optimizing for their quote unquote lifestyle versus optimizing for KPIs. And when they use AI, they look for cool and sexy stuff. And a lot of times they're down this rabbit hole and they spend more time doing work than they would have if they didn't use AI. And in most cases, we don't really see revenue uh go up or cost savings come down. And that's really the goal, right? Like the goal should be how can you increase your numbers? When I say numbers is like how can you just get the numbers to be a lot better from the aspect of more sales, more revenue, less cost and AI is great and it's here to stay. Just people use it and they think using it is great but they don't think about how they can use it to actually impact what matters for the business. You know, this reminds me uh must have been about 30 years ago. I was in my EO form group and this sort of topic came up and we were talking about how efficient computers, personal computers are going to be. It's going to cut down the workload. We're only going to work four hours a day and get 10 times the output. Well, I think what you just said is happening right now. The efficiency is there, but the ROI on it, and that's always on my mind, ROI. And if it's not there, well, so much for efficiency. And I've got a question. How would you define right now the balance of automation and the amount that you have to put into it? So the personalization that you have to add to it. We see unless you have tons of data, we see that AI can it doesn't automate and personalize things as much as one may think and it requires a lot of human intervention. We really see the solution isn't AI. It's not human. It's H AI. It's human combined with AI. Hey, Kevin King and Norm Ferrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button. If you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it, and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits. I I just saw to your point, I just saw someone did they posted this on Twitter, I think earlier this week. They they asked Claude, Open AI, and Perplexity, give me a random number between one and I forget what it was, 30 or 50 or something. All three of them gave the exact same number of 17. All three of them. Give me a random number uh between 1 and 30. They all three gave the same number. Serious. I'm dead. Yeah. Look it up. It's all g gave the same number. So that just tells you that they're they're not at the level of like, you know, what you're getting out of it is great and you got to use it for what it can give you, but it's still got a ways to go. Uh and uh it's it's really exciting. It's really exciting times. Well, I saw someone create uh because people have me judge stuff every once in a while and they're like it was supposed to be cool use case of AI and someone's like give me they went to JPT and they said just give me a marketing plan for this company and this industry here's the personal type. I'm like this is just so bad because I've seen a lot of people do it and it gives you similar types of marketing recommendations. I'm like well if everyone does it it's not going to be that effective and it wasn't giving you anything that was like revolutionary. is giving you the same old regurgitated stuff and some of it was actually terrible for that business. Well, if you don't know anything, you're like, "Cool, that's really that's really great. I had no idea." And this is I'm implementing right now. Um, but if if you if you're an expert in that, you look at go, "Uh, okay." Uh, if you say so. Neil, do you know Steve Weedderman? I do. He teaches a class in I think like some college in Southern California or something. Yeah, San Diego. Yeah. So, he he's he's a good friend of mine and he's comes on the podcast uh once in a while. He talks about SEO and he says, "You know, when I get my papers back now," he says, "You can always tell when somebody's using AI." Uh he goes back to them and he says, "I don't give them an F, but I usually mark down if a human wrote this, it would probably be XYZ." and he gives him a second chance. But he's saying every student's using it right now. I think the technology is here to stay. I think it's amazing. But just like any technology, some people can use it for bad and good. I have two kids. I don't want them to learn what 2 plus two is by going to AI and asking. I want them to understand some of these fundamentals. I think that's very important uh for youth to still get educated. Again, I'm not saying the techn is not here to stay. I'm not saying it's not amazing cuz I love it to death. It's just more so everything can be used for good and bad, right? You've seen people use guns to defend themselves uh and not shoot anyone and it protect their families. And you've seen people use guns in schools and kill people that should have never been shot at in the first place. The point I'm getting at is everything that is created in this world could be or most things could be used for good or bad. They can say like fruit is good for you. If you're just on a fruit diet and you eat fruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you're getting too much sugar in your body, right? I wouldn't recommend that to anyone. Um, does it mean fruit's bad for you? No. It's it's how people are using things. All right. Well, we are getting to the bottom of the hour and I know you've got to run. So, I guess at the end of every podcast, I always ask our misfit, do they know a misfit? Yes. Uh, Eric Sue. He's worth interviewing if you haven't interviewed him. Fantastic. No, we haven't. No, we haven't yet. Eric's a good guy. Yeah. Cool. So, if people want to reach out or find out more about you or follow you or learn more about your company, what's the best way for them to do that? npdigital.com. That's easy. Easy. I hope we can get you back on. We only got through a few questions. Yeah, I'm pretty next week. So, just hit me up whenever you guys want to do another one if you want to do it. All right. This has been fun. appreciate you coming on and making some time uh for a couple little old couple old misfits here to uh to ask some questions. I appreciate it. You guys are young. Now we know you're lying. All right, that that was awesome. And uh it's a lot of cool stuff happening out there. a lot to uh keep your head wrap your head around and and uh you know it's difficult sometimes to keep up with everything that's going on. But kind of like what he says like just pick a vertical you know and just like whatever is affecting that vertical you're in and pay attention to that and uh the rest of it just make it maybe you know a little bit more noise uh then and but I I agree AI used properly uh and if you have the fundamentals of like what we talked about in the first part of the interview the fundamentals of SEO the fundamentals of marketing and if you know that then AI can be a very powerful tool uh and and can really accentuate that. Yeah. One of the other things, uh, if you're interested, go to neilpel.com. Just he's always publishing some really great content. Yeah. His newsletter that he sends out, too, is is also really good. Short, to the point, and uh, always has something uh, uh, you know, I delete a lot of little marketing newsletters and stuff, but his is one that I actually open every time and actually take a look at it. So, cool. But if you want if you want more cool stuff like this, uh, make sure you hit subscribe. Whether you're listening this on Apple or Spotify or you're watching this on YouTube, make sure you subscribe to the channel. If you like this episode with Neil and you think some other people should uh, hear this or feel free to forward it to share it out there. Uh, and uh, we have a new channel too, Norm. Right. Uh, we've got a YouTube channel. We got the YouTube channel which is Marketing Misfits Podcast and we have a shorts channel where we just extract nuggets and put them as long as they're under three minutes and we put them on that channel and that is marketing misfits clips. Also, uh there's something I heard some birdies say that we have something on Tik Tok now too. Just started. I think we got two posts, but we're building our followers, guys. All right, cool. Well, we're here every Tuesday uh with a new episode. So, uh hopefully we'll see you again next week. And if you like this, there's also plenty of episodes uh on the channel, so you can go back and listen to some other great marketers uh uh share their wisdom. Uh otherwise, we'll see you all next week. All right, see you later. [Music]